Essay 1 — Rhetorical Analysis (4-5 pages)
Schedule of Stages and Due Dates Below
In our first unit, we read Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture” and his seven theses that discuss the relationship between monster’s and culture. For your first essay, you will write a comparative analysis of the two of Cohen’s theses.
Your argument should be rooted in picking one key term that appears in both theses and analyzing how Cohen defines and uses this word between the ideas in the two theories. Examples can include, but are not limited to: monster, body, culture, escape, or history.
Please be sure that your thesis statement summarizes
HOW each Cohen defines this word in each thesis (according to your argument),
HOW each thesis’s uses of the word are in conversation with each other, and
WHY is this conversation important (i.e. what more do we learn about Cohen’s argument that he does not state explicitly)?
In some point in your analysis, your discussion should address the following questions:
1. What is the “they say” to which Cohen is responding in these theses?
2. What is your motivation in exploring this word?
3. What is the proof of the definition that you provide? (Note: your proof should go beyond a one-or-two-sentence definition that the author offers in their introductions)
4. How do the authors say what they say? (Analyze at least one rhetorical strategy)
“Monster theory” must therefore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift; invigorated by change and escape, by the impossibility of achieving what Susan Stewart calls the desired “fall or death, the stopping” of its gigantic subject, monstrous interpretation is as much process as epiphany, a work that most content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shadows, obscured glimpses—signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in for the monstrous body itself).” (thesis 2)
“The monster is the abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds of identities—personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal, particular (even if that “particular” identity is an embrace of the power/status/knowledge of abjection itself); as such it reveals their partiality, their contiguity.” (thesis 6)
I will use these two pieces of evidence for my essay. Fragment is the word I have chosen to work with.
The use of “fragment” in Thesis 2 is being used to represent the physical aspect of the monster such as its body parts to signify monstrous aura.
The use of “fragment” in Thesis 6 is used to show the monster is an absolute representation of the forming of multiple aspects of identity, of which monsters border that reveals why we like to fear them.
While “fragment” aligns in both theses in its purpose to represent, they differ in what they are describing such as a physical body parts or personal identity.
