Aaah, the First Day.

The Idea of Order at Key West
by Wallace Stevens
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Poetry/Stevens/The_Idea_of_Order_at_Key_West.html


Frye: "...all structures in words are partly rhetorical, and hence literary, and that the notion of a scientific or philosophical verbal structure free of rhetorical elements is an illusion" (350).

Whenever I hear or read the word "rhetoric" or "rhetorical", I am taken back to my first semester of my freshman year of college to ENGL121 with Joshua Lenart. I think he was a grad student who was teaching the course, and on the very first day of class he asked us what we thought rhetoric was - the definition, in our own words. Most of the males in the classroom sat there with blank stares because the class was an early one and they really didn't care to be there or understand what rhetoric really was (that was a broad generalization; I apologize). And most of the females sat there with blank stares because Josh was absolutely gorgeous and whether anyone knew the definition or not, we were all unable to speak in his oh-so-perfect presence (at least I was - not ashamed!). In short, none of us could come up with a definition for the word "rhetoric" for varying reasons.
I felt my face grow hot as he eyed each of us. The room got even more silent than it was before; one could hear the clock ticking - it was so utterly painful. I had to look away for fear of him thinking that I was an incompetent moron, and I just knew that he knew that I had a huge Freshman year crush on him while he stood at the front of the room in his gray button-up shirt with his sun-kissed skin, probably just as nervous teaching the course as I was sitting in that dreaded room that actually made me think. Because we were unable to come up with anything, Josh mercifully helped us out. He explained to us that rhetoric was a way of using language effectively - influentially - persuasively. Each person strives to get their point across to another by using language, whether they are an English major, a biology major, a history major, etc, etc, etc. What Frye means (completely dumbed down and totally inarticulate on my part - but with the help of Mr. Josh Lenart) is that each of us use language as a way to communicate with one another. We are constantly using rhetoric to persuade, influence and add our two cents to a conversation or through correspondence, and we do it in ways that are considered literary. So no matter what is being discussed and by whom, everything we say can be taken literarily (is this even a word?)...and in the words of Dr. Sexson, "Not literally - lit-er-ar-il-y". Rhetoric is everywhere, therefore everything that we say and write and the ways in which we communicate with one another is literary. Whew. Thank you, Josh, for explaining rhetoric to me and helping me to understand Frye a few years down my educational road.