b l o g o s

uiuc odyssey, year one

JM has been in the news a lot lately! Yesterday's Odyssey graduation was quite the media event. Check it out. (radio link to come soon I think)

news gazette article

WCIA (local tv news):
  Odyssey Project Graduation

For my part, I enjoyed seeing our students again and meeting their kids and grandkids and family and friends. And as the person in charge of laying out the food spread, I have this to say: when did fruit rollups become so popular? And also Mt. Dew is as big a hit with the teens now as it was twenty years ago.

In all seriousness, though, in the News Gazette article Dale Bauer indicates that teaching in this project was the most remarkable pedagogical experience she's had, and I really couldn't agree more.

in-class work: cave art

Socrates:  Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up that is open to the light and as wide as the cave itself.

They have been there since childhood, with their necks and legs fettered, so that they are fixed in the same place, able to see only in front of them, because their fetter prevents them from turning their heads around.

Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire, there is an elevated road stretching. Imagine that along this road a low wall has been built--like the screen in front of people that is provided by puppeteers, and above which they show their puppets.

Glaucon: I am imagining it.

Socrates: Also imagine that there are people alongside the wall carrying mutlifarious artifacts that project above it--statues of people and other animals, made of stone, wood, and every material. And as you would expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.

 

Glaucon: It is a strange image you are describing, and strange prisoners.

[text by Plato (The Republic, Book VII, 514a-c); illustration by Anora Johnson of Champaign, Illinois. Please do not reproduce the images without artist's consent.]

geometry and the job market

Tonight's insights are brought to you by this evening's Odyssey class, in which we read Book VI of Plato's Republic, where Plato's Socrates delineates the characteristics of a good ruler, and also where the theory of forms is presented: IOW, the meat of the dialogue. We started class with a little geometry lesson.  I asked the students to draw a circle and used the notion of 'circlehood'--that form we all had in our minds which we knew we were trying to achieve but which our lame little renderings never could: my circle's ends didn't quite meet, and one students' circle looked a lot like an egg. But something like circleness or what Soc. would call 'the circle itself' helped to illustrate the theory of the forms, while the formulaic rigidity of geometry helped us get at the difficulty (impossibility?) of the dialectic method.

But the better lesson of forms was driven home for us when a student raised her hand during the second part of class and pointed out that Plato/Socrates' description of an ideal ruler sounds an awful lot like a job ad.

That's exactly right. Job ads, with their glittery prose about what bright and positive (and multiple) qualities and capacities the ideal candidate would have, are the perfect everyday contemporary instance of the 'candidate-itself'--and its impossibility--i.e., the candidate that only exists in the abstract realm of Platonic form.

The wobbly ovals and the rounded line with ends that don't quite meet are far, far more interesting to me. I suppose that's why I study rhetoric.

Cs and stuff

Seems like it's the norm to post about getting into Cs, so I'll bite. The proposal I submitted with Jeff Walker and Janet Atwill got in too. I'll be talking about identity in relation to Aristotle's theory of vision in a paper called "In the Eyes of Others" (plus a subtitle I can't quite recall) on a panel called "Conspicuous Identities: Disposition, Declamation, Imitation, and Arts of Character in Ancient Rhetorical Education."

I'm also excited to be chairing a panel on The Odyssey Project featuring John, my colleague Dale Bauer, Michael Leff, and Amy Thomas Elder, the director of Odyssey in Chicago. Those of you who have expressed an interest in this program--which actually had its origins in New York where the conference will be held--might want to come on by.

These acceptances mean a few things. First, I'll have to stop grumbling about how Cs doesn't care about rhetoric. I imagine it helps to have a rhetoric scholar leading the conference effort: bravo to Cheryl Glenn and all the reviewers. Second, for the first time, I'll be presenting alongside not one but both of my advisors. Jeff and Janet happen to be working on new projects in the same period, and the irony is that my proposal was the odd abstract in the batch. And Third, it will be the first time that John and I attend the same conference. I'm excited. John, however, has more of a Bartleby-esque stance on the hidden Cs: crowds and costs.

epideixis

All month I've been looking forward to yesterday, what had affectionately become known in our household as "Danielle Allen Day," since Allen was scheduled to visit campus to talk about The Odyssey Project, and since I was lucky enough to share two meals and good conversation with her and even to present a rather encomiastic introduction to her audience (though what introduction is not encomiastic?). I also got to meet her dog; he licked me on the nose.

Yesterday in fact took me back a little, to basketball camp on another campus the summer I turned 14, and to the day I met Mary Ostrowski, a longago Tennessee player who was strong and fast and sported high cheekbones, high socks, and thick black wristbands, and who I thought was pretty awesome. I got to know Mary O at camp; she learned my name and autographed my vinyl adidas bag which I then carried everywhere despite the fact that the bag was yellow with black stripes, the school colors of our cross-county rivals.

It's probably a little dumb or uncool for an academic (or an adult) to admit she has a heroine, but my feeling on the matter is this: if I ever find myself in a position where I can't admit to admiring someone with intelligence so fierce and yet so tempered with generosity and humility, someone who makes everyone around her smarter (qualities she in fact shares with the only other MacArthur fellow I know)--or worse, if I find myself no longer coming into contact with such people, then it's probably time for me to get out.

philosophy/rhetoric

A few posts back, I mentioned that I'm teaching philosophy in a new program that offers low income people in the community a free course in the humanities. Why a person who specializes in rhetoric is teaching philosophy is a good question, and the answer leads to a discussion about which department heads support this sort of outreach effort and which (cough) do not. Local politics aside, given the list of associations with philosophy the Odyssey students generated at the beginning of class last night, the better question--and the one that has vexed rhetoricians and philosophers alike for millennia--is this: in what ways doesn't a rhetoric specialist already traffic in philosophy? Here's the list:

beliefs
theories
convictions
experience
perception
abstract
argumentative
motives
dangerous
Why?
weird
the color brown