The Great Kairos Situation

Kairos and Composition

        In class over the past week we talked about many rhetorical roots that fit in to the rhetoric of our field and the field of composition. I feel though, that we kind of glossed over the entirety of kairos completely. We did a group project about kairos, but I'm not sure that everyone was 100% sure what a "kairotic" situation exactly was. In essence, kairos is the appropriate time to deliver some sort of rhetoric. Now, some people would confuse this with chronos, except chronos deals more with the passage of time rather than the appropriateness of time as kairos does. A big example is Obama's famous "Hope" speech he gave before he was first elected in 2008. If you read the transcript for his speech and hear his delivery he touches on a lot of things that were "appropriate" for the time. One of these things were the minority groups of the time and how they are the legacy that holds a family afloat in the future concerning the unemployment rate. He had done this on purpose to make a rhetorical situation relevant and personable to the audience in which he was aiming to get votes from. It was also kairotic in history because he was the first black man to even run for president, let alone win it. So his speech took on an MLK-esque quality in delivery and format because that was what was appropriate for the time.

       In class, we were told to respond appropriately to a certain situation involving our first year composition course. While I think this was a good exercise for those who understand the use of kairos in rhetorical situations, I don't know if everyone got it. How does this apply to composition as a whole? Kinneavy had some great ideas on how we could incorporate, or how we should incorporate, kairos in to first year programs. I think Kinneavy's idea is in line with my own in this situation. He says that we should incorporate the appropriateness in to the curriculum. So say, an engineer is in the course. Why not have this engineer do writing assignments that include his field? At that point in time it is probably the most kairotic thing he/she could be doing without realization. This would also help with other departments wishing to splinter the composition programs because they think they can do it better. It's not that they can do it better, it's that they are trying to implement a kairos in to their program that they think is not present in current composition programs. If the field of composition can develop assignments that are general, yet kairos specific at the same time, I think that all of this splintering would slow down and eventually stop. Is it 100% possible or probable? I don't know. However, kairos plays a huge part in our field and any field that requires a certain appropriateness for success.