cross posted at body blog
Today marked the first of two days in which students in my grad seminar give brief sketches in the history of rhetoric, taking up the question "what happens to those histories when we attend to matters of the body?" The answers are as various as they are interesting. I appreciated some of the threads that got going--the discussion of what happens to theories of voice as rhetoric's material changes e.g. (esp. the Cicero and Blair presentations). The focus on materiality is striking too--from Margery Kemp's fashion style to Gilbert Austin's notation system. Lots of references to the expressiveness of the eyes: who's up for writing a dissertation or book on eyes in the history of rhetoric? I was also excited to learn about the possibilities Vico holds for a critical body rhetoric.