Analysis #1 Classical Literary Criticism

English 436, Analysis #1, Classical Criticism and Theory

The focus of my analysis deals with James Farmer Jr.’s dramatically charged culminating speech at Harvard University during a debating contest in 1935, as depicted in the 2007 film, The Great Debaters. This debating contest actually takes place between Wiley College, a small Negro university from rural Texas, and Harvard University. It is the first time a Negro College debates at the renowned Harvard University. Farmer’s culminating speech perseveres and transcends the others’ because it embodies the classical Greek elements of Aristotle’s great Rhetoric and Longinus’s Sublimity.

Gorgias of Leontini, ca. 483-376 B.C.E., values sophistry and rhetoric for its ability to persuade, regardless of what position the rhetor takes—the ends justifies the means. However, Plato, ca. 427—ca. 347 B.C.E., maintains that The Republic’s Ideal State must be founded in justice and reason; hence, justice is the most desirable, refuting Gorgias’s sophistry. From the outset Farmer’s persona establishes Aristtotle’s ethos, a term for character—knowing who you are. As an impressionable, innocent, but highly intelligent fourteen-year-old, he brings eunola, goodwill and good mindedness. Even at his young age he establishes sophrosyne, reflecting that he knows his way around. He satisfies any remaining doubters later in his argument when he relates “witnessing a white lynch mob in the Jim Crow South, string-up, hang, and burn a Negro.” (YouTube) Thus he establishes Aristotle’s logos, reason, and certainly pathos, emotion when describing this gut wrenching scene.

Prior to Farmer’s final argument, when his Harvard opponent describes his father’s partner dying in the line of duty as a police officer and exclaims, “Nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral, no matter what name we give it [ i.e.; civil disobedience]” (YouTube) he puts the Wiley team on the defensive in their position as proponents of Gandhi’s civil disobedience. Farmer counters and eloquently responds with a quote from Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all,” (YouTube) which helps establish logos, or justice. He escalates the stakes and establishes a deciding and extremely poignant appeal with his pathos emotionally driven evocation of the lynch mob in the unjust Jim Crow South of the 1930’s. Farmer then raises the stakes and culminates his speech with, “I have a right to resist with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter,” (YouTube) which successfully evokes both fear and compassion in the audience. However, it is Farmer’s prior epideictic part of his speech—an eulogistic description of the Negro victim that particularly helps evoke this emotion—pathos—that establishes his humanity and gives the victim a real face and life that the audience can visualize: “Was he a sharecropper, a preacher? Were his children waiting up for him?” (Youtube)

Farmer’s hyperbaton, which is Longinus’s term for “an arrangement of words or thought which differs from the normal sequence” (Leitch 146) strikes a chord in the audience’s heart. His plain use of diction, avoiding magniloquence, helps create visualization, or as Longinus terms it, phantasia, “in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience” (143). Longinus advocates for the speaker/writer to take chances in their rhetoric just like Farmer does when he states African American violence as a real possibility. He does not, as Longinus puts it, maintain generally at a correct and safe level “and take no risks and do not aim at the heights, whereas greatness, just because it is greatness, incurs danger” (149). Indeed, James Farmer Jr. speech engenders an aura of sublimity and his audience responds accordingly, accepting the rights for civil disobedience for the unjustly oppressed.

Works Cited

Washington, Denzel, The Great Debaters, “Ending Speeches” 2007, Web, 10 Feb. 2011 Youtube http://www.youtube.com/

Washington, Denzel, The Great Debaters, “James Farmer Jr.’s Ending Speech” 2007 YouTube Web 10 Feb. 2011 http://www.youtube.com

Leitch, Vincent B., Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print