The following document contains notes collected from a number of courses I have taught on argumentation over the years, both at elementary and more "advanced" levels, so-called. Many of the things you will find here are likely to reappear in my lectures because I think they are important, but it seemed to me it might be useful for some of you simply to find them written down somewhere to refer to them at will. And I also thought some students might be interested to see how various themes that arise haphazardly over the course of a particular class may relate to one another in a slightly more linear fashion. Be warned, however: Some of what follows is simply very basic advice appropriate for writers at every level I teach, but sometimes I drift here into more philosophical sorts of speculation that may not seem useful at all and which can always safely be ignored altogether if you like.
In this course you are engaging with complex literary and argumentative texts of various kinds, and producing sustained written arguments based on close readings of those texts. I like to choose texts for you to read that are complex and often perplexing, or which make strong but controversial claims. And so, it is common for students to read a text I have assigned and react to it with great passion; with enthusiasm, with anger, or even with utter bewilderment. Similarly, the texts I assign may provoke passionate in-class discussions that seem to end up raising more questions than they answer.
Despite all of this, however, it is also still quite common for students to have great difficulty translating these strong reactions and disagreements into arguments for their assigned papers. Why might this be happening? And how can you translate your initial emotional engagement and personal investments in a text into a more formal argument that can sustain the interest of your peers for several pages or so?
Our assigned papers are too brief for you to hope to do justice to the full complexity and context of most of the texts we will be reading in the course. Your more modest task instead will be to elaborate an aspect of the text that interests you and communicate to your readers why their own understanding of the text would be enriched by dwelling on this aspect with you.
The ambition of your arguments for the purposes of this course should not be to identify the single true and indisputable meaning of a text, but always simply to identify some aspect of the text that is worthy of special attention because it illuminates something important about the text, something that has mattered to you.
The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, as often as not the process of argumentation is one that simply seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks to prevail over difference. We argue to understand what are the best beliefs on offer to affirm for now as true, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.
Remember, an argument is a claim supported by reasons and evidence. An argumentative reading is more than a matter of simple self-expression (like sounding off, expressing enthusiasm, or venting frustrations inspired by a text), but of actually providing support for a strong claim about a text. And a strong claim, remember, is simply a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition.
It is quite easy to come up with an argument in response to an editorial that makes a clear topical claim about drug legalization, capital punishment, gun control, gay marriage, global environmental standards, or similar questions. You simply (1) determine the claim that is being made, and then (2) agree or disagree with that claim, supporting or opposing the case it makes either by making your own claims about (3) how well or ill-substantiated the case being made seems to be, or (4) supplementing the case with your own considerations. In such an argument it is also relatively easy to imagine an intelligent opposition, and then address your argument forcefully to the intelligent objections you anticipate such an opposition would make.
But in an argument that offers up an interpretation of a more literary text this may seem a hopelessly more difficult task. What kinds of reasons and evidence are available for you to substantiate the claims you would make for a compelling interpretation? Isn't your reaction to a text itself reason enough to validate it? Isn't the evidence simply just the text itself?
Literary texts often testify to emotional realities that seem the farthest thing from argumentation. And offering up an interpretation of such a text is often simply a matter of trying to communicate a personal reaction to it, testifying to an emotional reality that likewise seems the farthest thing from something you want to argue for.
The meaning of a text will always be in some measure a collaboration between an author and an audience. The point of close reading as a kind of argumentation will never be to demonstrate the validity of a reaction to a text or to invalidate the reactions of others. The point will always be to render a reaction intelligible to other readers, and therefore contribute to the ongoing collaboration by means of which texts remain meaningful and alive after they are released by their authors into the world to circulate among us in the first place.
A text originates as an inchoate kind of inspiration, a host of idiosyncratic associations, images, and concerns. And in producing a text, writing it down or what have you, an author is always first engaged in a kind of translation operation, translating those deeply personal details that could only be perfectly intelligible to themselves alone at first into a form that hopefully will register that author's intentions (which often keep changing as the process of translation proceeds) best to the audience to whom the text is offered up.
This effort of translation inevitably involves innumerable choices and accidents, assumptions about an audience's expectations, capacities, and interests, and so on. And so every text always also expresses some measure of an author's sense of the world into which they are releasing their work. That is to say, the text itself is always also a reading of the world and of the ways in which the world might be open to reading the text at all.
It is for this reason that I always take such pains to resist the common belief among students that the proper interpretation of a text is a matter of identifying an author's intentions, or that argument as interpretation is a matter of supporting a claim to have discerned these intentions in the text itself.
The author's intention, if such a thing could ever be identified conclusively in the first place (even to the author), always really amounts just to the first reading of that tantalizing but unavailable text that inspired its material instantiation. An author's intentions are the first act of interpretation in the neverending collaboration of readings that recreates the meaning of that text as it circulates interminably in the world. Every reader contributes to that project of collaboration in some measure. In an important sense, no reader's reaction to or interpretation of a text has primacy over any other's, including that of its creator.
What all this means is that you can relieve yourself here and now of the ambition to identify the definitive or final meaning of a text. I think this is an ambition that produces unnecessary frustration, anxiety, and even paralysis in many students.
You need only illuminate the text by drawing attention to whatever aspect of the text seems most worthy of attention. This aspect can be a matter of identifying an ongoing problem or conspicuous omission or unstated assumption in the text, selecting some detail which makes a unique contribution among others to the overall impact of the text, discerning the working of a persistent theme or image or stylistic tic in the text, or whatever. Often you will simply want to find a way to communicate what it is about a text that most excited you in your own inhabitation of it.
Your evidence will consist of a highly selective and deliberate presentation of textual evidence and your own contextualization of that evidence, in which you demonstrate the operation of this aspect of the text to an audience of your peers. Of course, the intelligent opposition to your argument, and the objections you should anticipate, will arise from the fact that many of your peers will not see precisely the same things you have seen yourself in the text, or at any rate will not have focused on these same things, and fewer still will have drawn from them the same significance you do.
There is no need for you to demonstrate that you are right to see what you see in the text, or that others are wrong to see otherwise. You need only convince your readers that what you have seen is worthwhile enough to justify devoting their attention to your own interpretation for the space of time it takes to read your paper.
So, I think my advice to students who cannot think of what they want to write is first to remember that doing justice to a text and supporting a claim about a text isn't a matter of identifying its one true meaning and demonstrating this meaning to the world. When you read a complex text you will find part of the aliveness of the text simply in the effort to make sense of it. Begin your argument right there, in that initial engagement with the text.
Whether the text you are reading is literary or more conventionally argumentative, always underline or try to remember places in a text where claims are being made (or assumed) by the author. Also, indicate with a question mark or other sign the places in the text where you are troubled or confused, or where you discern a problem that deserves deeper exploration.
Pay close attention to an author's use of figurative language in the text, and especially metaphors, analogies, and the like. Is the purpose of this figurative language to make a particular passage more memorable, or does it conjure up concrete imagery that helps you grasp abstract ideas that would otherwise be less clear? Are there consistent images throughout the text that convey a meaning that especially emphasizes or possibly undermines the literal language of the text?
All of these are the kinds of details you can notice in a first reading, and to which you can return in a second reading once you have decided that a text deserves the deeper exploration of an argumentative interpretation.
Over the course of the term I will have offered up several different approaches to the reading of the text which will provide you questions with which you can intervene in a text and try to get a handle on your own sense of it.
Sometimes these interventions will seem to do great violence to the complexities and ambiguities of a text. But remember that the point of close reading as a kind of argumentation is not to do final and definitive justice to a text but to find a provocation that will help you to determine just which aspect of the text is really the one you want to talk about. The complexities will inevitably weave their way back in once you begin to make your case and address it to your peers!
Audience and Intention:
I adapt this first most elementary but still powerful approach from a text by Nancy Mason Bradbury and Arthur Quinn. Even if we have decided that there is no need to privilege an author's own intentions or interpretation over our own, it is also true that part of what we confront with any text is more than just some indifferent object, but a significant address to a sensible audience.
Your own reaction to a text here and now may elicit more powerfully than an author's intentions (or their very different reactions to their own text later in life) a sense of the meaning available in a text in this particular moment of its life. But it is also true and important that you have a meaningful text to illuminate with your reading precisely because, once upon a time, an author sought to meaningfully address an audience with the text in the first place.
In a broad sense, what do you think the author was after in the text you have read? The author might disagree with your assessment, you might disagree with your own assessment with each new reading, everyone in class may disagree with one another about the assessment... But it is inevitable that every reader will form such an assessment, at least provisionally, just in consequence of apprehending this object as that special kind of thing that a text is: a significant address to a sensible audience.
Your colleagues in class have shared with you the experience of reading and the effort of making sense of a text. Although you know full well you may be wrong, it is inevitable that there are certain details of plot, certain assertions, certain themes, certain details of imagery or style that you assume nearly everyone who grapples with the text will have noticed, and which you imagine you understand as the author has intended you to do. What are these basic elements? (It is often a source of great enjoyment to discover just how different every single reader's sense of these essential and obvious elements may turn out to be.)
Ask yourself to whom do you imagine the author is addressing this piece as an ideal audience? Do you think that you are a proper part of that audience? Why or why not? What do your answers to these questions tell you about your reactions to the text?
Even if the text seems nonargumentative, or if it seems to make many important or even contradictory arguments, force yourself to identify a single passage in the text that comes closest to representing the texts thesis.
What is a claim in the text (or assumed by the text) for which the most possible details exhibited by the text otherwise might seem supportive reasons, substantiation, and evidence? If you cannot find such a claim, paraphrase one, but it is always better to find an actual passage that can seem to function as a thesis. Which details in the text become clearer in light of the project of supporting the claim you have selected as the thesis, and which become more troubling and problematic? How does choosing a thesis change your focus on the text? What do you gain? What do you lose?
Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliation:
I adapt this approach from a textbook by Timothy W. Crusius and Carolyn E. Channell. Rather than thinking of argument as some single monolithic kind of thing human beings engage in, and usually imagined to be a kind of battle for supremacy, it is useful to distinguish different modes of argumentation by the different ends they try to accomplish. One way to get initial purchase on a text is to ask which of four basic ends do you think best defines what a text is after, or which of these four basic modes of argument do you think it best exemplifies: interrogation, conviction, persuasion, or reconciliation?
Even literary texts that seem utterly nonargumentative will sometimes be illuminated by the effort to read them through the lens of these categories (as, for example, fictions that try to call conventional assumptions into question, or which try to testify to an injustice and so influence conduct).
Argument as Interrogation (or what Crusius and Channell call Inquiry): Interrogation argues to call assumptions into question, to explore options, to investigate evidence, and substantiate hypotheses.
Argument as Conviction: Convincing arguments are those that seek to change minds and to alter beliefs. A process of interrogation (for example, scientific inquiry, cross-examination, devil's advocacy) will often issue out in an actual conviction, at which point the kinds of arguments one makes change very significantly to reflect this. Often when we say of a belief that it is true, we mean that we are confident that it is the best belief on offer: we are convinced of it.
Argument as Persuasion: Persuasion is argument to influence conduct, to alter behavior. Most often when people think of rhetoric they think of it as the art of manipulating people through argument to do one's bidding. It is largely the persuasive mode of argumentation that they have in mind when they think this way. Part of the reason that many people feel suspicious of rhetoric as a discipline is because it can sometimes be so difficult to distinguish the kinds of argumentative pressures one brings to bear in influencing conduct in this way, from the way coercion can be employed to similar ends. Despite the intractable difficulty of distinguishing persuasion from violence in any kind of definitive or final way, however, every society will urgently attempt to do so, and few locations in culture will be more perfectly symptomatic than those in which conventions and anxieties on this question are addressed.
Argument as Reconciliation: At the heart of political life is the ongoing project to reconcile an ineradicable diversity of human aspirations with one another. While conviction and persuasion take as their point of departure a settled position that one assumes and from which one seeks to prevail upon others with whom one differs, reconciliation shares with interrogation an abiding unsettled restlessness. With interrogation and reconciliation one cannot really know for sure just where the process of argumentation will lead. In reconciliation many parties must arrive at a position which satisfies all, but in which usually nobody is likely to perfectly prevail. For a sense of reconciliation as an argumentative mode it is useful to turn away from the litigious model of argument of Stephen Toulmin that preoccupies so much of our attention in argumentation courses, and think about the work of psychologist Carl Rogers and his "synthetic" model of argument. It is also interesting to compare and contrast Rogers with the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other advocates of nonviolent social struggle. While all of these efforts model reconciliation in significant respects, some of them edge back in the direction of persuasion and conviction to illuminate those categories in unexpected ways.
Ethos, Pathos, Logos:
To an important extent what we mean by rhetoric as a discipline derives most conspicuously from a text by that name written by Aristotle as a handbook for sophists hoping to make a difference in the public institutions of ancient Athens. In his Rhetoric Aristotle proposes that every argument exhibits three rhetorical dimensions -- ethos, pathos, and logos -- and that each of these dimensions will contribute to the success of an argument in achieving whatever its end may be.
It is easy to grasp the significance of logos and pathos to a persuasive argument. Logos refers to the coherence of an argument, not only to its logical coherence in a strict sense, but to the clarity of and its consistency with its own enunciated definitions, with its measured demonstration of facts, its clear step-wise delineation of its case, and that sort of thing. Pathos, on the other hand, refers to an argument's appeal to emotions, to its elicitation of sympathy, pity, outrage, vanity, greed, suspiciousness, and the like.
Ethos is the argumentative dimension that usually seems most alien to new students of rhetoric, and it is intriguing to note that for Aristotle it was also the dimension of argument that he regarded as the most compelling and powerful overall. Ethos refers to the way in which the author of an argument projects into the case they make a kind of ideal characterization of themselves as a figure worthy of special respect or attention or even outright emulation. We find expressions of ethos in the moments in an argument when an author calls attention to their training or expertise, or when they offer up anecdotes that cast them as especially sympathetic or as uniquely qualified to speak to an issue, or in joking asides when they try to put an audience at ease or suggest their likeablity, or in any number of the ways people signal their membership within particular subcultures in ways that are often legible only to other members of those cultures.
Often, a useful way to get a handle on complex longer conventional arguments, especially philosophical arguments, will be to decide which of these three argumentative dimensions is the one on which an argument depends most crucially for its intelligibility and force, and then make a case to support your choice. How does your sense of the argument change if you subsequently force yourself to read the text as if the most crucial of these three dimensions is the one that initially seems to you quite conspicuously to be the least important one?
Created 1-20-05. Last Modified 1-23-05.
The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley.
Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu