b l o g o s

first person, plural

This time of year, we are a busy lot. Our email pronounces things to us. Things like good news. itinerary. reminder. favor. checking in. favor. big favor. ms. review?. urgent. We send emails with these same subject lines to others, like barely mutated viruses. We get colds. We medicate. We wonder why, with medical advances and so many medications, we still feel as if we lost an eraser up each nostril.  We quickly skim the surfaces of each other's lives via facebook and blogs. With others we have drinks and think through more important matters with the kind of attention they deserve. We join groups online that cohere around fleeting desires. We attend curriculum meetings; we shuffle papers; we receive news about the dire budget situation; we read first-person columns in the Chronicle detailing problems with one aspect or another of our jobs, the framing of which make the authors seem virtuous, suspiciously so. Some of us sneer. Others of us snort. Others of us wring our hands as if we wrote the column and are about to be discovered. Maybe we did. Maybe we are.

Some of us check email incessantly and cultivate reputations for our lightening-quick response time. Others of us ignore email for days and days. This slowly drives us fast responders insane and perhaps it serves us right for not having a more full life. We stand in front of classrooms, looking out upon distracted faces, formerly chatty and bright young adults whose slouching seems to have deepened as the semester goes on, turning to slumping after the end of daylight savings time, when even the reasonably timed afternoon classes spill us out into darkness.

We try with varying degrees of success to conceal our weariness. Some of us act more beset than others. Others have little patience for the contest of who is busiest. We are all very tired; this is the point. We read Nietzsche and wonder why more people don't think this way. We are very tired, but we wake up at 3 am and can't go back to sleep. Our days become shorter. We begin to feel out of touch with our research, which in turn makes us restless. Those of us who are on leave feel their euphoria giving way to a vague anxiety about not having done enough. To steel ourselves and remind ourselves of a more productive time, or to postpone beginning that conference paper we proposed in some spring haze, we check on the status of manuscripts we submitted at the end of summer, when everything seemed bright and fresh, and turnaround times could be counted in weeks, not months. We get cheerful but vague replies from overworked editors and/or their overworked assistants about how they are still waiting. We wait. We unroll our lunchbags and chew on cold sandwiches. We attend afternoon talks and fend off sleep by snickering at our colleagues who nod off in the front row.

Soon (though not soon enough) it will be time for thanksgiving break. Some of us will travel a long way for a big meal, while others of us will lay around all week, catching up, peeking at our research, falling into slumbers, rousing ourselves only to make soup and bread and eat turkey and pie, all in an effort to regroup somehow. 

It helps to know we're not alone.

church, space; gender, race

Last night the IPRH-supported Rhetorical Studies Reading Group had the pleasure of hosting Roxanne Mountford from the University of Kentucky, author of The Gendered Pulpit and co-author (with Michelle Ballif and Diane Davis) of Women's Ways of Making it in Rhetoric and Composition.

Professor Mountford's work on the history of preaching in protestant spaces attends to the whole material swirl of bodies, gender, race, and belief in the context of space. Hers is that kind of research that nearly everyone can connect to in one way or another--either they have studied history of religious rhetoric, have a religious background themselves (think VBS or tent revivals, or maybe that's what I think because I'm from the south), have thoughtfully set aside religion, have given more than a passing thought to Jeremiah Wright, to megachurches, to Christian youth movements or mission work. Our discussion last night was even more wide-ranging.

One of the things I admire about Mountford's book is how it mixes historiography with ethnography. Last night we talked about how the two work together--in this case, historical work helps Mountford figure out how and when the pulpit became so masculinized, and ethnographic investigation helps her to explore the ways women are inhabiting those  masculinized spaces and, effectively, change them in the process. It's a complicated, time-consuming, and challenging set of methods, I'm sure, but seeing as how I have directed/am directing/ am planning to direct four dissertations that mix methods in a similar way, it sure was great to have an opportunity to reflect with her on that mixture. I've often thought about how both methods involve finding or developing a narrative arc, and how doing so requires laborious sifting and searching. Historians and ethnographers really ought to talk more across their methods.

Last night everybody munched on Antonio's pizza and posed thoughtful questions about sexuality in churches, about race and religion, about the African American Jeremiad tradition (which she focuses on in chapter 4 of her book), and about the role of the progressive church in combatting the liberal discourse of tolerance (hat tip goes to Sharon Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse).

Roxanne also took advantage of having so many scholars from the "communication side" at the event to inquire about how the work "plays" with comm scholars. The answers covered a) what RM brings that rhetoric/communication scholars might not (e.g., ethnographic methods); b) the seeming welcoming of literary texts in communication; c) contextual expectations, and d) graduate student research in communication that RM's work has spurred.  I love these kinds of cross-disciplinary meta-conversations, and they are best when rooted, as ours was last night, in specific work rather than generalities. One communication graduate student, who immediately went home to draft a short document about his research trajectory mentions having been inspired by Mountford's focus on the importance of the progressive church for progressive politics in this country.

If you like what you're hearing, but don't happen to be in Urbana, don't despair! Professor Mountford, along with Patricia Bizzell, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Jane Donawerth will be co-leading a workshop at the Rhetoric Society of America's Institute this June in State College. Click here for details. 

for all of you who are on the job market (or plan to be someday)

I know I've mentioned this on here before, but since it's that time of year again: if you or someone you love is going on the job market and if you have about twenty bucks to spare, or even if you don't, you should probably order a copy of this book (amazon link with five stars and great reviews here). When I was on the market fresh out of grad school, this book wasn't out, but I was lucky enough to be working with its author for my job search.

And as a nice complement, I point MLA-ers to my frolleague's highlarious web videos, 9 interviews.

scattershot 10: not enough time to process

1. Daniel Gross's book, The Secret History of Emotion, is an important one. A few of us in my seminar felt like he beat up on science unnecessarily toward the beginning of the book, and that surely there is more to say about scientific accounts of emotion than that they are reductive, but others made a good case that he had to do that in order to make room for his intervention on behalf of the humanities. (By the way, having a class full of productive critics totally rocks.) The end of the book moves toward a much tempered critique of work about emotions that relies on scientific findings, but the imbalance is noticeable and off-putting. We did wonder how Gross might respond to recent work in rhetoric that makes use of some of the very scientific work he critiques without ever losing sight of what rhetoric brings (and must bring!) to the table (e.g., Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse).

When a fellow Aristotle scholar saw Gross on my syllabus, he said "you know that book isn't really about Aristotle," I was all "I know!" But approaching it  from the depths of book II of A's Rhetoric makes it very difficult to read as a book about anything but Aristotle (despite its focus on 17th- and 18th-c rhetoric), because of its sustained case in favor of rhetoric's usefulness for conceiving the emotions as active energy that happens between people. My class has developed the parlance of "dispositions on dispositions," which is well supported by the first lines of Book II. Aristotle hangs with Judith Butler as Gross's heroes, a pairing that no doubt deserves its own post.

Since I don't have time to say more, I do welcome comments on this or other parts of the book--I know some of you have read it thoroughly (and this goes for people in my class who definitely have and other scholars who I believe have), so do post away. 

2. My visit to IU was fast, fun, and pretty intense. When I first started in this business, I was not all that good at thinking on my feet, but now I feel a lot better equipped for doing that, in part because I've had a lot of practice, and in part because I acknowledge that no answer will ever perfectly address a question because of the intractable problem of other minds and the inherent difficulty of knowing where a question is really coming from (and the strictures that prevent us from saying that on the spot). But/and so it's a good idea to check in with the questioner's nonverbal cues and to keep checking back in verbally (and nonverbally--with looks and gestures) with the questioner even in the midst of other answers in order to keep interesting lines of discussion alive.

3. I have only once been stumped silent by a question, and so was quite relieved when the questioner interrupted the silence and said something along the lines of "Oh! Did I ask about the implications this research holds for ethos? I meant pathos!!" (Those of you from Purdue probably remember this.)

4. Even though I have just finished an entire book about Kenneth Burke, I still find it difficult to sustain a conversation with someone who *only* uses Burkean terminology. Now, this might just be my problem, but I still think it's important to make an effort to break out of the terminology. (This problem is not of course confined to Burkeans, but also to Deleuzians.)

5. When you are doing a presentation of some sort, if you're lucky, there will be a question or two that will "stick" and end up moving the whole project (or the next one) in an unanticipated direction. You might not realize this for several months or years, but it is still very cool. As a scholar I chase that feeling.

6. As an audience member and a student, nodders sometimes bug me (I say this as a partially reformed nodder), but as a speaker and a teacher, oh lordie, nodding and its bodily partners--hastily writing something down, low rumbles of assent, even good eye contact--are oh, so welcome.

7. I had a good conversation with someone this week about how the best classes are often the ones you're least prepared for. It strikes me that this only works if you are not expecting the class to go well because you haven't prepared. It also strikes me that I might test this hypothesis this week, since I'm flying back on the day of my seminar meeting.

8. Moderating a long discussion (which I did for Tuesday's panel on the Media and the Election) is kind of awesome but also a teeny bit stressful because I don't want to play favorites, and it is impossible to tell whose hand goes up first when they all shoot straight into the air. 

9. If you have not seen David Sedaris on his current tour or had the good fortune of knowing people who have recounted to you the highlights, I suggest you read his piece in this week's New Yorker on undecided voters, like, right now.

10. Come on, November 4!!!! I America can't wait much longer.

days like these

I officially have more meetings and events than hours today. The first one begins at 8:30 a.m., and the last one will end around 9:00 p.m. The sum total is something of a drag. I am, however, looking forward to moderating tonight's IPRH panel on The Media and The Election featuring my colleagues Bob McChesney and Dave Tewksbury. If you're here, you ought to come--these guys know their stuff.

best rec request ever

when nouns have sex

At the request of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities director, my two blogging reading group participant colleagues (Cara Finnegan and John Murphy) and I will be blogging the activities of the Rhetorical Studies Reading Group, which is funded by IPRH and is in its third year running. This year it is being coordinated by our colleague Ned O'Gorman (go Ned!). This is a large group that involves, all told, 25-30 people and that investigates the state of rhetorical studies. We have become quite good at linking in with visitors to campus whose research is related to rhetoric. We tend to read work by that visitor and then spend an hour or two with that person to talk about their research. This sort of informal format allows for a nice combination of discussion about theory and method, as well as a behind-the-scenes account of how research gets produced.

So good have we become at linking to visitors and at using the modest funds allotted by the IPRH for our reading group, that this year we are only going to be reading work of scholars visiting our campus. Past guests have included Jason Black, who studies American Indian rhetorical history; David Fleming, who publishes on classical rhetoric and on contemporary cities; Blake Scott, who studies rhetoric in the context of transnational pharmaceuticals; John Sloop, who theorizes sexuality, identity, and also communications technologies; and Phaedra Pezzullo, whose work on toxic tourism and environmental rhetoric keeps on raking in awards. This year we hosted Kirt Wilson from Minnesota back in September. While scarfing down Antonio's pizza, we got to talk with Wilson about his articles on Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and a truly brilliant study of mimesis in the African-American tradition.

Last night we hosted Anthony Corbeill, a classicist from University of Kansas whose book Nature Embodied, in addition to having one of the coolest cover images, like, ever, is a remarkable and wide-ranging study of gesture in ancient Rome.

We were delighted that in addition to our usual suspects from English and Communication, Corbeill also drew faculty and grads from Classics and Art History. If the book spans five centuries of textual and artifactual evidence, our group blew that open, and the discussion spanned more than 2500 years. At one point it occurred to me that in addition to all the disciplinary affiliations, we had at the table an expert in just about every traditional historical period, and so what this meant was we were able to pool our collective knowledge to think even more broadly about rhetorical gesture. 

In addition to excerpts from Nature Embodied, we also read an article of his on the relationship between grammatical gender and sex. This piece*, which appeared just this year in Transactions of the American Philological Association,  consults with the Latin grammarians to locate the onset of compulsory heterosexuality in increasingly restrictive practices around the gendering of ambiguously gendered nouns. Nouns, he suggests, not only have gender, but they have sex, and he means that, wildly, in both senses of the phrase. It's a delight to encounter Judith Butler and Monique Wittig in a TAPA article, but it's altogether mindblowing to read hints about words copulating and reproducing. Josh Gunn, you would love this piece.

Corbeill was funny, engaging and (too) modest, and he displayed an astonishing ability to pull examples out of his brain files, many of which contain roman jokes (his first book was on laughter). It turns out Cicero was a funny guy with a butch daughter. For those of you on campus, Corbeill is presenting a talk today** on weeping statues. Given that my Aristotle class is smack in the middle of book 2 (and therefore smack in the middle of emotions) I'm a little weepy that I won't be able to make it. Please! Go! You won't be disappointed.

*Corbeill, Anthony. "Genus quid est? Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex." Transactions of the American Philological Association 138 (2008): 75-105.

**The Department of the Classics takes pleasure in announcing a lecture by Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas, on Friday, October 17, at 2:30 PM, in Room 223, Gregory Hall. The lecture is entitled "Weeping Statues, Weeping Gods, and Prodigies from Republican to Early-Christian Rome.

theory & event

The preparation that goes in to teaching graduate seminars can pay big dividends in terms of one's research. This is often the case where my seminars are concerned. But this week I'm finding another pretty interesting confluence between the readings I have assigned and the administrative and service posts I inhabit. The topic for this week in my Aristotle seminar is "friendship, justice, and democracy," and in addition to assigning excerpts from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics, I also assigned two chapters from Danielle Allen's book Talking to Strangers. This book never fails to resonate with me in one way or another. The last time I taught it, for example, I was also teaching in the Odyssey Project, a free humanities education program for people in the community living at or slightly above the federal poverty line. That particular context made Allen's arguments about equity glow on the page; they still do. And incidentally, if Barack Obama gets elected, we might well be hearing more from Allen, an idea that makes me shiver with excitement. 

At any rate, the year I last taught Allen was also my tenure year, and post tenure I have become (as many do) more active in the inner workings of campus and my departments, and so Allen is rattling in my head as I adjudicate plagiariasm cases and worry about the culture of criminalization that often crops up around plagiarism charges. In addition, one of those departments has been going through a particularly rough patch and has experienced what Allen might call the corrosion of trust. So this time, Allen's arguments about friendship without emotional charge serving as a model for citizenly behavior, and about rhetoric as an art of trust production resonate on an even more local level.

At the end of last week, I agreed to serve on a committee whose explicit charge is to develop a plan for spending a pot of endowment money in a way that improves the departmental climate and attends to the aforementioned corrosion. It's not too often that one gets to join a committee and think about spending money, and so I of course said yes, and I reread Allen with this committee's charge in mind. As with all theory, though, the big challenge will be to translate principles of equity, democracy, trust, and healing into an event--or a series of events.

staging performativity

The faculty and grads of the Center for Writing Studies here at Illinois were very lucky to host Vershawn Ashanti Young from the University of Iowa yesterday. He is a scholar of literacy, race, and performativity, and he attends keenly to class and gender as well. I enjoyed two meals with him and various colleagues yesterday, and he got to meet our super smart graduate students. He performed at our colloquium, and when I say performed, I mean performed. In addition to being a careful and provocative scholar, Young is also a performance artist, and his ability to render his book as a performance was quite stunning, I'd say. He can write, act, and dammit, he can dance. His mimetic renderings of characters from his overconcerned mother to his full-of-herself colleague, to his pimped-out brother to his young, fearful self being jumped for his postage stamp money were as convincing as they were amusing. It was like watching a screenplay of the theories of Bourdieu, Butler, Bakhtin, and Althusser all rolled into one, only with pathos and verve (and with no mention of any of them).

Of course it made me wonder just how many scholarly books lend themselves to performance. The answer is probably not many. I mean if Aristotle is right that conflict is the basis of drama, then Young's story--Young himself--embodiesa deep and seemingly unresolvable conflict. The conflict of moving between social situations that call for (call him to) radically different comportments, down to gestures, enunciation, and the set of his jaw. The performer here is at once actor and social critic, as evidenced, for example, by his reading of an African-American woman's over-enunciation of the word "the" as an over-earnest overdoing of overwhiteness.

At lunch we wondered how the Q&A session would go. I feared that people would be too in the "entertained" mode to engage the performance intellectually, but instead everyone offered quite high-level questions and observations about identity, performativity, literacy, bodies, movement, and on, and on. Amazing stuff, this was. Really, really good stuff. Rhetorically potent stuff.

the Rhetoric Society of America

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