Introduction
Which words?
In which order?
To what end?
For my sophomores, engaging thoughtfully in these questions is the enduring lesson I hope to address each year. They all come to me with a growing sense of the power of words as they navigate their expanding world, constantly negotiating, persuading, and defending themselves through language. But they're still only learning to do so with conscious intent. By teaching children the fundamentals of rhetoric, and then helping them to recognize effective (or ineffective) strategies, first on the pages of the books we read, and then in speeches from history, they can begin to become more conscious of the potential of language, of the appropriate application of ethos, pathos, and logos. Once they've learned this, it's a natural step for them to begin employing these tools of rhetoric to their own benefit, and that's the true goal: to create students who both understand the dynamics of the speech communities in which they function and are consciously able to navigate their own ways within them.
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is the core text for this unit that focuses on the study and application of rhetoric. In addition to providing students an understanding of rhetoric and eloquence, the unit will also present students with historical texts and film footage of speeches by Adolph Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Neville Chamberlain to supplement the study of the core novel. The supplemental texts are rich in rhetoric and will aid students in their understanding of the appeals, as well as support our layered analysis of Golding's work as a parable for the political forces and methods of discourse used by world leaders of the time. We will analyze three major speeches of the era, focusing on key elements of eloquence and rhetorical appeals in order to assess their efficacy. Through Readers' Theater and textual interaction, we will apply this same analytical perspective to the text of Lord of the Flies to examine the author's use of speech to develop the major characters as illustrative of rhetorical strategies at work on the world stage during World War II, focusing on the efficacy of these different appeals on a populace. Students will clearly identify primary rhetorical appeals in speeches by the main characters. They will see how after being marooned on a tropical island, Golding's principal characters begin to vie for leadership and the power and control that accompanies it. Students will understand how Jack moves others through pathos, how Ralph establishes, and then relies on his ethos, and how Piggy ineffectively attempts to use logos. Students will draw the connection between Jack and the demagoguery of Nazi rhetoric by looking at the histrionics within an early political speech by Adolph Hitler; they will recognize the clear connection between Ralph and Allied political leadership of the time through the character's willingness to appease and remain conciliatory in the face of Jack's rising power in an effort to maintain his own ethos and preserve the status quo; and they will understand why Piggy's appeals to logic and rational sense fall on deaf ears, or are lost amid emotional cries for action. By focusing on the use and consequence of rhetorical strategies in the novel and helping students to see similarities between language within the novel and three different speech acts, they will develop a deeper understanding of both. Ultimately, students will apply their knowledge of rhetoric and eloquence to craft and deliver an oration in the persona of one of the principal characters from the novel.
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