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2 Rhetorics of “Advantage” and “Pure Persuasion” Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and vietnam My title for this chapter conveys certain flexibilities and potentials in poetry when it is used as a public art. Kenneth Burke’s distinction of a “rhetoric of advantage” and the rhetorical possibilities based on “pure persuasion ” suggests that public awareness can be produced on divisive topics by aggressively pursuing advantage over an audience, or also by seeking to follow the cohering relationships that emerge within certain contexts. Burke claims there often exists an “agonistic” purpose “to gain advantage, of one sort or another.”1 “Advantage,” for Burke, is useful as a way to account for the “drives” and “urges” that motivate individual or group psychologies. Theorizing a modern rhetoric based on ancient models, he addresses rhetorical situations that are informed by the influences of nietzsche, Marx, and freud. A “rhetoric of advantage” also makes use of traditional rhetorical practices in which a writer or speaker attempts to move readers and auditors to act in some way based on a sense of shared motives. A person operating from the perspective of advantage does so with realizable purposes in mind. Denise Levertov, for example, contributed arguments to social movements in the 1960s and ’70s that protested war in vietnam. The moral advantage she sought corresponds with Burke’s reading of the Sophist rhetorician isocrates, who “chose to spiritualize the notion of ‘advantage’ (pleonexia).”2 Such spiritualization constitutes a “true advantage” in that it is based in a rhetorician’s sense of “moral superiority.”3 Levertov’s convictions about the immorality of war in Southeast Asia led her to address the antiwar movement through a poetics that derived its own rhetorical advantage from moral commonplaces. She restated these through textual and performative gestures that gave shape and resonance to debates over vietnam. Robert Duncan, by contrast, pursued different rhetorical possibilities in his war writing and in his personal response to the peace movement. His approach differs from Levertov’s in that it displays keen similarities with Rhetorics of “Advantage” and “Pure Persuasion” / 49 what Burke called a rhetoric of “pure persuasion,” and is most evident in Duncan’s poems during this time, especially “Passages 25,” which stressed the phatic role of the poet as seer. “Pure persuasion,” Burke argued, “involves the saying of something, not for an extra-verbal advantage to be got by the saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying.”4 for Burke, “pure persuasion” underlies a commitment to artistic and religious impulses in which the motives of an artist proceed in a kind of dialectic between the individual and her rhetorical situation. His theoretical description of “pure persuasion” aligns with Bronislaw Malinowski’s term, “phatic communion.”5 To Burke, Malinowski “refer[s] to talk at random, purely for the satisfaction of talking together, the use of speech as such for the establishing of a social bond between speaker and spoken-to.”6 Burke claims “pure persuasion” is “more intensely purposive,” possessing “a kind of purpose which, as judged by the rhetoric of advantage, is no purpose at all, or which might often look like sheer frustration of purpose.”7 next to “advantage ,” a rhetoric of “pure persuasion” seems feckless, even misguided, yet in its realm exist strategies that reinforce social bonds and relationships. it exhibits the rhetorical ground of the traditional relations of the artist to her work and to the larger social networks it engages. “Pure persuasion,” moreover, enables relations of inquiry and relates to nancy Struever’s emphasis on modalities of investigation, expanded pursuits, gestures, and actions that lead to confrontation or challenge; it allows inquests that can provoke new perspectives and outcomes. By looking at Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan’s public engagements through these possibilities of “advantage ” and “pure persuasion,” sharper distinctions of rhetorical poetry as a factor in citizenship and dissent may be shown. Both approaches indicate ways in which modality in poetry contributes to certain kinds of public intervention: it gives coloration of value possibilities that can prepare audiences to understand controversial issues from different perspectives. Modalities of possibility also encourage social change, resistance, or future political engagement. if publics can be addressed through rhetorical modalities that shift attention from actual conditions toward other possible public actions, new social alternatives may be offered for public understanding, preparation, and future action; poetry in such instances produces capacities that enable an audience to receive ethical perspectives in complex systems of belief based on private and public feelings . The rhetorical...

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