Overview

In the Humanities, rhetoric is an important factor in all forms of composition and analysis.  In all your assignments for the Humanities Core Course you  should look closely at how conventions about speaking to particular audiences shape discourse.  In this assignment you will be asked to consider how the dynamic interaction of identity, role, and subjectivity (page 137-138) shape the speaking "I" of Equiano's narrative and how this particular writer employs specific means of persuasion at key moments in the text.   You will focus your rhetorical analysis on a particular passage in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative that will be chosen by your section leader.  Do not choose the passage yourself! 

You should also be conscious about how your own rhetorical choices can make your argument more or less persuasive to a skeptical and well-informed academic reader.  This assignment requires you to use the primary source of Equiano's text, but it also asks that you integrate at least one scholarly secondary source from JSTOR to improve your understanding of the rhetorical context of the narrative.   The articles below come from many academic disciplines, and you will need to be able to paraphrase the scholar's argument.  Review your Discovery Tasks if you have difficulty locating or interpreting the article or articles you choose.

 For background you should carefully review your notes from Professor Mailloux's lecture and your responses to the reading questions.  Read "Who is Speaking?  Recognizing Rhetorical Context" (135-138), "Audience and Purpose" (139-142), and "Rhetoric and Interpretation" (143-144) in the Writer's Handbook.  Pay particular particular attention to how Professor Mailloux close reads texts rhetorically in his lectures.  You should also read the material on Burke's Pentad in Writing from A to Z.

Your essay should be roughly 4-6 pages and will count for 30% of your writing grade.

• Demonstrate that you understand the rhetorical complexities of the particular argumentative or narrative techniques in Equiano's text.
• Demonstrate that you have read the primary and secondary sources on the subject in-depth and more than once.
• Integrate a secondary source like those available from JSTOR or Project Muse.  Only sources approved by your section leader may be used.  Do not use other kinds of Internet sources!  You will want to choose the most relevant and scholarly source possible and only cite as much of it as is necessary to support individual claims in your argument.
• Cite all sources properly in the format specified by your section leader.
• Acknowledge limitations in the evidence.
• Subordinate and juxtapose sentence elements properly.
• Keep the reader on track by means of clear signals, clear paragraphing, interesting topic sentences, and relevant evidence in the form of quotations from the text.