Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Prof. Lasley
English 1A
7 October 2015
Rhetorical Analysis
In her essay, Its Time for Class: Toward a More Complex
Pedagogy of Narrative, Amy E. Rolbillard discusses the relationship
between time and social class, and the effect it has on narrative. As an
English professor with a working-class background, Robbillard is able to
identify with her readers and empathize with the experiences of the
working-class students that are part of her argument. Through the
structure of her essay and use of rhetorical devices Robillard convinces
her audience that the socioeconomic background of students
influences their perception of time in a way that may negatively effect
their perception of their own life.
In her work, Robillard writes to an audience of English professors
that discredit the use of the narrative as an affective and credible form
of writing. She argues for an inclusion of narrative, along with analysis
and argument, in the academia of college English because of its
importance in personal growth and understanding. With composition
being a middle-class dominated enterprise (75), it is important that
working-class students have an opportunity to understand themselves
and their background to excel in the classroom. In order to seem
credible to her peers she begins her essay with the use of epigraphs.
The use of epigraphs in her work is common and specifically used to
set a starting place for the direction she wishes her essay to go. In this
case she uses three quotes from writers Linda Brodkey and Carolyn
Leste Law two accredited writers who wrote about relationships
between social class and literacy, similar topics of interest for Robillard.
By juxtaposing her work with that of Brodkey and Law from the very
beginning and continuing to do so throughout her essay, she
essentially qualifies herself to interact with the work of these two
writers and formulate her argument. Doing this puts her in a position
that appeals to her audience because it now gives her a voice that she
intends to use to persuade them throughout the rest of her essay. The
use of the quotations, [I]n my family the past provided the only
possible understanding of the present (Brodkey, Writing on the Bias
528) and [A]utobiography [is] a sensitive instrument of critique,
certainly the only critical apparatus sensitive enough to register the
subtle rumblings of class in higher education (Law, The Making of
Working-Class Academics 7), brings to light the brings to light the
topic of a dialogue Robillard is attempting to open. She intends to
persuade professors that they should acknowledge that students, or
people in general, need to look back on their past to understand our
present. In order to do so, there needs to be a way for those in the