Getting started on this new chapter--the last one I've planned for the manuscript--has been tough, not out of lack of time spent on it, nor out of a desire to get going, nor even because of distractions (genuine or self-manufactured), but because the Burke text I'm working on has thrown me for a few loops. I'll go into those loops someday, but in the meantime I have found it productive to start sketching my graduate seminar for the fall.
I requested a seminar on rhetorics and bodies because I didn't want to build a new course from the ground up, and since I've taught something like seven graduate seminars in my comparatively short career, I figured it's time I re-do one. More importantly, students have approached me from both departments about the possibility of offering such a course. Of course since "Rhetorics/Bodies" was my first grad seminar, and since a lot has happened to my thinking about not only the body and rhetoric but what should happen in a grad seminar at all, and since a lot has happened in rhetorical studies to enrich our collective sense of why the body might matter not just for the humanities, philosophy, and the social sciences but more specifically for rhetorical studies, I am rebuilding the course. From the ground up.
And yet that's good news both for the students who will take the course and, even, as it happens, the wrenches my chapter is throwing at me (this metaphor is sadly not just a metaphor, since the story of Burke's I'm working on features a dream-sequence involving wrenches made of bones). It seems obvious to say/type, but it pays to pull one's head out of the pieces of one's study to reconsider broader questions that the study as a whole might be addressing. And while the various processes we go through--grant applications, job searches, tenure--force us to re-raise those questions, they don't necessarily give us the opportunity to think about new ways the work resonates. Courses, figured as extended questions, however, do.
That said, I've spent the weekend browsing through other courses on bodies and rhetoric, as well as journals and newer books that somehow touch on both. In addition to introductory readings that will go way back to the early 90s when the topic of the body started drawing some interest, I'm going to add some more recent readings on how questions of the body relate more generally to what we do for a living as scholars and teachers.
I'm also going to supplement the usual historical suspects (Butler's and Austin's versions of performativity--one of the big places where bodies and language meet; feminist theory's contribution to responsibility for insisting on the importance of bodily perspectives) with 'case studies,' such as my new obsession with hands in the history of rhetoric (we might even read some new neuroscience stuff on hands and language), and the work of dance as a moving-symbol system. I'm also thinking about including figural case studies, such as Davis Houck's work on FDR's body and disability, and an interesting piece on Kant's relationship to his body from the journal Body and Society, and--the chapter I'm currently banging my head against--Kenneth Burke's "Ailments, Ailments, Ailments" (a first line from a letter he wrote to Cowley), and how those ailments, which he cited as the only 'cure' for his hypochondria, reshaped his views on bodies, meaning, and language.
The figure-based studies, which we'll probably consider in one week, all raise the question of health and illness or disability. Suggestive stuff, especially given that these are all bodies of dudes. Could it be, I wonder, that the body matters the most for modern thinkers and leaders who are men when they're other-than-healthy or fully able? It's something to think about in light of what got all this body business started in the first place: feminists' views that western philosophy has long ignored bodies for the more 'robust' category of mind and rationality. Given its historical devotion to 'rational' processes of argument and persuasion, and the way rhetoric always falls in the shadow of philosophy, it's easy to see how the same can be said for rhetoric too. If only Descartes had been sickly.
I'll post a list of 'units' with readings soon.
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