b l o g o s

3 am (re) entry

I didn't have much of a chance to blog from RSA, in part because hi-speed internet access from the room was rather expensive, and in part because I was too busy at the conference. But my conference closed on a terrific note with Jenny Edbauer Rice and Dennis Lynch's panel on "The New Pathos." They played against and with each other quite nicely. So smart and thoughtful, both of them. And the audience was full of people whose work I adore. I continue to admire how Jenny pushes boundaries of what a conference panel can do, first with our amateuring gallery/panel on opening day, and then with her paper on pathos, a set of reflective meditations on rhetoric, emotion, affect, teaching, and the impossibility of affectlessness. And to my delight we got to talk just a little bit about why the heck animals keep coming up in theoretical discussions of pathos.

I enjoyed the roundtables I was on--the one on Burke was quite lively I thought. The five of us committed to presenting short statements in order to leave plenty of time for discussion, which meant we amped up our claims, tamped down our evidence, and had at it. I am really starting to like the roundtables, with their luxuriously ample discussion time that really draws in the audience. From an audience member's point of view, it's so hard to sit through three or four 15-20 minute papers, and then there's rarely enough time to really hash through people's responses, or the issues the papers raise for them. But at the Burke roundtable, and at the Pathos panel, since its members were reduced by a last-minute cancellation, we really got to explore the corners of the room, the joints of audience members' connections. When on a roundtable or panel like that I find that I think so much more during the give-and-take, after the papers are laid down, and it's those moments of exchange that linger with me long after I unpack my suitcase.

I've heard a few people say that they don't really go to panels besides the one they present, and I just don't think that's particularly cool. It's far more important, I think, to attend panels and pose questions, to push the discussion to new places. Otherwise, how will growth or transformation happen?

I kept hearing repeatedly that RSA is unique  because  most all the panels had good-sized audiences. As an example, I chaired a great panel with all graduate student presenters that had about 30 people in the audience. This is rather rare for the bigger conferences (CCCC, NCA), where the audience can get diluted to the point of nearly vanishing. So thanks to those who came to the conference, who attended a number and range of meetings. We travel so far not to perform our own little shows, but to actively engage each other's work.

rsa

A little live blogging of RSA, Seattle, with a one-day delay: yesterday, in addition to all the meetings tucked here and there, starting at 7:15 (!), and the chance ones squeezed in as well, I chaired a fun panel on popular culture, attended a great panel on "The Greeks" (not named by the panelists, I feel sure), and a supercool SUPERsession on the 2008 election, featuring, among other distinguished speakers, my new colleague John Murphy. These papers reminded me a little of listening to a long-ish piece on NPR, or an amplified (in both senses) piece from Oratorical Animal (no coincidence there of course). In other words, they were accessible, relevant, and thorough. The evening treat was a reading by Charles Johnson of two short stories, one featuring Plato as the frustrated teacher-narrator getting schooled by his student Diogenes, and the other featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. having an epiphany while rummaging through the fridge: food as the ultimate connector. Note to self: you need to make an effort to attend more readings like this.

Speaking of which, I am very happy to have discovered piroshkis (thanks, M!), savory pastries stuffed with all kinds of yummies. Yesterday, I had one crammed with sauerkraut, cabbage, carrots, and onions. Yum.



 

whoa.

Yesterday when I checked in to my room at the Westin in Seattle, there were clouds hanging over the Sound. They went away during the lovely hike M and I took in Discovery Park. After making our way back to downtown, stuffing ourselves with sushi, and walking back to the hotel, it was sleepy time.

And so it wasn't until this morning--a clear morning--when I realized that my 31st-floor room also features a fantastic view of the Olympic Mountains (I've noticed people call these "The Olympics" here.) Those are some mighty, mighty mountains.

2b2b

Too busy to blog. It's RSA's fault. Hope to see a lot of you in Seattle next week.

anatomy of a conference abstract

Speaking of rhetorical exercises, I just finished drafting my abstracts for ISHR and CCCC, two conference cultures that, as I mention in my previous post, could not be more different. Even though I'll be presenting pretty much the same material at each conference (I have learned that it's not realistic to write brand new papers based on brand new research for back-to-back conferences), the papers will end up being very different. The difference, though, is largely because of the audience.

I'm posting these here just to highlight the differences. Note, first of all, that the Cs proposal is shorter by about 100 words. The online submission box only allows 5000 characters, including spaces (thanks to advisee, C..., for the headsup). I've gotten mine down to 1600, which is a third of that, to allow room for my co-presenters. But I'll still have to chop more, mainly because the 5000-character limit applies to the entire session, and so I'll need considerable space (relatively considerable, anyway) to set up the panel itself. So I'll probably end up cutting this one in half, just about. It's way easier for me to cut stuff, though, once everything's there.

I decided to put these up here in part because we don't often share abstracts (they feel so wee and vulnerable--they might get rejected!--and this is just a little teeny slice of a much, much larger project), but also to show how starkly distinct they are. Even though they end in the same way, they begin and, largely, reside in very different argumentative spaces. ISHR is a smaller conference, but--sorry for the overused term here--the footprint of the argument tries to be a bit bigger. Or maybe the Cs one is bigger, I don't know. Now I can't tell.

Abstract One, ISHR

Performing as Animals

Recently, critics in the humanities (e.g., Agamben, Wolfe, Atterton, and Carlarco) have engaged what has become known as “the animal question,” which is to say they have focused on the enduring role played by animals in writings about human identity, values, and ethics. Most of this work has centered on philosophical texts.  Yet rhetorical texts deserve consideration as well, not least because ancient rhetorical treatises are crawling with animals. Aristotle finds beasts useful when theorizing humility and shame. Cicero and Quintilian write of horses, dogs, and birds. But the rhetorical genre with animals at its core is that of the fable. Fables appeared early in the sequence of ancient school exercises, or progymnasmata. That animals figure so prominently in these stage-setting composition exercises calls for more scrutiny. What, exactly, are animals doing there, and what can their presence tell us about rhetoric as an art?

The treatise on progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes asks students to consider the collective delight experienced by humans in cities, but to do so from the vantage point of an ape. The writer of the treatise suggests that students expand this fabulous scenario by composing a speech for said ape.  Later, John of Sardis develops the ape example in an exercise found later in the sequence, ethopoeia, or speech in character. Students, that is, were frequently asked to compose in the “voices” of animals, to perform as animals.

My paper will examine such prompts to perform as animals in educational settings, with a particular focus on the progymnasmata tradition. I will argue that performing as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play, but that animals function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. Here the stakes of the animal question become more apparent for rhetorical studies: animals’ centrality in rhetorical education expands rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to an art of becoming someone—or something—else.

 

Abstract Two, CCCC

 

Animals in Ancient School Exercises

The recent flurry of attention to ancient school exercises called progymnasmata has interested compositionists for the way they make writing regular and habitual, and how they ease students into the difficulties of rhetorical training. Thanks in part to J. David Fleming’s recent exhortation to embrace the “very idea” of these exercises, the progymnasmata are finding their way into classrooms and textbooks (D’Angelo, Crowley and Hawhee). This small but discernible shift in practice might usefully be accompanied by careful scrutiny of the exercises themselves, their history, their sequence, and their often striking content. Why, for example, are the progymnasmata crawling with animals?

Students working in this tradition usually began by composing fables about animals, but they were also, later in the sequence, asked to compose as animals, to write in the “voice” of, say, an ape interested in forming a city with fellow apes. I propose to examine the prompts that ask students to compose as animals. If, as Fleming (quoting Murphy) argues, the point of the progymnasmata was to “‘become rhetorical,’” then the exercises’ more peculiar features might tell us a bit more about what exactly that means. For starters, the prompt to compose as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play; the animals, rather, function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. A look at animals in these ancient school exercises begins to expand rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to, more generally, an art of becoming someone—or something—else.

 

 

abstracting

The proposal deadlines for CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) and ISHR (International Society for the History of Rhetoric) are within a week of each other, and they are coming up f a s t. My proposed panels just--just--came together. I'm going to propose brand new work for both of them, on animals in the history of rhetoric.

For CCCC, we are going to coalesce around past educational practices, and for ISHR, around performance and theater. For both, I'll likely be looking at ancient fable assignments, particularly the request that students write in the "voices" of animals. My preliminary research question is: what's that about?

But hopefully that question will be refined as I work.

post-swarm

I must say the whole conference is a blur at this point, except for the three day routine that went exactly like this: up ass early; coffee shop for wireless access; shower and oatmeal back at the apartment; travel to conference by whatever means; a jumble of panels and meetings and one-on-one appointments, followed swiftly and noisily by a glut of parties, so many sharply-dressed bodies crammed into windowless rooms. Highlights, for me, included hanging with roomie Blake, smashing performances by my graduate students, a seven-mile saturday morning bike trek from boystown to the chicago hilton, (relatedly) a  presentation on mysticism delivered from the midst of an amazing endorphin high, and night-time galavanting with the beautiful and brilliant Queens of NCA.

swarm theory

I'm headed off to NCA, where I will be thinking about this piece in today's Science Times a good deal.

roundup: classics blogs

When I checked blogos's stats this morning and noticed that my recent post on the Timaeus conference has already made a round or two on email, I thought to myself "yah, blogging and the classics probably don't mix."

And while lots of scholars who study the ancient world probably think blogs are silly, some of their own still do it. Maybe my search engines failed me, but here's what I came up with, and some are a little, ahem, out of date. If you know of other classics blogs, leave em in the comments.

Here's the sampler:

rogue classicism (the only one I'd known before my search)

campus mawrtius

greek geek

philog

roman times

ancient world blog

ellopos blog

local conference blogging: Plato's Timaeus Today

1. How did all these scholars--all of them so marvelous and from so far away!--make it to the Plato's Timaeus Today conference here in Urbana, Illinois? The UK is very well represented (see #3).

2. Did Plato wear a ponytail? Because the look among Platonists is definitely full beard with ponytail and glasses. 

3. So far this conference wins the award for best readers. Being in the audience is a little like listening to an audiobook narrated by an English actor: Such intonation! Such perfect cadence! The arguments are actually followable this way. And the Q&A sessions are a little like British Parliament, if members of the british parliament based every question on their Oxford editions of the Timaeus.

4. The conference is so perfectly organized. Every session starts at the precise moment listed in the program. Every paper runs exactly 28 minutes. I would think it's a little creepy, except the whole conference is devoted to Plato's thoughts on the order of the kosmos.

5. I'm keeping a tally of the number of times rhetoric gets mentioned. This morning's total is one. But it wasn't used disparagingly (hooray).