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.
