Reading Response for October 23rd

I believe that if Madeleine de Scudery were alive today, we would be friends. I found her extremely fascinating with her feminist outlooks and thoughts on many issues. Although she wasn't as "polished" as many rhetoricians thought she should of been, she still believed in the woman's voice, which you don't see a lot of during the Renaissance. These novels that she produced were strong, determined and portrayed a loud voice of a proud woman. She reminds me a lot of the woman in the Titanic, Molly Brown (who is played by Kathy Bates) who speaks up for women and their rights. Again, like I said in the last blog, it is very refreshing to see a woman in the field of rhetoricians and see her getting praised for the work she has done. It seems to rare in a world that men ruled for such a long time.

I enjoyed that Madame de Rambouillet invented the "salon." I felt as though it allowed some fun because it seems so rare in those times. Things were serious and always down to business, that women never knew fun until the salon. The following passage is what makes me believe that de Scudery and me would be friends: "To enter salon society, one should be able to behave like a salon denizen and be witty, imaginative, urbane, and above all, verbally adapted in both writing and speech. (...) One must not monopolize the conversation - indeed, no faux pas was worse than insisting on one's on point of view to the exclusion of all others' - but also, one must never be at a loss for words. Madeleine de Scudery won instant acceptance in this milieu." (761)

By reading her story, Madeleine de Scudery presents a woman of strength and outright dominance and I appreciate reading about her and what she represents for women rhetoricians, past, present and future.

In the reading for ARCS, I thought that the chapter on arrangement was very interesting. I really enjoyed that the way an argument is presented can make a difference in the outcome. I also thought that Aristotle in absolutely nuts in his logic sometimes because the guy doesn't even take into consideration other's work and it is always his way or the highway. I know he is a classical thinker, so don't think I was judging the guy and claiming that his arguments are false, but my god, he is crazy. Any who, the more I read, the more I begin to comprehend Cicero was among one of the first to take rhetoric and form it into what it should be.