Jane Verdel E5X-07 Mr. Baldwin 11/1/11 The Rhetorical Analysis of “Limits of Magical Thinking” “Limits of Magical Thinking” by Maureen Dowd was published on October 25th, 2011. In her article, Dowd ridiculed Steve Jobs to assert the drawbacks that come with him being a perfectionist. Dowd begins her article by usage of seductive anaphora: “He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality in his.” The effect was the creation of a memorable phrase, “he wanted to”, which firmly grasped the reader, so he or she would desire to continue reading the article. This memorable phrase also helped the reader understand what the author is going to talk about, which was Steve Job’s strive to perfect everyone around him. In using anaphora, Dowd conveyed the demanding emotion behind Steve Jobs’ hopes to make everyone think like him. Her tone was one of mockery in the explication of Jobs’ impossible hopes. Contributing to the hold on the reader that anaphora achieved in this powerful introduction, Dowd used an allusion, “Dracula’s saturnine gaze” which referenced the character Count Dracula, a vampire from Dracula by Bram Stoker. The effect was in the implication that Jobs wanted to use is “saturnine gaze” to command people to act the way he wished they would, like the famous vampire. Dowd implies that Jobs’ impossible hopes were due to his madness, which derived from his past, through using epistrophe. The coincidence implied by the epistrophe in Dowd’s statement that Jobs “was abandoned by parents who conceived him out of wedlock at 23, and he then abandoned a daughter for many years that he conceived out of wedlock at 23”, showed that Jobs’ roots didn’t allow him to see any other way to deal with that circumstance. Dowd achieved the effect of giving the reader an epiphany through the use of epistrophe. This specific phrase forces the reader to puts all of the facts about Jobs together, through the acknowledgment of the significant coincidence, and find the cause of his behavior towards people. Through the use of hypophora, Dowd further triggers this epiphany, directly quoting Jobs’ friend Hertzfeld: “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people. That goes back to being abandoned at birth.” Here, already knowing the answer from the previous sentences, the question followed by the answer confirmed the reader’s assumptions. This hypophora reflected back to the other point that Dowd was trying to imply, which was that there was a specific reason that Jobs acted the way he acted. Dowd used an eponym and metaphor to conclude her article, which summed up all that was understood from reading the article. The eponym was used in calling him the “Da Vinci of Apple”, using Da Vinci’s attribute of being a brilliant creator to describe any brilliant creator, which for Apple, was Steve Jobs. Then, Dowd directly quoted Jobs, who was on his deathbed: “I know that living with me was not a bowl of cherries”. A “bowl of cherries”, is something pleasant, so by Jobs clearly stated that living with him was not pleasant. The usage of the eponym and Jobs’ metaphor helped Dowd convey that while Jobs mayhave been the “Da Vinci of Apple”, he knew his madness and his being a perfectionist distressed the people around him, which was his biggest drawback.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 15:48:45 +0000
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