Viewpoints rhetorical analysis

Rhetorical analysis, informed by feminist theory that attempts to examine the silences in written texts, can make visible the viewpoints lost at critical moments of transformation. Such an analysis, we argue, can help us resolve the dichotomy between incommensurable post-modem relativism (all viewpoints are equivalent) and the limitations of a perspective that privileges a single distanced perspective (the so-called androcentric viewpoint of the Archimedian observer). ... 

While it would be impossible to examine all of the viewpoints that writers represent in all 25 appendices, two documents in particular help us analyze the rhetorical processes by which local knowledge moves into the domain of science and public policy. Appendix F contains Blake s hand written account of his escape, written immediately after the accident. Appendix H contains Nagy s independent analysis of miners testimony following the accident. Blake s narrative enables us to view the uncertain and dynamic geography of a mine from the viewpoint of a miner focused on his own survival. His viewpoint is limited to his own experience, but his narrative reveals how he used sensory cues in the environment to save his life. Nagy s report reveals the rhetorical strategies that one fire consultant employed as he attempted to reconcile conflicting accounts of the disaster in order to reconstruct a coherent and consistent narrative of events and conditions that precipitated the disaster. 

Analysis of miners speech and gesture suggests, first, that individuals can represent themselves and others as characters in their narrative (mimetic view point) and second, that they can move outside of this embodied experience to observe and analyze events from a distance (analytic viewpoint). When speakers assume a mimetic viewpoint, they enact events directly with no rhetorical distance between themselves and the action. When speakers assume an analytic viewpoint, they place temporal and spatial distance between their current position (as observers or narrators) and the events they describe. 

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