b l o g o s

aristotle and the profane

Even though I was expecting it, because my roster told me so, it was still a little odd to walk into my Aristotle seminar today and have fifteen graduate students. That's a lot, especially for a class on one extremely dead dude. There are a couple of familiar faces from my bodies seminar and from rhetoric reading group, and several people I and my colleagues worked very hard to recruit in the past couple of years. A good mix of communication and writing studies folks, and even a literature person in the mix, and above all, quite good energy, I thought. The challenge will be to maintain that energy. Aside from the unexpected weirdness that I  kept wanting to swear (this was the only sign that I hadn't been in the classroom for over a year, and was wholly attributable to my enthusiasm), I thought things went swimmingly. I'm even toying with the idea of making a slide show for next week.

[Updated to add: the syllabus]

semester preparedness list

syllabus: check.
new pens: check.
converted from paper to iphone calendar: check.
calendar filling up: check.
TAs oriented: check.
RA task planned: check.
attended freshman convocation in full regalia: check.
met enthusiastic and charming new graduate students from one department: check.
half wondered if I'll ever meet all the new grad students in the other: check.
bought cheesy land of lincoln mug at a garage sale down the street: check.
returned canning paraphernalia to t: check.
finally answered all email from vacation: check (i think!)
house clean: check. (good enough)
laundry done: almost.
completed reading4others: never fully checkable.
tenure reviews finished: hm, nope.
journal reviews finished: not yet. one more to go.
prepared first class: oh, shit.

the month of the exam

In the midst of all this octobering, three of my advisees are doing their exams. The first exam was today, and K was great. The best moment for me was when a distinguished sr colleague raised a characteristically blunt objection, and K, who was taking notes, laid down her pen and said "I'm not sure I agree with you." And then she proceeded to lay out precisely why she disagreed with him in a really thoughtful, engaged, and respectful way.

My two departments do exams very differently, and both are pretty brutal. In Communication (that's right, I am effecting the name change) grad students respond in writing to three questions devised by committee members. The students are not given a designated place or time limit to answer the questions and so they labor over these answers for a few months to a year or longer. The answers end up being 30+ pages each and can often be worked directly into the dissertation. Students must then meet with the committee to discuss the exam, a kind of exam defense.

In English, students develop a reading list and a guiding rationale in consultation with the committee. And then they read for months (and months). And then they emerge for a two-hour oral exam.

I don't think either model is better, but I'd bet that the students doing it one way envy--just a little bit--the students doing it the other way.

As an advisor, I think the unbounded writing can be more challenging, but it might also ease the dissertation process. As a graduate student, though, I would have been pretty terrified of a 2-hour oral exam.

Okay, now I gotta get back to reading reviews. (Because we don't just write em, we read em too.)

this just in

My first perfect score on teaching evaluations! My rhetoric 108 this past semester was a terrific group of students, and I would have given them all 5.0s as well.

Of course we shouldn't let everything hinge on the evals--I'm fully aware I've not yet received the results for my upper division course on the Rhetorical Tradition--but since I know this rationally and still brood over student comments, I need to allow myself a little enjoyment here.

where there's a dissertation, there's a whippet, part 3 (of 3)

parts 1 and 2 .

etc.

Thanks again to everyone who offered encouragement re: the textbook revision. It's coming along, though it would be faster if I didn't have so much other stuff to do.

e.g.:

This is dissertation two of three for which defenses are scheduled during the last two weeks of May. This photo is part of a series called "where there's a dissertation, there's a whippet."


 

New Edition

This is new edition month! I used to love New Edition, especially that song where they spell the word s-c-h-o-o-l.

But I'm not talking about that New Edition. I'm talking about the new edition of the textbook. And I'm having revisor's anxiety, mostly because of a major change I've proposed.  I want to divide the progymnasmata (preliminary exercises) and imitation chapters and intersperse them as small interchapters every third or fourth chapter. There's sound theory behind this change. While the progymnasmata were a much later development than some of the material in earlier chapters which are more sophistic and Aristotelian, the exercises nevertheless follow through on an important belief about rhetorical education that endured from the 5th century bce on: no one ever gets any better at this stuff without practice. Lots of it.

Also, the progymnasmata are making something of a comeback, thanks to scholarship by folks like Christy Desmet,  David Fleming, and Ruth Webb. Last year I participated in a seminar on progymnasmata at RSA (sponsored by the International Society for the History of Rhetoric), and that renewed my interest in the tradition.

Making the imitation chapter more prominent involves a whole other risk in this age of anxiety about plagiarism. But I have learned a good deal from Rebecca Howard and figure as long as we're very clear about the differences between plagiarism and imitation, we should be okay. I do think that imitation as an educational practice has been one of the forgotten casualties of the ownership myth.

The way it's set up now, instructors probably don't have time to use the progymnasmata or imitation chapters, since they're the last in the book. This semester I made a conscious effort to have students dip into them and realized that it's the perfect thing for a class to work on in that lull between assignments or as a run-up to writing a paper.

But in the archival work I did for a handbook long ago, I learned that teachers of books frequently don't respond well to major changes, so I'm having a hard time finally making the change. (I'm also hoping users of ARCS are a little more flexible than handbook users in the 1950s.)

And so for a couple of weeks now I've been avoiding the slicing and dicing. In the meantime I've added new examples and made new (deep) cuts to the introduction, but now I'm to the point where I need to make this change and move on: otherwise the chapter on topoi won't get the attention it deserves.

I guess if our reviewers don't like it I can always change it back to the way it was. OK, here it goes. (deep intake of breath)

[UPDATE: Thanks so much for the comments this morning! They helped me to finally stop second-guessing and to focus on the main task. I made a new interchapter plan and have set to dividing, with Collin's new rendition of "Cool it Now" in the background.]

listlessness

that which does not kill you still might not make your grade stronger

especially wrt professor hawhee's perfect-spelling-of-proper-names (surprise!) bonus.

Full disclosure: I do seem to recall having to use the eraser for my often-not-so-hot chalkboard spelling on Nietzsche day.

From the question sheets, which often double as scratch paper:

          

         

     

imitation

For today's class I asked my students to try their hands at imitating. They were to choose a short passage from their favorite authors and see if they can't imitate the sentences' structures and rhythms. Like a lot of our mini-assignments, I decided to try this one myself and chose the opening lines from The Echo Maker, the latest from Richard Powers. Aside from the parsimony of RP's prose, here's what I learned: imitation asks one to inhabit a structure, and as such it can be pretty challenging at first, but then it can become inventive, and the new passage takes on a life of its own. For me, a couple of rhymed words presented themselves, but rhyming of course isn't necessary. Oh, and also words and birds may have a thing or two in common.

RP:
Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.

DH:
Words keep crowding as sleep calls. Reams of them cram in, wound among the folds. Squeezed from the day's moments, in phrases and clauses, repeating with the broken fan. Hosts of figures dance in geometric shapes. They cluster on my end-table, calling, clacking their consonants, rounding: the condensed noise of a staged sit-in. More words tamp into seconds, the night thick with sense.