Asch's Agency

After reading Campbell’s text on agency then reading Asch’s story, I found that many of Campbell’s key points on the concepts of “agency” were exemplified throughout Asch’s text. Campbell’s first claim that agency is “communal, social, cooperative… and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture” what I viewed as the prime source of the agency Asch bestowed upon himself (Campbell 3). Even though Campbell is discussing gender as an identity, Asch’s personal background conform to the idea that “relationships to externals” based on a shared “category/groups” and “attributes” can give agency towards other groups which view their “relationship to externals” with similar regard (Campbell 4). Asch’s Jewish background enables him to better connect to the characters he fictionalizes, giving the narrator agency over characters simultaneously.

Campbell’s second claim of agency as “points of articulation” is easier when viewed in the prism theory; Asch’s narrator (author/rhetor) can be viewed as that prism (Campbell 5). The narrator has evidently heard of the oppressive environments laborers exist in, yet by becoming the willing voice of the oppressed and bring to light something known but disregarded, makes him in a metaphorical sense, the prism. For instance, “We’re going to make people so mad they’ll have to do something about it” shows that society knows about the living conditions, and still have yet to take action in order to change the conditions (Asch 288).

“Agency is linked to and effected though artistry or artfulness; it is learned” (Campbell 6). Asch achieves agency this way, almost doubly. Asch’s narrator takes you on a very long, but narrow journey to learn about conditions and secondly live in the conditions. Asch’s nearly poetic diction helps balance the miserable engagement and design of the story to help draw on the emotion of the audience.