Project Proposal!

As most of you know, I started out with the idea of analyzing how the relationship between the maker and his/her object influences the relationship that the object has on its audience. While I think it's an interesting question that is worth investing research in, my brain hasn't generated a feasible way to approach this....maybe I'll utilize some aspect of that question in analyzing our class readings for the synthesis project. We'll see, but for this project, I have decided to ditch it :/

However! My brain did redeem itself by generating a new idea...one that I haven't really fine tuned the details or even the focus of my question, but I believe I have a solid starting point. My new idea: how does rap and spoken word poetry rhetorically and effectively integrate the balance of the logic and emotional binaries in the creation of their performative art? I know that there has been a preexisting debate on whether rap and spoken word poetry can be considered poetry and I know, at least the last that I've heard, it does. I think that the main difference it has from from written poetry, besides the fact that it is read aloud and presented differently, is that rap and spoken word artists are trying to create a successful relationship between integrating the emotional pull that poetry has and logically structuring it for an audience's engagement. To me, rap and spoken word seem more rhetorical in that they consider their audience more, in their writing processes, than most (not all, of coarse) written poetry. Rap and spoken word focuses more on performance while written poetry focuses on emotional reflection. I realize that other elements contribute to both forms of poetry like sound, tone, presentation, etc. and that these elements differ in rap/spoken word and written poetry and I would like to invest in that more. However, I'm primarily interested in the writing construction and process of these forms of poetry and how writers of both forms play around with the relationship between the binaries that we have thoroughly discussed in class.

I'm interested in this topic because I grew up in a very pious religious community that, to say this nicely, overlooked rap as art. I grew up calling it "rap crap" until I discovered a Christian rap artist (my church would probably consider this as a paradox) named Lecrae. His lyrics and the way that he performed them spoke more to me than any hymn or poem or really any creative genre ever did. I had an epiphany that I enjoy rap crap and that I and many people I know overlook it as art and especially as rhetorical art. For spoken word poems, I think they share a lot of similar features that rap shares in that their construction contains strong performative influences. I like written poems but rap and spoken word poems have always engaged and spoken to me more, yet their genres are overlooked in much of academia (I think it would be so sweet to have a rhetorical rap class....right??...maybe one day). Rap/spoken words are becoming more popular and I think that in analyzing, teaching, and considering them as rhetorical art, it could reshape traditional ideologies of what genres rhetoric can be. Before this class and my Digital Rhetorics class, I limited rhetoric to the academic field and I think that is a lot of people's first impressions of what rhetoric is. By showing that rhetoric also appears in genres that are more prevalent to audiences outside of the academic/writing comp. world, maybe more people would be interested in the topic of rhetoric and try to apply it to other forms of art.

How to approach this? Excellent question. I obviously want to research how much this topic has been discussed and what those discussions are. If I can, I want to interview some spoken word/rap artists about how they compose their poetry and how the fact that they know that they are physically performing it for an audience changes what they write. I also want to know how much of the emotional binary they integrate into their writing. I would also like to analyze poems written as rap/spoken word versus poems that are not and try to find reoccurring themes in their differences and similarities. I'm still trying to fine tune my methodology of this proposal but these are my ideas thus far.  Let me know what you think!