Journal #6

Our discussion of everyday writing has emphasized the place/scene, the rhetorical situation, the audience, and exigencies. We've seen how all these elements interact to convey a message. Tombstones communicate a message. Not just the words on the stones themselves, but the entire era.

Focus on exigencies first. The exigence is death. There is nothing we can do about. So how do we deal, as people who will one day die, as a friend or family member of the deceased, or as a culture. The graveyard responds to this exigence. "Death on Display" explains how American culture reacts to death. These reactions communicate our culture.

We fence in our graveyards, to divide the living from the dead. We place these graveyards by churches, and holy ground, because we want to perpetuate the belief that there is something after death, and that is where the souls of our loved ones go. During the romantic period we stared writing "In Memory of" on tombstones, because we want to remember the lives that were lived, and we want to console the living. The similarity of the graves themselves, as mentioned in the text, show that our culture values each life, but also emphasizes that no one life is more valuable than any other. This discussion of tombstones, more than any of our other discussions, shows the power of placement. The text is only one element or just the final outcome of an entire scene. The words on a tombstone are not enough to communicate American culture on their own.
There is something we haven't touched upon in class that I feel important to the discussion of Tombstones as everyday writing. Do rituals count as everyday writing? I say they do, and that the cultural surrounding how people make their graves is ritual. However, I could understand the argument of seeing ritual as an institution, as rituals are something learnt. My counter to this is that if we look at things on a grander scale, and see each culture as an individual expression, then rituals, in suit, are unique, and therefor not part of the institution.