convergence

1. Last week we did practice interviews for our students who will be attending MLA and hopefully interviewing there. I had a good discussion with one of our students in Writing Studies about the unfortunate separation between Linguistics and Rhetoric.

2. I am working on an article about ancient notions of rhetorical vision, the idea that words help people see (this is not, for the ancients at least, strictly metaphorical).

3. That article folder, into which I have been tossing anything related to the idea for the past three years, contains a piece by Dan I. Slobin, an emeritus professor of psychology and linguistics at Berkeley. The essay is titled "Relations between Paths of Motion and Paths of Vision: A Crosslinguistic and Developmental Exploration,"* and it examines what Slobin calls "the recruitment of path expressions to verbs of looking." The upshot of this "recruitment" (which incidentally is itself a verb that I like a good deal) is that verbs of vision are most usually accompanied by prepositions and other words that indicate motion, e.g., we "look over" or "into" something, or "across" a room. In other words (namely mine), vision travels, and that observation is performed and preserved across a number of languages.  Slobin intimates (rightly I think) that such an idea probably owes to the ancient Greek notion of extramission, whereby vision was thought to emanate from the eyes (some thought)  through invisible fire that travels toward and "meets" the fire emanating from objects (I write about theories of extramission in Bodily Arts).

4. The linguistic residue of extramission is an instance of a feature of language that Kenneth Burke always was quite interested in as well: the incorporation of physicality and physical movement into language and grammar. Such incorporation is so subtle as to be stunning when we (with the help of the likes of Slobin) notice these tendencies.

5. That such tendencies largely go unnoticed speaks volumes about scholarly preferences for disembodied ideas, which is one of the points of chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.

*I found the piece on the internets, but it is no longer there. It is, however, slated to appear in a fetschrift later this month. Here is the citation:

Slobin, D.I. "Relations between paths of motion and paths of vision: A crosslinguistic and developmental exploration." In V. M. Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Comments

[bonnie kyburz]

first, i can't wait to read your book.

second, what your post conjures for me (fwiw): i am currently reading Delueze's _Cinema 1: The Movement Image_, in which he begins by attempting to correct Bergson's faulty (to D's mind) conceptualization of filmic images as stills strung together to approximate movement (Bergsonian "cinematic illusion"). For D, this notion disappears how movement is always happening, even/esp between adn within the "stills" Bergson considers. oh, it's much fancier in D-speak!

i'm also reminded of a much beloved phrase from Irwin Panofsky, who wrote about the development of (artistic) perspective, in which development we eventually find "a refashioning of the world - now unified but still luminously fluctuating" (in _Perspective as Symbolic Form_, 49). "luminously fluctuating"!!