RTC611S - RHETORICAL THEORY AND CRITICISM - 1ST OPP - JUNE 2022 :: NUST past examination papers between 2020 and 2024

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RTC611S - RHETORICAL THEORY AND CRITICISM - 1ST OPP - JUNE 2022

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RTC611S - RHETORICAL THEORY AND CRITICISM - 1ST OPP - JUNE 2022

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n Am I BI A u n IVER s ITY

OF SCIEn CE Ano TECHn OLOGY

FACULTY OF COMMERCE, HUMAN SCIENCE, AND EDUCATION

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION

QUALIFICATION: BACHELOROF COMMUNICATION/ BACHELOROF ENGLISH

QUALIFICATION CODE: 06BACO/06BAEN LEVEL: 6

COURSE CODE: RTC611S

COURSE NAME:

RHETORICALTHEORYAND CRITICISM

SESSION: JUNE 2022

TIME: 2 HOU RS

PAPER: (PAPER1)

MARKS: 50

EXAMINER

FIRST OPPORTUNITY EXAMINATION QUESTION PAPER

DR.C. PEEL,MR C MATENGU

MODERATOR: DR. M. MHENE

INSTRUCTIONS

1. This paper has five questions in total. Answer TWO questions, one of

which must be Question 1 as it is compulsory. Choose one other

question from the remaining four. Candidates may not choose to

substitute Question 1 with another question.

2. Read all the questions carefully before answering them.

3. Indicate whether you are a FT, PT, or DE student.

THIS MEMORANDUM CONSISTS OF _7 _ PAGES (Including this front page)

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Question 1

(RTC)

25 marks

Use your own examples to demonstrate your knowledge and application of the

following:

(a) Aristotle's three artistic proofs (identify and explain) ......................................9.. marks

(b) Examples of how you would apply each artistic proof to your messaging......9 marks

Question 2

25 marks

In each of the following newspaper opinion pieces - (a) and (b) - and the advocacy

campaign (c), discern whether the rhetor's intention is to generate credibility,

emphasise the logic of an argument, draw emotion, or draw a mixture of the above.

Give reasons for your answer in each case.

(a)

CF-18 replacement in jeopardy

I was surprised to read that Canada's fighter aircraft replacement programme

has hit another hurdle. Apparently, the new F-35s will not be able to

communicate or share information with the older CF-18fighter jets. As a retired

pilot, I can tell you that this is not a significant problem. In fact, the Americans

are already working with Lockheed Martin to come up with a solution. With

new technology there is always a process of adaptation and implementation.

The suggestion that the new jets will have communication issues is likely just a

fabrication made up by Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer that did not get the

contract.

Colonel J. Fitzroy

Retired pilot, Royal Canadian Airforce

(b) Vandals and Goths

To the Goths who punctured my car's tyres, you may like to know that your actions

prevented an old-age pensioner (me) from getting to his chemotherapy appointment

on time. Grow up and be considerate!

Francois Andreas Witbooi

Pensioner, Khomasdal

abortion campaign outside a clinic

in the US.

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Question 3

25 marks

a) Identify, explain, and distinguish between the two types of rhetorical 'subjects':

(i) Functional persuasion; and (ii) Literary persuasion. 2x4.5 ....................(.9 marks]

b) With the aid of Aristotle's three rhetorical proofs, and Cicero's five canons of

rhetoric, critique the emotional significance of the text by Peter Midgley entitled

Writing Namibia from afar, attached to this question paper ........................[16 marks]

Question 4

25 marks

Identify and discuss the merits and/or demerits of each of the five types of Ad

Hominem messages deployed by Amakali, Kangira, and Ekanjume-lllong (2019),

generating your own examples to demonstrate your understanding of each category.

Marks will be awarded for:

(a) Identifying and discussing merits/demerits of each of the 5 categories of Ad

Hominem messages (Sx4 marks).....................................................................2..0. marks

(b) Generating your own examples (one for each category, lxS mrks) ...............5 marks

Question 5

25 marks

Briefly narrate and analyse an important contribution by each of the following six

classical scholars to the development of Rhetorical Theory and Criticism:

(a) Plato...............................................................................................................4...m...arks

(b) Aristotle .........................................................................................................4....m..arks

(c) Erasmus.........................................................................................................4....m..arks

(d) Quintilian ........................................................................................................4...m..arks

(e) St Augustine of Hippo ....................................................................................4...m. arks

(f) Cicero..............................................................................................................4...m...arks

Bonus mark for good language and presentation ..............................................1.. mark

End of comprehensive test

Total: 50 marks

/ ...Appendix 1 Writing Namibia from afar

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NEWSI 07/0612020 ., .•.. ,:,:· . ' · · ., ,,

WritingNamibiafrom afar

AUTHOR

Peter Midgley

, · ,, ·.

Peter Midgley is a Namibian-born writer based in Edmonton, Canada. His collection of

poetry, "Letus not think of them as barbarians" {NeWest Press, 2019}, was shortlisted for

the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. His book Counting Teeth: A Namibian

Story was shortlisted for the Robert Kraetsch City of Edmonton Prize.

Let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn

from the stones of Namibia.

The history of the genocide in Namibia is easily summarized: In 1904, war broke out between

the Ovaherero of central Namibia, then known as German Southwest Africa, and the German

colonists. On 1 October 1904, soon after the Battle of Ohamakari (Waterberg), the German

general, Lothar van Trotha, gave his infamous Vernichtungsbefehl, which led to four years in

which the Herera and from late 1905 onward also the Nama, were systematically shot,

rounded up, and placed in concentration camps.

The legacies of the German colonial genocide in Namibia still reverberate today. The politics

of remembrance and compensation are fraught with difficulty and can distort historical

narratives in the way certain aspects of the history become elided to create convenient

binaries such as black vs. white, or good vs. evil, "us" against "them". In turning the genocide

into a national narrative, we forget for instance that, initially, the Nama (who later became

victims, too) aided the Germans in their fight against Herera, or that members of the

notorious Koevoet special force, who were recruited from local indigenous people, served to

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suppress the efforts of the liberation war in the 1980s. Such elisions can undermine

opportunities for post-independence Namibia to come to terms with both distant and recent

histories of dispossession, but a discussion of these nuances is crucial to dealing effectively

with the past.

For writers, the neat binaries required of the courtroom-rights and wrongs, victims versus

perpetrators, individual deviance from collective behaviour-are insufficient to counter the

complexities, ambiguities, and complicities found in historical records, archives, and

individual memories. Memory is messy and ambiguous, and as a writer, my task is to help

tease out the contradictions by stringing together competing renditions of the past.

Literature, and particularly literature about the genocide, helps us to work through difficult,

but essential questions such as: what responsibility do we have, individually and collectively,

to carry the past with us, or to contribute to reconciling our present with the wrongs of the

past? What is clear is that we are all implicated in this history through familial lines, through

privilege, and through conscious choices. Writing is just one way of exploring our part in the

past, and for finding ways to take that sense of complicity with us into the future in

responsible ways.

This has certainly been how I have approached my own writing-to have my writing bear

witness to the past and my own implication in it, and to establish how to make art that

contributes to establishing a shared future. My relationship with Namibia is complex, but not

unusual: I was born in Okahandja in 1965, mere months before the start of the War of

Independence, the child of settlers who had come to the country as part of the South African

government's post-World War II settlement policy. Years later, I would be called up by the

South African Defence Force for compulsory military service. To have heeded that would have

been to choose sides by working actively to prevent the citizens of my birthplace from gaining

independence. I chose to become a conscientious objector; thousands in a similar positions

did not. What I can do through my writing, is to explore the moral and ethical choices we

make under such circumstances, and try to understand the implications of those choices

today.

In writing about the genocide, I am not so much interested in the physical body count; rather

my focus is on the cultural legacy of those four years. As the Ovaherero fled into the desert

where they starved to death, the okuruo (sacred fires) were put out. After the war, these had

to be relit, but much of the cultural knowledge that had accompanied the making and

maintaining of fires had been extinguished. Many survivors had converted to Christianity, as

this offered them a greater chance of survival in the camps. The loss of precolonial cultural

heritage has had a persistent and profound psychological effect that has spanned

generations. We see it in inequalities that were exacerbated by the genocide and colonial

oppression under apartheid, and that persist still. The effect of the psychological warfare that

accompanied the physical decimation of bodies has continued through subsequent

generations.

Politically, the loss and suffering of the genocide was turned into acts of heroism and

resistance during the War of Liberation. In this way, the trauma of one generation became

the seed that generated resistance, but that also led to a second period of national trauma.

The psychological wounds of the liberation struggle run deep and overlay the scars of the

genocide in the Namibian national consciousness.

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We also see the continued legacy of the genocide in efforts to sue the German government

and companies like the Woermann lines for reparations. Money is only one aspect of this

equation: no amount of money can heal the psychological wounds and the loss of cultural

knowledge.

As a writer, I make such legacies visible in the stories I choose to tell and the ways in which I

try to offer pathways to healing. We can theorize the notion of genocide and debate what is,

or what should be called genocide or not, but ultimately the crucial question is how we change

our behaviours-and only imagination and will can provide answers. Story is both the quest

to uncover that past, and imagining a future beyond it. When I returned for my research for

my book, Counting Teeth: a Namibian Story, a librarian in Swakopmund denied the presence

of camps there. When I asked what she would call the mass killing of people other than

genocide, she responded, "Well, not quite that"-words that echo David Lurie's thoughts in

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace as he reflects on having sex with Melanie even as she averts herself:

"Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." Not quite that:

A crucial step to working with memory, reconciliation, and healing through art is

acknowledging the past for what it was, and accepting our implication in that past and its

legacies.

I have always had a diasporic relationship with Namibia: although I was born there, my

parents returned to South Africa when I was five years old. Yet the country stayed with me-

not only through visits, but through the stories and artefacts that filled my childhood home,

and that occupy a central place in my own home now. While I was at university, I had to

negotiate the complexity of soldiers (on both sides) entering and crossing borders. What

intrigues me is how the ebb and flow of exiles and returnees moving across borders is a

common thread in our histories. And against those bodies in motion, there are the ones who

stayed. How does one negotiate the various forms of physical and emotional exile and return

other than through literature?

Exile and diaspora, I learned from those who have been placed in that position, and from my

own experience in diaspora, involves a very visceral, bodily engagement with a country.

Physical separation from a place that has commanded so much of my body, in all respects,

reminds me of the physical and emotional hurt and agony of separation from a lover. In such

a context, writing about absence becomes a vehicle through which I can explore my own

relationship to the place as well as my responses to reconciliation and repatriation of people

and artefacts of note.

Growing older has allowed me to reconcile myself with my own body and its implication in a

broader past, and this, too, I have attempted to incorporate into my artistic practice. Through

accepting myself and my role in the past, I have begun to consider whether we can pass

healing on to future generations in the same way we have passed trauma on through the

generations that preceded us.

In 2011, I visited Namibia to travel and do the research that became Counting Teeth: a

Namibian Story. It was my first trip back to Namibia since Independence in 1990, and for the

two months that I was there, I kept a diary. Each night as I put down the day's experiences on

paper, fragments of poetry drifted into the writing. After finishing Counting Teeth, I began to

reconstruct those fragments, following the ebb and flow of words, the repetitions and

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laments, the acts of defiance that they revealed. Not long after my return to Canada, the

ancestral remains that had been kept at the Charite in Berlin were returned to Namibia. The

movement of bodies, dead and alive, across borders and around Namibia contained their own

rhythm and illustrated how the past and the present mingled and intruded on each other

constantly. That, too, found its way into the poetry of let us not think of them as barbarians in

the way characters moved through the country, through time, and through each other.

Slowly, a story emerged: let us not think of them as barbarians is a love letter to Namibia; a

celebration of independence; a recognition of the pasts that made Namibia what it is today;

and a journey towards healing and a reconciliation of many pasts, absences and presences.

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/42615/writing-namibia-from-afar

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