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Teaching Resources: Developing Analytical Thinking
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Rhetorical Triangle / Reading Texts in Layers (Music Videos)
Rhetorical Triangle / Reading Texts in Layers (Music Videos)
Rhetorical Triangle / Reading Texts in Layers (Music Videos)
submitted by Andy ScahillWhy this may be useful in your class: It’s a good way to illustrate how one would take the concepts of the rhetorical situation (Motives for Writing 2-7) out of a writing context and into an analytical context. It also helps students to divide a complicated text into individual components to analyze and then reconstruct them into cohesive analytical claim. For my class, I use Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video, mostly because it’s considered to be one of the first “post-modern” videos, toying with concepts of gender identification, voyeurism and audience address.
What you need: A chalkboard, a VCR or DVD player
Timing: About 45 minutes to an hour.
What to do:
- Go over the rhetorical situation, with particular attention being paid to translating MFW’s composition focus to one of analysis; for example, how might “audience” be reconceptualized in terms of different mediums: textual, visual, cinematic, musical, and advertising?
- Distribute the lyrics to the song. Have a student read the text aloud (preferably one that doesn’t know the song, since we read songs things differently when we don’t know the melody). Insist on a close reading, and record student observations about the text under the heading of “topic”—what is the song “about”? My classes generally begin by noting that “OYH” is a love song, and then specifically a heterosexual love song, a song of unrequited and aggressive love, etc… They also note the sexual “lock/key” metaphor, and the gender ambiguity inherent in requesting the male be the one to “open up”.
- Play the song (or the video without the picture on). Direct students’ attention to “purpose”—how do the conventions of that musical genre (pop, punk rock, etc…) operate? What effect does it intend for the listener? And by extension, discussion of “audience” works well here, as in the next stage. My classes generally hit on pop music’s marketability, broad audience composition, simple and easily remembered melodies, and its pleasurable nature.
- Discuss the role of the artist (for purposes of music, generally understood to be “author”). How is the artist’s star persona at work? My students have plenty to say about Madonna, who is at once savvy and slutty, iconic and versatile, and a figure that inspires identification from young girls, desire from heterosexual men and lesbians, and icon worship from gay men.
- Then, of course, “always historicize.” Discuss the “context” of the piece—its place in a larger historical context, but also in the artist’s own career trajectory. My classes generally note (with my help) that the 80s was a time marked by gratuitous consumerism, the emergence of AIDS and gay public consciousness, women’s workforce issues and questioning of the career woman/mother binary, and debates over pornography and the ever ubiquitous “obscenity.”
- Finally, play the video. Ideally, the choice in video will force students to re-examine their previous conclusions about several of the elements of the rhetorical situation. Then have the students create an overall interpretation for the text based on the layered reading performed. For “OYH,” students have to negotiate how Madonna plays upon her star persona to suggest that she is both a spectacle for a variety of voyeurs, but also an empowered manipulator of voyeurism and consumerism. They also, generally, concede that the topic of the text may not be a simple heterosexual love song after all, but rather a love song aimed at her consumer public and a call for a model of both erotic desire and identification (at least that’s the reading my classes came up with).
Have an idea for Tried and True? Send it to fywp@osu.edu!
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