When we first discussed agency as a class, I had been a little confused. When shown the video of the talking dog and discussing what would be considered the agent in the video, it was revealed to me that there were so many more ways to be an agent than I had imagined. I felt this same sense of confusion after reading Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean."
Agency can be anything. It can be a person giving a speech, it can be the translator, it can be the words and discourse used in a speech, and so on. In Campbell's essay, she goes into detail of what her five different definitions of agency are. When going over these definitions it makes you question what an agent could be considered to be. When discussing Sojourner Truth's statement we found that the validity of a statement comes into play. Just because you intend for an audience to interpret your work in a certain way does not mean that they will. This can change the agency of it. When an audience does not understand the work in the way that you want them to, you have to consider what the agent is in your case. You might have thought that you and your thoughts would be the agent, but when looking back it could have been the discourse or language or setting of it.
When the validity of a statement is questioned, it makes the audience not trusting; they do not believe what is said, therefore questioning everything else the writer or orator is saying. We see this in Sojourner Truth's statement because of many factors. The most important being that she is a woman. Women of the 19th century were not given many rights. When women wrote, it was not seen as truthful and trustworthy, especially if they were not fiction. When considering the time period of these works, it is hard to imagine what the women went through. To have your character questioned, and your work possibly not punished just because you are a woman would be difficult. Who says that some of these women weren't smart or able to write an incredible piece of work? And who says that men can? It was all because of the time period that the gender bias was so prominent. We might have missed out on some life-changing works just because of the bias.
In Gage's analysis of Truth's speech, he was able to give the audience an understanding of what she was saying. Does this make him the agent? "We can never hear the ordinary moment of the living voice; we can only struggle to recreate its immediacy, and in its dramatic form, Gage's fiction allows us to sense what it must have been like to hear Truth speak" (Campbell 13). This quote allows us to understand the legitimacy of the speech. Gage goes on to say how when listening to Truth speak, the value of the speech diminished, just because of her language and dialect. Therefore, Truth's speech relies heavily on Gage's rendition of the speech; to give the audience a clear understanding.
- Haley Bryant -
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2.1 (2005): 1-19.
Agency is a key term for this class, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds it a bit slippery! I like your idea of discourse and language being agents. I noticed that in terms of the audience, you gave them a more passive role. I wonder if the audience could potentially be more active, in fact, if they could be agents themselves after the message has been delivered, or even while they are receiving it. It's a difficult topic, and one that I hope we delve further into as a class.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to discuss Truth and the role that her race played in the agency she was allowed to have (since you mostly just discussed her gender). I think it's important to note that she was hardly even AFFORDED womanhood before she spoke; she had to verify to the audience that she was, in fact, a woman, and this had everything to do with her status as a black woman and former slave. The struggles that women faced in her time that you listed were certainly relevant, but race must be factored into the equation in order to have a fuller understanding of the situation (especially when considering the issue of her dialect).