Rhetorical Situations and Intertextuality

First, I'd like to say that I loved having to read the Grant-Davie piece. For one thing, we often throw around words like "exigence" and "rhetorical situation" before we define them, and frankly it gets a little confusing! So I was glad to read this piece and have things broken down a little better than I've seen them broken down previously. So what on earth does "rhetorical situation" actually mean? Well according to this piece, it is "a situation where a speaker or writer sees a need to change reality and sees that the changes may be effected through rhetorical discourse" (pg 265). I was hesitant to accept this definition at first, because it sounds as if a rhetorical situation may only arise from a standing problem that needs fixing; however, as the piece went on it also addressed that a rhetorical situation could arise from happy events as well--that's where exigence comes in. I also think that this piece is interesting because it takes the standard three points that we focus on--exigence, audience, and constraints-- and challenges them. This piece says that the rhetor is as equally important as the audience, and I couldn't agree more. One would not write simply for the purpose of being read, if that was the case, half of us would never write! I think no truer statement is laid out there (in this piece) as when Grant-Davie says, "situations do not exist without rhetors, and that rhetors create rather than discover rhetorical situations" (265).

Now, I am no stranger to the idea of intertextuality. I am also the first to admit that I once had a very difficult time accepting intertextuality. The idea that no piece of writing can be produced without the influence of every other word that a person has heard or read or written before me was not only baffling but a little painful. I always felt that what was so amazing about writing was that I could create something unique that came out of my mind and my mind alone. For me it was impossible to believe that what I found magical about writing could be stripped by the word intertextuality. Now, however, I've come to accept and appreciate the concept. I can accept that each writer draws on the work of the past. In fact, writing would not be what it is today without those who broke the old conventions and created the ones that we use today. Without intertextuality writing would never evolve, and we as writers would never evolve. I can totally appreciate this, but I cannot fully buy that writers are not the romantic image that has been created for us; I cannot fully accept that we do not each live upon our own island, in our own world, writing the things that flow from our own minds. Let me explain. You see, each writer only knows what they have previously experienced for themselves. No two writers have read or written or spoken all of the same things, therefore each writer lives on their own island with their own knowledge base to work with. All of these islands are located in what I am calling the Sea of All Writers. We can each migrate from one island to another, exploring what our peers know and learning from them, but in the end we can only take so much information back to our own island. There is no way we will explore every single piece of information that has come before us, and the future writers will never be able to explore all of the writing that has come before them, but I do believe that we draw on everything that we know in order to write whatever it is that needs to be written.