"Making Ourselves Over in the Image of the Imagery": Overcoming Alienation Through Poetic Expressions of Experience

• Main Author: Teusch, Jacqueline Aquino
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2014
• Subjects: alienation; attitude; Gloria Anzaldúa; Kenneth Burke; form; identification; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4131; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5130&context=etd

My focus for this essay is on understanding the rhetorical process that occurs when people come together despite their differences—that is what rhetoric is all about. Kenneth Burke argues that this process, for alienated people especially, happens poetically, more than semantically because there are too many differences to overcome semantically between alienated people and the dominant community. This essay is about how the rhetorical process of identification as described by Burke helps us to explain how we cross barriers that divide people who are different to create moments of mutual understanding—identification. In this essay, I look at the experience of reading Gloria Anzaldúa's work from the rhetorical perspective that Burke's theory of rhetorical identification provides. In the case of Borderlands, Anzaldúa helps us understand how an alienated person can prompt a momentary, present space of shared experience through poetic language.