Moon, Gretchen Flesher. “The Pathos of Pathos: The treatment of Emotion in Contemporary Composition Textbooks.” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.
“When Aristotle delineates three appeals in the Rhetoric—logos, pathos, ethos—he establishes not only a system of classification, but a principle of valuation for study by the generations of rhetoricians to follow him” (33).
“Aristotle understands, accepts, and promotes emotional appeals and devotes a major portion of his treastie to them” (33). =A
“He claims at the outset that ‘the man who is to be in command of [the pisteis] must, it is clear, be able to reason logically, to understand human characters and excellences, and to understand the emotions—that , to know what they are, their nature, their causes and the way in which they are excited’” (1156a 22) (34). =A& E
“in the province of rhetoric as Aristotle defined it—is to find the common ground between rhetor and audience in attitudes and states of mind” (34). =E
He and Burke are thinking alike here. Burke believes one needs to identify with the audience and that identification is finding common ground.
“The writers this textbook imagines, and their audiences, are apparently apt to agree that emtotions play a useful role, but a potentially unsavory one” (35). =B
“The dominant impression after such a survey is that appeals to emotion are understood to be a kind of compromise for the postlapsarian world, infinitely dangerous and detached from rational process” (38).
“Similarly, cognitivist approaches to composition schematize the highly conscious, linear processes of rationality and largely ignore the unconscious and chaotic affective ones” (40). =B
“What would a textbook that took emotions seriously look like? It would not make composing look simple. It would recognize and provoke analysis of both the discourse of emotions and emotional discourse” (40). =B
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