aristotle and the profane

Even though I was expecting it, because my roster told me so, it was still a little odd to walk into my Aristotle seminar today and have fifteen graduate students. That's a lot, especially for a class on one extremely dead dude. There are a couple of familiar faces from my bodies seminar and from rhetoric reading group, and several people I and my colleagues worked very hard to recruit in the past couple of years. A good mix of communication and writing studies folks, and even a literature person in the mix, and above all, quite good energy, I thought. The challenge will be to maintain that energy. Aside from the unexpected weirdness that I  kept wanting to swear (this was the only sign that I hadn't been in the classroom for over a year, and was wholly attributable to my enthusiasm), I thought things went swimmingly. I'm even toying with the idea of making a slide show for next week.

[Updated to add: the syllabus]

Comments

[Gil]

If you can't swear in your own graduate seminar, where *can* you swear?

[LisaN]

Waitin' for the F bomb to drop was one of the best parts of graduate seminars, as I recall. Because it always did, particularly with the "good" professors, which you most assuredly are. Your class sounds like it rox. your students are lucky.

[Midmodern scholar]

Sometimes I accidentally swear in my lecture class while I'm wearing the mic. Usually it's about the mic. #&%@ing mic. Think you're so great? Do you?

Anyway, it's the single reason the students come back to the next class.

[Sharon Crowley]

So what texts are you teaching?

Aspasia

[dhawhee]

Hi Aspasia!

The main text is Aristotle's Rhetoric, which we read slowly throughout the course of the semester. But we read out of it too, according to the section (so, during book 2, e.g., we'll pop over to Daniel Gross's _Secret History of Emotion_.) I've gone ahead and added a link to the syllabus to the main post above.

[Aspasia]

Thanks for the link to the syllabus. Not that I'll need it in future (I hope) but because it lists good stuff to read.

And you are right on about Palin. What cynicism to appoint a sacrificial lamb to a post she is manifestly unqualified to hold. It does women no good whatever, and I can't imagine it will do Palin's family or her subsequent life any good either.

A