A Final Defense

Throughout this blogging experience, I have tampered with the mystic arts of rhetorical theory. Now, the time has come to pay the price for this tampering. I will be judged on my works, evil and good, and repaid with a numeric grade. This is my final defense.

The primary goal of this blog was to engage rhetorical concepts. I proved my knowledge worthy of belief by incorporating and describing complex, developed reasoning, possibly sacrificing the interest of audiences uninitiated in the ways of rhetoric. Because of this, I tried to limit these explanations to the minimum, just enough so that the concept could still be understood. Sometimes this involved an easily-skipped, well-developed theoretical paragraph, and sometimes it amounted to a brief name drop for the sake of decorum.

While pretty much all of my posts fit snuggly into nerd culture, I think the artifacts analyzed were still pretty diverse in content, pulling from several different genres, therefore establishing myself, the rhetor, as one who has knowledge in many fields, yet one with a distinctly nerdy voice (or ideology? Maybe this blog is actually secretly all about arguing for the Cult of the Nerd, and by reading its theories, one is drawn further in until one cannot escape, and does not, in fact, realize that there is even anything to escape from, thinking instead that this is just the way life should be: wrapped in the false consciousness of comic books and spools of film).

In order to propel the audience into the proper frame of mind, I start each blog with a recognizable related to the artifact. This is an attempt to pique the audience member’s interest, and if it is something they care about, to get them to possibly understand the artifact the way I describe it, even if they didn’t want to. In the fashion of many of the Great Blogs, including The Bloggess, Tynan, and The Inky Fool, I try to incorporate an abundance of interesting dynamic features like lists and pictures in my blog to keep it interesting and unique, while also applying to blog conventions. I am not the best layout person, but I keep it consistent at the very least and stylish at the most. Another dynamic blog convention I included often was links to other pages that might give background information about something I am talking about to save space for more analysis. Links are enjoyable, as they are the bane of productivity in the Internet age.

Looking at the blog through Kenneth Burke’s “frames of acceptance,” which can be tragedy, comedy, or epic, I would at least halfheartedly argue that each of these frames would fit this artifact. By discussing parts of the heroic tales of such people as Spider-Man, Brandon Stanton, and our friend the sloth, the audience of the blog may feel a sense of adventure and invigoration from watching these individuals overcome hardship. The comic and / or tragic frames will be more apparent after the blog is finally graded. Both have been set up, as the heroes of this blog are all victims of fate. Ultimately, this blog attempts to provide a method of transcendence, with which this fate can be transcended and conquered. Tragedy and comedy are quite similar, until the end, when tragedy ends in death and comedy ends in marriages. Only once the blog is graded will fate determine whether it shall end in tragedy or comedy.

If it is a comedy, dibs on marrying Spider-Man!