Edbauer

This text is written by Jenny Edbauer, who was a professor of writing at the University of Austin Texas. The primary audience of this text is anybody who wants to attempt to elevate their understanding of rhetoric, but mostly people of higher forms of education. Edbauer gives many different definitions of implications that state or allude to what rhetoric is, and one of those definitions that i found interesting was what she said in the abstract of her writing. Edbauer states that “rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling. Placing the rhetorical “elements” within this wider context destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation.” This is an extremely heavy and hard to understand piece of text. I think that Edbauer is making many statements as to what she thinks rhetoric is in these two statements. One thing that I think she is saying is that the rhetoric of something is constantly changing as the world around it changes. Because literature exist “within a network of lived practical context” it’s meaning and rhetoric changes from person to person, from group to group, and even from generation to generation. This ties into the idea that she is trying to get across to the audience of rhetorical ecology. These two sentences sum up her argument of rhetorical ecology pretty well. Rhetorical ecology is the idea that rhetoric is similar to a biological ecology, which is never fixed, but fluid and constantly changing. Rhetorical ecology also includes the idea that literature and humans live symbiotically, constantly changing and influencing each other. The main purpose of Edauer’s writing is to get this complicated message across to the audience. She wants her audience to understand that they have an influence on the world around them, in both a passive and an active way.