Where the Wild Things Should Be Rhetorical analysis

I was really excited about this blog entry because we get to choose any visual narrative that we want! One of my all time favorite childhood stories is, “Where the Wild Things Are.” I absolutely love the power that these illustrations have on inspiring the imagination. I love how the story starts with Max being sent to his room without any dinner. From there, he does what every child does- uses his imagination. Only Max thinks and creates an adventure that is far fetched and whimsical. The visual aspects of this amazing childhood story are what make this one of the most beloved childrens books of all time. I love the beginning when Max is pacing in his room and the line reads “Max’s room began to turn into a forest” and we see his room slowly start to grow trees. Then it continues with “and grew” … “and grew” and Max gets this really mischievous grin on his face as he begins to think up the rest of his adventure. This is definitely one of those moments in the story that really needed to be illustrated for people to really connect to Max and his story. If it had just been described that “his room turned into a forest” without the progression, funny look from Max, to eventually seeing his whole room as a massive jungle, it just wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Another reason why I chose to focus on this story is because it was adapted into a movie. Going into the next until of this class, I thought it was important to discuss how visual narrative works in relationship to films. Where the Wild things are is such a great example because the incredible illustrations were so powerful that it was able to be created into a moving, powerful, imaginative film. I only saw the film once, a long time ago, but I thought it was extremely well done, and stuck true to the original narrative and visual aspects of the book very well. All in all, I think this is one of the most impactful visual narratives I have ever seen, and I jsut love the way it takes readers back to using their imaginations.

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One of the desired outcomes for Argument in Children's Lit was that students demonstrate the value of using children's and young adult literature to learn the skills and principles of rhetorical analysis and argumentation. In this class, we sharpened our skills of analyzing and composing effective arguments by reading certain children's literature to dissect the rhetorical strategies within their plots. We then wrote a paper (or in the case of the final project-made a video) that most of the time wasn't about the book we read in class, but was still structured so that we applied the concepts learned in class.

For the first unit, we read To Kill A Mockingbird and discussed the personalities, communication styles and ideologies of the main characters and how these qualities contributed to the overall rhetorical message of the book. We then learned about the  Burkean Pentad as a method of rhetorical analysis. For our first assignment, we were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of our favorite book character. The goal of this assignment was to reflect more deeply on the particular ideologies that motivate our character’s rhetoric. We analyzed 2-3 important scenes from the book using the Burkean pentad in order to form our conclusions.

Here is a link to my first paper: Hans Hubermann FINAL.pdf 

For the second unit, we focused on visual rhetoric, which seeks to understand how and why visual images communicate meaning. The book we read to accompany this concept was Hugo. We discussed the intentional artistic techniques used in the illustrations of Hugo that convey a rhetorical message. For our assignment, we analyzed the works of a particular Caldecott award winning illustrator through a group paper. The ultimate purpose of this paper was to explain how the visuals accompanying the text persuade the reader to feel or think about an idea. My group chose Chris Raschka as our Caldecott winning illustrator. For my contribution to the paper, I formally analyzed A Ball for Daisy - his Caldecott winning book. We then made a Prezi presentation that summarized the key points of our paper and presented it to the class.

For the third unit, we read The Giver and learned about Statis Theory, the Rogerian model of Argument, and the Toulmin model. Our assignment for this unit was to write a policy paper that proposed a specific policy solution for Jonas’s world. We wrote our paper as if we were speaking directly to the Elders and constructed an argument that would convince them that this issue was indeed an issue and one that needed to be addressed. We presented the issue by employing a Rogerian style of representing multiple perspectives and acknowledging points of agreement. We then used the Toulmin model to propose a policy based on our consideration of the various perspectives. My policy paper focused on the issue of Jonas’s world not having any books for pleasure – the only books they had were a dictionary, a book of rules and a community reference. I argued that reading for enjoyment encourages exercise of the imagination and creative mind as well as helps the cognitive function and development of children. There was a research component to this assignment, for we had to back up the claims in our paper with scientific sources and had a works cited page at the end.

For the final unit we read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which proved to be a nice transition into our final project – a film evaluation.  The task was to create a scripted video that compared the film version of a young adult book that we studied in class to the original product. The purpose of this assignment was to explore how the message (rhetoric) of a certain narrative is affected by the medium in which it is produced and to construct a rhetorically effective visual argument.

Here is my final project, which compares the movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are to its original children's book version:

Where the Wild Things Are literary analysis?

Where the Wild Things Are analysis questions?

What do the wild things represent in Where the Wild Things Are?

What is the thesis of Where the Wild Things Are?