Neo-Aristotlelianism: Neo-Aristotelian Analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk: "The danger of a single story"
Neo-Aristotelianism
Neo-Aristotelian Analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk: "The danger of a single story"
Adichie presenting her speech at TEDGlobal 2009.
1. Context
- Speaker: The rhetor of this speech is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and she is a feminist writer. Before presenting this speech at TEDGlobal in 2009, three of her books had been published, including Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck. In 2013, after this speech, she would publish one of her most popular books, Americanah. This means that at the time of this speech, her career was not at its highest peak yet. She is a woman who was born and raised in Nigeria, but later moved to the United States to attend university. One of the most important aspects of Adichie, which influences the speech at hand, is that she read American and British children's books during her childhood, which ultimately influenced her perception about stories and who is represented in them. This this piece of background information influences her rhetorical approach in this speech in terms of her personal experiences as a rhetor and how they apply to her message about the danger of underrepresentation. This was her first TED Talk.
- Occassion: Adichie presents this speech at a TEDGlobal 2009 conference held in Oxford, UK on from July 21st-24th (unsure of exact date she presented her speech). During this year, certain topics such as immigration and cultural identity caused much controversial discourse, and she uses examples of this discourse in her speech.
- Audience: The audience included attendees at the TEDGlobal 2009 conference, and possibly other speakers who were scheduled to speak at the conference. It can also be inferred that the audience was majorly British given that the conference takes place in Oxford, which means that the audience may have certain cultural beliefs based on their observations and experiences in the UK. Audience definitely seemed engaged in the speech given that when Adichie made humorous remarks, the audience would burst in laughter. They also similar seemed to be deeply moved by the speech because their loud cheers are evident once she completes her speech.
2. The Cannons
- Invention:
- Establishes her credibility (ethos) when she mentions how she is just as capable as perpetuating the "single story" problem as anyone else (ex: speaks about her single story of Mexican people in the United States).
- Speaks about her experience in writing, reading, and publishing, which provides reasons as to why she is qualified to be speaking about story-telling, single story, and representation.
- Tells personal stories that appeal to pathos, as they are emotional (sometimes humorous and sometimes more sorrowful) and encourage the audience to further believe in her message about the danger of a single story about groups of people.
- Organization:
- Begins with personal childhood stories and later young adulthood stories where she had both been impacted by her American roommate's single story but also admitted her own single story about Mexican Americans, but then moves onto more general commentary about the danger of a single story and solutions to solve the issue.
- Style:
- Uses a more casual tone which complements the true stories she provides.
- Sprinkles humorous statements throughout the speech, which keeps the audience engaged.
- Uses anaphora near the end of her speech: "What if my roommate knew about...".
- Applies to how she refers back to certain people she talks about at beginning of speech.
- Memory:
- Based on what is visible, she sometimes looks down at what may be her speech, but for the entirety of the speech seems like she has either memorized the speech well or has a constant grasp of what she will be saying next.
- Delivery:
- The rhythm of the speech is not extreme, but fairly steady.
- Begins her speech and throughout the speech with a conversational tone, but near the end of her speech (in particular once her concluding anaphora begins), she seems to have a more serious tone in order to signify to her audience that her concluding remarks are important.
3. The Effects
- Is one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time with 11 million views on YouTube and more than 32 million views on the official TED website.
- Commenters (which there are more than 9,000 of) on YouTube use the time stamp feature in order to direct viewers to particular parts of the speech that they enjoyed, and there are several repeats, which means there are particular points in her speech that stand out to the wider audience.
- The speech sends a powerful message and call to action about how dangerous single stories and underrepresentation can be.
4. My Perspective on Neo-Aristotelianism as a Method for Rhetorical Criticism
- I find that the function of audience analysis is limited in Neo-Aristotelian criticism because it does not really consider the wider possible audience and is more focused on the immediate audience at hand
- For example, rather than focusing just on the immediate audience (which is already difficult to know for certain), one could analyze this speech from the perspective of scholars of literary representation, students who can reflect on their recent childhood and what they were exposed to in terms of representation, or how social media has impacted the ways in which this speech has been perceived since most people have viewed the speech from YouTube or the TED website.
- While the canons are helpful in analysis because certain important features of the speech are delegated to particular canon elements of Neo-Aristotelian criticism, these canons are also limiting and too general as someone may find elements of a speech that do not necessarily fit into one of the cannons are may fit into two at the same time.
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