Where High Theory and Fan Fiction Meet

Five months of intense rhetorical study, and yet it took an afternoon of reading fan fiction to trigger the realization that I am and always have been firmly on the rhetoric-as-dialectical side of things. Goes to show, I guess, how very important a role extra-academic experience and thought plays in developing systems of belief about the world.

This is a particularly interesting epiphany for me as I suspect it'll help me put into words some of the annoyance I have with overly Aristotelian views of rhetoric - in which knowledge is only employed, never created. And also to reconcile the view of logic as a dominant/superior mode of persuasion with the importance of local situation. But then...I guess the remaining sticking point then is persuasion. Dialectic is by nature not persuasive. And I do think rhetoric is. Is it simply a midpoint, a question of attempting to persuade while also remaining open to the influence of identification? Hmm. Might (and I can't believe I'm typing this) have to dip into Perelman again...