I’m working on a conference paper for a class in Classical Rhetoric and I’m running into a major problem: I have no idea how to analyze oratory. I think I would be doing okay, except that I’m forcing myself to attempt rhetorical analysis of one of Donald Trump’s campaign rallies (embedded above) without using a transcript. As I’ve hunted around looking for scholarship that might provide me with tools or a framework for rhetorical analysis of oratory, I’ve realized that my lack of skills is probably a result of my training in Rhet/Comp and not Communication. In other words, by getting creative and stepping outside my field, I may have just assigned myself the task of learning a whole new field. Such is the life of a graduate student, right ? . . .

So why not just use a transcript? Well, last week I read through the Phaedrus again and I realized something about the way Socrates criticizes Lysias’ speech on the benefits of giving favors to a non-lover. Around line 263e, Socrates asks Phaedrus to pull out the scroll with Lysias’ speech on it and read the introduction back to him. This request struck me as odd because I knew that later in the dialogue, Socrates would end up criticizing writing for making people forgetful and for disrupting dialectic. I started thinking that it seems like the criticism Socrates is leveling against Lysias’ speech is text-based criticism; in other words, he is in reality criticizing the scroll, not the speech Lysias actually gave. Immediately, I started to wonder what a non-text-based criticism would look like. Maybe Lysias’ speech works just fine as oratory, and Socrates isn’t evaluating it on its own terms?

Eventually, this line of thinking led me to Trump. It’s been less than a month since his inauguration and just yesterday, he called a press conference that most of the media agrees was a train wreck. But part of me wonders, didn’t they say the same thing about his rallies? His debate performances? Anyway, we’ll see if this goes anywhere, but I have a hunch that we’re missing something about oratory in all this.