While dwelling upon Sujay Kulshrestha’s essay about, The Relationship Between Gods and Humans in Aias and the Poetry of Sapphos, she makes obvious the point that the gods have very humanistic tendencies. However her argument is much more defined than that and goes on to state that gods represent “authoritative figures” resembling what we would consider the maternal figure in most normal families. Kulshrestha attempts to convince us of this very idea through her use of examples from Greek plays and poetry.
The way in which this essay was constructed highly reflects the thought process of very logos and ethos appeals. Sujay has no intention of winning over an audience by way of emotional subject matter and consequentially creates a piece of writing that is extremely text based and relies heavily upon the strong influences of the well-known Greeks Sophocles and Sappho. Time and time again she uses those two names in her essay to add to her credibility which comes into question throughout the spotty introduction. All of this is due to the fact that what Sujay Kulshrestha is trying to get across to her audience would be considered very controversial by many. Her reasoning and strongly supported stance regarding how gods are portrayed is somewhat revolutionary and not a very common idea. For example, many readers only hear about Greek gods as selfish rulers with a sick sense of humor. Kulshrestha’s opinion differs greatly from how most see Greek gods even though she may have a well-constructed thesis and examples to back it up.
Sujay’s selection of content is also very specific and surely is made to attract a very specific type of audience. While reading her essay the jumps she makes between the examples used from plays, and the ones used from poetry are unpleasantly confusing and tend to leave the reader in a constant state of back tracking and clarification of what is really trying to be said. That is not to say that the evidence in which she provides is in appropriate, yet the sub-par placement of many sentences and ideas has absolutely no rhythm and tends to decrease the persuasiveness of her arguments as a whole. An audience that would be attracted to such a loose style of writing would have to be very intelligent and certainly able to make connections which just don’t seem to be completely coherent.
On the other hand though, Sujay Kulshrestha does not use a very complicated diction in her writing and in turn the sentences are not all that complex. This is somewhat of a redeeming factor considering some of the things she has incorporated already and most would say that this very thing contributes well to the writer’s purpose. Another somewhat redeeming factor would be Sujay’s use of tropes all the way through the essay. The tropes are a sort of safety net and guide the audience from beginning to end.
Sujay Kulshrestha establishes a formidable point of view, backed up by the works of incredibly powerful people of the time period she is discussing. Although she may not have written the most clear essay, her credibility can hardly be challenged due to that fact alone. However, her style of writing is not one I would try to mimic because of how it jumps from thought to thought from introduction until conclusion. My expectations for such a topic were somewhat higher and in that aspect I am definitely surprised. She does not use a healthy balance of rhetoric by only incorporating two appeals and it clearly shows as a key component is unmistakably missing.
Essay found at: click here
No comments:
Post a Comment