b l o g o s

An Odyssey

In addition to my grad seminar on Bodies & Rhetoric this semester, I am teaching in a new program set up by none other than yesterday's guest blogger, JM. The program, called The Odyssey Project, is a free college level humanities course offered to low income people in the community. Odyssey has been running in Chicago for a while now, and it has even expanded to a spanish-language version as well as another "bridge" course for those students who wanted more.

Here, the course is divided into five parts--literature, philosophy, art history, U.S. History, and critical thinking and writing. I'll be teaching philosophy on Tuesday evenings starting next Tuesday alongside my colleague Dale Bauer who will be teaching literature on Thursdays. But our first meeting as a big group (the four faculty members, the director, and the 28 students) is tonight. I'm pretty excited to meet the students--JM has been telling me about each of them. Many are single moms whose kids are getting old enough so that they feel like they can start thinking about returning to school. I am also excited about what it will be like to teach a class in which every member--to a person--took the initiative to sign up and did so out of curiosity or interest or in hopes of something like self expansion (I'm groping here for a term that is not self improvement).

Interestingly, expansion is just what the program is about--in the way that Odysseus himself developed new capacities as he expanded his travels beyond habitual routes. The Odyssey Project, too, is about expanding the university beyond itself into the community and therefore expanding the humanities beyond themselves.  I'm pretty excited about expanding my teacherly self too. And nervous in that first day of school kind of way.

advent

People, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's time. There's no denying and no stopping it for that matter: two days ago while happily licking my bananas foster gelato cone at Tout Sweet I spotted my first hatchback creeping along Green street packed to the ceiling with clothes and bedding and whatever else can fit in a hatchback. And today when John and I were running 400s at the Urbana High School track while blue-shirted men squeegied windows, we could hear band practice going on inside the building--apparently they're going with the Star Wars theme this year. Nice. Neighbors are returning from  long vacations; colleagues not in denial have the same panic-stricken, slightly nauseous look; those going on sabbatical are worrying about rather strange and faraway things; campus rec is posting eerie notices of early closings for the 'recreation block party' (note to self: take that day off); raise notices arrived in departmental mailboxes with elaborate, algorhithmic accounts of how not everyone got screwed this year, only some people. And oh yeah, service really, really doesn't pay.

That's right, people, it's time for me to flee. I am spending the week preparing for the Hawhee/Marsh ritual of taking our summer vacation the week before the semester starts. This means if anyone needs me before classes begin they better get in touch now, because otherwise, come Saturday, I'm going where the humidity is low, the wireless nonexistent, scholarly reading is prohibited, and where there's nary an academic in sight. 

academia can be sweaty work

I have slotted the morning and the early part of the afternoon today for compiling the materials for my grad course packet, which means lugging all the books and things first to my office so that I can make a trip to the library to retrieve the stray article I can't seem to find. Then, if everything goes well at the library, it'll be on to the local packet-making store so that they might get busy on copyright clearance and so that I might move on to other things.

The biggest question I faced this morning was how to transport all this stuff. I resolutely do not drive to campus since we live so close. And since biking will probably be easier, the question came down to whether the books will fit in my pannier or whether I need to break out the bike trailer. I broke out the bike trailer--the box contains about a dozen books, alas, not a dozen bottles of casillero del diablo. (Praise be to Spencer who told me about his trailer.) And also, for good measure, I broke out the sweatband.

[UPDATE]: after adding all the extra stuff from my campus office and the library, the packet outgrew the wine box, resulting in this:

But the bottom line is: it's IN. (If you are registered for the seminar; don't worry. I don't think the packet will be that thick.)

shouts to the outs

In case it's not part of your normal summer reading, I wanted to call your attention to Josh Gunn's piece in IHE. He's one of rhetoric's own, and this piece stands as a strong refutation for misguided claims from the rhet comp side that comm-rhet folks don't think about pedagogy. Rock!

independent stupidities

Today's Times article about the Auburn sociology professor who allegedly does independent studies with athletes--lots of athletes--boggles my mind. (Independent studies, for those of you who don't know, are classes for which the student meets regularly one-on-one with the professor.) I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these particular classes, as the Times can only intimate, are probably bogus. This is not based on any sort of prejudice against athletes, and I hope this post doesn't draw any athlete-bashing comments, because as most of you know I was an athlete in college, and I hate that crap. But according to the article, this professor was apparently up to--wait for it--152 such independent studies in one semester.

Sorry, but just the paperwork for that many independent studies is too much for one prof to do and still maintain sanity (it sounds like he had secretarial help). It seems to me that it's physically and intellectually impossible to run that many independent studies in one semester in addition to one's normal teaching load. Natch.

As detailed over at Excelsior, good independent studies are rarely independent and  create more of what I call 'surface area' to clutter up professor's desks and brains. I am pretty much bringing independent studies to a halt except in extreme instances, in part because they are so much labor and importantly they are not 'on the books' labor.

IMHO, either these weren't actually independent studies, or this professor at Auburn has lost his marbles. Or quite possibly both. 

encomium on my graduate students--or, grad school, life

I have three official PhD advisees, all women, and I have had email or f2f contact with all three of them in the past day, during which time I have decided that they all, in their own very different ways, rock. These women are all smart and funny--is there some sort of secret humor requirement for grad admissions? I do believe women grad students probably need a sense of humor or lots of renewable prescriptions (or both) to negotiate the odd world of academia--they all work very hard, and they all have interesting and damned complicated lives.

One is going to give birth any day now and--get this--has maintained her usual writing schedule throughout her pregnancy, even stepped it up a bit. Recognizing that she'll probably not be able to complete a draft of her final dissertation chapter before her water breaks, she has decided to use the time 'remaining' to compose her job materials, months ahead of time. She sent them along to me today, and they're really among the strongest I've seen in draft form (and I've worked in grad placement at two universities).

Another just had a really horrific family tragedy--by which I mean unimaginably, even cinematically horrific--and so we met to talk about stuff and to readjust her timeframe, her focus, in a way that will be flexible enough to allow some sort of recovery, if recovery is even the right term. I would insert a few clichés here about her strength, but suffice it to say that her strength really seems to lie in the kind of clarity she has about how the whole strength thing is really ridiculous and any talk of it only comforts those uttering those clichés about how strong she is. Her insight is both instructive and admirable.

The third just left town--and the comfort of a place she actually owns--to share an apartment with a stranger in a big city while she hunkers down for a couple of months to learn Latin, a nonnegotiable necessity for the research she's planning.  For those of you who haven't learned a dead language or an inflected one, and haven't since high school sat in class for 8 hours a day, suffice it to say that her very expensive tickets to Lollapalooza are also her tickets to maintaining her sanity, or they would be for me anyway.

I dunno, so many of us expend so much energy worrying about or even--gasp!--complaining about our 'advisees' (and we know they complain about us too), I feel like it's time for something different.

<Insert a bunch of clichés here about learning from students and all that. Or, I would if I hadn't had the conversation with student #2 about dumb, stupid clichés.>

But each of them is just a little bit astounding, dammit.

The Bitch wants our help

Get on over there, rhet compers.

my new plagiarism policy

I've been spending the past week preparing for the seminar on Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, to be held at this year's meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA). Much like these terrific little ancient "pre-exercises"--which I have been known to use in my writing classes--the preparatory reading for the seminar ranges into eras less near but no less dear to my heart, namely the medieval and renaissance periods, when the progymnasmata were, not to put too fine a point on it, all the rage.

Today's reading, for example, features what might be figured as one of the oldest plagiarism cases (were it real rather than a tale), and it has enough detail about the penalty that I may well rip it off (in jest of course) for my own syllabi. This is from Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), a popular and widely proliferating collection of anecdotes about stuff Romans did, and is offered by Donald Clark in Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education as evidence of the 'persistence of latin verse writing by schoolboys during the Middle Ages' (178). The tale (number CLXIII) goes something like this (I am taking liberty with Clark's account, p. 178-179):

A schoolboy (actually Celestinus, the son of Alexander), while struggling with a difficult assignment that entails turning a theme into verse, receives a little visit. The visitor says:

"Young man, I am the devil in human form, and the best poet that ever lived: care nothing about your master, and promise to serve me faithfully, and I will compose such delectable verses for you that they shall excel those of the pedagogue himself."

Celestinus assented--it must have been late the night before the assignment was due--and the teacher, at once recognizing the verses as beyond the boy's capability (i.e., better than his--the devil doesn't mess around!) queried with a seemingly gentle multiple choice, "my child, have you stolen your verses or made them?"

The kid of course fibbed, and so the master changed into 'or else' discourse: "My dear boy, tell me if anyone made these verses for you . . . Unless you tell me the truth, I will flog you till the blood run."

The boy finally admitted to stealing the verse from the devil and was forgiven.

How's that for a plagiarism policy? Flogging "till the blood run" makes an F for the course seem easy. Then again, it *was* the devil, and not latinversesforsale.com.

commencement

Yesterday I attended two commencement ceremonies, one for each of my departments, both in the regalia my parents bought for me when I earned my degree 6 years ago. I was prepared for the multiple times that the meaning of commencement would be elaborated, that crying babies would be hurried out, and that cell phones would go off. But I really wasn't prepared to have such a good time. Among the graduates, especially in English, there were so many familiar faces and names. Before I left for my Pitt stint, I taught a 72-student literary theory course and dozen or so of those students yesterday shook hands with the Dean, looking slightly embarrassed because their families couldn't suppress their squeals and hollers. Several of them wore the braided cords and colors--graduation bling--that indicated the honors and distinctions they've accumulated in the past years.

After the ceremonies I posed for pictures with former students: one who took my gestures course this past fall and one from a long-ago literary bodies class. I witnessed an exuberant graduate's testimonial to Joe Valente, whose lecture course apparently inspired this woman to change her major to English, because in her words, she thought "this stuff is CRAZY GOOD." My very first honors student, who wrote a killer honors thesis that received high distinction, introduced me to his parents, sister, and girlfriend. I got to meet the family of a PhD student I had the privilege of hooding.

I'm not usually one for ceremony--the parades held for my various championship teams were all rather daunting, and John and I got hitched at a courthouse. I know it's a little cheesy, but something about going through the graduation ritual may have changed my relationship to my students, past and future, and, frankly, to my job. Having lined up with colleagues in our billowy robes to perform the old, old rituals (including following the bag-pipe playing kiltwearer through the parted sea of blue robes and even singing the alma mater); having witnessed the spectacle, from our vantage point on the stage, of the smiling whooping, flashing, jiggling, waving parents--some even brought signs as if ESPN would be there--will, in all likelihood, make me a better teacher.

ailing

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.