Audience is hard for me to identify in my own writing and others’ writing. It is also a crucial part of rhetoric. Walter Ong reminds us that ancient rhetoricians, orators, saw an audience standing before them and “for the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both,” an imagined group (10). In this way, the audience is fictionalized, something that the writer imagines, instead of knowing the group of people that she will stand before when she gives a speech. When I imagine my audience, I always imagine someone like me. Traditionally, I’ve shied away from the idea of argument, that cornerstone of rhetoric, because who am I to convince someone else or anything. I’m shy in that way, or nervous, or maybe just never believe that what I have to say could ever truly change those kinds of audiences who need to be reached. But, because I study rhetoric, because I teach and write and read rhetorically, I must think more about audience and I must think about persuasion and argument and how the writer constructs those things.
I’m noticing a few ways that writers construct audience in their writing. Some are explicit, some are not. An old translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses caught my eye because it has the subtitle: “Epitomized In An English Poetical Style For The Use And Entertainment Of The Ladies Of Great Britain.” The author, who is anonymous, gives many reasons for why women should read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most interesting is that the texts provides “many excellent lessons in morality” and they all “contain some instructive Moral, as the Whole tends in general to inculcate, that Virtue and Innocence are the best protection against the Evils of this life…” (xii-xiii). Ovid’s myths become stories with morals, and the morals serve an instructive purpose for women. The text is almost a laundry list of warnings, ways that women shouldn’t behave, but then again, most times, women aren’t actually doing anything wrong, and it’s the men who are out of line, both in myth and reality. Not only does this translator identify an audience in his title, but he does so in the dedication by providing a reason for why women should be reading this epic poem.
In her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, Emily Wilson doesn’t identify a specific audience, but she does give us some clues about who she’s writing for, about the vastness and contemporary nature of her intended audience. In her introduction and translator’s note, Wilson notes how she has translated certain words differently than her predecessors, most notably: rape and slaves, as well as those young women at the end of the Odyssey who are usually translated as sluts, Wilson simply calls them girls. Her reasoning behind using slave has to do with the “need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery, and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted” (15). Not far beneath the surface of these words, readers might think of the “fact and horror of slavery” in our own American culture, not quite so far away as ancient Greece. By giving names to the horrors of rape and slavery is a kind of acknowledgement that is important and long overdue. It is also a way to bring in readers who might be someone other than old, white men.
It seems obvious, but it has been a revelation to me that scholars simply name their audiences. They say who they are writing for, when writers of fiction, poetry, and even creative nonfiction don’t. What interests me are those people who write for multiple audiences, or who try to bridge gaps between fields of study. Take Susan Jarratt in her recent book, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. She identifies a primary audience of rhetoricians, and then additionally hopes that “the quality of the analysis will be of interest to scholars in classics, comparative literature, and related fields” (Jarratt, 23). Additionally, Royster and Kirsch claim an interdisciplinary identity, in their work on feminist rhetorical practices and their identities work across rhetorical studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies (10-11). I am learning that, just as with other kinds of writing, writers must imitate these moves that scholars make, particularly when it comes to identifying audiences. Just as with other kinds of writing, these exercises in imitation help me to discover my own voice.
Sources
Homer. Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton. 2018.
Jarratt, Susan. Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Southern Illinois University Press. 2019.
Ong, Walter. “The Write’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” PMLA. Vol. 90, No. 1. 1975. Pp. 9-21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/461344. 29 May 2020.
Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Epitomized In An English Poetical Style For The Use And Entertainment Of The Ladies Of Great Britain.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois University Press. 2012.
Alexandra Sladky 