Journal 2 - Desiree DeMarco

Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as the context of a rhetorical act comprised of three constituents. The first being the exigence; the second and third are elements of the complex, namely the audience to be constrained and the constraints which influence the rhetor and can be brought to bear upon the audience. An example from my own personal life is that my family and I are going on vacation to Italy this summer for two weeks. We were trying to finalize the flights and hotels this past weekend and we were having a hard time planning because we wanted to know how many days we should spend in each city depending on what we wanted to do (this was the exigence). I was on the phone for almost two hours with my mom, aunt, grandpa and brother arguing about where we should go (the audience). Our main constraint is time- there just won’t be enough to do everything we all want to do. Another constraint we have is transportation between the cities. Eventually, we scheduled everything out and we ended up with a pretty cool itinerary, but we each had to compromise.

Edbauer proposes the idea that rhetoric be seen as ecological rather than situational. Here, texts constantly transform and, similar to a biological ecology, a rhetorical ecology is fluid or constantly changing. When trying to think of an example for this, the first thing that came to mind was comic books. My older brother and his friends got me to love comic book characters such as Deadpool and Spider-Man from an early age. Recently, adaptation for these works took off. Spider-Man has been redone three times in the span of fifteen years, not including sequels, and each story has only followed Peter Parker. There’s been no indication of any of the other characters that become Spider-Man such as Doctor Octopus or Miles Morales!

I think both Bitzer and Edbauer would agree that rhetoric requires an exigence of some sort but Bitzer views a text as rhetorical only if it is created in response to a specific exigence, while Edbauer acknowledges the fact that elements of a rhetorical situation are connected with the world around us. At this point in the course, I feel Edbauer’s theory is more accurate to my own beliefs about text and rhetoric.

Word Count: 387