Mere Rhetoric

What do a mid-century photographer, a fresh new work, politics and poop jokes, solitary confinement and a music video all have in common? Why it must be time for a rhetoric journal roundup! This week we are going to take a little journey through the quarter’s last issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, otherwise known as the RSQ. The RSQ is the official publication of the Rhetorical Society of America, otherwise know as the RSA. So the RSA published the RSQ and now it’s time for the intro for you-know-who!   [intro]   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history and I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve finally finished the spring issue of the RSQ.   Before I give you a summary of this quarter’s issue, let me just give you a little context on the RSQ. The RSQ has been rolling out for decades and is probably one of the most prestigious and longest-running journals for rhetorical studies. If you become a dues-paying member of the RSA--and it’s pretty cheap for students--, you can receive your own subscription to the RSQ, and you’ll find that it has some of the same focus as the RSA conferences held every other year--it’s focused on the rhetoric side of comp/rhet, usually with a big dose of theory. You won’t find a lot of articles in the RSQ about first-year composition, but you will find archival research, cultural artifacts, history and more.    So let’s take a walk through the Spring 2020 issue of RSQ.   First off, we have an article from PhD candidate Emliy N. Smith because, yes, grad students can get published in RSQ. Smith has looked into the photograph of Charles “Teenie” Harris, an African American photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith argues that Harris’ photography counters other mid-century depictions of Black people in two important ways: first, the iconic form of photography--iconic photography, as Smith points out, are high performance. Think, as Smith says, of the photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It’s dramatic, semi-staged and capital M Meaningful. Harris had some pictures like that, but Smith is more interested in the other type of photography he did, the so called idiomatic image, colloquial and conversational. She describes photographs of Harris’ that show Black people creating their own lives as they are “simply moving about in a world suffused with structural racism” (85) like one picture showing kids at a Halloween party, part of their own community, and that community building its own future through its children. The “idiomatic, everyday work of building and sustaining ...Black community,” Smith argues, is itself a powerful mode of visual rhetoric, not less than the iconic mode.   Romeo Garcia and Jose M. Cortez wrote  the next article “The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” If you wondered what a third of those words mean, you are not alone. I had to read the abstract three times before I understood what the article was about, but then I began to see that those words I didn’t understand were exactly what the article was about. In rhetoric we talk a lot about postcolonialism, but these authors are seeking new theories andnew terms--one term is decoloniality. Instead of positioning, for example, the Latin American experience in terms of its difference from Europe, how about just “actually theorizing  rhetoric from the locus of non-Western … space” (94)? The authors give an example of the kind of contrastive rhetoric that really gets their goat. Don P Abbott wrote an article about rhetoric in Aztec culture where he  says, “It is possible that Aztec discourse, both practical and conceptually, would have continued to evolve as the culture itself developed” (qtd 99) and Garcia and Crotez are like…”wait what…? So you think Aztec culture was ‘undeveloped’? Do you think that logocentrism is the only way to figure rhetoric? Uh, no..!” This brings us to the other term in the title that might not be familiar--anthropoi. As you might guess, this word has a connection to anthropology, with the idea that the anthropoi are people you study, “that which cannot escape the status of being external to the subject and being gramed as object/nature” (97).  But wait! de-Colonialism has its own flaws. How can modern rhetoricians ever hope to reconstruct the rhetorics of people in radically different cultures living thousands of years ago? “Decoloniality,” the authors say, “cannot carry out its promis of decolonization while adopting the language and conceptual apparatus of propriety” (103)  If post-colonial thinks about the other and decoloniality gets caught in a loop of using western logocentrism to approach non-Western rhetorics, what’s the solution? Well….they propose an alterity symbolized in the letter X, both as the end of Latinx, and also as in the symbol you use to signify your name if you aren’t literate. They “move past decoloniality without completely giving up on its ground of intervention” seeking “ (104). Whew. That is some heavy stuff!   Don’t worry, the next article includes potty humor! Richard Benjamin Crosby at Brigham Young University (Go Cougs!), digs into the Rhetorical Grotesque, especially in the 21st century policial arena. He argues that leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro and Hugo Chavez and Silvio Berlusconi all “enact in rhetoric the kinds of incongruous combinations, comis distortions and corporeal excesses that scholars in art and literature have long associated with grotesquerie” (109, original emphasis). The grotesque, if you remember your Baktin, focuses a lot on the body, and bodily excess--eating, pooping, reproducing. As Crosby says. “The groteque’s only true allegiance is to transgression of the presumed order of things” (112) and it is in this way that politicians like Trump exemplify the grotesque-- positioning themselves as transgressive, shaking up the old foundation, and being grotesque is part of that. “A political cutlass” (112) as “a mode of communication, the essence of which is transgression of or deviation from and degradation of that which is presumed to be normal” through being 1- incongruous, 2- mocking, and 3- corporal. Crosby gives examples of political discourse of the grotesque from several different countries and political positions, but Trump is the clearest example for us, especially during the Primary campaign. Trump’s grotesque rhetoric argued that “Trump is real, because he is uncontained” (115) as Trump mocks  accusations that he calls women he doesn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” and says “the big problem this country has is being politically correct” (116). Distrust in political institutions have led, says Crosby, to a “grotesque kairos” (119) of wanting to mock and dismantle social norms. And although we rebel-rousing rhetoricians often get excited about breaking social norms, Crosby points out that demagogues like Trump demonstrate that the grotesque is “a neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone skilled enough to use it” (120) and sometimes it can be disasterous.   From Trump’s consolidation of power we then move to the powerless--prisoners on hunger strikes in California’s Pelican Bay Prison. Chris S Earle writes an article called “‘More Resilient than Concrete and Steel”: Consciousness-Raising, Self-Discipline and Bodily Resistance in Solitary Confinement” where he argues that the “widespread, multiracial coalition emerged through years of organizing between prison cells, a process rendered nearly impossible by solitary confinement” (124). “Against the odds,” he relates, these prisoners “created a discursive space” in prison across racial boundaries in three collective hunger strikes opposition prisoner conditions (125). These hunger strikes took place in a Supermax prison and solitary confinement, among the prisoners termed “worst of the worst,” yet they exemplified “strict regimes of self-discipline” (132) as the prisoners “turned their bodies into weapons of resistance” and made “a moral critiques of solitary confinement” (133). Earle concludes his article by saying that making distinctions between nonviolent and violent offenders undermines prison reform efforts and justifies “even more inhumane conditions for many people in prison” (134).   In the next article, Jennifer Lin Lemesurier (li-mis-i-ur) walks us through the “racist kinesiologies” in Childish Gambino’s “this is America.” If you haven’t seen the music video of “This is America,” pause this podcast, fire up the YouTube and watch it now. You’ll thank me. [....] Aaaaaand we’re back. Lemesurier describes what Childish Gambino’s body is doing in this video as embodying two racist assumptions about black male bodies--that they are hyper talented and hyper violent. She takes us deep into the history of Black dance as seen through the filter of white eyes, as slavers demanded slaves dance on demand across the middle passage (141) and slave owners exhibit the “savage wildness” of Black dance (142), but it’s one figure of the Black male body that Childish Gambino especially channels--the 1889 figure of The Original Jim Crow, a minstrel figure who danced with a knee bend, elbow bend and naive amusement. Lemesurier, a dancer herself, describes how uneven the position is in body weight and posture, how it “does not valorize linear pattern or gentle arcs” (144)--it is a stark and mocking other. As all of my listeners have now seen the video--RIGHT?!-- you know that in the video Childish Gambino transitions seamlessly between depictions of performance and violent. “The emphasis on dance,” Lemesuir writes, “is key to the critique of how Black embodiment serves white audiences” (145). “Gambino’s chorerographed performance of violence is a metaperformative moment that asks viewers to question the naturaizationof Black bodies as always dancing or shooting and the impact of such portrayals on  broader relations that are possible between racialized bodies” (146). Lemesuir ends by recommending that we in rhetoric continue studying moving bodies, “Rhetoric needs more clarity on how bodily hierarchies are always present, not only in visuals or discourses, but in the very steps we take through the world, toward or away from one another,” (149).   And there you have it! Those are the main articles from RSQ this quarter. I’m skipping over the book reviews, even though it includes a review by my Casey Boyle, one of my faves from the University of Texas at Austin (go Longhorns!), Dana Cloud and Steve Mailloux’s new book. But you, as they say, don’t have to take my word for it!    

Some time ago, I was asked by listener Sarah Rumsey to do a podcast on composition theory. That’s a doozy of a topic, so I read a lot, I poked around, even pulled together a couple drafts, but couldn’t find the balance of breadth and depth to do this subject justice. So I gave up.   Ah, clever listener, you know I didn’t really give up, because this is Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history and I am Mary Hedengren and instead of trying to capture the entire depth of rhetorical theory thought I could just rip off someone who did.   Granted, the “did” in this case happened way back in 1982, when rhetoric and composition was still a young discipline, but the “someone” is James A Berlin, namesake of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Jim Berlin pub crawl. In addition to, I guess, being a man who could hold his liquor, Berlin was a composition historian and in 1982, he took stock of the current field of composition in an article titled “Contemporary Composition: the Major Pedagogical Theories.”   Now before I dive into this major theoretical typology, let me say that the article has been accused of being a little simplistic and a little...strawman-ish. Berlin himself acknowledges his bias in the article, stating, “My reasons for presenting this analysis are not altogether disinterested. I am convinced that the pedagogical approach of the New Rhetoricians is the most intelligent and most practical alternative available, serving in every way the best interests of our students” (766). Well, in that case, why even worry about other theories? And why should Sarah be taught all of these competing pedagogical theories in her composition classes? Why not just settle down with one intelligent and practical one without holding up competing theories? Won’t that just confuse would-be instructors and, worse, muddle students who must adapt from one instructor’s theory to another as they progress through their classes: freshman comp with a classicist and advanced writing with an expressionist?   Well, for starters, you might not agree with Berlin’s conclusions about which is best. And, even is so, Berlin fears that most people don’t think consciously about their overall theory of writing and learning at all “ many teachers,” he says, “(and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because it serves students in getting them through school and in advancing them in their professions. This essay will argue that writing teachers are perforce given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task” (766).   Okay then, what are the theories Berlin posits for how “writer, reality, audience and language--are envisioned”(765)?   First are the Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists. You might suspect, they echo the philosophies of Aristotle, but Berlin claims that actually they are “opposed to his system in every sense” (767). Okay, then, what does Aristotle posit and what do these wannabes do? Aristotle, if you remember from that famous fresco by Rafael, is the one pointing down to the earth. Berlin describes Aristotle’s view that reality can be “known and communicated with language serving as the unproblematic medium os discourse. There is an uncomplicated correspondence between the sign and the thing” (767). Aristotle’s rhetorical writings are among the most complete we have from the ancient world and emphasize reasoning, but also acknowledge that sometimes it takes a little appeal to emotion, too, to get the job done.   Then Berlin says, in essence, okay, but what those so-called Neo-Aristotelians actually do is Current-traditional or Positivist. [For those keeping track at home, this means that there are two terms (Neo-Aristotleian or Classicist) to describe the general theory and then two (Current traditional and positivist) to describe the way that people botch it up and sometimes still call themselves NeoAristotlean.] So in what ways have Current traditionalists been mucking up Aristotle’s ideas on rhetoric?  Well, for starters they abandon deductive reasoning altogether and embrace exclusively induction, emphasizing only experiment and then they also “destroy” a distinction between dialective and rhetoric, “rhetoric becomes the study of all forms of communication: scientific, philosophical, historical, political, eval and even [gasp] poetic” (769). Additionally, “truth is to be discovered outside the rhetorical enterprise--through the method, usually the scientific method of the appropriate discipline, or as in poetry and oratory, through genious” (770). Instructors in this theory move beyond persuasive to “discourse that appeals to the understanding--exposition, narration, description and argumentation” and is “concerned solely with the communication of truth that is certain and empirically verifieable--in other words, not probablistic” (770).   The second band Berlin identifies are the neo-Platonists or expressivist. Let’s think back on that fresco by Rafael--Aristotle pointed to the ground and Plato pointed to the sky. If neo Aristotleans see themselves as focused on the empirical, the neo Platonists  head in the opposite direction “truth is not based on sensory experience since the material world is always in flux and thus unreliable. Truth is instead discovered through an internal apprehension, a private world that transcends” (771). Because of this, for our writing instructors, “truth can be learned by not taught” (771). The expressionists then “emphasizes writing as a ‘personal’ activity as an expression one’s unique voice” (772). Berlin objects that, like that neo-Aristotleans, these Expressionists have strayed far from Plato’s precepts--”Their conception of truth,” he says “can in no way be seen as comparable to Plato’s transcend world of ideas.” Non of them,” he objects “is a relativist...all believe in the existence of verifiable truths and find them, as does Plato, in private experience” (772). Further, although expressivists may encourage freewriting and journaling, they also emphasise workshopping and peer review, practices that, accord to Berlin will “get rid of what is untrue to the private vision of the writer” (773). This peer practice to purify private truths is not about communication to others, to expunge insincerities. There is a very Dead Poets Society vibe to the whole thing.   So, to summarize where we end up, the Current-traditionalists who think they are Aristotlean are dropping “personal and social concerns in the interests of the unobstructed perception of empirical reality” while the expressivist Neo-Platonists are finding reality only within and using an audience only as a “check to the false note of the inauthentic” and some lingering true NeoAristotleans or classicalists are emphasizing rational structures and only occasionally acknowledging things like “emotion”  (775).   Then there is New Rhetoric. You can almost feel Berlin heave a sigh of relief at finding something sensible. “In New Rhetoric the message arises out of the interactions of the writer, language, reality and the audience. Truths are operative only within a given universe of discourse, and this universe is shaped by all of these elements, including the audience” (775). In other words, if Rafeal were painting the school of Athens now, Aristotle might point towards the objective earth and Plato towards the transcendent heavens, but New Rhetoric (personified, let us say, by Berlin himself) would be pointing outwards towards you--towards the viewer and also towards the painter. The writer creates truth, doesn’t just discover it in the world or within herself, but actually creates it.   And what does that mean for composition? Everything, says Berlin. “In teaching writing we are not simply offering training in a useful technical skill that is meant as a simple complement to more important studies in other areas. We are teaching a way of experiences the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it” (776).   And that’s why learning theory is important. When you’re teaching students to write, are you teaching them to just “write down their observation” about the outside world as though it were uncomplicated? Are you asking them to just “write whatever comes into your mind” about a topic as sincerely and unrestrained as possible? Or are you asking them to create meaning with their audience and, in the same sense with language?   I confess that reading this article in 2019, I’m less twitterpated with the idea that people can make up whatever truths they want. Although no one would ever describe themselves as a Current Traditionalist, some of these ideas--writing in the disciplines, using mixed research methods, even including belleliteristic writing seem very comfortable to me. Things have changed since 1983, not least of which is composition theory.   And I guess this means that this ccan’t be my only podcast on theory. Ah, rats.  

Welcome to Mere R the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary H and if you grew up in the eighties and nineties, like I did, then you might remember a series of posters in your school and public library. Celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker,A-Rod and, of course, Lavar Burton would be posed with a book, smiling, encouraging you to read. They were all readers, and so should you, because being a reader was a worthy identity.     Deborah Brandt, in her decades of interviews with people of all walks of life, found that being a reader had very different connotations than being a writer. Readers were feted, writers were suspect; readers had clubs, writers had isolation; reading was receptive, writing was productive. However, in Brandt’s latest book, The Rise of Writing, she finds something changing--our definition of literacy is swinging from readers to writers.     The subtitle of her book is redefining mass literacy, and that’s just what her interviews reveal--that writing, not reading, is becoming the definition of literacy. She gives a definition of what this looks like: “Writing based literacy is a literacy driven primarily through engagement with and orientation toward writing instead of reading--a literacy that develops by way of emphasizing and embracing the social role of the writer rather than the social role of the reader” (91).     Writing-based literacy is necessary as an increasing number of jobs in both the public and private sectors require writing as part of the work. Often the writer-employee is paid as a condition of the employment, rather than given authorial rights. Instead of getting a byline and a royalty credit, people like lawyers and government officials write in the voice of their company or office. As legal voices have claims “once a person is employed to say what she does, the speech usually represent not her own self-expression but, at best, the expression of the employer” (qtd. 23)This is not a small group--More than a third of the writers Brandt interviewed ghost write, usually for their superiors (32-33). These writer-workers must compose with a borrowed identity (48) One government writer says “I try to be a reasonable voice of the institution. I can’t got outside my role” (75).   However, it’s one thing to put off your authorship when writing on the job, but increasingly people associated with organizations must continue to restrict their writing off the job.Brandt says that the government “readily recognized the intimate intermingling of writer subjectivity with institutional mission as the dangerous mix that potentially undermines the government’s voice when employees speak out in the public domain and political arena, Yet they remain incurious about how this dangerous mix affects the citizen voices of millions of Americans” (87). “When it comes to writing, people’s expressive voices seem inevitably entangled with interests and liabilities of the organizations that employ them--and often cannot be comfortable extricated even off the job” (164). She calls this the “residue of authorship” (27)--the way you change after putting on the writing mask of the job. A writer at a non-partisan agency explains “in terms of our private lives as non-partisan legislative service agency employees, it is made clear to everyone that there are strict boundaries that we cannot  cross. You have to agree to this.You are basically giving up your constitutional rights. We discourage any type of external correspondence that would be published anywhere” (82).   Writing isn’t just an anonymous workplace practice in this new literacy, though. It’s also a hyper personalized practice. Brandt interviewed young people about their writing practices and found that writing was actively enjoyed and productive for these young adults the way reading sometimes is. Her so called unaffiliated writers “wrote enthusiastically outside of school...but did not play to pursue careers as writers.” (111)--they wrote blogs and raps as “private projects of self-development...they engaged in process of self-authoring by composing texts that they need to read” (114-5) and they wrote from surprising young ages (100)--7, 9, 11...even 2 years old   Writing even had a leg up on reading for her interviewees.“While learning to read in this society is largely regarded as child’s work, learning to write is associated with the adult world, entitling you to experience the arduous arcs, rewards and risks of authorship” (104). They described the value of mentors in their writing who helped them to develop their sense of personhood while strengthening their craft--adult mentors besides teachers who didn’t talk down to them, but took their writing as seriously as anyone else’s.   Overall, “The (a)vocational and commercialized status of writing--a status that makes it different from the other language arts of speaking, listening and reading--proved highly salient to the young people I interviewed” (97) Okay, so How do we teach this new literacy? Some of the young people Brandt interviewed talked about how instead of reading encouraging them to write, their writing led to an interest in (or even a duty of) reading. However, most schools privilege reading over writing   Unsurprisingly, Brandt says that school is reading based--especial literature classes--and writing is still very low prestige in schools (163), with its weird extremes--the practical vocational benefits of professional writing and the messy personal practice of writing for self development   For schools “the historical affiliation of writing with art, artisanship, craft, vocation, performance, publicity and earning” are “parts of the the human world that have been suppressed in the abstract, symbol-based routines of the school” (166). What would happen if the next generation of literacy was peppered with Posters that say Write instead of read posters? featuring--not just Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson, but Hugh Jackman, Drake, and Stephen Curry. People who write on and off the job, to define their own voice and to merge their voice with others, people who eagerly identified as writers.  

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’d like you to think a little about the types of writing you’ve done in the past, oh, let us say, year. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably written breezy email, stern syllabi, obscure academic texts and pun-based posts on Reddit that didn’t get nearly the number of upvotes as they deserve. Now what if a random, oh, say 12% of what you wrote was preserved and no one who knew you was around to testify you wrote it all? What would people think about your writing style? About your history? Would they even know you who were you?   This is precisely the mystery behind today’s Other Eight Attic Orator, Antiphon of Rhamnus. Like many of us, Antiphon may have written a variety of texts. He was a logographer, one of those professional legal speechwriters, so he probably wrote dozens of defenses for the rich and powerful in his social circle. He also attracted followers and students, so he wrote examples for them, imaginary legal cases with evenly balanced sides and arguments in weighted antithesis. He may have even written a treatise On Rhetoric, but we don’t have it, because, remember? Most of your writings--gone. We only have rumor of Antiphon’s rhetoric text. He also maybe wrote some abstract sophistic texts, On Truth and On Concord, which sure don’t sound like the pragmatic legal texts we know were his. Antiphon also lived in the real world, which, during this stormy period of Athenian politics, included a lot a hairy situations where Antiphon would have to rhetoric for his life.   All of this makes it hard to sort out what Antiphon really wrote and what, if any, style you would attribute to him--is he a cut-and-dry type-A arranger like his sample cases sound or did he play fast and loose with the traditional four parts of a speech like his court cases? He looks like both. Take those traditional four parts of a speech--prologue, narrative, proof or argument and epilogue, or in other words, set the stage, tell the story, supply the evidence, and sum it all up.   In one speech Antiphon goes on and on in the narrative. Why? Because he’s writing a speech for the prosecution and so it’s his job to plaint what happened. In this case, it’s about a step-mother poisoning a father, so it’s a very lurid narrative, too. The step-mother tricks a family’s friend’s mistress into thinking a poison was a love potion. “When they had finished dinner, ...they naturally began pouring libations...But while Philoneus’ mistress was pouring the libations...she was pouring in the drug. And she thought she would be clever and put more into  Philoneus’ cup, on the theory that if she gave him more, he would love her more. She didn’t realize she had been deceived by my stepmother until the evil was already done.... When the men had poured out the libations, each took hold of his own murderer and drank it down--his last drink” (19-21). I mean--wow! That is shocking stuff. Of course the jury wants to hear more of it. The defense’s excuses of why she did it is almost irrelevant when there’s such a vivid narration. Even though Antiphon says he will “try to relate the rest of the story about giving the drug as briefly as possible,” (13) he knows that the story is the most convincing part and aside from this allegation...there’s not really a lot of evidence. In fact, not only is the evidence sparse, but the narrative is almost entirely fabricated. How could the plaintiff or Antiphon know what the cloistered women said to each other behind closed doors? How could he know what they were thinking when they poured the drinks? But with such a robust narration section, the argument looks compelling. This kind of playing with the order is seen in extreme cases where he even blends togethers evidence and narration.   But this is far from the case of his orderly Tetralogies. These school texts are so orderly that you might even call them...textbook cases. See what I did there? The 1st Tetralogy considers a man and his servent killed in the middle of the night in the street. Were they killed by a common criminal seeking valuable cloaks or by some violent drunk...or was it personal this time? The argument here iis very argumenty, and quite different from “Against the Step-mother”: “We know the whole city is polluted by the killer until he is prosecuted and that if we prosecute the wrong man, we will be guilty of impiety, and punishment for any mistake [the jury] makes will fall on us… no one who went so far as to risk his life would abandon the gain he had securely in hand”, and yet the victims were still in possession of their property when they were found (4)...and the whole thing goes on like that. Counter supposition and response. It’s chock full of evidence and the narration takes back seat, as is more typical.   These cases sound very different, even though the cases all involve murder--Antiphon in both the cases he took and the cases his taught seemed drawn to the bloody side of Athenian life. The extant works of Antiphon are littered with the corpses of poisoned, drowned and javelined Athenians. But just as each legal case is different, the arguments needed to defend or prosecute are also different.   So what do we make of On Truth and On Concord and, for cryin’ out loud, the Interpretation of Dreams? The lawyer-y logographer Antiphon was writing about summary arrest and probablitities, but what about the fragments of the so-called sophistic works? Were these written by “our” Antiphon or some other Antiphon, sometimes named Antiphon the Sophist? What about the Antiphon who squared the circle? It’s difficult to say who is who.   Because there were only like, a dozen names in the ancient Greek cities, there were other Antiphons about. It could be that these little fragments are Antiphon’s weekend work, when he wasn’t wading through gutters of blood. But, as Michael Gagarin points out, you write different ways in different circumstances for different audiences (“Introduction” 6). A real court case isn’t the same as a textbook example for students is not the same as a purely theoretical exploration. Yet with so much missing, it’s hard to say we know Antiphon’s full contributions.   The sad irony is that this great forensic logographer who has been enshrined as one of the Great Attic Orators wasn’t able to win the most important court case of his life--the course case for his life. Although he gave what was later called “the greatest [speech] ever made by a man on trial for his life” he was prosecuted for his role in the coup of the council of 400. Like with much of Antiphon’s work, we hear more about his trial’s speech than we are actually able to read. Aristotle’s Eudemanian Ethics includes expert praise for it as well as the allusion that many others commonly appreciated it. It didn’t seem to stem the rage of the Council, though. He was prnounced guilty and not only was treason a capital offense, but his descendants would even be stripped of their inheritance and their citizenship. Most people thus charged slipped out the back way or threw others under the bus, or did both--see our episdoe on Andocides. But instead of fleeing into exile, Antiphon stayed in Athens and was executed. It’s likely that after his execution his works weren’t exactly broadly disseminated. It wasn’t until 1907 that the fragments of Antiphon’s defense on the revolution were discovered...badly mutilated papyrus from the 2nd century AD.   Kind of a downer ending, so I’m going to end with a quote from someone who knew him, Thucydides , who was Antiphon’s student.   “Antiphon, one of the best men of his day in Athens; who, with a head to contrive measures and a tongue to recommend them, did not willingly come forward in the assembly or upon any public scene, being ill-looked upon by the multitude owing to his reputation for cleverness; and who yet was the one man best able to aid in the courts, or before the assembly, the suitors who required his opinion.”

Welcome to MR the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history   It’s the start of another semester, which, for me, means a season of wonder. I wonder about who my students will be. I wonder whether my schedule will be crushingly busy. Mostly, though, I wonder how my students will react to the syllabi and assignments that I have lovingly crafted. Will they understand the instructions? Will they learn what I hope they will? Will they find it meaningful?   Many compositionists have wondered these same questions and have argued about what kinds of assignments are best for students--digital or analog? Open-ended or directed? Reflective or projective? The authors of the Meaningful Writing Project,Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, Neal Lerner , had similar questions. But instead of pontificating, they just asked the students themselves.   And, boy howdy, did they! They surveyed students at a varied of schools--big state, small private, research and community college--and asked them which (if any) of their writing projects had been the most “meaningful” for them. What they found surprised them, and it surprised me too.   The researchers were expecting on finding a small cohort of “meaningful project” professors who had skillfully crafted assignments that were more meaningful to their students, but instead they found that the meaningful projects were scattered across instructors. Some of the instructors were veterans, some were novices; some were full professors and some were adjuncts. There weren’t clear patterns in who assigned meaningful projects. There was also no pattern on where these meaning projects were taking place. Meaningful writing projects occurred in big classes and small, required courses and capstones and in no courses at all. This might seem like a null result--what can we say about meaningful writing projects if any sort of instructor can assign them in any sort of class?   Again, the answer is in listening to the students. The authors found that these projects focus on the past (students' personal connection and previous experience) and the future (application to the students' sense of their future selves). These projects recognize that education doesn’t happen in discrete modules, but builds upon past lived experience and anticipates the classes, jobs and lifestyles students will eventually enter.   Almost 70% of the students in the study said that the writing project was related to what they expect to do in the future, usually related to their prospective jobs (41). They said things like “”As a teacher, I must write lesson plans that are creative,” “As a physician assistant I will have to write referral letters,” and “As a career artist I..must be able to write about my work when I submit  it to juried exhibitions” (41). Recognizing connections to their future lives envigorates writing for these students. The past also matters, even when the comparison to the past was uneven. One participant, Leah, described her previous writing experience as “neutral.”   Leah also gave a good insight into the importance of choice in writing projects.The authors note that the “balance between allow and require once again seems key…[because] Leah’s experiences up tot his point were too close to the require end o the continuum with not enough allow” (48). Accordingly, student choice means a lot--encouraging students to delve into personal interest and to feel "invited and encouraged" (133). This is always a hard balance for me too--do I let my students choose to write on whatever topic they want, assuming that they will write with more passion about the topic of their choice? Or do they not have any particular passion yet, and fall back on standard fare: gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Similiarly, do they lack the content knowledge to know how to approach that topic and will falter, unable to come up with a meaningful area of research? It’s not enough just to dump novice students into it--”You decide what to write and how to write it,” sounds like agency, but it also sounds like neglect. Instead, the authors say we teachers can “intentionally build optimal conditions for agency to emerge” like directing students to make use of the skills and thoughts that they have developed in and out of the class (53). That’s kind of a big deal, not just for a student’s writing ability, but for their developing sense of self.   As the authors put it, the meaningful projects were "holistic--not merely about content or genre or process but also about mind and body, heart and head--and to act as a kind of mirror in which students see their pasts and futures, enabling them to map those on to their writing projects to make meaning" (107). It’s not overstating it to see these meaningful writing projects as meaningful experiences period. Certainly I remember some of the most meaningful projects of my undergraduate life--the time I wrote a platonic dialogue to explain Foucault’s theory for my theory class, the long honors thesis where I was able to pursuit my obsession with an obscure Steinbeck novel, the Shakespeare class that allowed me to delve deep into Renaissance concepts of madness. These weren’t just fun assignments, but projects that helped develop my sense of what mattered to me.   But as I reflect on my undergraduate writing, I’m also impressed by the impact that non-required writing had on me. The sketches I wrote for my comedy group, the impassioned articles for the school opinion paper, the poetry and fiction that I was able to give readings of in the library auditorium. While the authors mention that some of the MWP took place without classrooms, teachers or grades (131) there’s not much discussion of those projects. Look, I know that I’m a writing nerd--otherwise I wouldn’t end up the host of a show called Mere Rhetoric--but in addition to designing assignments that might be meaningful to students, we can also nurture environments where meaningful writing can take place outside of our classes too.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve been reading A Christmas Carol this holiday season because I’m playing Mrs. Crachit in a community theatre production. And wow. There is a story behind that. But becaue I was interested in The christmas carol, so I started reading The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford’s history of Dickens’s masterpeice. I was surprised to hear how A Christmas Carol had solidified Christmas as we know it, a home-and-family holiday rather than a racacus drunken orgy of disrule. Yeah, Christmas used to be like that. In fact, there was a debate about Christmas raging over several centuries when Scrooge came on the scene. After Dickens, though, industrialists started giving their employees Christmas Day off, and everyone started sending their workers the ubiquitous Christmas turkey. Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol first cried his eyes out and then committed to donate money to the poor. Even Dickens’s best frienemy and critic, William Makepeace Thackery, was deeply moved by it. Dickens’s book had, in the words of Lord Jeffrey “fostered more kindly feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence” than all the sermons in all the churches pervious. So if literature is so powerful to change the way people live, why isn’t it considered rhetoric? That question is probably best addressed in Steven Mailloux (My-U)’s Rhetorical Power. In the book that would in some ways define his career, Mailloux advances a rhetorical perspective of literature that would present a middle ground between idealist and realist literary theory. He calls the exercise of this perspective “rhetorical hermeneutics” which he suggests as an “anti-Theory theory” that will  “determine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchanges” (15). It isn’t just the content or, to use the old fashioned phrase, “theme” of a book that impacts people, but the way the story is drawn through, and the techniques that the author gets us to buy into. Such a reading differs wildly from the notions of New Criticisms that would restrict interpretation to the page and from even Stanley Fish’s narrow academic interpretative community. Instead, the work is rooted in a specific history, rhetorical tradition, and cultural conversation (145-6). We can be impacted by 19th century books, but not the in same way that Lord Jeffrey and Stevenson were. There are conversations going on and arguments made in the book catalogs of any culture. Mailloux claims that this perspective is not only engaged in the world outside the text, but also describes the temporal experience of reading. In this way, literature exits circles of elite academic interpretative communities and instead belongs to the community of readers at large. The text has an individual influence as well. Mailloux describes how a text can educate a reader (41) and train the reader to see and think a certain way as the text progresses (99). This education depends on the form of the work, how the work develops from premise to premise. Moby Dick is Mailloux’s main example of this kind of trained reading. The disappearing narrator through chapters isn’t just an error; it’s an education. In this way, rhetorical hermeneutics seem to draw on both Kenneth Burke’s discussion of form in Counter-statement and Wayne Booth’s concerns about immoral narration in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While Mailloux uses Moby Dick as his primary example of the education of the reader within the pages of a book, he spends more time discussing the way that a text’s educating qualities relate to a community’s debate, and what better example could he use than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?     In Mark Twain’s book, Mailloux has a prime example of the way a work “includes rhetorical histories of interpretative disputes” (135).  Because of the way Twain’s work was part of the national debates of the “Negro Question” and the “Bad Boy Boom,” it can clearly demonstrate a reading that prioritizes not the “isolated readers and isolated texts” but the entire “rhetorical exchanges among interpreters embedded in discursive and other social practices at specific historical moments” (133).  We often think of Huckleberry Finn in terms of race only, because that’s the predominant issue from the book for our culture, but the issue of “bad boys” was even more pressing on Twain’s contemporaries, which may seems a shocking undersight to modern readers. Huckleberry Finn was originally banned from some schools and library for showing a bad boy getting away with rebellion.  Mailloux demonstrates that there were many pieces of literature of all sorts discussing what to do with juvenile delinquent boys, and Twain’s contribution in the unintentionally humane and thoughtful Huckleberry was a response to, and instigator of, some of the alarm. Moving from Mark Twain, Mailloux applies his theory to contemporary political disputes, demonstrating that this kind of reading practice isn’t exclusive to formal literature. So we come full circle. Literature participates in a wider societal conversation, and our political conversations can benefit of a reading as intense as the one we give to literature. As Mailloux says “textual interpretation and rhetorical politics can never be separated” (180).     So if you do a little light reading this holiday break, you might take a moment and wonder, what, exactly, are the political implications of what you’re reading. If you found a deeper level of rhetorical discourse in your holiday reading, why not drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? This is Mary Hedengren, ruining your vacation from Mere Rhetoric.

[intro] Welcome to MR the podcast for beginngs and insiders aboutt he ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren. This last week I graded my students’ rhetorical analyses. For many of them, this was the first time they had been asked to write a rhetorical analysis and this assignment always makes me nervous. I give them sample papers. We practice writing a rhetorical analysis together. We discuss in depth examples and abuses of ethos, logos, and pathos, but many of them struggle tremendously. I know I could write a 3-page rhetorical analysis in 20 minutes; why do my students take hours and still fail the project?   David Bartholomae wondered, as I do, how students approach projects they’ve never been asked to weigh in on before. In my students’ case, they just barely learned what “ethos” is--how are they supposed to assert how it impacts a particular audience? Writing in the early 80s, Bartholomea, like a score of composition scholars like Mina Shanessey and Linda Flower, were interested in the needs of a population sometimes called Basic Writers. Basic writers are those who, in Bartholomae’s words “shut out from one of the privileged languages of public life” in academic writing, although they are “aware of, but cannot control” that language (64). Not having been exposed to reading or writing much of it, they must fall back on what they think academic writing is supposed to sound like. They have to invent what “university writing” is. This is where you have all those errors that make your students sound like robots on the fritz: “utilization,” “the reason for this is because that,” and endless “therefore”s. It impacts big-picture ideas, too. B mentions that commonplaces that many students fall back on: “mistakes are because of a lack of pride,” “creativity is self-expression,” “the text you assignment to read was life-changing and insightful, o teacher mine!” This is where we roll our eyes and feel slightly manipulated, but the students aren’t being malicious when they try to give us what we want--they’re simply not confident at being able to give us what they want, too.   And every time the task changes, students can find themselves flummoxed. “A student who can write a reasonably correct narrative may fall to pieces when faced with a more unfamiliar assignment,” Bartholomae points out. A student can write smooth, error-free prose in a form that makes sense to them, but asked to assume new authority, and they panic in the new register. And who can blame them? They’ve never encountered it before. Imagine being asked to give a public speech in Japanese without knowing the language. Bartholomae’s students were exposed to many of the same forms ours are “test-taking, report or summary--work ...where they are expected to admire and report on what we do” (68). Certainly I saw that in the rhetorical analyses I read. The background research on the author was good, relevant and cited appropriately. The articles were summarized fairly, with occasional quotes from the text. But when I ask them to apply their knowledge of rhetorical terms to argue how the articles were working and they fall to pieces, just as Bartholomae says. Many of them have never been asked to defend their own scholarly opinion or assert another’s through conjuncture. They can’t possibly make a scholarly argument, so instead they are made by it. They put on a mask of “scholar”--”They begin with a moment of appropriation, Bartholomae says, “a moment when they can offer up a sentence that is not their as though it were their own” (69).   But students who are outside of the academic discourses they write also recognize that it is not fair that they have to be outsiders. Even when they are given supposedly non-academic discourse to write-- “explain kairos to a classmate”--students are thrown into assumed authority: how on earth would they explain kairos--they just learned about kairos! They don’t know anything more about kairos than anyone else in the class! It is, in Bartholome’s words “an act of aggression  disguised as an act of charity” (65). Being put into a position of insider to which they beleive they have no claim, some students doggedly imitate while others also subtly criticize. “The write continually audits and pushes against and language that would render him [or her] ‘like everyone else’ and mimics the language and interpretative systems of the privileged community” (79).   What is the solution then? Bartholomae suggests that we meet students on the grounds of their own authority--instead of encouraging them to give tidy, pat answers that imitate what they think the professor is looking for, “well within safe, familiar territory” (80). This can seem quixotic, especially when a grade is on the line. While Bartholomea doesn’t give a comprehensive solution, but he does mention the work of Particia Bizzell and Linda Flower as useful starting points--determining, for example, what the conventions of the discourse community to teach them explicitly. This can mean anything from pointing out the expectations of MLA citation to providing templates of academic discourse. Another strategy is to look broadly at where students are all falling short together--is everyone falling back on summary instead of moving into analysis? Is everyone asserting the opinion of the audience without reasoned conjecture? Seeing where students depart, like a big-picture Error and Expectation, can give insight into where students feel uncomfortable acting as insiders.   Because, no matter how frustrated we get when we grade student work, they aren’t dum-dum heads who didn’t understand anything that we taught them. They’re paying attention--they’re writing the way that they think we want them to write and the way that they think we write. Batholomae, however, wants to to consider they way they write and what they want to write about.

Weeeeellllcommmme to Meeeeeereeee Rhetoooooric! It’s our annual Halloween episode, which means a little bit of the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetorical history, but mostly a ghost story. This year, we’re going with our first not-MR-James story. Don’t worry--there are still intials--but first--to business.   If you’re going to talk about ghost stories and influential thinkers, you won’t dig long until you come across Freud’s contribution, a little piece called “The Uncanny.” You might not peg Sigmund Freud as a connoisseur of boogeymen, but he was capital-f freaked capital-o out by ETA Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.” If Hoffmann’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you know him from writing the story of the Nutcracker ballet. Look at that--our annual tradition here at Mere Rhetoric just founds 3-degrees of separation to every ballet company’s annual tradition! Anyway, the Sandman is a freaky sci-fi horror tale that eventually inspired another ballet called Coppelia. The original is even more terrifying. Don’t worry--it’s coming up after we talk about Freud. Right now all you need to know is that the line between reality and madness is thin, thin and shaky.   Freud was, as you might expect, very into that. He draws heavily on a German pun--evidentally heimlich means both homey or familiar and secret or hidden. In terms of the uncanny, things are most terrifying when we think we’re playing in the realm of our daylight reality and then suddenly the rules change. No one, for example, is horrified when Snow White RISES FROM THE DEAD, because we already are accepting that we’re in a fairy tale with, like, singing animals who do housework. As Freud says, ““as soon as it is given an arbitrary and unrealistic setting in fiction it is apt to lose its quality of the uncanny” (19). And what are these eerie occurances? Because Freud is a master classifier, they can be split across “either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed (17)--so he believes either the terrors of childhood or of primitive man resurface in our horror stories. The parts of us that we repress resurface as ghosts and witches and we confront them in physical manifestations separate from us. For example, the supernatural power of, like, a giant or a firestarter, relates to our own narcissistic impulses to dominate others. Freud goes through and gives a catalogue of things that are uncanny:   dismembering the double living dolls repetition (like seeing the same number all day) evil eye ghosts witchcraft madness As you listen to this year’s Halloween episode, The Sandman, you can point out where these pop up--see if you can get Uncanny Bingo!   NATHANEL TO LOTHAIRE Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long - so very long. My mother, am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time in dissipation, entirely forgetful of her fair, angelic image that is so deeply imprinted on my heart. Such, however, is not the case. Daily and hourly I think of you all; and the dear form of my lovely Clara passes before me in my dreams, smiling upon me with her bright eyes as she did when I was among you. But how can I write to you in the distracted mood which has been disturbing my every thought! A horrible thing has crossed my path. Dark forebodings of a cruel, threatening fate tower over me like dark clouds, which no friendly sunbeam can penetrate. I will now tell you what has occurred. I must do so - that I plainly see - the mere thought of it sets me laughing like a madman. Ah, my dear Lothaire, how shall I begin ? How shall I make you in any way realize that what happened to me a few days ago can really have had such a fatal effect on my life? If you were here you could see for yourself; but, as it is, you will certainly take me for a crazy fellow who sees ghosts. To be brief, this horrible occurrence, the painful impression of which I am in vain endeavoring to throw off, is nothing more than this - that some days ago, namely on the 30th of October at twelve o'clock noon, a barometer-dealer came into my room and offered me his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to throw him downstairs, upon which he took himself off of his own accord. Only circumstances of the most peculiar kind, you will suspect, and exerting the greatest influence over my life, can have given any import to this occurrence. Moreover, the person of that unlucky dealer must have had an evil effect upon me. So it was, indeed. I must use every endeavor to collect myself, and patiently and quietly tell you so much of my early youth as will bring the picture plainly and clearly before your eyes. As I am about to begin, I fancy that I hear you laughing, and Clara exclaiming, 'Childish stories indeed!' Laugh at me, I beg of you, laugh with all your heart. But, oh God! my hair stands on end, and it is in mad despair that I seem to be inviting your laughter, as Franz Moor did Daniel's in Schiller's play. But to my story. Excepting at dinner-time I and my brothers and sisters used to see my father very little during the day. He was, perhaps, busily engaged at his ordinary profession. After supper, which was served according to the old custom at seven o'clock, we all went with my mother into my father's study, and seated ourselves at the round table, where he would smoke and drink his large glass of beer. Often he told us wonderful stories, and grew so warm over them that his pipe continually went out. Whereupon I had to light it again with a burning spill, which I thought great sport. Often, too, he would give us picture-books, and sit in his arm-chair, silent and thoughtful, puffing out such thick clouds of smoke that we all seemed to be swimming in the clouds. On such evenings as these my mother was very melancholy, and immediately the clock struck nine she would say: 'Now, children, to bed - to bed! The Sandman's coming, I can see.' And indeed on each occasion I used to hear something with a heavy, slow step come thudding up the stairs. That I thought must be the Sandman. Once when the dull noise of footsteps was particularly terrifying I asked my mother as she bore us away: 'Mamma, who is this naughty Sandman, who always drives us away from Papa? What does he look like?' 'There is no Sandman, dear child,' replied my mother. 'When I say the Sandman's coming, I only mean that you're sleepy and can't keep your eyes open - just as if sane had been sprinkled into them.' This answer of my mother's did not satisfy me - nay, the thought soon ripened in my childish mind the she only denied the Sandman's existence to prevent our being terrified of him. Certainly I always heard him coming up the stairs. Most curious to know more of this Sandman and his particular connection with children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of man he was. 'Eh, Natty,' said she, 'don't you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.' A most frightful picture of the cruel Sandman became impressed upon my mind; so that when in the evening I heard the noise on the stairs I trembled with agony and alarm, and my mother could get nothing out of me but the cry, 'The Sandman, the Sandman!' stuttered forth through my tears. I then ran into the bedroom, where the frightful apparition of the Sandman terrified me during the whole night. I had already grown old enough to realize that the nurse's tale about him and the nest of children in the crescent moon could not be quite true, but nevertheless this Sandman remained a fearful spectre, and I was seized with the utmost horror when I heard him once, not only come up the stairs, but violently force my father's door open and go in. Sometimes he stayed away for a long period, but after that his visits came in close succession. This lasted for years, but I could not accustom myself to the terrible goblin; the image of the dreadful Sandman did not become any fainter. His intercourse with my father began more and more to occupy my fancy. Yet an unconquerable fear prevented me from asking my father about it. But if I, I myself, could penetrate the mystery and behold the wondrous Sandman - that was the wish which grew upon me with the years. The Sandman had introduced me to thoughts of the marvels and wonders which so readily gain a hold on a child's mind. I enjoyed nothing better than reading or hearing horrible stories of goblins, witches, pigmies, etc.; but most horrible of all was the Sandman, whom I was always drawing with chalk or charcoal on the tables, cupboards and walls, in the oddest and most frightful shapes. When I was ten years old my mother removed me from the night nursery into a little chamber situated in a corridor near my father's room. Still, as before, we were obliged to make a speedy departure on the stroke of nine, as soon as the unknown step sounded on the stair. From my little chamber I could hear how he entered my father's room, and then it was that I seemed to detect a thin vapor with a singular odor spreading through the house. Stronger and stronger, with my curiosity, grew my resolution somehow to make the Sandman's acquaintance. Often I sneaked from my room to the corridor when my mother had passed, but never could I discover anything; for the Sandman had always gone in at the door when I reached the place where I might have seen him. At last, driven by an irresistible impulse, I resolved to hide myself in my father's room and await his appearance there. From my father's silence and my mother's melancholy face I perceived one evening that the Sandman was coming. I, therefore, feigned great weariness, left the room before nine o'clock, and hid myself in a corner close to the door. The house-door groaned and the heavy, slow, creaking step came up the passage and towards the stairs. My mother passed me with the rest of the children. Softly, very softly, I opened the door of my father's room. He was sitting, as usual, stiff end silent, with his back to the door. He did not perceive me, and I swiftly darted into the room and behind the curtain which covered an open cupboard close to the door, in which my father's clothes were hanging. The steps sounded nearer and nearer - there was a strange coughing and scraping and murmuring without. My heart trembled with anxious expectation. A sharp step close, very close, to the door - the quick snap of the latch, and the door opened with a rattling noise. Screwing up my courage to the uttermost, I cautiously peeped out. The Sandman was standing before my father in the middle of the room, the light of the candles shone full upon his face. The Sandman, the fearful Sandman, was the old advocate Coppelius, who had often dined with us. But the most hideous form could not have inspired me with deeper horror than this very Coppelius. Imagine a large broad-shouldered man, with a head disproportionately big, a face the color of yellow ochre, a pair of bushy grey eyebrows, from beneath which a pair of green cat's eyes sparkled with the most penetrating luster, and with a large nose curved over his upper lip. His wry mouth was often twisted into a malicious laugh, when a couple of dark red spots appeared upon his cheeks, and a strange hissing sound was heard through his gritted teeth. Coppelius always appeared in an ashen-gray coat, cut in old fashioned style, with waistcoat and breeches of the same color, while his stockings were black, and his shoes adorned with agate buckles. His little peruke scarcely reached farther than the crown of his head, his curls stood high above his large red ears, and a broad hair-bag projected stiffly from his neck, so that the silver clasp which fastened his folded cravat might be plainly seen. His whole figure was hideous and repulsive, but most disgusting to us children were his coarse brown hairy fists. Indeed we did not like to eat anything he had touched with them. This he had noticed, and it was his delight, under some pretext or other, to touch a piece of cake or some nice fruit, that our kind mother might quietly have put on our plates, just for the pleasure of seeing us turn away with tears in our eyes, in disgust and abhorrence, no longer able to enjoy the treat intended for us. He acted in the same manner on holidays, when my father gave us a little glass of sweet wine. Then would he swiftly put his hand over it, or perhaps even raise the glass to his blue lips, laughing most devilishly, and we could only express our indignation by silent sobs. He always called us the little beasts; we dared not utter a sound when he was present, end we heartily cursed the ugly, unkind man who deliberately marred our slightest pleasures. My mother seemed to hate the repulsive Coppelius as much as we did, since as soon as he showed himself her liveliness, her open and cheerful nature, were changed for a gloomy solemnity. My father behaved towards him as though he were a superior being, whose bad manners were to be tolerated and who was to be kept in good humor at any cost. He need only give the slightest hint, and favorite dishes were cooked, the choicest wines served. When I now saw this Coppelius, the frightful and terrific thought took possession of my soul, that indeed no one but he could be the Sandman. But the Sandman was no longer the bogy of a nurse's tale, who provided the owl's nest in the crescent moon with children's eyes. No, he was a hideous, spectral monster, who brought with him grief, misery and destruction - temporal and eternal - wherever he appeared. I was riveted to the spot, as if enchanted. At the risk of being discovered and, as I plainly foresaw, of being severely punished, I remained with my head peeping through the curtain. My father received Coppelius with solemnity. 'Now to our work!' cried the latter in a harsh, grating voice, as he flung off his coat. My father silently and gloomily drew off his dressing gown, and both attired themselves in long black frocks. Whence they took these I did not see. My father opened the door of what I had always thought to be a cupboard. But I now saw that it was no cupboard, but rather a black cavity in which there was a little fireplace. Coppelius went to it, and a blue flame began to crackle up on the hearth. All sorts of strange utensils lay around. Heavens! As my old father stooped down to the fire, he looked quite another man. Some convulsive pain seemed to have distorted his mild features into a repulsive, diabolical countenance. He looked like Coppelius, whom I saw brandishing red-hot tongs, which he used to take glowing masses out of the thick smoke; which objects he afterwards hammered. I seemed to catch a glimpse of human faces lying around without any eyes - but with deep holes instead. 'Eyes here' eyes!' roared Coppelius tonelessly. Overcome by the wildest terror, I shrieked out and fell from my hiding place upon the floor. Coppelius seized me and, baring his teeth, bleated out, 'Ah - little wretch - little wretch!' Then he dragged me up and flung me on the hearth, where the fire began to singe my hair. 'Now we have eyes enough - a pretty pair of child's eyes,' he whispered, and, taking some red-hot grains out of the flames with his bare hands, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes. My father upon this raised his hands in supplication, crying: 'Master, master, leave my Nathaniel his eyes!' Whereupon Coppelius answered with a shrill laugh: 'Well, let the lad have his eyes and do his share of the world's crying, but we will examine the mechanism of his hands and feet.' And then he seized me so roughly that my joints cracked, and screwed off my hands and feet, afterwards putting them back again, one after the other. 'There's something wrong here,' he mumbled. 'But now it's as good as ever. The old man has caught the idea!' hissed and lisped Coppelius. But all around me became black, a sudden cramp darted through my bones and nerves - and I lost consciousness. A gentle warm breath passed over my face; I woke as from the sleep of death. My mother had been stooping over me. 'Is the Sandman still there?' I stammered. 'No, no, my dear child, he has gone away long ago - he won't hurt you!' said my mother, kissing her darling, as he regained his senses. Why should I weary you, my dear Lothaire, with diffuse details, when I have so much more to tell ? Suffice it to say that I had been discovered eavesdropping and ill-used by Coppelius. Agony and terror had brought on delirium and fever, from which I lay sick for several weeks. 'Is the Sandman still there?' That was my first sensible word and the sign of my amendment - my recovery. I have only to tell you now of this most frightful moment in all my youth, and you will be convinced that it is no fault of my eyes that everything seems colorless to me. You will, indeed, know that a dark fatality has hung over my life a gloomy veil of clouds, which I shall perhaps only tear away in death. Coppelius was no more to be seen; it was said he had left the town. About a year might have elapsed, and we were sitting, as of old, at the round table. My father was very cheerful, and was entertaining us with stories about his travels in his youth; when, as the clock struck nine, we heard the house-door groan on its hinges, and slow steps, heavy as lead, creaked through the passage and up the stairs. 'That is Coppelius,' said my mother, turning pale. 'Yes! - that is Coppelius'' repeated my father in a faint, broken voice. The tears started to my mother's eyes. 'But father - father!' she cried, 'must it be so?' 'He is coming for the last time, I promise you,' was the answer. 'Only go now, go with the children - go - go to bed. Good night!' I felt as if I were turned to cold, heavy stone - my breath stopped. My mother caught me by the arm as I stood immovable. 'Come, come, Nathaniel!' I allowed myself to be led, and entered my chamber! 'Be quiet - be quiet - go to bed - go to sleep!' cried my mother after me; but tormented by restlessness and an inward anguish perfectly indescribable, I could not close my eyes. The hateful, abominable Coppelius stood before me with fiery eyes, and laughed maliciously at me. It was in vain that I endeavored to get rid of his image. About midnight there was a frightful noise, like the firing of a gun. The whole house resounded. There was a rattling and rustling by my door, and the house door was closed with a violent bang. 'That is Coppelius !' I cried, springing out of bed in terror. Then there was a shriek, as of acute, inconsolable grief. I darted into my father's room; the door was open, a suffocating smoke rolled towards me, and the servant girl cried: 'Ah, my master, my master!' On the floor of the smoking hearth lay my father dead, with his face burned, blackened and hideously distorted - my sisters were shrieking and moaning around him - and my mother had fainted. 'Coppelius! - cursed devil! You have slain my father!' I cried, and lost my senses. When, two days afterwards, my father was laid in his coffin, his features were again as mild and gentle as they had been in his life. My soul was comforted by the thought that his compact with the satanic Coppelius could not have plunged him into eternal perdition. The explosion had awakened the neighbors, the occurrence had become common talk, and had reached the ears of the magistracy, who wished to make Coppelius answerable. He had, however, vanished from the spot, without leaving a trace. If I tell you, my dear friend, that the barometer-dealer was the accursed Coppelius himself, you will not blame me for regarding so unpropitious a phenomenon as the omen of some dire calamity. He was dressed differently, but the figure and features of Coppelius are too deeply imprinted in my mind for an error in this respect to be possible. Besides, Coppelius has not even altered his name. He describes himself, I am told, as a Piedmontese optician, and calls himself Giuseppe Coppola. I am determined to deal with him, and to avenge my father's death, be the issue what it may. Tell my mother nothing of the hideous monster's appearance. Remember me to my dear sweet Clara, to whom I will write in a calmer mood. Farewell. CLARA TO NATHANIEL It is true that you have not written to me for a long time; but, nevertheless, I believe that I am still in your mind and thoughts. For assuredly you were thinking of me most intently when, designing to send your last letter to my brother Lothaire, you directed it to me instead of to him. I joyfully opened the letter, and did not perceive my error till I came to the words: 'Ah, my dear Lothaire.' NO, by rights I should have read no farther, but should have handed over the letter to my brother. Although you have often, in your childish teasing mood, charged me with having such a quiet, womanish, steady disposition, that, even if the house were about to fall in, I should smooth down a wrong fold in the window curtain in a most ladylike manner before I ran away, I can hardly tell you how your letter shocked me. I could scarcely breathe-----the light danced before my eyes. Ah, my dear Nathaniel, how could such a horrible thing have crossed your path ? To be parted from you, never to see you again - the thought darted through my breast like a burning dagger. I read on and on. Your description of the repulsive Coppelius is terrifying. I learned for the first time the violent manner of your good old father's death. My brother Lothaire, to whom I surrendered the letter, sought to calm me, but in vain. The fatal barometer dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, followed me at every step; and I am almost ashamed to confess that he disturbed my healthy and usually peaceful sleep with all sorts of horrible visions. Yet soon even the next day - I was quite changed again. Do not be offended, dearest one, if Lothaire tells you that in spite of your strange fears that Coppelius will in some manner injure you, I am in the same cheerful and unworried mood as ever. I must honestly confess that, in my opinion, all the terrible things of which you speak occurred merely in your own mind, and had little to do with the actual external world. Old Coppelius may have been repulsive enough, but his hatred of children was what really caused the abhorrence you children felt towards him. In your childish mind the frightful Sandman in the nurse's tale was naturally associated with old Coppelius. Why, even if you had not believed in the Sandman, Coppelius would still have seemed to you a monster, especially dangerous to children. The awful business which he carried on at night with your father was no more than this: that they were making alchemical experiments in secret, which much distressed your mother since, besides a great deal of money being wasted, your father's mind was filled with a fallacious desire after higher wisdom, and so alienated from his family - as they say is always the case with such experimentalists. Your father, no doubt, occasioned his own death, by some act of carelessness of which Coppelius was completely guiltless. Let me tell you that I yesterday asked our neighbor, the apothecary, whether such a sudden and fatal explosion was possible in these chemical experiments? 'Certainly,' he replied and, after his fashion, told me at great length and very circumstantially how such an event might take place, uttering a number of strange-sounding names which I am unable to recollect. Now, I know you will be angry with your Clara; you will say that her cold nature is impervious to any ray of the mysterious, which often embraces man with invisible arms; that she only sees the variegated surface of the world, and is as delighted as a silly child at some glittering golden fruit, which contains within it a deadly poison. Ah ! my dear Nathaniel! Can you not then believe that even in open, cheerful, careless minds may dwell the suspicion of some dread power which endeavors to destroy us in our own selves ? Forgive me, if I, a silly girl, presume in any manner to present to you my thoughts on such an internal struggle. I shall not find the right words, of course, and you will laugh at me, not because my thoughts are foolish, but because I express them so clumsily. If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves. Lothaire adds that if we have willingly yielded ourselves up to the dark powers, they are known often to impress upon our minds any strange, unfamiliar shape which the external world has thrown in our way; so that we ourselves kindle the spirit, which we in our strange delusion believe to be speaking to us. It is the phantom of our own selves, the close relationship with which, and its deep operation on our mind, casts us into hell or transports us into heaven. You see, dear Nathaniel, how freely Lothaire and I are giving our opinion on the subject of the dark powers; which subject, to judge by my difficulties in writing down. its most important features, appears to be a complicated one. Lothaire's last words I do not quite comprehend. I can only suspect what he means, and yet I feel as if it were all very true. Get the gruesome advocate Coppelius, and the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, quite out of your head, I beg of you. Be convinced that these strange fears have no power over you, and that it is only a belief in their hostile influence that can make them hostile in reality. If the great disturbance in your mind did not speak from every line of your letter, if your situation did not give me the deepest pain, I could joke about the Sandman-Advocate and the barometer dealer Coppelius. Cheer up, I have determined to play the part of your guardian-spirit. If the ugly Coppelius takes it into his head to annoy you in your dreams, I'll scare him away with loud peals of laughter. I am not a bit afraid of him nor of his disgusting hands; he shall neither spoil my sweetmeats as an Advocate, nor my eyes as a Sandman. Ever yours, my dear Nathaniel. NATHANIEL TO LOTHAIRE I am very sorry that in consequence of the error occasioned by my distracted state of mind, Clara broke open the letter intended for you, and read it. She has written me a very profound philosophical epistle, in which she proves, at great length, that Coppelius and Coppola only exist in my own mind, and are phantoms of myself, which will be dissipated directly I recognize them as such. Indeed, it is quite incredible that the mind which so often peers out of those bright, smiling, childish eyes with all the charm of a dream, could make such intelligent professorial definitions. She cites you - you, it seems have been talking about me. I suppose you read her logical lectures, so that she may learn to separate and sift all matters acutely. No more of that, please. Besides, it is quite certain that the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, is not the advocate Coppelius. I attend the lectures of the professor of physics, who has lately arrived. His name is the same as that of the famous natural philosopher Spalanzani, and he is of Italian origin. He has known Coppola for years and, moreover, it is clear from his accent that he is really a Piedmontese. Coppelius was a German, but I think no honest one. Calmed I am not, and though you and Clara may consider me a gloomy visionary, I cannot get rid of the impression which the accursed face of Coppelius makes upon me. I am glad that Coppola has left the town - so Spalanzani says. This professor is a strange fellow - a little round man with high cheek-bones, a sharp nose, pouting lips and little, piercing eyes. Yet you will get a better notion of him than from this description, if you look at the portrait of Cagliostro, drawn by Chodowiecki in one of the Berlin annuals; Spalanzani looks like that exactly. I lately went up his stairs, and perceived that the curtain, which was generally drawn completely over a glass door, left a little opening on one side. I know not what curiosity impelled me to look through. A very tall and slender lady, extremely well-proportioned and most splendidly attired, sat in the room by a little table on which she had laid her arms, her hands being folded together. She sat opposite the door, so that I could see the whole of her angelic countenance. She did not appear to see me, and indeed there was something fixed about her eyes as if, I might almost say, she had no power of sight. It seemed to me that she was sleeping with her eyes open. I felt very uncomfortable, and therefore I slunk away into the lecture-room close at hand. Afterwards I learned that the form I had seen was that of Spalanzani's daughter Olympia, whom he keeps confined in a very strange and barbarous manner, so that no one can approach her. After all, there may be something the matter with her; she is half-witted perhaps, or something of the kind. But why should I write you all this? I could have conveyed it better and more circumstantially by word of mouth. For I shall see you in a fortnight. I must again behold my dear, sweet angelic Clara. My evil mood will then be dispersed, though I must confess that it has been struggling for mastery over me ever since her sensible but vexing letter. Therefore I do not write to her today. A thousand greetings, etc.   Nothing more strange and chimerical can be imagined than the fate of my poor friend, the young student Nathaniel, which I, gracious reader, have undertaken to tell you. Have you ever known something that has completely filled your heart, thoughts and senses, to the exclusion of every other object? There was a burning fermentation within you; your blood seethed like a molten glow through your veins, sending a higher color to your cheeks. Your glance was strange, as if you were seeking in empty space forms invisible to all other eyes, and your speech flowed away into dark sighs. Then your friends asked you: 'What is it, my dear sir?' 'What is the matter?' And you wanted to draw the picture in your mind in all its glowing tints, in all its light and shade, and labored hard to find words only to begin. You thought that you should crowd together in the very first sentence all those wonderful, exalted, horrible, comical, frightful events, so as to strike every hearer at once as with an electric shock. But every word, every thing that takes the form of speech, appeared to you colorless, cold and dead. You hunt and hunt, and stutter and stammer, and your friends' sober questions blow like icy wind upon your internal fire until it is almost out. Whereas if, like a bold painter, you had first drawn an outline of the internal picture with a few daring strokes, you might with small trouble have laid on the colors brighter and brighter, and the living throng of varied shapes would have borne your friends away with it. Then they would have seen themselves, like you, in the picture that your mind had bodied forth. Now I must confess to you, kind reader, that no one has really asked me for the history of the young Nathaniel, but you know well enough that I belong to the queer race of authors who, if they have anything in their minds such as I have just described, feel as if everyone who comes near them, and the whole world besides, is insistently demanding: 'What is it then - tell it, my dear friend?' Thus was I forcibly compelled to tell you of the momentous life of Nathaniel. The marvelous singularity of the story filled my entire soul, but for that very reason and because, my dear reader, I had to make you equally inclined to accept the uncanny, which is no small matter, I was puzzled how to begin Nathaniel's story in a manner as inspiring, original and striking as possible. 'Once upon a time,' the beautiful beginning of every tale, was too tame. 'In the little provincial town of S____ lived' - was somewhat better, as it at least prepared for the climax. Or should I dart at once, medias in res, with "'Go to the devil," cried the student Nathaniel with rage and horror in his wild looks, when the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola . . .?' - I had indeed already written this down, when I fancied that I could detect something ludicrous in the wild looks of the student Nathaniel, whereas the story is not comical at all. No form of language suggested itself to my mind which seemed to reflect ever in the slightest degree the coloring of the internal picture. I resolved that I would not begin it at all. So take, gentle reader, the three letters. which friend Lothaire was good enough to give me, as the sketch of the picture which I shall endeavor to color more and more brightly as I proceed with my narrative. Perhaps, like a good portrait-painter, I may succeed in catching the outline in this way, so that you will realize it is a likeness even without knowing the original, and feel as if you had often seen the person with your own corporeal eyes. Perhaps, dear reader, you will then believe that nothing is stranger and madder than actual life; which the poet can only catch in the form of a dull reflection in a dimly polished mirror. To give you all the information that you will require for a start, we must supplement these letters with the news that shortly after the death of Nathaniel's father, Clara and Lothaire, the children of a distant relative, who had likewise died and left them orphans, were taken by Nathaniel's mother into her own home. Clara and Nathaniel formed a strong attachment for each other; and no one in the world having any objection to make, they were betrothed when Nathaniel left the place to pursue his studies in G___ . And there he is, according to his last letter, attending the lectures of the celebrated professor of physics, Spalanzani. Now, I could proceed in my story with confidence, but at this moment Clara's picture stands so plainly before me that I cannot turn away; as indeed was always the case when she gazed at me with one of her lovely smiles. Clara could not by any means be reckoned beautiful, that was the opinion of all who are by their calling competent judges of beauty. Architects, nevertheless, praised the exact symmetry of her frame, and painters considered her neck, shoulders and bosom almost too chastely formed; but then they all fell in love with her wondrous hair and coloring, comparing her to the Magdalen in Battoni's picture at Dresden. One of them, a most fantastical and singular fellow, compared Clara's eyes to a lake by Ruysdael, in which the pure azure of a cloudless sky, the wood and flowery field, the whole cheerful life of the rich landscape are reflected. Poets and composers went still further. 'What is a lake what is a mirror!' said they. 'Can we look upon the girl without wondrous, heavenly music flowing towards us from her glances, to penetrate our inmost soul so that all there is awakened and stirred? If we don't sing well then, there is not much in us, as we shall learn from the delicate smile which plays on Clara's lips, when we presume to pipe up before her with something intended to pass for a song, although it is only a confused jumble of notes.' So it was. Clara had the vivid fancy of a cheerful, unembarrassed child; a deep, tender, feminine disposition; an acute, clever understanding. Misty dreamers had not a chance with her; since, though she did not talk - talking would have been altogether repugnant to her silent nature - her bright glance and her firm ironical smile would say to them: 'Good friends, how can you imagine that I shall take your fleeting shadowy images for real shapes imbued with life and motion ?' On this account Clara was censured by many as cold, unfeeling and prosaic; while others, who understood life to its clear depths, greatly loved the feeling, acute, childlike girl; but none so much as Nathaniel, whose perception in art and science was clear and strong. Clara was attached to her lover with all her heart, and when he parted from her the first cloud passed over her life. With what delight, therefore, did she rush into his arms when, as he had promised in his last letter to Lothaire, he actually returned to his native town and entered his mother's room! Nathaniel's expectations were completely fulfilled; for directly he saw Clara he thought neither of the Advocate Coppelius nor of her 'sensible' letter. All gloomy forebodings had gone. However, Nathaniel was quite right, when he wrote to his friend Lothaire that the form of the repulsive barometer-dealer, Coppola, had had a most evil effect on his life. All felt, even in the first days, that Nathaniel had undergone a complete change in his whole being. He sank into a gloomy reverie, and behaved in a strange manner that had never been known in him before. Everything, his whole life, had become to him a dream and a foreboding, and he was always saying that man, although he might think himself free, only served for the cruel sport of dark powers These he said it was vain to resist; man must patiently resign himself to his fate. He even went so far as to say that it is foolish to think that we do anything in art and science according to our own independent will; for the inspiration which alone enables us to produce anything does not proceed from within ourselves, but is the effect of a higher principle without. To the clear-headed Clara this mysticism was in the highest degree repugnant, but contradiction appeared to be useless. Only when Nathaniel proved that Coppelius was the evil principle, which had seized him at the moment when he was listening behind the curtain, and that this repugnant principle would in some horrible manner disturb the happiness of their life, Clara grew very serious, and said: 'Yes, Nathaniel, you are right. Coppelius is an evil, hostile principle; he can produce terrible effects, like a diabolical power that has come visibly into life; but only if you will not banish him from your mind and thoughts. So long as you believe in him, he really exists and exerts his influence; his power lies only in your belief.' Quite indignant that Clara did not admit the demon's existence outside his own mind, Nathaniel would then come out with all the mystical doctrine of devils and powers of evil. But Clara would break off peevishly by introducing some indifferent matter, to the no small annoyance of Nathaniel. He thought that such deep secrets were closed to cold, unreceptive minds, without being clearly aware that he was counting Clara among these subordinate natures; and therefore he constantly endeavored to initiate her into the mysteries. In the morning, when Clara was getting breakfast ready, he stood by her, reading out of all sorts of mystical books till she cried: 'But dear Nathaniel, suppose I blame you as the evil principle that has a hostile effect upon my coffee? For if, to please you, I drop everything and look in your eyes while you read, my coffee will overflow into the fire, and none of you will get any breakfast.' Nathaniel closed the book at once and hurried indignantly to his chamber. Once he had a remarkable forte for graceful, lively tales, which he wrote down, and to which Clara listened with the greatest delight; now his creations were gloomy, incomprehensible and formless, so that although, out of compassion, Clara did not say so, he plainly felt how little she was interested. Nothing was more unbearable to Clara than tediousness; her looks and words expressed mental drowsiness which she could not overcome. Nathaniel's productions were, indeed, very tedious. His indignation at Clara's cold, prosaic disposition constantly increased; and Clara could not overcome her dislike of Nathaniel's dark, gloomy, boring mysticism, so that they became mentally more and more estranged without either of them perceiving it. The shape of the ugly Coppelius, as Nathaniel himself was forced to confess, was growing dimmer in his fancy, and it often cost him some pains to draw him with sufficient color in his stories, where he figured as the dread bogy of ill omen. It occurred to him, however, in the end to make his gloomy foreboding, that Coppelius would destroy his happiness, the subject of a poem. He represented himself and Clara as united by true love, but occasionally threatened by a black hand, which appeared to dart into their lives, to snatch away some new joy just as it was born. Finally, as they were standing at the altar, the hideous Coppelius appeared and touched Clara's lovely eyes. They flashed into Nathaniel's heart, like bleeding sparks, scorching and burning, as Coppelius caught him, and flung him into a flaming, fiery circle, which flew round with the swiftness of a storm, carrying him along with it, amid its roaring. The roar is like that of the hurricane, when it fiercely lashes the foaming waves, which rise up, like black giants with white heads, for the furious combat. But through the wild tumult he hears Clara's voice: 'Can't you see me then? Coppelius has deceived you. Those, indeed, were not my eyes which so burned in your breast - they were glowing drops of your own heart's blood. I have my eyes still - only look at them!' Nathaniel reflects: 'That is Clara, and I am hers for ever!' Then it seems to him as though this thought has forcibly entered the fiery circle, which stands still, while the noise dully ceases in the dark abyss. Nathaniel looks into Clara's eyes, but it is death that looks kindly upon him from her eyes While Nathaniel composed this poem, he was very calm and collected; he polished and improved every line, and having subjected himself to the fetters of metre, he did not rest till all was correct and melodious. When at last he had finished and read the poem aloud to himself, a wild horror seized him. 'Whose horrible voice is that?' he cried out. Soon, however, the whole appeared to him a very successful work, and he felt that it must rouse Clara's cold temperament, although he did not clearly consider why Clara was to be excited, nor what purpose it would serve to torment her with frightful pictures threatening a horrible fate, destructive to their love. Both of them - that is to say, Nathaniel and Clara - were sitting in his mother's little garden, Clara very cheerful, because Nathaniel had not teased her with his dreams and his forebodings during the three days in which he had been writing his poem. He was even talking cheerfully, as in the old days, about pleasant matters, which caused Clara to remark: 'Now for the first time I have you again! Don't you see that we have driven the ugly Coppelius away?' Not till then did it strike Nathaniel that he had in his pocket the poem, which he had intended to read. He at once drew the sheets out and began, while Clara, expecting something tedious as usual, resigned herself and began quietly to knit. But as the dark cloud rose ever blacker and blacker, she let the stocking fall and looked him full in the face. He was carried irresistibly along by his poem, an internal fire deeply reddened his cheeks, tears flowed from his eyes. At last, when he had concluded, he groaned in a state of utter exhaustion and, catching Clara's hand, sighed forth, as if melted into the most inconsolable grief: 'Oh Clara! - Clara!' Clara pressed him gently to her bosom, and said softly, but very solemnly and sincerely: 'Nathaniel, dearest Nathaniel, do throw that mad, senseless, insane stuff into the fire!' Upon this Nathaniel sprang up enraged and, thrusting Clara from him, cried: 'Oh, inanimate, accursed automaton!' With which he ran off; Clara, deeply offended, shed bitter tears, and sobbed aloud: 'Ah, he has never loved me, for he does not understand me.' Lothaire entered the arbor; Clara was obliged to tell him all that had occurred. He loved his sister with all his soul, and every word of her complaint fell like a spark of fire into his heart, so that the indignation which he had long harbored against the visionary Nathaniel now broke out into the wildest rage. He ran to Nathaniel and reproached him for his senseless conduce towards his beloved sister in hard words, to which the infuriated Nathaniel retorted in the same style. The appellation of 'fantastical, mad fool,' was answered by that of 'miserable commonplace fellow.' A duel was inevitable. They agreed on the following morning, according to the local student custom, to fight with sharp rapiers on the far side of the garden. Silently and gloomily they slunk about. Clara had overheard the violent dispute and, seeing the fencing-master bring the rapiers at dawn, guessed what was to occur. Having reached the place of combat, Lothaire and Nathaniel had in gloomy silence flung off their coats, and with the lust of battle in their flaming eyes were about to fall upon one another, when Clara rushed through the garden door, crying aloud between her sobs: 'You wild cruel men! Strike me down before you attack each other. For how can I live on if my lover murders my brother, or my brother murders my lover.' Lothaire lowered his weapon, and looked in silence on the ground; but in Nathaniel's heart, amid the most poignant sorrow, there revived all his love for the beautiful Clara, which he had felt in the prime of his happy youth. The weapon fell from his hand, he threw himself at Clara's feet. 'Can you ever forgive me, my only - my beloved Clara? Can you forgive me, my dear brother, Lothaire?' Lothaire was touched by the deep contrition of his friend; all three embraced in reconciliation amid a thousand tears, and vowed eternal love and fidelity. Nathaniel felt as though a heavy and oppressive burden had been rolled away, as though by resisting the dark power that held him fast he had saved his whole being, which had been threatened with annihilation. Three happy days he passed with his dear friends, and then went to G___ , where he intended to stay a year, and then to return to his native town for ever. All that referred to Coppelius was kept a secret from his mother. For it was well known that she could not think of him without terror since she, as well as Nathaniel, held him guilty of causing her husband's death.   How surprised was Nathaniel when, proceeding to his lodging, he saw that the whole house was burned down, and that only the bare walls stood up amid the ashes. However, although fire had broken out in the laboratory of the apothecary who lived on the ground-floor, and had therefore consumed the house from top to bottom, some bold active friends had succeeded in entering Nathaniel's room in the upper story in time to save his books, manuscripts and instruments. They carried all safe and sound into another house, where they took a room, to which Nathaniel moved at once. He did not think it at all remarkable that he now lodged opposite to Professor Spalanzani; neither did it appear singular when he perceived that his window looked straight into the room where Olympia often sat alone, so that he could plainly recognize her figure, although the features of her face were indistinct and confused. At last it struck him that Olympia often remained for hours in that attitude in which he had once seen her through the glass door, sitting at a little table without any occupation, and that she was plainly enough looking over at him with an unvarying gaze. He was forced to confess that he had never seen a more lovely form but, with Clara in his heart, the stiff Olympia was perfectly indifferent to him. Occasionally, to be sure, he gave a transient look over his textbook at the beautiful statue, but that was all. He was just writing to Clara, when he heard a light tap at the door; it stopped as he answered, and the repulsive face of Coppola peeped in. Nathaniel's heart trembled within him, but remembering what Spalanzani had told him about his compatriot Coppola, and also the firm promise he had made to Clara with respect to the Sandman Coppelius, he felt ashamed of his childish fear and, collecting himself with all his might, said as softly and civilly as possible: 'I do not want a barometer, my good friend; pray go.' Upon this, Coppola advanced a good way into the room, his wide mouth distorted into a hideous laugh, and his little eyes darting fire from beneath their long grey lashes: 'Eh, eh - no barometer - no barometer?' he said in a hoarse voice, 'I have pretty eyes too - pretty eyes!' 'Madman!' cried Nathaniel in horror. 'How can you have eyes? Eyes?' But Coppola had already put his barometer aside and plunged his hand into his wide coat-pocket, whence he drew lorgnettes and spectacles, which he placed upon the table. 'There - there - spectacles on the nose, those are my eyes - pretty eyes!' he gabbled, drawing out more and more spectacles, until the whole table began to glisten and sparkle in the most extraordinary manner. A thousand eyes stared and quivered, their gaze fixed upon Nathaniel; yet he could not look away from the table, where Coppola kept laying down still more and more spectacles, and all those flaming eyes leapt in wilder and wilder confusion, shooting their blood red light into Nathaniel's heart. At last, overwhelmed with horror, he shrieked out: 'Stop, stop, you terrify me!' and seized Coppola by the arm, as he searched his pockets to bring out still more spectacles, although the whole table was already covered. Coppola gently extricated himself with a hoarse repulsive laugh; and with the words: 'Ah, nothing for you - but here are pretty glasses!' collected all the spectacles, packed them away, and from the breast-pocket of his coat drew forth a number of telescopes large and small. As soon as the spectacles were removed Nathaniel felt quite easy and, thinking of Clara, perceived that the hideous phantom was but the creature of his own mind, that this Coppola was an honest optician and could not possibly be the accursed double of Coppelius. Moreover, in all the glasses which Coppola now placed on the table, there was nothing remarkable, or at least nothing so uncanny as in the spectacles; and to set matters right Nathaniel resolved to make a purchase. He took up a little, very neatly constructed pocket telescope, and looked through the window to try it. Never in his life had he met a glass which brought objects so clearly and sharply before his eyes. Involuntarily he looked into Spalanzani's room; Olympia was sitting as usual before the little table, with her arms laid upon it, and her hands folded. For the first time he could see the wondrous beauty in the shape of her face; only her eyes seemed to him singularly still and dead. Nevertheless, as he looked more keenly through the glass, it seemed to him as if moist moonbeams were rising in Olympia's eyes. It was as if the power of seeing were being kindled for the first time; her glances flashed with constantly increasing life. As if spellbound, Nathaniel reclined against the window, meditating on the charming Olympia. A humming and scraping aroused him as if from a dream. Coppola was standing behind him: 'Tre zecchini - three ducats!' He had quite forgotten the optician, and quickly paid him what he asked. 'Is it not so ? A pretty glass - a pretty glass ?' asked Coppola, in his hoarse, repulsive voice, and with his malicious smile. 'Yes - yes,' replied Nathaniel peevishly; 'Good-bye, friend.' Coppola left the room, but not without casting many strange glances at Nathaniel. He heard him laugh loudly on the stairs. 'Ah,' thought Nathaniel, 'he is laughing at me because, no doubt, I have paid him too much for this little glass.' While he softly uttered these words, it seemed as if a deep and lugubrious sigh were sounding fearfully through the room; and his breath was stopped by inward anguish. He perceived, however, that it was himself that had sighed. 'Clara is right,' he said to himself, 'in taking me for a senseless dreamer, but it is pure madness - nay, more than madness, that the stupid thought of having paid Coppola too much for the glass still pains me so strangely. I cannot see the cause.' He now sat down to finish his letter to Clara; but a glance through the window assured him that Olympia was still sitting there, and he instantly sprang up, as if impelled by an irresistible power, seized Coppola's glass, and could not tear himself away from the seductive sight of Olympia till his friend and brother Sigismund called him to go to Professor Spalanzani's lecture. The curtain was drawn close before the fatal room, and he could see Olympia no longer, nor could he upon the next day or the next, although he scarcely ever left his window and constantly looked through Coppola's glass. On the third day the windows were completely covered. In utter despair, filled with a longing and a burning desire, he ran out of the town-gate. Olympia's form floated before him in the air, stepped forth from the bushes, and peeped at him with large beaming eyes from the clear brook. Clara's image had completely vanished from his mind; he thought of nothing but Olympia, and complained aloud in a murmuring voice: 'Ah, noble, sublime star of my love, have you only risen upon me to vanish immediately, and leave me in dark hopeless night?' As he returned to his lodging, however, he perceived a great bustle in Spalanzani's house. The doors were wide open, all sorts of utensils were being carried in, the windows of the first floor were being taken out, maid-servants were going about sweeping and dusting with great hairbrooms, and carpenters and upholsterers were knocking and hammering within. Nathaniel remained standing in the street in a state of perfect wonder, when Sigismund came up to him laughing, and said: 'Now, what do you say to our old Spalanzani?' Nathaniel assured him that he could say nothing because he knew nothing about the professor, but on the contrary perceived with astonishment the mad proceedings in a house otherwise so quiet and gloomy. He then learnt from Sigismund that Spalanzani intended to give a grand party on the following day - a concert and ball - and that half the university was invited. It was generally reported that Spalanzani, who had so long kept his daughter most scrupulously from every human eye, would now let her appear for the first time. Nathaniel found a card of invitation, and with heart beating high went at the appointed hour to the professor's, where the coaches were already arriving and the lights shining in the decorated rooms. The company was numerous and brilliant. Olympia appeared dressed with great richness and taste. Her beautifully shaped face and her figure roused general admiration. The somewhat strange arch of her back and the wasp-like thinness of her waist seemed to be produced by too tight lacing. In her step and deportment there was something measured and stiff, which struck many as unpleasant, but it was ascribed to the constraint produced by the company. The concert began. Olympia played the harpsichord with great dexterity, and sang a virtuoso piece, with a voice like the sound of a glass bell, clear and almost piercing. Nathaniel was quite enraptured; he stood in the back row, and could not perfectly recognize Olympia's features in the dazzling light. Therefore, quite unnoticed, he took out Coppola's glass and looked towards the fair creature. Ah! then he saw with what a longing glance she gazed towards him, and how every note of her song plainly sprang from that loving glance, whose fire penetrated his inmost soul. Her accomplished roulades seemed to Nathaniel the exultation of a mind transfigured by love, and when at last, after the cadence, the long trill sounded shrilly through the room, he felt as if clutched by burning arms. He could restrain himself no longer, but with mingled pain and rapture shouted out, 'Olympia!' Everyone looked at him, and many laughed. The organist of the cathedral made a gloomier face than usual, and simply said: 'Well, well.' The concert had finished, the ball began. 'To dance with her - with her!' That was the aim of all Nathaniel's desire, of all his efforts; but how to gain courage to ask her, the queen of the ball? Nevertheless - he himself did not know how it happened - no sooner had the dancing begun than he was standing close to Olympia, who had not yet been asked to dance. Scarcely able to stammer out a few words, he had seized her hand. Olympia's hand was as cold as ice; he felt a horrible deathly chill thrilling through him. He looked into her eyes, which beamed back full of love and desire, and at the same time it seemed as though her pulse began to beat and her life's blood to flow into her cold hand. And in the soul of Nathaniel the joy of love rose still higher; he clasped the beautiful Olympia, and with her flew through the dance. He thought that his dancing was usually correct as to time, but the peculiarly steady rhythm with which Olympia moved, and which often put him completely out, soon showed him that his time was most defective. However, he would dance with no other lady, and would have murdered anyone who approached Olympia for the purpose of asking her. But this only happened twice, and to his astonishment Olympia remained seated until the next dance, when he lost no time in making her rise again. Had he been able to see any other object besides the fair Olympia, all sorts of unfortunate quarrels would have been inevitable. For the quiet, scarcely suppressed laughter which arose among the young people in every corner was manifestly directed towards Olympia, whom they followed with very curious glances - one could not tell why. Heated by the dance and by the wine, of which he had freely partaken, Nathaniel had laid aside all his ordinary reserve. He sat by Olympia with her hand in his and, in a high state of inspiration, told her his passion, in words which neither he nor Olympia understood. Yet perhaps she did; for she looked steadfastly into his face and sighed several times, 'Ah, ah!' Upon this, Nathaniel said, 'Oh splendid, heavenly lady! Ray from the promised land of love - deep soul in whom all my being is reflected !' with much more stuff of the like kind. But Olympia merely went on sighing, 'Ah - ah!' Professor Spalanzani occasionally passed the happy pair, and smiled on them with a look of singular satisfaction. To Nathaniel, although he felt in quite another world, it seemed suddenly as though Professor Spalanzani's face was growing considerably darker, and when he looked around he perceived, to his no small horror, that the last two candles in the empty room had burned down to their sockets, and were just going out. The music and dancing had ceased long ago. 'Parting - parting!' he cried in wild despair; he kissed Olympia's hand, he bent towards her mouth, when his glowing lips were met by lips cold as ice! Just as when he had touched her cold hand, he felt himself overcome by horror; the legend of the dead bride darted suddenly through his mind, but Olympia pressed him fast, and her lips seemed to spring to life at his kiss. Professor Spalanzani strode through the empty hall, his steps caused a hollow echo, and his figure, round which a flickering shadow played, had a fearful, spectral appearance. 'Do you love me, do you love me, Olympia? Only one word! Do you love me?' whispered Nathaniel; but as she rose Olympia only sighed, 'Ah - ah!' 'Yes, my gracious, my beautiful star of love,' said Nathaniel, 'you have risen upon me, and you will shine, for ever lighting my inmost soul.' 'Ah - ah!' replied Olympia, as she departed. Nathaniel followed her; they both stood before the professor. 'You have had a very animated conversation with my daughter,' said he, smiling; 'So, dear Herr Nathaniel, if you have any pleasure in talking with a silly girl, your visits shall be welcome.' Nathaniel departed with a whole heaven beaming in his heart. The next day Spalanzani's party was the general subject of conversation. Notwithstanding that the professor had made every effort to appear splendid, the wags had all sorts of incongruities and oddities to talk about. They were particularly hard upon the dumb, stiff Olympia whom, in spite of her beautiful exterior, they considered to be completely stupid, and they were delighted to find in her stupidity the reason why Spalanzani had kept her so long concealed. Nathaniel did not hear this without secret anger. Nevertheless he held his peace. 'For,' thought he, 'is it worth while convincing these fellows that it is their own stupidity that prevents their recognizing Olympia's deep, noble mind?' One day Sigismund said to him: 'Be kind enough, brother, to tell me how a sensible fellow like you could possibly lose your head over that wax face, over that wooden doll up there?' Nathaniel was about to fly out in a passion, but he quickly recollected himself and retorted: 'Tell me, Sigismund, how it is that Olympia's heavenly charms could escape your active and intelligent eyes, which generally perceive things so clearly? But, for that very reason, Heaven be thanked, I have not you for my rival; otherwise, one of us must have fallen a bleeding corpse!' Sigismund plainly perceived his friend's condition. So he skillfully gave the conversation a turn and, after observing that in love-affairs there was no disputing about the object, added: 'Nevertheless, it is strange that many of us think much the same about Olympia. To us - pray do not take it ill, brother she appears singularly stiff and soulless. Her shape is well proportioned - so is her face - that is true! She might pass for beautiful if her glance were not so utterly without a ray of life - without the power of vision. Her pace is strangely regular, every movement seems to depend on some wound-up clockwork. Her playing and her singing keep the same unpleasantly correct and spiritless time as a musical box, and the same may be said of her dancing. We find your Olympia quite uncanny, and prefer to have nothing to do with her. She seems to act like a living being, and yet has some strange peculiarity of her own.' Nathaniel did not completely yield to the bitter feeling which these words of Sigismund's roused in him, but mastered his indignation, and merely said with great earnestness, 'Olympia may appear uncanny to you, cold, prosaic man. Only the poetical mind is sensitive to its like in others. To me alone was the love in her glances revealed, and it has pierced my mind and all my thought; only in the love of Olympia do I discover my real self. It may not suit you that she does not indulge in idle chit-chat like other shallow minds. She utters few words, it is true, but these few words appear as genuine hieroglyphics of the inner world, full of love and deep knowledge of the spiritual life, and contemplation of the eternal beyond. But you have no sense for all this, and my words are wasted on you.' 'God preserve you, brother,' said Sigismund very mildly almost sorrowfully. 'But you seem to me to be in an evil way. You may depend upon me, if all - no, no, I will not say anything further.' All of a sudden it struck Nathaniel that the cold, prosaic Sigismund meant very well towards him; he therefore shook his proffered hand very heartily. Nathaniel had totally forgotten the very existence of Clara, whom he had once loved; his mother, Lothaire - all had vanished from his memory; he lived only for Olympia, with whom he sat for hours every day, uttering strange fantastical stuff about his love, about the sympathy that glowed to life, about the affinity of souls, to all of which Olympia listened with great devotion. From the very bottom of his desk he drew out all that he had ever written. Poems, fantasies, visions, romances, tales - this stock was daily increased by all sorts of extravagant sonnets, stanzas and canzoni, and he read them all tirelessly to Olympia for hours on end. Never had he known such an admirable listener. She neither embroidered nor knitted, she never looked out of the window, she fed no favorite bird, she played neither with lapdog nor pet cat, she did not twist a slip of paper or anything else in her hand, she was not obliged to suppress a yawn by a gentle forced cough. In short, she sat for hours, looking straight into her lover's eyes, without stirring, and her glance became more and more lively and animated Only when Nathaniel rose at last, and kissed her hand and her lips did she say, 'Ah, ah!' to which she added: 'Good night, dearest.' 'Oh deep, noble mind!' cried Nathaniel in his own room, 'you, you alone, dear one, fully under

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and every semester, I feel like it’s New Year’s Day. “This semester,” I say, “everything’s going to be different.” I revise my classes, everything from switching two minor assignments to rehauling the entire curriculum. I try to create assignments that will catch my students’ attention, prepare them for their other classes, and, because I teach dozens of students, be interesting to grade.   But how do I know if the assignments I find interesting are effective? Or even that the students will think they are interesting? In Engaging Writers and Dynamic Disciplines, Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki explore how students learn to write in their majors, and how instructors write in their disciplines. These two things are not synonyms. Disciplines are dynamic, even before you account for all of the interdisciplinary work that goes on between them. Thaiss and Zawacki interviewed scholars from across a wide variety of  disciplines and found that “many of our informants describe changes in their disciplines that allow scholars to work in alternative ways--ways that might formerly have been closed to them” some of these scholars are hesitant about these new ways of writing, but many embrace them (44).   I remember the first time I wrote an article that was truly alternative. It was an article for Harlot about the biopower of zombies and I referenced everything from Foucault to World War Z to Joshua Gunn. I wrote about my personal experience dressing up like a zombie for a “capture the flag” 5k and about buying a shirt off Etsy. And the whole thing was littered with hyperlinks and quirky footnotes and a half dozen pictures, which cost the journal nothing because the whole thing was exclusively online. This was a far cry from the time I literally sent three copies of an article in a manila folder, through the mail, to England for a more traditional journal. I’m not the only one who has had such exhilarating experiences encountering disciplinary writing in new ways.   Because we remember the heady rush of talking about scholarly topics in slightly less than scholarly ways and the sheer joy of doing something new and “fun,” we might be tempted to assign these new forms of writing to our students, to show them the great diversity of our discipline. If I was able to write the first draft of “The Biopower of Zombies” in one sitting, chuckling to myself in an airport terminal in Ohio, certainly my students would also delight in such open forms of scholarship, right?   According to Thaiss and Zawacki’s research, “the undergraduate students we interviewed and surveyed from across majors showed much less desire to experiment with format and method in their disciplinary classes than to conform to their professors’ expectations” (92). It’s maybe not surprising that scholars who are already pretty familiar with their field would have an easier time adapting to the variations than students who are just learning the ropes for the first time. But not all “alternatives” are equal.   Experimenting with new ideas (eg “Is our obsession with zombies a result of increased non-state organizations?”) is different than having to learn a new format (e.g. casual academic tone with generous hyperlinks). Over all, Thais and Zawacki suggest, that students crave structure and predictability, knowing what the professor is looking for, even more than the wide-open freedom of many disciplines.  Think about it: the seasoned professor knows not just what’s appropriate in biology or economics writing, but they also know what kinds of articles can be written by post-docs and what can be written by old-timers, they know what kind of writing different journals prefer. So professors, thinking about “good writing” can actually be combining academic, disciplinary, subdisciplinary and personal writing preferences in ways that baffle students. Sometimes they over generalize and assume that one class taught them “science writing” and sometimes they over patictularize, thinking that one teacher was just “picky.” Students do the best they can with the limited expereince they have.   This is especially evident at the beginning of the semester. One of Thaiss and Zawacki’s student informants pointed out that the first couple of assignments provide a lot of experience in what the class is supposed to be (125), and getting graded feedback provides a sense of not just what that professor is looking for, but what “counts” in the field. While “the mature writer in a field has encountered a sufficient range of course environments to develop an over all sense of disciplinary goals and methods” while novices “have not yet encountered the array of exigencies and therefor genres that typify it” (109). Following Perry’s developmental stages, Thaiss and Zawacki suggest three stages in disciplinary writing: When a writer with experience in very few course” comes up with generalized ‘rules’ When the writer encounters many different instructors and perceives inconsistency, which is “sometimes interpreted as teacher idiosyncrasy” (110) A writer reaches an “articulated, nuanced idea of the discipline” (110). Over all, it’s not surprising that Thaiss and Zawacki conclude that  students need both frequent writing in a variety of teachers and courses (in order to encounter that variety of a discipline) and the change to reflect on the choices they’ve made and why to begin to process how those differences occur (121). Other prescriptions are include frequent and detailed feedback on writing, and explicitly teaching what are the “generic academic” principles of writing and what are discipline specific. None of these are radical sounding to those of us in composition, but they do remind me of all the things I need to change next semester. Next semester. Next semester everything’s going to be different.   If you ever had a book inspire a change in your teaching, feel free to drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com I’d love to hear it. Until next week!

Andocides (An-DOS-id-dees) Do you remember in the 90s when there was this huge “thug life” thing going on? Shady types getting money doing shady things. Andocides, the 5th century BCE rhetor, would have fit fell into that world. Even though he may have been acquainted with Socrates, he was more interested in roving with his friends of rabble-rousers. He was born to wealth and lived as what one editor called “a hot-headed young man-about-town with more money than sense” (321).   His carefree life came to a hard stop after a significant act of vandalism. Andocides was accused of multition of the Herms right before an Athenian expedition against Sicily--exactly not the time that you want to get the gods mad at you. Everyone was shocked. The act was seditious and blasphemous.  Athens could forgive some offences, but not parodying the most intimate religious beliefs on the eve of war. The act was seen as an affront against democracy from exactly the kind of rich snobs who would want to consolidate power. Numbers of the stone images of Hermes were mutated across Athens in one night. Just as quickly, informers sprang up to place the blame. Forty two members of the riotous party were named. Andocides was one of the accused.   But when they threw Andocides into prison, he did what all those 90s gangsters warned about--he turned snitch. He revealed the names of everyone who was involved, and, although he was an accomplice, he was still exiled from Athens and had his citizenship stripped from him. It turned out worse for the four men that he snitched on--they were all put to death.   But if you’re a young man of wealth, a little thing like state-defying vandalism and sending four people to their deaths doesn’t get you down. He traveled the city states of Greece, making friends with powerful people. Powerful and shady, but powerful. Andocides came back to Athens during the oligarchy and it didn’t go well--he narrowly missed being sentenced to death and was imprisoned. Later, he was set free, or maybe he escaped. The historical record is hazy on that detail. So you can see the kind of life that he lived. And it reflects in his greatest speeches. On His Return was written as an attempt to get back into the city’s good graces. The reasons for his exile was fresh in their minds, and he openly admits his guilt. He claims to be a changed man: “my behavior today,” he says “is much more in keeping with my character than my behavior then” (26). He had been foolish and he had been unlucky--dreadfully unlucky. “No one came near suffering the sorrows which I suffered” (9). However, he points out, he is rich. That wealth can bring in a lot of corn to prevent famine. It also buys a lot of naval support. And he is willing to use his wealth to help Athens. “I have been reckless of both life and goods when called up” in an effort ”to render this city such a service as would sipose you to let me at last resume my rights as your fellow” (10).   Unfortunately, Andocides’ bad luck continued. Before he even began his speech, people were muttering against him. It might not help that he smugly referred to his accusors as “either the most stupid of mankind or the worst of public enemies” (1) and preemptively said that he would forgive the people all the wrongs he suffered (27). He still comes across as a rich snot weasling his way back.   Andocides did finally get back to Athens under a general amnesty after yet another political overthrow. For 3 years, everything was coming up Andocides. He held important roles in  political cultural life. His influence was growing and everyone was forgetting his youthful indescretions.   And then enemies old and new began to circle. Callias II, along with some others, created a legal case against him, arguing that the amnesty shouldn’t have applied to Andocides and that he should be kept out of the assembly and, oh yeah, how about put to death for rebellion? While he again had to confront the ghosts of his past,Andocides had some advantages this time.   For one thing, time had passed. People had moved on and forgotten much of the outrage they felt in the several political upheavals they had been suffering since then. Also, Andocides had become a productive member of society, totally supporting the city in many facets. It seems that Andocides had also learned to temper his rhetoric. “On the Mysteries” was a plea for his life, but it’s also a thrilling piece of legal rhetoric. He refutes claims that he was involved in other acts of blasphemy and sedition and recalls his very minor role in the destruction of the herms.  He also changes tactic from deigning to absolve Athens of the wrongs they had done him to emphasizing Athen’s positive qualities. “The whole of Greece,” he says “thinks that you have shown the greatest generosity and wisdom in devoting yourselves, not to revenge, but to the preservation of your city and the reuniting of its citizens...do not change your ways” (140). He calls on his family heritage “Our house is the oldest in Athens,” he says, “and has always been the first to open its doors to those in need” (147). He even makes the people of Athens his family: “It is you who must act as my father and my brothers and my children. It is with you that I seek refuge. It is to you that I turn with my entreaties and my prayers. You must plead with yourselves for my life, and save it” (149). Wow--you see what he did there? He recruited the jury to be his advocates. It’s powerful stuff and it went a lot better than “On the Return”--maybe time and circumstances have changed, but I think Andocides also became a more savvy speaker. “On the Mysteries” is a whole lot less cocky and more compelling than on the return. The verdict was in his favor and after that no one dragged up Andocides’ youthful thug life.   If you have a favorite ancient rhetorician gangster, why not tell us about it at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com ? I love hearing from listeners, even if they’re snitching on ancient Greek thinkers.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Uh, I guess including recent history, because today we’re going to talk about the February 2017 issue of College Composition and Communication as our “journal of the month” summary. This issue, as editor Jonathan Alexander points out, “takes up the notion of the ‘personal’ in a variety of ways” (436), departing from what we might think of as “composition as usual.” The articles in it include thinking about students who are full-time workers, students who have disablities, and indigenous methodology.   College Composition and Communication, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is one of the grand old dames of composition journals. It came about way back in the 50s as a summary of the conference on college composition and communication and many of the early issues were just summaries of what happened in the conference, so that you could follow along at home. The conference itself was an outgrowth of the rise of college writing classes. Many of these early composition classes were taught by people trained in literature, and they were eager to have their own place to share ideas about teaching and come up with theories that would apply as well in Tampa as in Toledo. CCC, or “the cs” as it is sometimes called, is still a great resource for composition instructors and researchers looking for theory as well as practice for their own classrooms.   In that spirit, let me take you through a whirlwind summary of all of the articles in this issue. Maybe you don’t subscribe to it. Maybe you just haven’t had time to sit down and read it. Maybe you haven’t thought that reading a journal could be fun. Okay, let’s dig in.   The first article called “Don’t Call it Expressivism” is Eli Goldblatt’s cautionary response to the emphasis in composition studies on job-readiness and college sucess. If, as Goldblatt worries, “the discussion about writing instruction [is] too narrowly around school success and professional preparation” (441), we lose sight of other important goals of writing. Writing, he suggests, can have real personal and political power beyond the instrumental ways that learning to write well makes someone a better student or worker. He gives examples like Tiffany Rousculp’s community writing center in Salt Lake City and Sondra Perl’s work in Austria with student whose parents had been complicit with Nazi atrocities. Over all, he “hope[s] to link [students’] acts of writing to purposes more compelling to them than passing the next class or getting a job” (462).   Rebecca Brittenham wants to not just talk about student’s next job, but their current ones. She points out that often universities see student’s “dead-end jobs” as competition to focusing on school. They downplay what students learn through working and expect them to approach school like some idealized fully funded 18-year-old. “The multidimensional realities of students’ actual work experiences are often rendered invisible or obsured through a narrative of interference,” she writes (527). She created a research instrument to discover what kind of work students do and how it actually affects their education in a wider sense. Some students indeed report being time strapped, but they know that they must work several jobs to make rent. Other student report pride in their time management skills through their work experience. Brittenham makes some great suggestions for universities, like encouraging advisors to discuss skills on the job and how they align with course work or even creating a database of student-friendly employers in the area. Such accommodations would benefit all students, whether they work 3 hours a week or 30.   Accommodations are also the theme of Anne-Marie Womack’s article “Teaching is Accommodation,” where she focuses on how universal design, the use of design principles to include students with physical and learning disabilities. These designs often help everyone. The “classic example is the curb cut,” which benefits people in wheelchairs and also people with carts or, like rollerblades. Applying this principle to our clases, and especially documents like syllabi and course descriptions, Womack gives practical suggestions on colors, fonts and design that can help all students get the information they need. I was fascinated, for example, that there’s a font called Dyslexie that’s especially reader-friendly for folks with dyslexia, and that creating a submission window of several days rather than a hard deadline can help a variety of students succeed.   Chris Mays discusses complexity theory in relation to writing. After all, we rhetoricians understand that writing always takes place in a context and both impacts and is impacted by the systems in which it participates. He gives students two visual examples to illustrate the fractal complexity--the top of a pine tree looks very much like the top half of a tree looks very much like a whole pine tree. Similarly, the outline of a formal school paper has several main points, nestled under each of which there are many supporting point and their own supporting evidence (578-580). “By making and comparing different cuts” Mays writes, “we reveal how the writing works independently at each level and works in relation to form a complex text” (574).   Research should also be complex, argue Katja Thieme and Shurli Makmillen, as they introduce a research stance they call “principled uncertainty” (466). Because “researchers make method choices by considering how a method is valued in their research community,” communities with different knowledge values will contribute to a different accepted method. Indigenous research methos like “commuity-based or tribal centered research, collaborative participatory research, storytelling or “storywork” “yarning” or conversational method (471) all expand method because “method is situated, interpellative and dialogic” and indigenous conversational method is linked to a “particular tribal epistemology” (484).   There you have it. Each of this articles could be a podcast in themselves, but when you have them all sitting side-by-side it certainly gives you a feel for the variety and connection across one regular issue of College Composition and Communication. If you teach college writing classes, I recommend joining the National Council of Teachers of English, despite their awkward name, and I recommend subscribing the CCC.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today I want to start with a walk down memory lane   Remember laser discs? You might not be old enough to, but I do. I remember my seventh grade science classroom had a laserdisc player and we watched just a couple of films, brilliantly bright documentaries about butterflies or some other medium-appropriate topic. I don’t remember the topic, only that it was beauitlful. But I do remember that we only had the two laserdiscs, partially because they were expensive, but partially because in just a couple of years, DVDs would become widespread and accessible.   How about mini-discs? I definitely had boxes of minidiscs I had recorded from cds--I could get a cd and a half  onto only one mini-disc!--and I could listen to seemingly endless music at my college early morning janitorial job. It seemed very impressive--until I bought my first iPod.   This is fun. But why am I talking about technological non-starters? Because it’s so hard to guess what kind of technology will be pivotal when you’re doing research on the role of technology in our society. Things are guarenteed to change as fast as you get your book to press.   Cynthia L. Selfe wrote Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-first Century in 1999 as a forward thinking volume. In 1999, mini-discs and laserdiscs were soon to fade into history, andsome of the terms she uses, like the Web to name the internet, seem almost quaint. But when technology changes all the time, the best tact, and the one Selfe takes, is to discuss principles of the technology rather than the technology itself.   Selfe’s foremost claim is straightforward and applicable today as when it was written: “Literacy professionals and the organizations that represent them need to commit to understanding the complex relationship between literacy and technology and to intervening in the national project to expand technological literacy. We must also realistically appraise the multiple roles that literacy educators are already playing in support of this project” (160).   The word “realistically” is key for Selfe. Technology, she points out, has always attracted boosters and boycotters. Somebody introduces, say, a wiki assignment into a composition classroom and assumes that the students will now learn collaboration and concision perfectly, while another teacher rolls their eyes, believing that such an assignment is, at best, an interesting distraction. As Selfe points out “By describing computer technology as either beneficial or detrimental, either good or bad, they limit our understanding”  (36) and instead she aims for us to “understand the complex ways in which technology has become inked with our conception of literacy and, possibly, to shape the relationship between these two phenomena in increasingly productive ways” (37).   So what does this word “literacy” mean anyway? We’ve talked about literacy before on the show, especially in the Deborah Brandt episode. Remember how we talked about how literacy has meant, in different times, everything from cursive to memorizing vast tracts of poetry to understanding chunks of French or Latin in the middle of a text? Cursive might not be useful at all for you now. Well, now, Selfe says, we need to think about technological literacy. She defines technological literacy as “a complex set of socialy and culturally situated values, practices and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments” (11). Whew. So what does that include? According to Selfe, it include reading and writing and communicating. It includes the “social and cultural contexts for discourse and communication” and it includes “print, still graphics, moving images” and “such tools as databases...e-mail, listserv software, bulletin boards, and graphics and line-art packages” (11-12).   If you’re like me the first thing...well, the first thing I thought was “heh! Bulletin boards. Clip art! That’s as old-fashioned as laserdiscs and minidiscs!” and we’ll get back to that thought in a moment, but the second thing I thought was “how?! How on earth am I supposed to teach visual rhetoric and how to use emerging technology and I might not even be that good at on top of all the other literacy practices that my students need?” It seems like too much for us, and too complicated.   And in many ways it is too much. For that reason, it can be tempting to buy a package of projects and assignments, or to subscribe to every new technology that comes out in the hope of covering all the basis. One of the complex relationships that Selfe emphasizes is that whereever there is change, there are people wanting you to buy stuff. The companies who make the technology--in Selfe’s day it’s all “word processing” and “home PCs”--advertise to schools and, especially, parents, that children will fall behind unless they own this or another type of technology, and if they fall behind, the number one consequence is that they won’t make as much money. Selfe says that we need to be cautious of accepting the premise of technology as a purely economic investment--buy a computer now and it will pay off one hundredfold! Other voices, too, will make them, in Brandt’s words “sponsors of literacy,” such as the government and your school’s administration. There are complex and sometimes conflicted voices in how our students are introduced to technology literacy. Okay, now that you know to be skeptical of some of the many voices with vested interests, how do you know how to proceed?   Well, let’s get back to that first thought we had--reading Selfe’s book, it’s remarkable to think that less than 20 years ago there were still teachers who didn’t like their students to type up their first draft of assignments and there wasn’t a computer with projector in practically every classroom. There was also relatively little “non-computer digital technology”--she talks a lot about the PC and chatrooms and listservs, not foreseeing the way smartphones, Reddit, and Facebook will transform literacy in the first decade of the 21st century. She couldn’t have, and no one can. So this is maybe a hint about how to incorporate technology literacy into your own pedagogy--things are going to change so quickly that perhaps what you can best do is to encourage students to develop the general skills that will help them to adapt to new forms of technology.  You can encourage conversations about privacy and anonymity, audience and permanence with their application to whatever technology is blooming and dying--FourSquare, Twitter, Pokeman Go. You can teach students about the way we talk about technology--how those vested interests like corporations and governments talk about how technology is to be used and the limits of both the optimists and the Luddites. You can also teach them the tools that will make them successful when they encounter new kinds of technology. Maybe you teach them how to use a peer review software that they will NEVER AGAIN use in their lives, as I had to do once. My students HATED it and, to be honest, I hated making them use it. We struggled over and over again, spending precious time in class explaining how to upload their papers, how to make comments. But what I should have done instead is emphasize how this experience taught them certain abstract technology skills--how to fiddle around with something without thinking you’re going to break it, how to search for FAQs online when you need to troubleshoot, how to read instructions and intuit from the interface what the program “wants” you to do. These are skills that will outlast listservs and laserdiscs and  their progeny.   In short, we need to realize, to quote Selfe’s subtitle “the importance of paying attention” and help students to identify the ideological, political, economic, and spiritual implications of the the technology they can ignore or embrace.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, and I’ve had a hard time getting started on this one.   Sometimes I procrastinate an episode because I don’t want to get into an idea or movement that is potentially stupidfaced. Other times, I’m nervous about doing a great work a disservice in doing a stupidfaced episode. This is one of those times.   Patricia Roberts-Miller was one of my mentors at the University of Texas, and I always knew that she was doing work on demagoguery. She’s one of those wonderful rare people who let you in on the secrets of their research revision and editing process, letting you behind the curtain of producing academic work. But until I read Demagoguery and Democracy, I had no idea how important that work could be. I am not exaggerating when I say this is the most important book I’ve read this year.   First off, let me give you the caveat that the small, portable, ultimately very readable Demagogury and Democracy is not, strictly speaking, the academic version of her research. That’s forthcoming. But Demagoguery and Democracy is compact and makes a handy gift for friends and relatives this holiday season. Perhaps you can think of someone who needs it.   The fact is we all need it. Roberts-Miller argues that when we think of demagoguery, we usually think of demagogues-- silver tongued seducers who memorize their audience into doing stupid things they would normally never do. These lying liars know what they’re saying is false, but they know it will manipulate the sheeple follow them. But that’s not the direction it goes. “We don’t have demagoguery in our culture because a demagogue came to power,” she argues, “when demagoguery becomes the normal way of participating in public discourse, then it’s just a question of time until a demagogue arises” (2). So if we should be focusing less on individual demagogues and more on the practice of engaging in demagoguery, if it’s something you and I could be doing, how do we know if we’re doing it?   “Demagoguery,” Roberts-Miller says “is about identity. It says that complicated policy issues can be reduced to a binary of us (good) versus them (bad). It says that good people recognize there is a bad situation, and bad people don’t; therefore, to determine  what policy agenda is the best, it  says we should think entirely in terms of who is like us and who isn’t” (8). In other words “demagoguery says that only we should be included in deliberation because they are the problem” (20 emphasis in original).   I shouldn’t have to say that if you’ve been following American politics for the past, oh, especially year and a half, all of this is going to sound familiar, but again, remember that demagoguery isn’t about one powerful individual--it’s about a range of discourses that gives power to an individual. When compromise is out of the picture and persuasion is about being the right kind of person rather than having a good idea, democracy withers.   Roberts-Miller gives the example of Earl Warren as someone who go burned by participating the demagoguery. Warren, if the name doesn’t ring a bell, was the WWII-era attorney general for the state of California, and he advocated strongly for Japanese internment. He made spurious claims, like that people of Japanese descent were living disproportionately close to areas like factories, ports, railroads, highways etc. without considering that PEOPLE live disproportionately close to factories, port, railroads, etc. because that’s part of living in civilization. Years later, in his 1977 memoirs, Warren himself said he deeply regretted his role in advocating in Japanese-American internment. Warren wasn’t an evil mustache-twirler, even though he participated in some pretty wicked demagoguery. Later, Warren was the supreme court justice who, among other things, managed to bring about the pivotal Brown vs. Board ruling, hastening racial desegregation. So if this generally good dude could engaged in bad demagoguery, we’re all at risk of falling into it. I like to think that he might have had fewer regrets iif one of Warren’s friends had been all, “Hey Earl, seems like you’re getting carried away. Let’s take a couple steps back and talk about your reasoning.”   And that, Roberts-Miller suggests, is one of the keys to fighting demagoguery whereever we find it--with others or with our friends or even ourselves. She gives us some key todos:   Consume less of it yourself. That means not clicking on links that say “Look at this stupid thing the other side did--aren’t they idiots?” It’s hard to restrain yourself because, as demagoguery, it will make you feel good for not being one of those idiots. But it’s not what you or democracy need Don’t engage in purely “us vs. them” arguments who are just repeating talking points someone told them to think. Instead, consider sharing counter-examples or stories, which can lead them to think for themselves. Instead of arguing abstractly with, for example, someone who thinks immigrants are lazy, tell them how proud you are of your sister-in-law for learning three languages and graduating college and becoming a high school math teacher. Even better, invite them to meet her and get to know her personally. It’s hard to think of someone as “them” when you’re meeting him or her individually. If appropriate, go ahead and engage those arguments, but be prepared to point out inconsistencies in reasoning. This is where Roberts-Miller encourages all of us to review our logical fallacies and learn to reason abstractly in order to look for internal inconsistencies. Again, think of Earl Warren’s imaginary friend saying, “Say, Earl, don’t you think those folks are living next to highways and railroads because they need to commute to work, not because they want to sabotage them?” You can’t just go around saying “that’s a fallacy” because that will make people want to punch you, so you might as well also ask, or discover, the key question “what are the circumstances under which [you] would change [your] mind?” Finally, and most importantly, support and argue for democratic deliberation. Encourage inclusion, fairness, self-skepticism and the other values of democratic deliberation. As Roberts-Miller puts it “Democracy is about having to listen, and compromise, and it’s about being wrong (and admitting it)” (129). I’ve given you the quick summary and takeaways of this book, but I really do recommend checking it out yourself, and recommending it to others who are concerned about the increasingly bifurcated social and political world we inhabit. I don’t know about you, but I hate always having to wonder if I’m the “right kind of person.” It’s much more freeing to think, “Am I having the right kind of conversations?”   If you have a favorite strategy for more productive deliberation, why not send us an email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? I’m thinking we’re probably going to be talking a lot more about this sort of thing in the future, so probably an episode on listening rhetorics? Maybe something on protest rhetoric? What would you like?

Don’t you love those group adventure movies? You know, the ones with a ragtag group of misfits who each have their special skill--Ocean’s 11, the Great Escape, Power Rangers? Rhetoric had that too and they were called the Canon of Ten of the Ten Attic Orators. Like most canonical lists, they weren’t clumped together until they well and dead. Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace compiled what’s called the Alexandrian Canon including these ten hotshots of the 5th and 4th century BCE. Later, a scholar who was probably not Plutarch, called the Psuedo-Plutarch, wrote “The Lives of the Ten Orators” to chronicle the Rat Pack of Classical Greek rhetoric. A couple of these ten will be familiar to you--Demosthenes and Isocrates. Demosthenes and Isocrates are like the George Clooney and Brad Pitt of the Ten Attic Orators, getting most of the screen time and most of the glory. We’ve have individual episodes on each of them as well as individual episodes on some of the works they’ve written. Mere Rhetoric isn’t alone in emphasizing these super stars of the Canon of Ten: the Psuedo Plutarch spends almost 3500 words on Demosthenes and a paltry 392 on Aeschines. So, to make it up to them, we’re going to dedicate eight episodes of Mere Rhetoric to the  other members of the Canon of Ten, the Bernie Macs and Casey Afflecks of Classical Greek Rhetoric.   And today we’re going to start with the anti-Demosthenes, Aeschines.   Aeschines hated Demosthenes. The most famous peice he ever wrote was a legal argument called Against Ctetisphon (k’tes-i-fawn), which really could have been “Against Demosthenes and His Stinkin’ Friend.”   First, some background. Aeschines came from a modest background. He wasn’t destitute, certainly but it is “generally doubted that his father could have afforded to provide him with an education in rhetoric” and he had to marry up to enter a public career (9). The Pseudo Plutarch describes him as “neither nobly born nor rich.”  Demosthenes, on the other hand, was born to privilege and had a first-rate education. Demosthenes was educated at the schools os Isocrates and maybe Plato; Aeschines was taught by someone named Leodamas, whose reputation in history is partially that he was a mathematician and partially that Plato may have taught him math. Not a particularly impressive training for a future political rhetor.   Aeschines was a good performer and did a stint as an actor, and while this wasn’t as shameful as it would become in later centuries, Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of being a bad actor, which is pretty shameful (10). Unlike Demosthenes, he never was a professional speechwriter--every speech we have is about his own political concerns, and all three of them may be all that there is to have--nothing seems to have been lost (12). The best of these three, “Against Ctetisphone,” requires a little political history.   Demosthenes, as we’ve discussed in our earlier episode, was a rabble rouser against King Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, and the aggressor of the Hellenistic cities like Athens. He defeated them and then ruled over them in something called the League of Corinth, sort of a loose confederation of vassal states. Demosthenes did not like that and called for activism, which was pretty popular. Aeschines on the other hand favored peace and capitulatoin with Macadonia and King Philip. He was badly let down, though, as were the rest of the pragmatists because they received no gains or special treatment from the partnership. Defiant Demosthenes gained all the cultural capital and Aeschines looked like a collaborator.   Demosthenes’ friend, Ctetisphon, seeks to give a public award to Demosthenes, kind of a lifetime acheivement award from the state, with some real money attached. This “Golden Crown” was a civic and almost religious honor : As Thomas Leland points out, “To give this transaction the greater solemnity, it was moved that the ceremony should be performed in the theatre of Bacchus during the festival held in honor of that god, when not only the Athenians, but other Greeks from all parts of the nation were assembled to see the tragedies exhibited in that festival.”  So everyone would be fawning over Demosthenes, not just the Athenians. Aeschines just can not. Ctesiphon gives public crown to Demosthenes, Aeschines brings suit against him, and, like an animal to a trap, Demosthenes shows up in person as a “speaker for Ctesiphon.”   So there you have it, head-to-head, Aeschines and Demosthenes in the courtroom arguing about whether Demosthenes is a public hero or an extravagant wastrel and war profiteer. Opposition political parties, opposite managerial styles, opposite backgrounds. You can kind of feel Aeschines boiling over in this oration. One scholar points out that “Against Ctesiphon” disorganized, uneven, although powerful in some places.”   But Aeschines makes three main claims that range from the reasonable to the vitriolic.   First off, there is the location. The law specifically says that the award is presented in assembly and nowhere else, certainly not at the theater! How humiliating, Aescheines says if “He confers this honor, not while the people are assembled, but while the new tragedies are exhibiting; not in the presence of the people, but of the Greeks; that they too may know on what kind of man our honors are conferred.”  Okay, I could see that.   Also, that the award being given to Demosthenes is a little preemptive. Aeschines complains about giving Demosthenes the crown--there hadn’t been a full investigation into his full character.   But finally, Aeschines says, the award is supposed to be for people who have excellent character and Demosthenes, he argues, is the opposite of excellent. He is not shy about it: “Say, then, Ctesiphon, when the most heinous instances of this man's baseness are so incontestably evident that his accuser exposes himself to the censure, not of advancing falsehoods, but of recurring to facts so long acknowledged and notorious, is he to be publicly honored, or to be branded with infamy? ”Demosthenes, as a senator, doesn’t acknowledge diplomats, and he led a lot of soldiers to their certain death in an ill-fated military campaign. Aeschines even attacks Demosthenes’ private life because “He who acts wickedly in private life cannot prove excellent in his public conduct: he who is base at home can never acquit himself with honor when sent to a strange country in a public character.”   At the beginning, he says,“An examination of Demosthenes’ life would be  too long a speech, why should I tell it all now…” then he does, tells tale of primary, nepotism, violence, heart of it though “the worst of the crimes” was his greed for a cut of the peace with Philip, benefitted from war profiteering and perjury, sacrificing the lives of the young soldiers “as yourselves whether the relatives of the dead will shed more teachers over the tragedies and sufferings of the heros that will be staged after this or at the city’s insensitivity” (152). He holds, even, his bad luck against him, because in ancient Greece, bad luck in a leader was as indefensible as stupidity.   Look, I’m team Demosthenes and fighting for independence is always going to sound better than capitulating to an occupying force and this speech is so venomous and spiteful that it’s hard not to just dismiss it because it is so angry, but Aeschines does make a lot of good points, and he’s mostly pointing out that we don’t make exceptions for Demosthenes, which could also be interpreted as “no one is above the law,” which I find quite reassuring. The law is a big deal for Aeschines--makes sense, this is a legal case, and he praises it throughout the speech. Aeschines proclaims how excellent the law is, how excellent the assembly is: “A noble institution this a truly noble institution, Athenians!” he declares.   I’m also sympathetic when Aeschines alleges the Demosthenes just wants to shut him up. “He compares me to the Sirens, whose purpose is not to delight their hearers, but to destroy them. Even so, if we are to believe him, my abilities in speaking, whether acquired by exercise or given by nature, all tend to the detriment of those who grant me their attention. I am bold to say that no man has a right to urge an allegation of this nature against me; for it is shameful in an accuser not to be able to establish his assertions with full proof.” You shouldn’t want to shut up your opposition--that leads to all kinds of tyrany.   But then again, Aeschines dishes it out again back at Demosthenes, “But when a man composed entirely of words, and these the bitterest and most pompously labored when he recurs to simplicity, to artless facts, who can endure it? He who is but an instrument, take away his tongue, and he is nothing.”   In the end, I think the jurors had the same unpleasant taste in their mouths that we do reading it--Aeschines comes across and a squirming, angry little man trying whatever he can to stop his wildly popular rival from getting praise. In the result of the trial, Ctesiphon was acquitted and Aeschines failed to get ⅕ of the votes. Aeschines was humiliated for having brought the lawsuit to the courts, and, because of the unsuccessful suit, he was slapped with a  “fine of 1000 drachmas and (probably) loss of the right to bring similar action again” to the court. Aeschines left Athens in shame, and ending up as a rhetoric teacher in Rhodes.  As a rhetoric teacher myself, I don’t think of this as that much of a crushing ignobility, and, really, history has looked fondly on him, including him, with his bitter enemy, on the list of the Ten Attic Orators.

This last year I adopted a dog, a scruffy grey schnauzer mix. I call him Pip. I talk to Pip all the time. But I don’t expect Pip to talk back to me, and I don’t think about what Pip calls himself. Maybe I should. The rhetorical power of non-human animals, this week on Mere Rhetoric. Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginner and indisers about the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetprical history. I’m Mary Hedengren   Today we start a new type of episode of Mere Rhetoric. In the past, I’ve given you the low-down on books and movements, scholars and terms, and now I’m going to expand on that to give you the heads-up on some of the most recent issues of major journals in the field. Consider it a sort of Reading Rainbow, a teaser-taster of what’s showing up in rhetorical scholarship today.   Reading journals is one of those activities that I was encouraged to do when I first became a grad student in rhetoric and I’m always surprised how useful what I read ends up being: sometimes I find scholarship that relates directly to what I’m working on, sometimes I find stuff that comes up in conversation, but it’s rare that I regret reading an issue. I recommend reading them to everyone interested in the field, partially because it gives a good sense of what our field actually is these days.   The first issue I’m going to feature, I’m willing to admit though, is a little weird. It’s a the special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly that came out this summer, and special issue usually means that there’s a theme that all of the articles are about, but even this special issue is special--it’s a Quote rhetorical bestiary unquote. A bestiary is a sort of encyclopedia of the animals, usually loose on the science and loaded on moralizing for a human world, but this rhetorical bestiary is specifically trying to break away from a human-centric orientation towards entering with animals more on their terms.   Within the bestiary, there are mini-essays on children raised by wolves, salmon spawning, a town full of roosting vultures and the cunning of snakes. These essays are an unusual lot for a scholarly journal: rich, imaginative, personal and poetic. They are grounded in theory, but are also beholden to activism, creative writing, and --as might be expected--animal behaviorism. One impetus for this collection is the 25th anniversary of George A. Kennedy’s “A Hoot in the Dark” article in Philosophy and Rhetoric.   Kennedy’s “Hoot in the Dark” isn’t included here, but it’s worth checking out on its own merits. George Kennedy was a tweedy classical rhetorician, translating, for example, the definite edition of Aristotle’s rhetoric. So it was a bit of surprise in 1992, when he argued that rhetoric is not an exclusively human endeavour, but that rhetoric “is manifest in all animal life and [that] existed long before the evolution of human beings” (4)... for instance “A rattlesnake’s rhetoric consists of coiling or uncoiling itself, threatening to strike and rattling its tail, which other creatures hear, even though a rattle-snake [sic] is itself deaf” (13). Pretty wild stuff. And the response, as Diane Davis writes in her afterward for the bestiary, “was to basically wonder what Kennedy had been smoking” (277).   But even if Kennedy’s work was out of character, some rhetorical scholars embraced the non-human animal turn. For instance Debra Hawhee, who also writes an afterword for the issue, has written such works like Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw and Moving Bodies, which explores “the places in rhetorical theory that are infested with nonhuman animals” (“towards a bestial rhetoric” 86). Looking at non-human animal rhetoric is a humbling practice that opens up our field and colors our received rhetorical traditions. That being said,I was most impressed by the foreword by Alex C. Parrish and the afterwards by Hawhee and Diane Davis. Davis’ afterward is  espeically illuminating in highlighting that “there is no single, indivisible line between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’” (278). She also provides a useful dichotomy between two threads in researching non-human animals in rhetoric. One is “studying human discourses about other animal species” --the way we use non-human animals in our human rhetoric--while the other involved “engaging the specific rhetorical practices of other species” (279).  This latter area of research is particularly interesting to me.   When Pip barks at a strange dog, or drops his ears backwards, or lulls his tongue out in a squinty-eyed smile, he is using symbols just as effectively as Burke’s “symbol using (symbol making and symbol misusing)” human agent. I mean, I can testify that he symbol misuses all the time, especially in his clumsy attempts to make friends at the dog park. Dogs are especially interesting because they are attuned to cross species communication: for millenia, they’ve been learning to read our weird symbols, like me pointing to Pip’s crate, and respond with their own communication, like Pip’s resulting “hangdog” expression. It’s almost like he’s telling me “I don’t want to go to my room.” But sometimes when you discuss communication with, or among, animals, you’ll be accused of anthropomorphism. Certain, I don’t think Pip communicates the same things in the same ways as he would if he were another human, but, as Davis points out, instead of throwing around accusations of  anthropomorphism, we would be better served by recognizing that communication is beyond the “anthro” and rather something inherent in creatures that live in proximity with other creatures.   If you have a great dog story, or other kind of animal communication story, why not drop us a line at Mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Also, let me know what kind of journals you’d like me to be checking in with. I can’t promise I’ll read every issue of every rhetoric journal for you because there’s a lot out there--and you don’t have to take my word for it.    

Just checking in to let you know that new episodes of Mere Rhetoric are just around the corner. I've moved to a new institution and we've been figuring out how to set up a recording studio, but I think it's time to just get started making episodes the old fashioned way--in my office with a blanket over my head to muffle the sound.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas people and movements who have shaped rehtorical history. Before we get started, big announcement: Rerecordings are over! We’ve re-recorded over 80 episodes here in the studio thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas. That’s an incredible feat and now that we’re done, there’s no more reruns, at least for a while. We’ve had new ones interspersed yeah, but now it’s all new from here on out. The other news is that having defended my dissertation and finished my time here at the University of Texas --boo!--I’m headed to the University of Houston Clear Lake --yippie! That means this might we one of the last episodes we record here at the booth at the University of Texas. Well, I hope it’s a good one!   Today we’re talking about LuMing Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie. This book is not, as you might suspect, a treatise on how to decipher phrases like “Your smile is your best asset” or “Defeat your enemies by making them friends.” Instead, Mao is talking about what the fortune cookie represents. It might surprise you to know that fortune cookies are not the traditional end of meals in China. They aren’t even the dessert when you go to a Chinese restaurant in Europe. The fortune cookie is an American-Chinese invention, combining an ancient way to pass notes undetected with the American proclivity towards dessert at the end of a meal (18). In this sense, “Like the Chinese fortune cookies, the making of Chinese American rhetoric is born of two rhetorical traditions, and made both visible and viable at rhetorical borderlands as a process of becoming” (18). That’s the meaning of Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie--we’re not talking about Chinese rhetoric, and no American rhetoric, but something distinctively Chinese American All of this adds up to being more or less fluidly comfortable with these different elements. This might sound like a cheesy platitude about tolerance and strength of immigrants, but it’s more complex than that, argues Mao. “‘Togetherness-in-difference”--rather than harmony-in-difference--...becomes constitutive of the making of Chinese American rhetoric,” he writes (29). Instead of trying to be perfectly assimilated, this “togetherness-in-difference” highlights a distance between non-Western rhetoric and the other Americans around them. First, we need to “recognize that there will be times when instances of incommensrablity become irreducible” (28) Second this is not a matter of celebrating diversity because, as Mao says, “there is nothing to celebrate”--the emergence of Chinese American rhetoric is a rhetoric of survival based on as the scholar Mao cites, Ang says ‘the fundamental uneasiness’ of interconnection. Third, Mao points out “at rhetorical borderlands where there is more than one... rhetorical tradition, if nothing else, the basic question of commununication never goes away in terms of who has the floor, who secures the uptake, and who gets listened to” (29). Much of the book then focus on what these differences in rhetoric are and how we are to interpret them. For example, Mao talks about the (in)famous Chinese indirection. While the American academic writing values clarity, Chinese indirection communicates through “subtle, direct strategies, through innuendoes and allusions” (61). Many American writers, especialy those who teach first-year composition and English as a foreign language, or work in writing centers, find themselves slashing through sentences and paragraphs and repeated asking, “What are you trying to say here?” This deficiency model ignores the rich possiblities of indirection.   Okay, so get comfortable, because here’s a long quote from Mao: “Chinese indirection should not be seen, without discrimination, simply as an example of a non transparent style of communication or, worse still, of indecision and incoherence. Chinese indirection, be it realized or articulated by repeated appeals to tradition/authority or y recurrent parallel statements with or without a transparent profession of ideas, takes on new meanings or associations within its (newly-developed) context. To put the matter another way, the contextualized nature of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking in Chinese culture both constitute a central context to understand the rhetoric of Chinese indirection more completely and provide a metadiscourseive language to talk about and reflect upon it more felicitously” (71). But remember the Chinese fortune cookie? Chinese American rhetoric doesn’t have a list of characteristics, but “border residents can behin to take advantage of this oportunity to develop and try out new ways of speaking, and to reconstitute rules of relationships and patters [sic] of communication” (75).   Another section talks about the mysterious and misunderstood concept of “face.” Americans will use phrases like “saving face” or “losing face” Mao points out, but they are talking about “the myth of the individual, of the individual’s need either to be free or to be liked” in contrast to the “public, communical orination, which underpins the original concept of Chinese face” (38). For one thing, there are two kinds of “face”: lian, which refers to moral dignity, integrity and shame and mianzi, which is more about what you do with your life, your position in society. Usually when Westerners think about losing face, they mean mianzi--prestige and position. Lian, though, the moral integrity, is consistered far more important and far worse to loose than mianzi (39). But Westerns think about pride, not the “ever-expanding circle of face-giving and -receiving in one’s own community and beyond” (43). This balance of self and community gets even more complicated as Chinese Americans negotiate and transform multiple communities. The urge to “yi”-- immigrate, move, transform-- re-emphasises that “togethenessr-in -difference”-- to “moliblize and put to practice a hybrid rhteoric that ...openly cultivates not a harmonious fusion,” but recognizes inherent tensions and potential” (50)?   This double-mindedness is not just a cultural sophistic exercise, but a robust theory that has implications in communities, in classrooms and in families. Mao closes his book with a sustatined case study of a statement prepared by Chinese Americans and others to protest the racist statements of a Cincinnati city councilman. Mao doesn’t just consider the document itself in this hybridity, but the process of putting together the document, of addressing the Westerner-American city council as well as the Chinese American community they are representing. Mao ends with three practical suggestions from his case study. First “we try to assert our agency and to establish our residency” to “speak out more openly about thee experiences” (141), and second “learn ow to place ourselves in the other’s position and ‘word the world through the other’s eyes”... “incorporating both self and other into a relaionship of interdependence and interconnectedness” (141-2). Finally, he calls for Chinese American scholars to “reconnect to our own rhetorical history”... as it “enables us to resist both the discourse of assimilation and the discourse of deficiency or difference” (142).   Reading this book reminded me of some of the other scholars who have felt pulled in two different traditions, like “Bootstraps” which was in an earlier episode. Well, I hope you don’t feel pulled in two different directions about this podcast. If you like us, please leave a message on iTunes or send us a message at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com, especially as I begin to figure out how Mere Rhetoric will continue at my new institutional home. And let me give one last thank you to the University of Texas for a great year of recording!

  Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and a big thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas for support for this show. Also thanks to Jacob in the booth. Today, All Hallow’s Eve is upon us and it’s been a long time since I attempted some terrible British accents, which means it’s time for the Mere Rhetoric HALLOWEEN SPECIAL [thunder sounds? Screeching cat? What have you.] But first, some background.   When you’re asked to give a description of what rhetoric is, as we did in our very first episode, What is Rhetoric?, you might say something like, “It’s the use of words to persuade someone,” and you would imagine someone in a toga standing around on a rostom shout-talking at people, but that’s not exactly all rhetoric is. Remember Kenneth Burke’s definition of rhetoric: that we can “influence each other's thinking and behavior through the strategic use of symbols.” Even Aristotle says that rhetoric is about discovering the available means of persuasion. Verbal or alphabetic rhetoric is only one of those available means of persuasion. Visual rhetoric is another.   As you might suspect, visual rhetoric focuses on other kinds of symbols than just words. Visual rhetoricians might interrogate the influence on other people of war posters, cartoons, even the layout of airport security. But visual rhetoric isn’t just about the object of study.   Sonja Foss puts it this way:   Visual rhetoric refers not only to the visual object as a communicative artifact but also to a perspective scholars take on visual imagery or visual data. In this meaning of the term, visual rhetoric constitutes a theoretical perspective that involves the analysis of the symbolic or communicative aspects of visual artifacts. It is a critical-analytical tool or a way of approaching and analyzing visual data that highlights the communicative dimensions of images or objects (305-306)   As you might imagine, visual rhetoric opens up a lot of possiblities for scholars. And those scholars will need more theories of how to approach that those artifacts. Foss herself suggests that critics look first at the elements of the object, then   Kostelnick and Roberts create canons of visual rhetoric [what do you think? The cannon sound again?] Really? As I was saying, these canons of visual rehtoric  parallel the classical canons of rhetoric. these canons can be remembered by the British-inspired acronym CACE-TE, but you have to be creative with your spelling the first C stand for Clarity, or ease of understanding for the reader. A stands for arrangement, how the visual elements are laid out; the second C (I told you that you had to be creative in how you spell CACE) is for concision with nothing extraneous; the E is for emphasis. TE is also spelled poorly: T for tone--sarcastic or sincere, loving or rageful and E for ethos--demonstrating good will for the reader. Clarity, Arrangement, Concision, Emphasis Tone, Ethos: Cake and tea. Do you know what else is british? M. R. James ghost stories. And this year’s story demonstrates the dark side of looking too deeply into visual artifacts. And so, without futher aido, M. R. James’ 1904 story, “The Mezzotint.” Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at Cambridge.   He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to England; but they could not fail to become known to a good many of his friends, and among others to the gentleman who at that time presided over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun’s, and that he should be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so agitating an emergency. It was, indeed, somewhat consoling to him to reflect that he was not expected to acquire ancient MSS. for his institution; that was the business of the Shelburnian Library. The authorities of that institution might, if they pleased, ransack obscure corners of the Continent for such matters. He was glad to be obliged at the moment to confine his attention to enlarging the already unsurpassed collection of English topographical drawings and engravings possessed by his museum. Yet, as it turned out, even a department so homely and familiar as this may have its dark corners, and to one of these Mr Williams was unexpectedly introduced.   Those who have taken even the most limited interest in the acquisition of topographical pictures are aware that there is one London dealer whose aid is indispensable to their researches. Mr J. W. Britnell publishes at short intervals very admirable catalogues of a large and constantly changing stock of engravings, plans, and old sketches of mansions, churches, and towns in England and Wales. These catalogues were, of course, the ABC of his subject to Mr Williams: but as his museum already contained an enormous accumulation of topographical pictures, he was a regular, rather than a copious, buyer; and he rather looked to Mr Britnell to fill up gaps in the rank and file of his collection than to supply him with rarities.   Now, in February of last year there appeared upon Mr Williams’s desk at the museum a catalogue from Mr Britnell’s emporium, and accompanying it was a typewritten communication from the dealer himself. This latter ran as follows:   Dear Sir,   We beg to call your attention to No. 978 in our accompanying catalogue, which we shall be glad to send on approval.   Yours faithfully,   W. Britnell.   To turn to No. 978 in the accompanying catalogue was with Mr. Williams (as he observed to himself) the work of a moment, and in the place indicated he found the following entry:   978.— Unknown. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.   It was not specially exciting, and the price seemed high. However, as Mr Britnell, who knew his business and his customer, seemed to set store by it, Mr Williams wrote a postcard asking for the article to be sent on approval, along with some other engravings and sketches which appeared in the same catalogue. And so he passed without much excitement of anticipation to the ordinary labours of the day.   A parcel of any kind always arrives a day later than you expect it, and that of Mr Britnell proved, as I believe the right phrase goes, no exception to the rule. It was delivered at the museum by the afternoon post of Saturday, after Mr Williams had left his work, and it was accordingly brought round to his rooms in college by the attendant, in order that he might not have to wait over Sunday before looking through it and returning such of the contents as he did not propose to keep. And here he found it when he came in to tea, with a friend.   The only item with which I am concerned was the rather large, black-framed mezzotint of which I have already quoted the short description given in Mr Britnell’s catalogue. Some more details of it will have to be given, though I cannot hope to put before you the look of the picture as clearly as it is present to my own eye. Very nearly the exact duplicate of it may be seen in a good many old inn parlours, or in the passages of undisturbed country mansions at the present moment. It was a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known. It presented a full-face view of a not very large manor-house of the last century, with three rows of plain sashed windows with rusticated masonry about them, a parapet with balls or vases at the angles, and a small portico in the centre. On either side were trees, and in front a considerable expanse of lawn. The legend A. W. F. sculpsit was engraved on the narrow margin; and there was no further inscription. The whole thing gave the impression that it was the work of an amateur. What in the world Mr Britnell could mean by affixing the price of £2 2s. to such an object was more than Mr Williams could imagine. He turned it over with a good deal of contempt; upon the back was a paper label, the left-hand half of which had been torn off. All that remained were the ends of two lines of writing; the first had the letters — ngley Hall ; the second,— ssex .   It would, perhaps, be just worth while to identify the place represented, which he could easily do with the help of a gazetteer, and then he would send it back to Mr Britnell, with some remarks reflecting upon the judgement of that gentleman.   He lighted the candles, for it was now dark, made the tea, and supplied the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing persons.   The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect. It was now that the friend — let us call him Professor Binks — took up the framed engraving and said:   ‘What’s this place, Williams?’   ‘Just what I am going to try to find out,’ said Williams, going to the shelf for a gazetteer. ‘Look at the back. Somethingley Hall, either in Sussex or Essex. Half the name’s gone, you see. You don’t happen to know it, I suppose?’   ‘It’s from that man Britnell, I suppose, isn’t it?’ said Binks. ‘Is it for the museum?’   ‘Well, I think I should buy it if the price was five shillings,’ said Williams; ‘but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it. I can’t conceive why. It’s a wretched engraving, and there aren’t even any figures to give it life.’   ‘It’s not worth two guineas, I should think,’ said Binks; ‘but I don’t think it’s so badly done. The moonlight seems rather good to me; and I should have thought there were figures, or at least a figure, just on the edge in front.’   ‘Let’s look,’ said Williams. ‘Well, it’s true the light is rather cleverly given. Where’s your figure? Oh, yes! Just the head, in the very front of the picture.’   And indeed there was — hardly more than a black blot on the extreme edge of the engraving — the head of a man or woman, a good deal muffled up, the back turned to the spectator, and looking towards the house.   Williams had not noticed it before.   ‘Still,’ he said, ‘though it’s a cleverer thing than I thought, I can’t spend two guineas of museum money on a picture of a place I don’t know.’   Professor Binks had his work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the subject of his picture. ‘If the vowel before the ng had only been left, it would have been easy enough,’ he thought; ‘but as it is, the name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book has no index of terminations.’   Hall in Mr Williams’s college was at seven. It need not be dwelt upon; the less so as he met there colleagues who had been playing golf during the afternoon, and words with which we have no concern were freely bandied across the table — merely golfing words, I would hasten to explain.   I suppose an hour or more to have been spent in what is called common-room after dinner. Later in the evening some few retired to Williams’s rooms, and I have little doubt that whist was played and tobacco smoked. During a lull in these operations Williams picked up the mezzotint from the table without looking at it, and handed it to a person mildly interested in art, telling him where it had come from, and the other particulars which we already know.   The gentleman took it carelessly, looked at it, then said, in a tone of some interest:   ‘It’s really a very good piece of work, Williams; it has quite a feeling of the romantic period. The light is admirably managed, it seems to me, and the figure, though it’s rather too grotesque, is somehow very impressive.’   ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Williams, who was just then busy giving whisky and soda to others of the company, and was unable to come across the room to look at the view again.   It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very nearly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable — rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o’clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.   I do not know what is the ideal course to pursue in a situation of this kind, I can only tell you what Mr Williams did. He took the picture by one corner and carried it across the passage to a second set of rooms which he possessed. There he locked it up in a drawer, sported the doors of both sets of rooms, and retired to bed; but first he wrote out and signed an account of the extraordinary change which the picture had undergone since it had come into his possession.   Sleep visited him rather late; but it was consoling to reflect that the behaviour of the picture did not depend upon his own unsupported testimony. Evidently the man who had looked at it the night before had seen something of the same kind as he had, otherwise he might have been tempted to think that something gravely wrong was happening either to his eyes or his mind. This possibility being fortunately precluded, two matters awaited him on the morrow. He must take stock of the picture very carefully, and call in a witness for the purpose, and he must make a determined effort to ascertain what house it was that was represented. He would therefore ask his neighbour Nisbet to breakfast with him, and he would subsequently spend a morning over the gazetteer.   Nisbet was disengaged, and arrived about 9.20. His host was not quite dressed, I am sorry to say, even at this late hour. During breakfast nothing was said about the mezzotint by Williams, save that he had a picture on which he wished for Nisbet’s opinion. But those who are familiar with University life can picture for themselves the wide and delightful range of subjects over which the conversation of two Fellows of Canterbury College is likely to extend during a Sunday morning breakfast. Hardly a topic was left unchallenged, from golf to lawn-tennis. Yet I am bound to say that Williams was rather distraught; for his interest naturally centred in that very strange picture which was now reposing, face downwards, in the drawer in the room opposite.   The morning pipe was at last lighted, and the moment had arrived for which he looked. With very considerable — almost tremulous — excitement he ran across, unlocked the drawer, and, extracting the picture — still face downwards — ran back, and put it into Nisbet’s hands.   ‘Now,’ he said, ‘Nisbet, I want you to tell me exactly what you see in that picture. Describe it, if you don’t mind, rather minutely. I’ll tell you why afterwards.’   ‘Well,’ said Nisbet, ‘I have here a view of a country-house — English, I presume — by moonlight.’   ‘Moonlight? You’re sure of that?’   ‘Certainly. The moon appears to be on the wane, if you wish for details, and there are clouds in the sky.’   ‘All right. Go on. I’ll swear,’ added Williams in an aside, ‘there was no moon when I saw it first.’   ‘Well, there’s not much more to be said,’ Nisbet continued. ‘The house has one — two — three rows of windows, five in each row, except at the bottom, where there’s a porch instead of the middle one, and —’   ‘But what about figures?’ said Williams, with marked interest.   ‘There aren’t any,’ said Nisbet; ‘but —’   ‘What! No figure on the grass in front?’   ‘Not a thing.’   ‘You’ll swear to that?’   ‘Certainly I will. But there’s just one other thing.’   ‘What?’   ‘Why, one of the windows on the ground-floor — left of the door — is open.’   ‘Is it really so? My goodness! he must have got in,’ said Williams, with great excitement; and he hurried to the back of the sofa on which Nisbet was sitting, and, catching the picture from him, verified the matter for himself.   It was quite true. There was no figure, and there was the open window. Williams, after a moment of speechless surprise, went to the writing-table and scribbled for a short time. Then he brought two papers to Nisbet, and asked him first to sign one — it was his own description of the picture, which you have just heard — and then to read the other which was Williams’s statement written the night before.   ‘What can it all mean?’ said Nisbet.   ‘Exactly,’ said Williams. ‘Well, one thing I must do — or three things, now I think of it. I must find out from Garwood’— this was his last night’s visitor —‘what he saw, and then I must get the thing photographed before it goes further, and then I must find out what the place is.’   ‘I can do the photographing myself,’ said Nisbet, ‘and I will. But, you know, it looks very much as if we were assisting at the working out of a tragedy somewhere. The question is, has it happened already, or is it going to come off? You must find out what the place is. Yes,’ he said, looking at the picture again, ‘I expect you’re right: he has got in. And if I don’t mistake, there’ll be the devil to pay in one of the rooms upstairs.’   ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Williams: ‘I’ll take the picture across to old Green’ (this was the senior Fellow of the College, who had been Bursar for many years). ‘It’s quite likely he’ll know it. We have property in Essex and Sussex, and he must have been over the two counties a lot in his time.’   ‘Quite likely he will,’ said Nisbet; ‘but just let me take my photograph first. But look here, I rather think Green isn’t up today. He wasn’t in Hall last night, and I think I heard him say he was going down for the Sunday.’   ‘That’s true, too,’ said Williams; ‘I know he’s gone to Brighton. Well, if you’ll photograph it now, I’ll go across to Garwood and get his statement, and you keep an eye on it while I’m gone. I’m beginning to think two guineas is not a very exorbitant price for it now.’   In a short time he had returned, and brought Mr Garwood with him. Garwood’s statement was to the effect that the figure, when he had seen it, was clear of the edge of the picture, but had not got far across the lawn. He remembered a white mark on the back of its drapery, but could not have been sure it was a cross. A document to this effect was then drawn up and signed, and Nisbet proceeded to photograph the picture.   ‘Now what do you mean to do?’ he said. ‘Are you going to sit and watch it all day?’   ‘Well, no, I think not,’ said Williams. ‘I rather imagine we’re meant to see the whole thing. You see, between the time I saw it last night and this morning there was time for lots of things to happen, but the creature only got into the house. It could easily have got through its business in the time and gone to its own place again; but the fact of the window being open, I think, must mean that it’s in there now. So I feel quite easy about leaving it. And besides, I have a kind of idea that it wouldn’t change much, if at all, in the daytime. We might go out for a walk this afternoon, and come in to tea, or whenever it gets dark. I shall leave it out on the table here, and sport the door. My skip can get in, but no one else.’   The three agreed that this would be a good plan; and, further, that if they spent the afternoon together they would be less likely to talk about the business to other people; for any rumour of such a transaction as was going on would bring the whole of the Phasmatological Society about their ears.   We may give them a respite until five o’clock.   At or near that hour the three were entering Williams’s staircase. They were at first slightly annoyed to see that the door of his rooms was unsported; but in a moment it was remembered that on Sunday the skips came for orders an hour or so earlier than on weekdays. However, a surprise was awaiting them. The first thing they saw was the picture leaning up against a pile of books on the table, as it had been left, and the next thing was Williams’s skip, seated on a chair opposite, gazing at it with undisguised horror. How was this? Mr Filcher (the name is not my own invention) was a servant of considerable standing, and set the standard of etiquette to all his own college and to several neighbouring ones, and nothing could be more alien to his practice than to be found sitting on his master’s chair, or appearing to take any particular notice of his master’s furniture or pictures. Indeed, he seemed to feel this himself. He started violently when the three men were in the room, and got up with a marked effort. Then he said:   ‘I ask your pardon, sir, for taking such a freedom as to set down.’   ‘Not at all, Robert,’ interposed Mr Williams. ‘I was meaning to ask you some time what you thought of that picture.’   ‘Well, sir, of course I don’t set up my opinion against yours, but it ain’t the pictur I should ‘ang where my little girl could see it, sir.’   ‘Wouldn’t you, Robert? Why not?’   ‘No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible, with pictures not ‘alf what that is, and we ‘ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you’ll believe me; and if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know ‘ow it is with children; ‘ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I should say, it don’t seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not where anyone that’s liable to be startled could come on it. Should you be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir.’   With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin.   From five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by turns. But it never changed. They agreed at last that it would be safe to leave it, and that they would return after Hall and await further developments.   When they assembled again, at the earliest possible moment, the engraving was there, but the figure was gone, and the house was quiet under the moonbeams. There was nothing for it but to spend the evening over gazetteers and guide-books. Williams was the lucky one at last, and perhaps he deserved it. At 11.30 p.m. he read from Murray’s Guide to Essex the following lines:   16–1/2 miles, Anningley . The church has been an interesting building of Norman date, but was extensively classicized in the last century. It contains the tomb of the family of Francis, whose mansion, Anningley Hall, a solid Queen Anne house, stands immediately beyond the churchyard in a park of about 80 acres. The family is now extinct, the last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802. The father, Mr Arthur Francis, was locally known as a talented amateur engraver in mezzotint. After his son’s disappearance he lived in complete retirement at the Hall, and was found dead in his studio on the third anniversary of the disaster, having just completed an engraving of the house, impressions of which are of considerable rarity.   This looked like business, and, indeed, Mr Green on his return at once identified the house as Anningley Hall.   ‘Is there any kind of explanation of the figure, Green?’ was the question which Williams naturally asked.   ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, Williams. What used to be said in the place when I first knew it, which was before I came up here, was just this: old Francis was always very much down on these poaching fellows, and whenever he got a chance he used to get a man whom he suspected of it turned off the estate, and by degrees he got rid of them all but one. Squires could do a lot of things then that they daren’t think of now. Well, this man that was left was what you find pretty often in that country — the last remains of a very old family. I believe they were Lords of the Manor at one time. I recollect just the same thing in my own parish.’   ‘What, like the man in Tess o’ the Durbervilles ?’ Williams put in.   ‘Yes, I dare say; it’s not a book I could ever read myself. But this fellow could show a row of tombs in the church there that belonged to his ancestors, and all that went to sour him a bit; but Francis, they said, could never get at him — he always kept just on the right side of the law — until one night the keepers found him at it in a wood right at the end of the estate. I could show you the place now; it marches with some land that used to belong to an uncle of mine. And you can imagine there was a row; and this man Gawdy (that was the name, to be sure — Gawdy; I thought I should get it — Gawdy), he was unlucky enough, poor chap! to shoot a keeper. Well, that was what Francis wanted, and grand juries — you know what they would have been then — and poor Gawdy was strung up in double-quick time; and I’ve been shown the place he was buried in, on the north side of the church — you know the way in that part of the world: anyone that’s been hanged or made away with themselves, they bury them that side. And the idea was that some friend of Gawdy’s — not a relation, because he had none, poor devil! he was the last of his line: kind of spes ultima gentis — must have planned to get hold of Francis’s boy and put an end to his line, too. I don’t know — it’s rather an out-of-the-way thing for an Essex poacher to think of — but, you know, I should say now it looks more as if old Gawdy had managed the job himself. Booh! I hate to think of it! have some whisky, Williams!’   The facts were communicated by Williams to Dennistoun, and by him to a mixed company, of which I was one, and the Sadducean Professor of Ophiology another. I am sorry to say that the latter when asked what he thought of it, only remarked: ‘Oh, those Bridgeford people will say anything’— a sentiment which met with the reception it deserved.   I have only to add that the picture is now in the Ashleian Museum; that it has been treated with a view to discovering whether sympathetic ink has been used in it, but without effect; that Mr Britnell knew nothing of it save that he was sure it was uncommon; and that, though carefully watched, it has never been known to change again.    

Shout out to Daniel T Richards to wrote in to me asking for a podcast about Rhetorical Situations. Couldn’t be more pleased to oblige a fan, if you have a request for an episode or a question or comment, feel free to email me at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and I’d love to see what I can do, but Daniel asked for rhetorical situations and there’s no time but the present, eh? so let’s get it started with a couple of clips, eh? Churchill, Henry V, and Aragon. Why are these such great speeches so good? Qtd Churchill There comes a precious moment in all of our lives when we are tapped on the shoulder and offered the opportunity to do something very special that is unique to us and our abilities, what a tragedy it would be if we are not ready or willing.” This moment is part of what L B in 1968 calls the rhetorical situationation. More fully: A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.   OK, let’s break this very dense quote apart. First there is exigence, which is a problem that exists in the world. It may be pressing, like an upcoming battle, or it may be gnawing, like an increase in teen violence or campus discrimination. It may even be potential: Henry V didn’t have to go to France, but there was a potential there. The key thing for Bitzer is that this exigence can be affected by discourse. So you may not be able to talk the orcs away from being evil, but you can talk the men fighting them into being brave. A speech churchil makes to parlement won’t make the Nazis retreat, but it may shore up patriotic interest.   So not every situation is a rhetorical situation, but only what Bitzer calls “finest hours” (3) when discourse can DO anything about it. As he says, a “mode-altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (4). Reality-changing discourse. That’s a pretty awesome power for rhetoric to have. But that’s not to say that Henry V or Churchill or Aragon can say whatever they want. In addition to the moment, to exigence, the rhetorical situation relies on an audience. When the men of the west or of England are standing at the start of a battle and can fight half-heartedly or lion-heartedly, they are able to be mediators of change. It wouldn’t do much good for Aragon to be giving this speech to Frodo or Sam—for one thing they aren’t men—but for another they aren’t an army. The army can fight one way or another and that action can impact the way the battle goes. For Bitzer, the audience must be agents of change. Finally, there are constraints. These are kind of the downers of the rhetorical situation. Contraints include what Aristotle calls artistic and inartistic proofs—things you can change and things you can do nothing about. So Henry V can’t talk more English solders into suddenly appearing in his army, he can’t talk the French into being weaker, and he can’t talk swords into tennis balls, but he can change beliefs and attitudes about the slim chances of success. These three elements: the moment, the audience and constraints, all combine in a delicate balance for the rhetorical situations. Bitzer points out Rhetorical situations can be mature or decayed, dissipate audience, lose to completing forces, etc (12). The rhetorical situation is a helpful way to think about seizing your own “precious moment” and a good way to analyze historical and fictional bits of rhetoric. But there are plenty of questions So does the rhetorical situation just alight on one? Would anyone have made the same speech at Henry V, or Churchil or Aragorn in the same situations? Maybe. John Patton says that there’s a two-sidedness to the rhetorical situation. You have to see it and also respond to it. As he says, 'the meaning of rhetorical situations is a dual process, partly a matter of recognition, i.e., clarity and accuracy of perception, and partly a matter of intentional, artistic, human action.' Some folks like Scott Consigny feel like Bitzer is a little fatalistic, suggesting the stars just align and suddenly you’re Churchill promising to fight in the streets. Richard Vatz also objects to the idea that exigence just sits out there, compelling a rhetor. Instead, Vatz suggests that the rhetor almost always creates the exigence. The rhetor is not pushed around by the rhetorical situation, but creates them. It might be hard to see this when you’re looking at an army in front of you, but remember when Henry V started this war? Yeah, when he, searched for legal claim to France, sent demands, was rebuffed with tennis balls and then gave this answer?   Henry V started this war. He put together the army and by doing so made France put together its army too. He created the rhetorical situation that led to him having to give the St. Crispin’s speech. It’s easy to spin around like this in circles: speech creates the situation (and the contsraints) which create the speech, but the key thing to remember about Vatz’s criticism is that elements of the rhetorical situation, exigence, audience, constraints, are always social constructions rather than objective realities. , So next time you’re addressing an army, ask yourself this question: did I make this situation or did this situation make me?        

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and outsider about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today we’re going to talk about the method to the madness, if madness were writing studies research. That’s right, we’re going to talking about a little edited volume called Writing studies Research in PRactice and you never knew methodology could be so fun.   But first, if you’re a regularly listener to the show, can I recommend you get on iTunes or whereever you find your podcasts and give Mere Rhetoric a review? It doesn’t have to be long or laudatory, but it would be nice for when I prepare reports for folks like the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas. This way I can let them know that people like the show and want it to continue.   Or if you want to, you can email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and a word about that: sorry! I recently realized that my email forwarding on that gmail account wasn’t correctly forwarding to my personal email, meaning that many of the lovely email people had been sending hadn’t been getting to me! As you can imagine, I am properly mortified, and I will begin to respond to the backlog and get on people’s requests for episodes as I respond. I thought no one had been writing! But now that I know, I’ll be (1) a lot more satisfied with the lovely responses and (2) getting back to everyone who emailed by didn’t get a response.   Okay, now on to the show. Writing studies research in practice is a relatively new book, published in 2012 and edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P Sheridan. It would be a nice addition to a doctoral course on composition research and methods, or for an advanted graduate student who is beginning to think about the kind of research she wants to do to approach a new project. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for a straight-up novice in research in compositoin. And here’s my reasoning why: this book mostly complicates some of the “traditional” methods of composition research, which might be a little disorienting for someone who isn’t familiar with the tradition. It’s a little like getting a triple-cake-chunk pineapple swirl mix-in sundae for someone’s first introduction to ice cream.   It consists of three main parts: part one “reimagining traditional research practices” talks about strategies we think we know well, like narratives or ethnographies.Part two, revisioning research in composition looks at controversal strategies like teacher research and autoenography, and part three reconceptualizeing metholodology and sites of inquiry. So you can hear how this text emphasizes the variation rather than the plain ol’ vanilla of research. There is a feminist methodology bent, which probably isn’t surprising because Sheridan and Nickoson are great feminist researchers and they themselves recognize that there are a few big, meaningful gaps in their book, including, like case study-research and surveys. Pretty much it leans heavily on lived research, like ethnography.   Here are some of the highlights of the text. First off, Doug Hesse, one of my favorite human beings and the reader on my dissertation has this fantastic chapter on “Writing Program Research” where he tells the story of how, plagued by the rumblings on campus that “students can’t even write a single correct sentence,” he “analyzed errors in a random sample of 215 papers selected from a corpus of 700 papers written by first-year students” and discovered “at least 85% of sentences were error free”--empirical proof that students can, in fact, write many correct sentences (144). But writing research isn’t just about snarky research design to stick it to your supercillious colleagues. Writing program research, like its cousin teacher research, seeks to advance actual practice as well as knowledge in the field. As Lee Nickoson puts it, “Teacher research is the study of a writing class conducted by one who teaches it with the ultimate purpose of improving classroom practice” (101). That means you care intimately about the results and you aren’t willing to sacrifice quality teaching for research, but that you create a holistic identity as teacher and researcher (105). You are always still a human being. That theme is also at the heart of Suresh Canagarajah’s chapter. We’ve done an episode on Canagarajah before and how deeply I love that man, so I refer you to it, but in this collection, he talks about autoethnography, an “emic and holistic perspective” where researchers “study the practices of a community of which they are members and they are visible in the research” (114).   Quick sidebar to define one of the terms there. Emic, means insider, and it’s opposed to Etic, which is outside. Etic is the traditional perspective of ethnography: some white guy, probably British, and I’m thinking with a pith hat and a monocle, goes to Papua New Guinea or somewhere and frowns disapprovingly and makes notes in a notebook while the native eat bugs. Emic is about coming from the inside, where traditions and culture are part of the researcher’s understanding, so the research isn’t just observations and interviews, but also their own understanding. Autoethnography is the ultimate in this emic perspective, where researcher and subject are the same person.   For narrative research, the individual is often also tied up. Debra Journet objects to the perspective that “narrative has sometimes been presented as a n almost direct way to represent qualities of personal experience” (15)--there are, she argues, many times of narrative that aren’t just personal, but a whole “range of narrative genres” (16). Cynthia Selfe and Gail E Hawisher, for instance, in their chapter about interviews point out that “we had grown increasingly dissatisfied with containing our questions to a standard set of prompts that elicited information but did not easily encourage follow-up questions and did not always encourage the kinds of narrative responses we found so richly laden with information” (39). These narrations don’t always come when the same list of questions are applied to each interviewee as traditionally happens in interviews. And because it’s Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, you know technology is going to come into play, and indeed, they talk about how participants in their interviews often supplement their answers with digital media, and how publishing should also include video clips and sound as well as alphabetic and static image representations (44-45).   And lest you think digital research is going to be 100% easier than other types of research Heidi A McKee and James E Porter present “the ethics of conducting writing research on the internet” The internet is such a strange space for research because it isn’t entirely anonymous and it isn’t entirely private. When you study a text on the internet, some are obviously public, like a professional blog, but others have an expectation of privacy, or at least a limited audience, like the forum posts on a website for recovering alcoholics. Many people may feel like they are interacting in a space of limited publicity when they send text messages or post in a forum or even join a game like World of Warcraft, and they feel this way despite any small print on the site to the contrary. So even if sometime is technically permissible by your IRB department, you will want to considerate about consulting with representative audiences, being open about being a researcher online, and being aware of the regulations and laws of the online spaces you research (256).   No matter what kind of research you do, the volume as a whole seems to say, be thoughtful about the participants you involve, the audiences you are writing for and your own involvement in the subject. Things aren’t always cut and dry in research and what starts as, for example, a survey, may end up expanding into a series of interviews or ethnographic observation. Research in writing studies is so variable and there are so many ways to do it, from discourse analysis to autoethnography. We study texts and we study people. We want to make sure that we do it responsibly, thinking about how what we claim to be studying will impact the folks we study, the folks we’re writing to and, ultimately, to us ourselves as researchers.

Welcome Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today's episode is brought to you by the Humanities Media Project and viewers like you, because today is a listener-suggested topic. Today we’re going to talk about Longinus, which is to say we’re going to talk about On the Sublime,which is to say we're going to talk about the sublime. We don’t know anything about Longinus except that he wrote On the Sublime, and, if we’re going to be strictly honest, we don’t know whether the author of On the Sublime  was actually named Longinus. So we have this key rhetorical text and the only thing we know for sure about its author is that they wrote this key rhetorical text.   Maybe that’s over-stating it. Maybe this was Dionysies of Halicarnassus. You remember him, Greek fellow, loved Romans? Maybe it was Hermagoras, whom you might remember from the stasis episode. Or it was this other bloke, Cassius Longinus. It’s all very confusing, and you’d think the Roman empire could come up with a naming system that didn’t rely on like the same four names and a series of embarrassing nicknames, but evidentally not. Also, authorship wasn’t so well documented. So all of this is conjecture, but  for the sake of the podcast today we’re going to say that Longinus was the author of “On the Sublime“ and leave it at that.   Historical vaguaries aside, in “On the Sublime,” Longinus advances a poetics that is rhetorical not in the sense that he expects poetry to develop and elaborate explicit persuasive claims, but rather seeks “to transport [audiences] out of themselves” (163). You may be familiar with a bastardization of the word “sublime” that talks about sublime chocolate or music, but the idea of the sublime is that it’s such a consuming process that you lose yourself completely. The chocolate becomes your entire experience.This  “irresistible power and mastery” has greater influence over the audience than any deliberate persuasive argument (163). Is the sublime, then a competitor with rhetoric or is it a mode of rhetoric? Is the sublime just high-falutin’ flowery language or something more? Longinus is vague about this point.   While the sublime comes from the world of poetry, it doesn’t exclusively reign there. Longinus may keep a traditional view of persuasion out of the sublime, but he does allow for sublime moments in traditionally persuasive orations, including legal discourse. Yes, in addition to waterfalls and chocolate, legal briefs can be sublime. I knew that, but then, I watched a lot of old school Law and Order. In such cases, when a sublime visualization is “combined with factual arguments it not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them” (223). Both poets and orators, then, can use the sublime to control an audience and “carry the audience away ” (227). With such incredible power, sublimity seems to be the ultimate skill to develop.            But while Longinus advises us in methods to improve our likelihood of sublimity (choosing weighty words for weighty topics, considering the context, borrowing from the greats, etc.), ultimately he gives us no great writer, nor any great work, as a model of constant sublimity. The sublime comes rather as “a well-timed flash” or “a bolt of lightning” that “shatters everything […] and reveals the power of the speaker” (163-4). This lightning bolt metaphor highlights some of Longinus’ difficulty in teaching someone to be sublime: sublimity is sudden, short, and almost divine in origin.  As you put it, the sublime “takes you out of this world into a heavenly life” (22/02/2011).                       But just as we aren't so sure whether Longinus wrote On the Sulime, we also seem to be constantly redefining what the Sublime is and how much we think Longinus' conception of the Sublime should set the tone for every else. Pretty much, everyone wants to redefine the sublime. The modern mania for the sublime started in in 1671 with a translation of Longinus into the French. But the real break for Longinus in the modern work was Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757. That date make clue you in that this is the Burke who was a politician in the late 18th century, not the 20th century rhetorician. This Burke, Edmund, defined the sublime a little more narrowly: the sublime is “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger.” I can see where Burke is coming from on this--what takes you away from the every day and focuses your attention more than the threat of imminent danger? Still, it somewhat restricts what the sublime can be. Now rather  than just a “bolt of lightning” it’s a bolt of lightning on a dark and stormy night.            This broodiness led to the sublime being picked up by all those romantic poets fifty years later, who loved to stand on top of Alpine cliffs in the fog and stare into the abyss and all that. Wordsworth, who was always have out-of-body sublime moments, wrote in “Tintern Abbey” about “of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/ in which the burden of the mystery/ in which the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world”--certainly solemn stuff. Wordworth’s sister, Dorothy, made fun of some tourists who were unforuntate enough to talk with Coleridge at a waterfall. She relates “Yes, sir’, says Coleridge, ‘it is a majestic waterfall.’ ‘Sublime and beautiful,’ replied his friend.” Coleridge thought this was the funniest thing ever and straight away ditched the tourists and came to his poet friends to laugh about how people were overusing the word “sublime.” Jerk move on Coleridge’s part, but gets to the point of how the “sublime” was becoming a specific term for the Romantics.            This isn’t to say everyone in the 18th and early 19th century had one idea about what the sublime is. Kant, for instance, found the sublime not in nature, but in the “presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason.” Yes, while Longinus describes the sublimity of language and the Romantics found the sublime in nature, Kant can be carried away by an abstraction. For Kant, the sublime isn't just about aesthetics, but about the contrast between something very big and grand and the littleness of man—you can try to comprehend something incomprehendable when you encounter the sublime. That's heavy stuff.            The sublime has continued to fascinate modern rhetoricians and thinkers. More recently, in the 1980s Suzanne Guerlac has contended that Longinus' “On the Sublime" “has traditionally been read as a manual of elevated style and relegated to the domain of the 'merely' rhetorical. The rhetorical sublime has in turn been linked with a notion of affective criticism in which analysis of style and expression centers upon questions of subjective feeling and emotive force” (275). Instead, and remember this is the 80s, she salutes “on the sublime” as being an assault on simple subjectivity, disrupting binaries like form/content and means/ends (276). The sublime in Longinus is about being sincere, but a sincerity that can be forced.  This isn't the only contradiction, but one that is representative of the paradoxes of art. " The Longinian sublime implies a dynamic overlapping, or reciprocity, between the orders of the symbolic and the imaginary" writes Guerlac (286).            The little essay that maybe Longinus wrote, or maybe someone else wrote, has had a big influence in art, literature and rhetoric. Also, evidentally, waterfall-watching.  Do you know what else is influential? Email I get. Even those I don't respond to for like, more than a year.  That's my bad. Mike Litts wrote in asking for an episode on the sublime back in 2015, but here we are, a year and a half later and by gum, we've done an episode about the sublime. If you like delayed gratification, please feel free to write in to mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and suggest your own favorite topic. No, I'm just kidding. I think I fixed my email problem, so if you write in, I'll respond in less than a year. And won't that be sublime?      

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, we have Jacob in the booth and we’re here together because of the support of the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas at Austin. And the reason we’ve gathered together in the beautiful recording studio in the basement of Mezes Hall is to talk about the work of George Campbell.   Campbell, like his contemporary Hugh Blair, was a rhetorician-preacher and he believed that he could teach preachers to preach better through modernizing classical rhetoric. Campbell started out in law as a young buck and gradually gravitated towards a clergical vocation. From there, he became the teacherly sort of minister, becoming a scriptorian, translating the gospels of the New Testament and tinkering around with what would be one of his crowning works: the Philosophy of Rhetoric.  According to C. Downey, this guide was not just for rhetoricians and not just for preachers, also the book really reached the best-sellers list in the 19th centurey. The book had 39 editions by the 20th century (9-10). It was a bedrock for many of the rhetoric textbooks that dominated in the 19th century. But before it was one of the defining texts of Enlightenment rhetoric, it was a work-in-progress read before Campbell’s friends in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, a bunch of like-minded brainy sorts who liked to spend time philosophizing together.   Sidebar: I don’t know why people think writing groups and faculty writing retreats are new-fangled productivity machines. These Enlightenment blokes were always clumping up together to read and think and write together. I’m as much of a loner as any other scholar in the humanities, but I figure if it works for Campbell and Blair and their lot, it’s worth giving it a shot, right?   Like all of his Scottish Enlightenment buddies, Campbell was engaged in the project of making the study of human activities more empircally demonstrable. Making the humanities more scientific, if you want. Campbell went back to classical sources of rhetorical thought and read them across the budding psychological sciences. Instead of “servile imitation” of the classic authors (vi), he promoted a modern interpretation that recognizes that things have changed since the classical treastises were written. That being said, he’s not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.   And, brother, did this guy like threes. That must be the Aristotlian influence creeping in. It might be worthwhile for you to imagine a chart with three columns when you think about Campbell’s ideas, as we go through the podcast you can start to fill in these columns in all of Campbell’s triparts.   One of the key Campbell trios are that the best langauge is “current, national and reputable.” Lets take a moment and dice out these three. Current is a modern gloss on what Campbell calls “present”--which doesn’t just refer to the time, but also to a metaphorical sense of place. Present is the opposite of past and also the opposite of absent. For a rhetor to use old-timey language is to alienate from the audeince. Similarly, Campbell, good Scotsman of the Enlightenment that he was, is a booster of national language, but this goes beyond the Eton accent--national langauge means there is no universal grammar. Again, we don’t need to stick to the same language rules of Cicero’s Latin when we’re writing and speaking in English.ure use must be (1) English (2) in the English idiom and (3) “employed to express the precise meaning which custom hath affixed to them” (170). If this all sounds cheerfully revolutionary, don’t worry, his idea of reputable will burst your bubble. Like the other “common sense” philosophers, Campbell assumed that one class--his class--were the proprietors of proper langauge. So while he wasn’t a chronological or Latinate snob, he wasn’t advocating a rich brogue riddled with slang over the pulpit. When your group gets to set common sense, everything else is nonsense (cf “Enlightenment Rhetoric” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric 233).Most important question: “is it reputable, nationals and present use, which, for brevity’s sake I shall hereafter simply demoninate good use” (154).  Over all, he argued that English is richer than even Latin (383) and language ought to “prove bars again licentiousness, without being checks to liberty” (380). PSo there’s your first trio: national, current, reputable langauge.   Campbell focuses on the audience as the heart of rhetoric, specifically, the psychological states of the audience. People care if the topic is important, close to their time or place, related to those concerned or interested in the consequences (91-94). This leads to our next set of threes: imagination, reason and passion. Members of the audience have all three of these parts and the rhetor must address them all three (77-86). Say you have these three main ideas, which come from Cicero, from Augustine, from everyone: rhetoric appeals to imagination, memory and passion. It delights, instructs and moves. With Campell, these three modes of rhetoric line up to genres, too. Imagination is related to epic; Passion related to tragitiy and comedy and memory fits in with satire and, through it, persuasion.Additionally important are Campbell’s listed aims related to these three: enlighten the understanding, please the imagination, move the passions or to influence the will” (11), in apparent order of importance (15)   Emotion was especially interested to Campbell. He Emphasizes the passions of the audience (82). Through diminishing or counter-suggesting a different emotion, the rhetorc can calm an emotion (97), especially implicitly rather than explicitly (98).The rhetor can leave “the effect upon their minds […] to nature” (96). If people are riled up about Catholics, as happened in Campbell’s Scotland, you can respond in a peaceful, calm way, as he did in a pamphlet called An Address to the People of Scotland, upon the Alarms that have been Raised in Regard to Popery urging people to calm the eff down.   The final three part from Campbell that I want to talk about is a little more complex. It starts with two seeming opposites: probability and plausibility. Probability and plausibility are “daughters of the same father, Experience” Probability is begot of Reason and Plausibility by Fancy (89-90). So you can think about this in terms of literature and art. This last week I chain-watched a sci-fi fantasy coming-of-age series about four nerds in the eighties. Even though my reason balks at the idea of monsters in the walls and nefarious psychic experiments, my imagination, my fancy, accepts that if there were monsters in the walls and nefarious psychic experiments, this show describes exactly how nerds in the eighties would respond to it.  My experience with the world tells me something about monsters in the walls and something else about pre-teen nerds in the 80s. Or in Campbell’s explanation, probability “results from evidence and begets belief”(86) while plausibility “ariseth chiefly from the consistency of the narration” being “natural and feasible” (87). Campbell is skeptical, as you might expect a Scottish Enlightenment preacher to be, of drawing on the artist for evidence.“Testimony of the poet goes for nothing” he writes “His object […] is not truth, but likelihood” (89)   So there are our three threes: language should be current, national and reputable; reasoning draws on imagination, memory and passion; experience leads to both probablility and plausibility. I have to admit, while researching this podcast, I came to a newfound appreciation of Campbell. His wikipedia page, for example, is severely lacking. I should probably do something about that now, huh? If you have a topic you think gets shorted, why not drop me a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Oh, or speaking of technology if you like the podcast, you can get on ITunes or whereever you get your podcasts and leave us a good review. Letting us know what you like lets us bring you even more. It’s like probable as well as plausible.  

abermas and public sphere theory Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movemnts who have shaped rhetorical history. special thanks to the rhetoric society of america student chatper at the university of texas at Austin.  I’m Mary Hedengren and today I’m joined by Laura Thain.   Have you spent much time thinking about coffee? If you’re a grad student, the answer is probably yes, but really do you spend much time thinking about what coffee did, especially coffee shops, especially in Europe? Coffee houses were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century and they spread quickly throughout all of Europe. By the 17th century, coffeehouses, not taverns, were the places to gather in your neighborhood. And if you think about how caffeine-fueled coffeehouses differed from the sloppy drunkenness of taverns, it’s little surprise that coffeehouses quickly gained a reputation as being a place of open political and intellectual discussion. 15th century Ottomans and 20th century Seattleites alike saw the coffeeshop as a place to open up dangerous conversation. The Spanish king Charles II even tried to restrict coffee houses on the grounds that there were places where “the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” (qtd Times 23 Feb 2008). Gathering around a cup of Joe seemed to set everyone to riotous conversation, to the public discussion that led to revolutions in America and France in the 18th century, and because of this the coffeehouse became the place of obsession for 20th century philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas noted an 18th century seachange in the relationship between people and sovereign. Earlier, people supported (or didn’t) their sovereign as a symbol for them: France is the king and the king is France, therefore it’s to the benefit of France for the king of France to be as rich and grand as possible, regardless of how this impacts the everyday peasant on the street. But in the 18th century, a rise in coffeehouses and the conversations they engender accompanied an increase in newspapers reading clubs, journals, salons and other groups of public political conversation. This Habermas calls the öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere. The public sphere was a dialogue, a conversation of opinions. “Is the king France? Should the king be France? Let’s hear the pros and cons, then!” Habermas drew a direct line between the increase of coffeehouses and their conversations and the toppling of the French monarchy. This public sphere isn’t a given and not every coffeehouse, town hall meeting etc. is going automatically be a public sphere. In fact, Habermas identified some of the identifying characteristics and requirements for a public sphere. 1-    First, the public sphere requires a temporary disregard of public status, according to Habermas. He believed in “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether” () . It doesn’t work if only the princes of France get their say and the merchants don’t. Everyone needs a place at the coffee table.   In many ways, our conception of a “public sphere” as ordinary citizens in the US is so pervasive that we have trouble imagining a world without one.  But what Habermas points out is that before the birth of a public sphere in the eighteenth century, there was little linking the private sphere (the discourse of ordinary subjects of the sovereign) to the bureaucratic sphere (the discourse of the sovereign to his subjects).  Imagine if laws and edicts were all that existed to communicate between king and subject. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerged as a unique space for what were once private murmurings to have real and legitimate impact upon bureaucratic procedure under certain rhetorical constraints.  This was no pitchforks-and-barn-burning kind of conversation, but rather, the emergence of a new rhetorical practice that rapidly came to be dominated by a nascent middle class of people: the bourgeois.     2-    Talking about private and bureaucratic coming together is tricky, though.  “Private” doesn’t mean what we might think today.  In the public sphere, there needed to be some sort of common issue, a public issue of common concern. Before the emergence of a public sphere, according to Habermas, the kinds of things we think about as very public were private conversations among citizens, if they were articulated at all.  For instance, the question of whether France needs a king is a question that everyone in France is concerned about. The question of whether wine dealers in the northwest of Paris should ration a particularly good vintage is not. The question of whether Pierre ought to marry Margarite is definitely not. Often these common concerns were rarely discussed—they were given. The civic or religious authorities told the people that France needs a king and that’s that. Until the people begin sitting around in coffeehouses started asking the questions about things that they all had an interest in.   The idea that the coffee house became a new space for people who previously had no visible platform to communicate with existing power structures is really important because it signals the emergence of not just a new place to talk but a new center of institutional authority.  Habermas argues that the public sphere is an important and new site of power in the 18th century.  This might sound familiar to you if you’ve heard talk about “public discourse” in the things you read and discuss in your own life.  Public discourse and a space to have that discourse in is really important, but it’s important to understand how that space happened to read how we might read what the public sphere means as a concept today.   3-    Habermas argues that the public sphere is a public good, but in order to do so he claims that once-private-now-public issues had to be open for anyone to discuss. As Habermas said “The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” In coffee houses and salons, there were no rules about who was allowed to open their mouths.   The coffeehouse seems to fulfill these expectations, which is probably why Habermas was so keen on the example. But the coffeehouse wasn’t perfect and these imperfections highlight some of the problems of the public sphere in general. For instance, there were rules about who could get in the coffeehouse. While Germany made some exceptions for silent baristas, in France and Germany, women were personae non gratae in these vibrant spaces of public debate. It’s all very well to say coffeehouses were inclusive, except where they weren’t. And for that reason, Habermas’s dreamy ideal of the public sphere is seen by some as just a dream, a bourgeois dream that pretends to be inclusive but actually excludes voices of women and other minorities. The scholar who is mostly closely associated with a criticism of Habermas’s public sphere is American scholar Nancy Fraser. Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere makes her three points about the public sphere to challenge Habermas’. While Habermas emphasizes disregard of public status, common issues and the freedom to open your mouth and speak, Fraser refutes these same points. When Habermas says that everyone is equal in the coffeehouse, Fraser contends that this is actually a “bracketing [of] inequalities of status” and far from removing these differences of status, “such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.” Instead of saying—inauthentically—that there is equality in the public sphere, Fraser recommends instead that we “unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them.” Instead of saying that a prince and a merchant are the same in the coffeehouse, some of the conversation should be about the fact that they aren’t and why. Fraser also challenges the idea that there are common issues in the public sphere. She says that there “no naturally given … boundaries” between public issues (or “common concern”) and private ones. So remember the example about how the question of whether France needs a king being a public one while Pierre marrying Margarite is a private one? Well, what if the names were instead Louie XV and Marie of Poland? Is that a public issue or a private one? Fraser points out that many issues that were once personal issues like domestic abuse, have become public issues. As she says, "Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation we succeeded in making it a common concern". Finally, Fraser points out that not everyone is welcome to the table. Women were excluded everywhere—in clubs and associations—philanthropic, civic professional and cultural—was anything by accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the arena, the training ground and eventually the powerbase of a stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class’” The deception that such spheres were truly public justified the male, middle classes in making decisions that were for ‘all of France’ when, in actuality, hegemonic dominance had excluded many participants. Instead, Frase suggests that theses marginalized groups form their own public spheres, which she called Counterpublics. These counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs"   Another site of vibrant research in public sphere theory is in the field of spatial rhetorics.  While Habermas arguably saw the public sphere as an ideological shift that just happened to be housed in Europe’s coffee house and salon culture, scholars like Henri LeFebvre, Edward Soja, David Fleming, and UT Austin’s own Casey Boyle are increasingly interested in talking about, to quote Dr. Boyle, “how spaces affect our shared practices and sense of identity.”  To these scholars, the coffee shop as a physical, embodied space is as important to the structural transformation of the public sphere as the folks who inhabited it.             So the next time you visit your favorite cafe and order yourself a hot beverage, think about what kind of public you’re a part of. What, if anything, do you have in common with the people around you? What are some power differentials between you? What “common concerns” do you have? And what do you think about the king of France?        

Habermas and public sphere theory Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movemnts who have shaped rhetorical history. special thanks to the rhetoric society of america student chatper at the university of texas at Austin.  I’m Mary Hedengren and today I’m joined by Laura Thain.   Have you spent much time thinking about coffee? If you’re a grad student, the answer is probably yes, but really do you spend much time thinking about what coffee did, especially coffee shops, especially in Europe? Coffee houses were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century and they spread quickly throughout all of Europe. By the 17th century, coffeehouses, not taverns, were the places to gather in your neighborhood. And if you think about how caffeine-fueled coffeehouses differed from the sloppy drunkenness of taverns, it’s little surprise that coffeehouses quickly gained a reputation as being a place of open political and intellectual discussion. 15th century Ottomans and 20th century Seattleites alike saw the coffeeshop as a place to open up dangerous conversation. The Spanish king Charles II even tried to restrict coffee houses on the grounds that there were places where “the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” (qtd Times 23 Feb 2008). Gathering around a cup of Joe seemed to set everyone to riotous conversation, to the public discussion that led to revolutions in America and France in the 18th century, and because of this the coffeehouse became the place of obsession for 20th century philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas noted an 18th century seachange in the relationship between people and sovereign. Earlier, people supported (or didn’t) their sovereign as a symbol for them: France is the king and the king is France, therefore it’s to the benefit of France for the king of France to be as rich and grand as possible, regardless of how this impacts the everyday peasant on the street. But in the 18th century, a rise in coffeehouses and the conversations they engender accompanied an increase in newspapers reading clubs, journals, salons and other groups of public political conversation. This Habermas calls the öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere. The public sphere was a dialogue, a conversation of opinions. “Is the king France? Should the king be France? Let’s hear the pros and cons, then!” Habermas drew a direct line between the increase of coffeehouses and their conversations and the toppling of the French monarchy. This public sphere isn’t a given and not every coffeehouse, town hall meeting etc. is going automatically be a public sphere. In fact, Habermas identified some of the identifying characteristics and requirements for a public sphere. 1-    First, the public sphere requires a temporary disregard of public status, according to Habermas. He believed in “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether” () . It doesn’t work if only the princes of France get their say and the merchants don’t. Everyone needs a place at the coffee table.   In many ways, our conception of a “public sphere” as ordinary citizens in the US is so pervasive that we have trouble imagining a world without one.  But what Habermas points out is that before the birth of a public sphere in the eighteenth century, there was little linking the private sphere (the discourse of ordinary subjects of the sovereign) to the bureaucratic sphere (the discourse of the sovereign to his subjects).  Imagine if laws and edicts were all that existed to communicate between king and subject. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerged as a unique space for what were once private murmurings to have real and legitimate impact upon bureaucratic procedure under certain rhetorical constraints.  This was no pitchforks-and-barn-burning kind of conversation, but rather, the emergence of a new rhetorical practice that rapidly came to be dominated by a nascent middle class of people: the bourgeois.     2-    Talking about private and bureaucratic coming together is tricky, though.  “Private” doesn’t mean what we might think today.  In the public sphere, there needed to be some sort of common issue, a public issue of common concern. Before the emergence of a public sphere, according to Habermas, the kinds of things we think about as very public were private conversations among citizens, if they were articulated at all.  For instance, the question of whether France needs a king is a question that everyone in France is concerned about. The question of whether wine dealers in the northwest of Paris should ration a particularly good vintage is not. The question of whether Pierre ought to marry Margarite is definitely not. Often these common concerns were rarely discussed—they were given. The civic or religious authorities told the people that France needs a king and that’s that. Until the people begin sitting around in coffeehouses started asking the questions about things that they all had an interest in.   The idea that the coffee house became a new space for people who previously had no visible platform to communicate with existing power structures is really important because it signals the emergence of not just a new place to talk but a new center of institutional authority.  Habermas argues that the public sphere is an important and new site of power in the 18th century.  This might sound familiar to you if you’ve heard talk about “public discourse” in the things you read and discuss in your own life.  Public discourse and a space to have that discourse in is really important, but it’s important to understand how that space happened to read how we might read what the public sphere means as a concept today.   3-    Habermas argues that the public sphere is a public good, but in order to do so he claims that once-private-now-public issues had to be open for anyone to discuss. As Habermas said “The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” In coffee houses and salons, there were no rules about who was allowed to open their mouths.   The coffeehouse seems to fulfill these expectations, which is probably why Habermas was so keen on the example. But the coffeehouse wasn’t perfect and these imperfections highlight some of the problems of the public sphere in general. For instance, there were rules about who could get in the coffeehouse. While Germany made some exceptions for silent baristas, in France and Germany, women were personae non gratae in these vibrant spaces of public debate. It’s all very well to say coffeehouses were inclusive, except where they weren’t. And for that reason, Habermas’s dreamy ideal of the public sphere is seen by some as just a dream, a bourgeois dream that pretends to be inclusive but actually excludes voices of women and other minorities. The scholar who is mostly closely associated with a criticism of Habermas’s public sphere is American scholar Nancy Fraser. Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere makes her three points about the public sphere to challenge Habermas’. While Habermas emphasizes disregard of public status, common issues and the freedom to open your mouth and speak, Fraser refutes these same points. When Habermas says that everyone is equal in the coffeehouse, Fraser contends that this is actually a “bracketing [of] inequalities of status” and far from removing these differences of status, “such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.” Instead of saying—inauthentically—that there is equality in the public sphere, Fraser recommends instead that we “unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them.” Instead of saying that a prince and a merchant are the same in the coffeehouse, some of the conversation should be about the fact that they aren’t and why. Fraser also challenges the idea that there are common issues in the public sphere. She says that there “no naturally given … boundaries” between public issues (or “common concern”) and private ones. So remember the example about how the question of whether France needs a king being a public one while Pierre marrying Margarite is a private one? Well, what if the names were instead Louie XV and Marie of Poland? Is that a public issue or a private one? Fraser points out that many issues that were once personal issues like domestic abuse, have become public issues. As she says, "Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation we succeeded in making it a common concern". Finally, Fraser points out that not everyone is welcome to the table. Women were excluded everywhere—in clubs and associations—philanthropic, civic professional and cultural—was anything by accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the arena, the training ground and eventually the powerbase of a stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class’” The deception that such spheres were truly public justified the male, middle classes in making decisions that were for ‘all of France’ when, in actuality, hegemonic dominance had excluded many participants. Instead, Frase suggests that theses marginalized groups form their own public spheres, which she called Counterpublics. These counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs"   Another site of vibrant research in public sphere theory is in the field of spatial rhetorics.  While Habermas arguably saw the public sphere as an ideological shift that just happened to be housed in Europe’s coffee house and salon culture, scholars like Henri LeFebvre, Edward Soja, David Fleming, and UT Austin’s own Casey Boyle are increasingly interested in talking about, to quote Dr. Boyle, “how spaces affect our shared practices and sense of identity.”  To these scholars, the coffee shop as a physical, embodied space is as important to the structural transformation of the public sphere as the folks who inhabited it.             So the next time you visit your favorite cafe and order yourself a hot beverage, think about what kind of public you’re a part of. What, if anything, do you have in common with the people around you? What are some power differentials between you? What “common concerns” do you have? And what do you think about the king of France?        

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas of Austin for the support for this podcast. Also, thanks to Jacob in the booth who makes these podcasts sound so great.   Okay, when we say rhetorical history, we know that rhetoric is a big of a swiper discipline, right? I mean, we’ve had philosophers featured on the podcast, educational psychologists, those sorts, and today we get to talk about an applied linguistics, Ken Hyland. But before we get into the skinny on Ken, it might be worthwhile to first talk about what applied linguistics is.   Applied linguistics is a little bit like rhetoric in that it’s a rather interdisciplinary field itself. Simply put, it’s a practical and applied approach to linguistics, which means that it covers everything from computer programming theory to translation. The leading journal in applied linguistics is called, creatively enough, Applied Linguistics. Its editor in chief is Ken Hyland.   And that brings me to get to talk about Ken. By the way, I get to be on a first-name basis with him, even though I’ve never met him, because I wrote my dissertation on disciplinarity and that happens to be Ken’s area. I’ve read a lot of books and articles by Ken Hyland. There’s no wikipedia article on Ken, for some bizarre reason, but I’ve read enough “about the author” blurbs to tell you that Ken is a brainy British bloke who taught English to speakers of other languages all over the world, seeking deeper and deeper into applied linguistics along the way. Now he has a list of publications as long as my arm and teaches and works in Hong Kong where he still keeps publishing and writing  about, among other things, academic discourse, graduate students, and how non-Anglophone natives write and publish academic writing.   If I were to recommend two books from Ken Hyland, I would recommend Disciplinary Discourses and its spiritual sequel, Disciplinary Identities, but there are four pages of books on Amazon for you to puruse. Have I mentioned how prolific Ken is?   In Disciplinary Discourses he interrogates how academic writing exposes the hierarchies beneath it. Academic writing genres "represent careful negotiations with, and considerations of, their colleagues" (1). Writing "helps to create those disciplines by influencing how members relate to one another, and by determining who will be regarded as members, who will gain success and what will count as knowledge" (5). Writing, in other words, isn’t just a step that allows disciplines to share research--it is very the constitutive force of disciplines.   Hyland puts it eloquently:  "the persuasiveness of academic discourse... does not depend on the demonstration of absolute fact, empirical evidence or impeccable logic, it is the result of effective rhetorical practices, accepted by community members" (8).   But not everyone in that community is esteemed equally. That community includes people on the edges "competing groups and discourses, marginalized ideas, contested theories, peripheral contributors and occasional members" (9). A graduate student won’t--and in some ways, can’t--write the same kind of article or book that a long-established luminary in the field will. Because of this, people have to position themselves within the project they’re attending, including the hedges, qualifications and even citations that they use. Disciplinary genres are only abstract until they determine whether you put food on the table. As Hyland says, "disciplines seek to ensure that accounts of new knowledge conform to the broad generic practices they have established, while writers are often willing to employ these practices because of a desire to get published and achieve recognition" (170). You might not like writing a lit review, but if need to do it to get published and get a job, you’ll learn to comply. Disciplinary Identity follows up the work  Discources started in ascribing genres to sociological conditions. Disciplinary Identity introduces two key terms that describe how practitioners relate to their disciplinary communities: proximity and positioning. Proximity refers to how align yourself as a member of a discipline. This proximity includes “identification /with/ and /by/ others" (29) For instance, if you’re a continental philosophy theory-head, you might show that allegiance by citing a lot of Derrida and Levinas and submitting to the right journals to support that work. But you also might have other people like reviewers, editors and colleagues describe your work as continental in bent. We aren’t the only ones who get to label us. The other key term is positioning--positioning relates to how we place our own work as part of the variation within the discipline, or, in Ken Hyland’s words, ”appropriating the discoursal categories of our communities as our own" (35). So we might be part of the continental philosophy club, but our unique contribution is to apply those philosophies to, say, invocation of international law in 20th century literature,  or some other variation that stamps our own contribution. Proximity is where we belong and positioning is where we take our place. It’s not surprising, then, that identity should be such a key part of how academic writing proceeds. Identity, generally, is "crafted and managed across time and across situations" and "our identities are the product of our lives in different communities" (15), and so in disciplinary writing our disciplinary identities are mediated by the departments we join, the journals we aspire to publish in, the collections we edit. For Ken Hyland, our identities are neither entirely stable and inflexible nor are they entirely socially determined, but mediated through the groups we aspire to join and what those groups decided to hold dear before we even showed up to the party. This tension leads to constant change where " Differences of opinion are normal and natural, but often hidden by a veneer of agreement and a common symbolic discourse which constructs a boundary to outsiders" (12).   Think about the most recent time you tried to join a new disciplinary group. Maybe this was in a graduate course where you had to learn the conventions of a new scholarly genre or maybe you were repurposing one kind of research to a new journal that you’ve never attempted to publish in. You were probably hyper aware of the mistakes you were making, while for those who were well-established in the discipline didn’t know how to explain the mistakes that you’re making. This happens to everyone in a new field. My rock star advisor Davida-freakin-Charney, told me that when she went from writing about scientific and professional writing to writing about the psalms, she had to re-learn how to write for the religious studies field. Disciplines are weird. They also change a lot. Hyland points out that  today’s  discipline doesn’t look yesterday’s and won’t look like tomorrow’s. So if Davida were writing about psalms when she started her career, it wouldn’t even necessarily look like the work she does now. That’s because, as Hyland puts it, “ Boundaries of scholarship shift and dissolve [...] New disciplines spring up at the intersections of existing ones and achieve international recognition [...] while other decline and disappear" (23). Disciplines change, but "identity and discipline can be understood only by reference to each other. Each is emergent, mutable and interdependent" (43). So your identity in your discipline might shift under you.   So what are you to do if you’re in a discipline that isn’t fully formed or is extremely cross-disciplinary? What do you do if you’re in, say, applied linguistics?  I guess it follows that your academic identity is going to keep shifting around, then, as your discipline slips around. Or you might find yourself sliding from one sub discipline to another, all while building a clear research agenda. You might, like Ken Hyland, focus on academic writing, but apply that to English language learners, metadiscourse, pedagogy and assessment.   And then we end where we began, with my deep admiration of Ken Hyland and his work. If there’s someone you admire, or a scholar or work that is part of your dissertation, you really ought to tell me all about it. Drop me a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and tell me who you feel on a first-name basis with.

On Christian Teaching   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movement that have shaped rhetorical history. Big thanks to the University of Texas’ Humanities Media Project for supporting the podcast.   Today we get to talk about the saint who brought classical rhetoric into the realm of Christian homiletics. Augustine was a fourth century saint whose life in someways demonstrates the great sea-changes in the Mediterranean world of rhetoric, education and religion. His father was pagan, his mother was Christian and young Augustine describes himself as a bit of a genius hedonist in his Confessions. His teachers were supposedly terrible, but he mastered the standards of a Roman education—Virgil and Cicero. He eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Carthage, Rome and Milan. He taught rhetoric all told for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, before his eventual conversion to Christianity and vocation as a priest and the bishop of Hippo. He must have spent a lot of time pondering the question of how his previous career as one who taught other people how to persuade could be reconciled with his new religion’s emphasis on inspiration. If God will give the preacher exactly the words which he needs, either through scripture or through divine inspiration, is there any space for a Christian rhetoric? He started working on his definition of Christian rhetoric as early as the 390s, but On Christian Teaching wasn’t finished until 427, only three years before his death. Throughout those forty years, Augustine must have thought about the practical question of whether Christian preachers could be trained to give better sermons, much as he had spent more than a decade teaching young men in the principles secular rhetoric.   The first argument that Augustine has to make is that Christian teaching can be rhetorical. Rhetoric was seen as pagan and more than a little sneaky. Augustine argues that rhetoric may be used by Christians as a means of spoiling of Egypt to adorn the temples of Jerusalem (Green’s 64-7). The biblical allusion he’s making comes from the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt who took pagan gold with them to make their own religious items. Augustine’s metaphor implies that rhetoric, like the gold itself, is valuable, but it must be melted down and essentialized from its current pagan form. Augustine goes on to argue that Christians not only benefit from using rhetoric, but they avoid rhetoric at their own peril. Because “rhetoric is used to give conviction to both truth and falsehood” why should truth “stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood” (101)? So Augustine argues that rhetoric has both positive and defensive value, but as part of the melting down of the pagan gold idols, he recommends several key differences from classical rhetoric.   First, the similarities: there’s a lot that Augustine believes that the Christian can be taught about oratory, especially he classical idea of the three levels of speaking, high, middle and plain. He is very willing to steal the gold, also, of the three aims of the orator, to instrut, delight and move, which Augustine calls “to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure and with obedience” (87). Even the methods of instruction can be taken from the pagan rhetors. Imitation looms large, except more Paul, perhaps, and less Cicero. Augustine sees the bible as not just source material, but examplars. This is a very Classical way of teaching style. Augustine’s destinction between “things” (the content) and “signs” (the proclaimation of the content) is itself a very classical distinction. Augustine’s “Egyptian gold” seems to be of a very Platonic and Ciceronian ore, but he does melt it down to reform it into a more Christian shape through two important moves.     First, Augustine puts a heavy emphasis on the ethos of the speaker. Classical rhetoric, too, especially Cicero, who Augustine read, valued ethos, but for Augustine, the character of the preacher is important for practical as well as theological reasons. Augustine demands that the speaker live a good life and be in companionship with the inspiration of the Spirit of God. While Augustine admits that “A wise and eloquent speaker who lives a wicked life certainly educates many who are eager to learn, although he is useless to his own soul,” he believes that the speaker in front on an audience should, in the best case, be the best sort of man (142). The speaker who is a good person can teach through acts as well as through words. By living lives that were beyond reproach, the preachers who follow Augustine “benefit far more people if they practiced what they preached” (143). This follows Paul’s injunction to his own teacher-in-training, Timothy, when he says about bishops that they “must have a good report of them which are without” (1 Tim. 3:7). The people outside of the church as well as in, would be best to have a good example teaching them               But for Augustine, it’s not enough just to live a moral life—pagan Stoics and Epicureans can similarly follow rules they have made for themselves. Augustine also says that the preacher needs to pray and receive the Holy Ghost’s instruction. The preacher needs to pray in preparation “praying for himself and for those he is about to address” (121). He needs the prayer in order to be able to be an instrument of the Spirit and the audience need the prayer so they can be receptive to the message. The preacher gets the truth of the subject as well as the delivery from the prayer. As a vessel fro the truth the preacher prays so he “can utter what he had drunk in and pour out what has filled him” (121). Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). The idea behind this is that eloquence can come as does inspiration to speak the right thing—from the inspiration of the Spirit. Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). This idea that the preacher can appeal to divine eloquence instead of considering the rhetorical situation has made several 20th century scholars frustrated with Augustine. Kenneth Burke complains in Rhetoric of Motives that Augustine seeks “cajoling of an audience [not] routing of opponents.” I don’t pretend to know every Burke means, but that seems like a bit of an unfair argument because Augustine spends most of his time describing homiletics, a genre that operates on the assumption that the speaker and the audience are already in agreement on most of the key principles, if not the application and degree. Once they’ve put on the stiff suit, or itchy nylons and are sitting on the hard-backed pews at an unreasonable hour of a Sunday morning, you’ve already won a large part of the battle. Your audience is probably less diametrically opposed to you than would be, say, the senate in a legislative speech or the jury in a judicial speech. Stanley Fish objects that that Augstine’s dependence on spirit depreciates the speaker, which is actually a very old argument against Christian homiletics. In the Renaissance, rhetoric was a scary idea in general and we’ll talk about Wayne Rebhorn’s books about rhetoric debates later, but the key thing is that Augustine along with his critics had to deal with how rhetoric fits into one of the key Christian paradoxes: that men are both “little lower than the angels” and also “less than the dust of the earth.” Fish is right that Augustine’s reliance on spirit depreciates the agency of the speaker, but he neglects that for Augustine the steps necessary to receive the spirit—obedience and prayer—are responsibilities of the speaker, as necessary to a Christian canon of rhetoric as invention and arrangement. And it’s not just a Christian rhetoric that Augustine is describing here: it’s a neo-Platonic one. Plato’s influence is seen all over On Christian Doctrine. You might not remember from our episode on the Pheadrus, but Plato believed that eternal truths about, for example, beauty could be “remembered” in this world. What we are remembering are the glimpses of truth that we were able to see in a spirit world where we were able to control our rash desires. In other words, when we were obedient to our better selves. Augustine was a big fan of Plato, but as a rhetorician, he probably liked the pro-rhetoric Plato best. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine seeks a way to reconcile his neo-Platonist philosophy, Christianity and the idea that good preaching is a skill that can be teachable and improved. In the turn of the fourth century, Augustine witnessed both the 410 sack of Rome and the 430 Vandal invasion of Hippo, his own home. He lived right on the boundary between the end of the old, Roman Mediterranean world and the rise of the Christian European one. In all of the tumultuous change that was about to begin, Augustine recommended adaption, not revolution, as Christians reused the best rhetorical practices of the pagan world to build their new era.          

Epideictic Rhetoric   Intro and rebroadcast note     Today we’ll be talking about epideictic rhetoric because it’s probably my favorite of the three branches of Aristotelian rhetoric and it’s my birthday. It being my birthday actually has a lot to do with epideictic rhetoric because birthday speeches are one of the classic examples of epideictic rhetoric, the others being wedding toasts, eulogies, and Independence Day orations, except I think the people who came up with that last one probably lived a century ago because I have never attended an Independence Day oration, unless you count the one Bill Pullman gives in the movie Independence Day and that was probably not what they had in mind. But then again, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a birthday speech either.   The point I think I was making is that epideictic rhetoric is very old and very important. It’s likely older than either political or legal rhetoric, and might have grown out of the same TV-less fascination with sitting around hearing someone talk that makes human beings revere storytellers. Because it has a long history, epideictic rhetoric also has a long history of being studied. Manuals on how to give speeches date back to the 4th and 5th century bc and Greeks continued to be fascinated by epideictic rhetoric. It is one of the three branches of rhetoric that Aristotle describes in the Art of Rhetoric along with the judicial and deliberative. But while judicial rhetoric obviously concerns itself with obtaining justice and deliberative rhetoric obtains laws or political action, it’s less clear what the goal of epideictic rhetoric is. Judicial rhetoric can keep you out of jail or paying a fine; deliberative rhetoric can stop a tax or send you into war with Sparta; epideictic rhetoric—makes a happy day happier and a sad one sadder? It turns out that epideictic rhetoric actually does a great deal of work, but a subtler way than judicial or deliberative rhetoric. It’s sneaky, but lets break it down into three things you need to know about Epideictic rhetoric   The first thing you need to know is that Epideictic rhetoric, according to Aristotle, deals with praise and blame. So all of those special occasion pieces, like wedding toasts and obituaries, point out the good qualities of the people getting married or buried. They talk about the virtues of the people of the hour. For Aristotle, these virtues were well classified: of course, it’s Aristotle so it’s well classified. He mentions “justice, courage, self-control, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, practical and speculative wisdom" or "reason." You can imagine an obituary that pointed out how brave and gentle the deceased was, or a wedding toast that honored the good reason in choosing this particular spouse. This is the “praise” side of epideictic rhetoric, which is easy to imagine because we see it relatively often. Well, hopefully the people writing the wedding toasts and obituaries point out the good qualities instead of blame, although you could imagine occasions that didn’t sugar-coat everything. Blame speeches are a little more difficult to conjure up, but Guy Fawkes Day springs to mind, as do the journalistic obituaries for dictators and other villains. These blame speeches, for Aristotle, will focus on the opposites of those virtues, so instead of talking about bravery and gentleness of the departed, a blame-based obituary would talk about a tyrant’s cowardice and cruelty. So the first key thing to remember about epideictic rhetoric is that it engages with praise and blame according to some criteria, some list of virtues that are deemed important by that community.   That leads to the second key element about epideictic rhetoric. The praise and blame that people bring up are dependent on the community in which those people live. So to go back to the example of writing an obituary, if you lived in a community where gentleness was not considered a virtue, but, on the contrary, being feared was the most important attribute, you might say, “He was a cold-hearted, calculating tyrant” with utmost praise and affection. When we in our society hear that phrase, we recoil and feel the figure is being blamed, but another culture might interpret that phrase as praise. So one of the jobs of the rhetor is to understand what is praise- or blame-worthy in the community. Chaim Perleman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca have said, “The speaker engaged in epidictic discourse is very close to being an educator ” and must do the work of “promoting values shared in the community” (52). The community determines what is blamed and praised, but also what is praised and blamed tells you something about the community. So if “He was a cold-hearted, calculating tyrant” is considered praise in a community, you know a lot about what it’s like to live there. You know you want to clear out of there. But epideictic rhetoric both reflects and creates a community. Celeste Michelle Condit describes this process when she says that one of the key things epideictic does is “shape and share communities” (289). Sometimes the epideictic rhetoric is the first time that common attitudes and beliefs have been put into words, and if the articulation of those beliefs resonate with the audience, it defines that community. Jeffrey Walker describes this as a lyrical enthymeme. An enthymeme does this [shave and a hair cut knock] It’s hard not to finish it, isn’t it? In your mind you’re filling in the blanks—provided you’re familiar with the whole pattern [shave and a hair cut—two bits]. You could only know the whole pattern if you were part of the culture that made this pattern so common. Imagine the same thing happening in an epideictic speech. I say “Brooklyn,” you say “whaaat?” and I say “He was a cold-hearted, calculating tyrant” and you say “boo.” The audience fills in the gaps. In fact, if the audience doesn’t, Condit sees this as a good sign that you aren’t part of the community. This works in parts as well as over all. The speaker gets to decide which parts of the community to highlight and which parts to downplay. If someone praises something that only 80% of the community agrees with, the remaining 20% are, according to Condit, “likely to [feel] a sense of alienation from the community “ (290). So while almost everyone in our community agrees that being “a cold-hearted, calculating tyrant” is a bad thing, if the speaker then goes on and says, “and he didn’t like dogs—he liked cats!” then everyone in the audience who likes cats is going to start thinking, “Wait, what’s wrong with liking cats? I like cats. Should I not be liking cats? Do only cold-hearted, calculating tyrants like cats? Argh! I’m terrible, I don’t belong here, what am I doing?” So epideictic rhetoric will sometimes reflect the values of an audience, but sometimes it will create an audience, by alienating some members of the community.   So if the first point is that epideictic rhetoric praises and blames and the second point is that epideictic rhetoric will shape and share our communities, the last thing to remember about epideictic rhetoric is that it’s actually everywhere. At this point you might be saying, “wait a tick, didn’t you just say that Independence Day orations and birthday speeches are really rare?” Yes, but epideictic rhetoric doesn’t always have to be a formal speech. Remember the characteristics we mentioned—praise and blame and reflect the society’s values. Now think about everything that does that. A movie like Independence Day might do that. It praises the courage of Will Smith’s character and Jeff Goldbaum’s quirky intellectual obsession while criticizing cowardly politicians and naïve hippies. If you’re an American, the movie seems to argue, these are the values that you’ll admire. If you don’t admire those values, the movie can be alienating. Movies, song lyrics, TV shows, museums, even art and architecture can be epideictic, establishing what is praiseworthy and what is blameworthy. A lot of literature, in a broad sense, can be read as epideictic. The idea that the arts presents to an audience stories that we can either praise or blame creates a rhetorical background for the rhetoric of poetics. Scholars from Wayne Booth to Jeffery Walker have noted the way that literature creates an argument for our societies, teaching us values. Being assigned certain “great works” can be a way of indoctrinating young people to the values and attitudes of a community, as can being told that a book or movie is a “classic.” When epideictic rhetoric can be found everywhere, we recognize that we are always being persuaded to attitudes and values, even if not to specific actions.   So while today I might not be getting a birthday speech at my party, I will probably have a conversation with someone about achieving my birthday goal of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays (which are persuading me to espouse certain values), and we’ll listen to the French circus music I like (which may alienate those who don’t appreciate a swing accordion) and when someone wishes me a happy birthday, they will wish me the things we as a community have agreed will bring me happiness.  

Saving Persausion   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today we continue our month-long festival of all things deliberative rhetoric with a discussion of Saving Persuasion by Bryan Garston.   One thing exciting about his book is that it isn’t written by a rhetorician. Nope, not really. It’s written by a political scientist, which makes rhetoricians excited for two reasons. First, we always get excited when someone outside of our field thinks of us, much less praises us. Second, this guy is in political science! Political science, the people who are always saying things like “empty rhetoric” and “let’s cut through the rhetoric”! And here’s Bryan Garsten saying that persuasion has value, that it is worth saving. We could, as a discipline, collectively kiss him.   But that would take a while.   Also, it would be weird. Garsten argues that the political theorists of the Enlightenment got it all wrong; instead of appealing to some sort of universal common standard for political deliberation, we need to be more comfortable with how people actually think. Their feelings, attitudes and even biases. Because, in our age "efforts to avoid rhetorical controversy tend to produce new and potentially more dogmatic forms of rhetoric" we need to realize that "public reason was ingested by philosophers to quell religious controversy by subjecting debate to authoritative standard"-in Hobbes' case, representation, in Rousseau's "prophetic nationalism" and in Kant's "public reason." In each other these there’s an attempt to keep debate from happening—to push people out of the debate Garsten suggests that all three of these standards result in what he calls "liberal alienation"--the way that "from implied unanimity [...] dissenters feel alienated"--if you feel like you can't participate in "general deliberation," your concerns are unaddressed. The result is a polarization where those not invited to the deliberative party strike out against those who exclude them.   And yes, Garsten invokes Hitler and how German concerns were polarized instead of addressed. You can see how it happens. Post world war I, the Germans were excluded from the table of negotiating the peace. German concerns were left out of the deliberations, or were underplayed and Germany hurt bad after the war. By not being considered part of deliberations, many Germans become polarized and aggressive about groups they feel wronged them. And the exclusion begins again. Hitler says, “We all are hurt from WWI” and the people all murmur “yes, yes” and Hitler says, “German should be great again” and the people all murmur “yes, yes” and then Hitler says, “So we should eliminate Jews and other undesirables” and some people suddenly are out of the discussion again.. Instead, Garsten recommends that we make more space for alternative arguments, including those that are based in partiality, passion and privacy. He defends these elements against the common Habermasian critiques against them and says that what should count as deliberative argument is simply "when we make decisions deliberately [...] when we purposefully consider [...] the factors relevant to the our decision." We need to, instead of excluding our adversaries because of their "bad reasoning," see each other and respect each other for how the actual existing individual thinks and feels.   The example Garsten gives is Pres. Johnson, who was able to meet the small-town, white Texans where they were and position something like civil rights for black people in a way that would be palatable to them as well In all of this there is still the threat of demagoguery. As a potential solution, Garsten invokes Madison, whose theories about small, localized governments within a extended territory can be extended to deliberation: break issues down into smaller, localized, even interested issues, and make sure that there is plenty of space for things to be re-evaluated in the future, and that even if one issue is decided, it doesn't by extension mean that all of the other issues are. Small, piecemeal disputes are best. These institutional strictures structure the individual though and directions deliberation--there can' be any thought of "If I were king," because there aren't any kings to be had. Ultimately, Garsten promotes a defense of persuasion where we look at each other, and speak to each other--not that we're BFFs or brothers, but that we "pay attention to fellow citizens and to their opinions," not as their opinions should be constructed, or we think they should be, but as they are. The best purpose of persuasion is that it forces us to think beyond ourselves, to encounter others as they are, instead of trying to make them in our own image.   If you’re a political scientist with thoughts about rhetoric or a rhetorician with thoughts about politics, feel free to contact us either via email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com or our Twitter account @mererhetoric-k-e-d or put out a negative TV spot showing us in unflattering, slow-motion footage. Keep on persuading, my fellow rhetoricians!

Welcome to MR podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. We’re beholden to the humanities media project at the university of Texas for support for this re-recording that sounds so good. And This is a re-recording, so recognize that it might not fit into a normal timeline. This was supposed to come after the Encomium ofHelen written by Gorgias. It’s a come back written by my favorite sophist--Isocrates.   Isocrates had a complaint that Gorgias has not written a true encomium, but an apologia--a defense. He only defended her actions as not her fault instead of saying what she was actually excellent at. Isocrates complains that the encomium of helen is flaky, like the encomiums of bees or salt that other sophist have written. And, like so many of us, he uses this technicality to fuel his own attempt. It kind of reminds me of the Phaedrus, where Socrates wants to correct the speech he has just heard from another sophist. Something about seeing something done wrong makes you want to do it right.   And Isocrates is certain that is has been done wrong. First lines of his encomium demonstrate that: “There are some who think it a great thing if they put forward an odd, paradoxical theme and can discuss it without giving offense” Complaints against the sophist especially gorgias--Isocrates was one of those people who thought Gorgias was disreputable, moving around all the time, proving impossibles all the time, and, damningly, a political.  “The most ridiculous thing of all is that they seek to persuade us through their speeches that they have knowledge of politics” (9).  Writing about trivial things means that people will listen, admire--but not debate. By taking novel topics instead of political, they are easily the best--like being the best player of Calvinball. Instead, Isocrates praises in a political vein, using Helen as a figure for a contemporary controversy. But he does so in a roundabout way.   So to praise Helen, starts by praising her absconder. He mentions himself that “it would not yet be clear whether my speech is in praise of Helen or a prosecution of theseus” (21) But he argues by association: those who are “loved and admired her were themselves more admirable than the rest” (22). So, that argument goes, those who wanted Helen were the best sort, so she was, by assoication, pretty great. There’s a lot of praise of Theseus here for a supposed praise of Helen, but the Theseus Isocrates paints is a hero, not just of himself, like Hercules was, but for the Greek people in general he “freed the inhabitants of the city from great fear and distress” (25) and “thought it was better to die than to live and rule a site that was compelled to pay such a sorrowful tribute to its enemies” (27). Theseus was a selfless, poltical heo who has “cirtue and soundness of mind … especially in his managment of the city. He saw that those who seek to rule the citizens by force became slaves to others and those who put others’ lives in danger live in fear themselves” (32-33).   Indeed, there’s so much civic love for Theseus here that you set the idea that Isocrates here isn’t just talking about fiction, or myth, or history , but politics. This is not just a fun triffle , a parodoxologia like where Gorgias made Helen a hero instead of a villian. this is not paignion, a fun peice of exhition. George Kenedy argues that Isocrates goes on at such great length about theseus because “theseus is worthy of Helen” and similarly “Athens is worth of the hegemony which it should take from Sparta” (81). In other words, The Helen is “in fact a clear statement of Isorates’ program of Panhellenism” (80)--a united federation of greek city states helmed by Athens.   The praise of Helen herself backs up this idea: “It is due to Helen that we are not the slaves of the barbarian” paraphrases Kennedy (82). Isocrates talks about Helen the way that 19th century americans talked about manifest destiny: “A longing for beautiful things,... is innate in us, and it has a strength greater than our other wishes” and “we enslave ourselves to such people with more pleasure than we rule others” (55-57). Helen wasn’t just beautiful--she was devine. She “acheive more than other mortals just as she excelled over them in appearances. Not only did she win immortality, but she also gained power equal to the gods’” (61). While Theseus was honored by association to be chosen to judge the gods, Helen was defied, and --and this is important for the political analogy--she was able to assist in the apotheiosis of Menelaisis and others.   In the end, Isocrates’ Helen is several things at once: it is a criticism of the Gorgias and the other traveling sophists, who made their living by proving the impossible in demonstration speeches that delighted and caused, to paraphrase Gorgias’ own words, amusement for the authors. He’s presenting a political tract, similar to the one in the PanAthenaicus, where he argues for a more involved Athenian hegemony in panhellenic unity. He’s also presenting a pedagogical advertisment: study with me, he says, and you’ll create real political speeches, not fluffy bits of taffy. At the end of the speech, ever the teacher, Isocrates says “If, then, some people wish to elaborate this material and expand on it, they will not lack material to stimulate their praise of Helen beyond what I have said, but they will find many original arguments to make about her”--yes, he’s setting up his potential students to use his encomium--a real encomium--as a model for their own, future, semi-scaffolded work.   If you have your own example of using your own writing to help your students learn about differnt genres, I’d love to hear about it. Send me an email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com or get in contact how ever you’d like. I recently heard from Rik in Holland (which, incidentally is awesome) that he listens to the podcast on his commute to Groningen University and when he walks the dog, as well as using the podcast in his own classes. Rik! I love to listen to podcasts walking a dog, or commuting, so good on you! Rik also made a suggestion for a podcast on framing, and, by gum, that sounds great, so look forward to hearing about framing in the future, Rik and all the dog walkers and everyone no matter where they are or what they do while listening to Mere Rhetoric.    

Review/Killingsworth   Welcome to MR the podcast about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today we’re going to be talking about what are perhaps some old ideas, but from a fresh angle. What if the way we thought about traditional rhetoric in a more modern context? But first, let me give a shout out to the Humanities Media Project, whose support lets us record these podcasts in such sound-proof-room splendor, and Jacob in the booth, who not only lets me know when I’ve muttered my lines, but edits it up so that it doesn’t sound like I did. Okay, back to the show. Rhetoric is a field bound by tradition. And no tradition is more traditional than Aristotle’s original three appeals: ethos logos pathos. Often times I think that if my first year composition students learn one thing this semester, it is ethos logos pathos and if they remember one thing five years after this semester, it will be ethos, logos and pathos. But one of the problems with the appeals is that they are ethos, logos and pathos--weird Greek words that don’t exactly map onto English easily. I’m forever explaining that a pathetic appeal isn’t a terrible one, or a tragic one, or that logos doesn’t just mean computer-program logic. M. Jimmie Killingsworth set out to reform and modernise the appeals in his 2005 text  titles, appropriately enough, “Appeals in Modern Rhetoric:an Ordinary-Language approach.”   Killingsworth breaks down the appeals in this way: Appeals to authority and evidence; appeals to time; appeals to place; appeals to the body; appeals to gender; appeals to race; appeals to race; appeals through tropes and the appeal of narrative.   Some of these may see straightforward and ever-lasting: appeals to authority, for instance, seem as old as time and require rhetors to judiciously determine which authorities are authoritative for them as well as for the audience.   But some of the appeals restructure how we think about rhetoric. Appeals to time, for instance, is a general way to describe how Aristotle’s other division, the genres of rhetoric, relate to each other. The genres of rhetoric, you might recall, include forensic (looking at the past), epideictic (looking at the present) and deliberative (looking towards the future). Again, because these genres seem very distant to modern audiences, Killingsworth translates into contemporary business writing:” reports narrate the pass, instructions deal with actions in the present time and proposals mak arguments for future action” (38). But these genres aren’t just neutral--they may an argument to the audience. Arguing that something is modern, or urgent is an appeal in itself, as does harkening back to the halcyon days of yesteryear. Instead of thinking of genres as genres, Killingsworth encourages us to think of them as arguments.   Killingsworth also breaks down the appeal about the author into some of the key identities which modern rhetors might use: appeals to race and to gender. He also pulls a bit an Aristotle himself in classifying these appeals further. TAke, for instance, appeal to race, where he talks about the way that racial stereotypes creates an othering. Fine, we might say, we all know that racial stereotypes create a wedge between groups, and “reduce the complexity of individuals and cultural groups” (99) but how exactly does this happen? In three ways, Killingworth suggests, in true artistotlean fashion. “Diminishment of character involves the denial of key human qualities” such as assuming that a group of people don’t love their children as keenly as another or that a group doesn’t value romantic love (99-100). Dehumanization goes even further and makes the people into animals or objects. The extreme example of this is chattel slavery, which completely dehumanizes slaves. Finally, demonization is where a race is seen as superhumanly wicked. “Western devils” for instance, or Indian witches, or black devils, who only exist to perpetrate crimes against another race. (100).   Killingsworth may be straying back difficult terminology when he talks about appeal through tropes--what the heck is a trope? Well, he’s talking about the four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, but he’s going to describe what they are and how they work as appeals in this way: you can identify one position with another, like a metaphor; you can associate one position with another, like metonymy; you can represent one position by another and you can close the distance between two positions and increase the distance from a third, like irony (121). Let’s give a few practical examples of how that might work. Metaphor, you might remember, is a little like an SAT verbal question. If I say “Cedar pollen smacked me in the face today,” I’m saying pollen is to immune system as fist is to face. In terms of an argument, you might say, like Martin Luther King Jr, that “Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is cover up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed” and so make the comparison that activists are to injustice as doctors are to illness (125). Metonymy sustitutes the part for the whole, for example, when someone says they question the bible, they don’t question the existence of such a book, but the validity of the events narrated therein.Synecdoche looks at a critical part for the full. There might be a critical story that tells a fuller story. For example, if I begin a paper about graduate student writers by telling about a student who was frustrated when her literature professors didn’t give her quizzes about the main characters in the books they read, I’m saying that something about this story relates to how all graduate students feel when they transition from undergraduate programs. Burke calls this the representative anecdote--a small story that represents a larger trend. Irony is, as Killingsworth says, “the most complex and diffitult of the four master tropes” (131). Irony is a beast, and we’ll talk more in-depth about irony this semester when we talk about Booth’s Rhetoric of Irony. Killingsworth here, though, points out that the “crucial elements of iron’ are “Tone and insider knowledge” (132). We come to identify with the rhetor when we hear irony because we’re both in the know.   So once I was describe satire and I described Swift’s a Modest Proposal as a magnificent work of ironic satire and one of my students sat bolt upright in his seat. “That was ironic?!” he said. “I just assumed Swift was some kind of sicko.” Really, Swift says we should eat babies, so how does anyone think he isn’t some kind of sicko? Well, partially because before I read a Modest Proposal, I knew Swift was a clergyman who worked with poor people in Ireland for most of his career, and I also knew that Swift loved satire--he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, after all. Because of my inside knowledge, I was able to interpret Swift’s exaggerations as irony. And then Swift and I get to stand together, winking at each other against the supporters of the Corn Tax. Irony unites the speaker and audience as we poke fun at the subjects of our irony (132-3).   So Killingsworth provides a review of many of the principles of rhetoric we’ve discussed in the podcast and well as a preview of things to come. Rhetoric, he proposes, is not just about stuffy terms and dead Greeks, but something that continues with us in all situations, even in the modern world.

Kant podcast   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have defined rhetorical history. Today is a re-record from when we were doing our "villians of rhetoric" series, but since we just recently did an episode where I apologized for being too hard on Kant, here's the original castigation. Enjoy!     Today we continue our podcast series on villians of rhetoric with Kant. As in Immanual Kant, and not ‘I can’t stnd him” I’ve actually been to Kant’s hometown, Kohnisberg, which is now Kaliningrad Russia. And when I say Kant’s hometown, I mean the town where he was born, studied and died. In his whole life he never even traveled more than 10 miles fromKonigsberg. He might not have been much of a traveler, but he had a spectacular philosophy career. He was apopular teacher and had success in fields of physics and natural science, but he didn’t really get into philosophy, hard core philosophy, until he was middle aged. And the emphasis is on “hard.” His critique of pure reason was 800 pages and dense dense philosophy, even for German philosophers. It wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves. But Kan revised it in a 2nd edition and eventually his philosophical work became popular. You know, for German philosophy. His ideas about Enlightenment were controversial, and he had to skirt censorship and even the King’s criticism. His disciples battled his detractors and Kant became the most important German philosopher since Christian Wolff and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. His ideas are quintessentially Enlightenment: agnostic, rationalistic, and committed to individual inquiry of philosophy instead of relying on tradition, including the classical tradition. Kant suggests that there is a thing-in-itself that exists out the in world, but that we are only able to encounter it through our senses and experiences.   Also, he didn’t like rhetoric.   And, brother won’t he let you know it. Rhetoric, he says “merits no respect whatever” because of several complaints: first, that rhetoric is just style. Kant says in the crituqe of judgment athat rhetoric is only “the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination (V 321), In this he makes the same complaint against rhetoric that some of our other villains—Ramus and Montaigne—have made: rhetoric is nothing more than style. By removing invention from the canons of rhetoric and focusing only on style, Kant can focus more on his idea of truth being something just out there rather than something constructed socially. As scholar Robert J Dostal says, “With Kant rhetoric is reduced to a matter of style—dispensable in serious philosophical matters. The requirement [of rhetoric] that one know men’s souls is eliminated in view that it is sufficient merely to speak the truth” (235).   Kant’s other complaint, like Agrippa, Jewel, Patrizi and Hobbes is that rhetoric is immortal. When Kant reads the classical rhetoricians he feels an “unpleasant sense of disapporival” because he finds rhetoric “an insidious art that knows how, in matters of moment, to move men like machines to a judgement that must lose all its weight with them in calm reflection” (V 327). In other words, if people would just sit down and think, really think like a philosopher, they’d come to the right conclusion, but these nasty rhetors mislead them with their tricky words. In this sense he defines rhetoric like this “Rhetoric, so far as this is taken to mean the act of persuasive, ie the act of misleading by means of a beautiful illusion ” Kant wasn’t the only Enlightenment philopher to criticize rhetoric. Descrates points out that you don’t need to study rhetoric to be a good speaker because “those who reason most cogently, and work over their thoughts to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persauve even if they … have never studied rhetoric.” Like Kant, Descartes believes that if you just speak the truth you don’t need rhetoric. Kant wan’t alone in thinking that rhetoric was dangerously misleading, either. John Lock wrote that “all the art of rhetoric […] are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions and thereby mislead the judgment and so indeed are perfect cheat” So Kant had good company in disliking rhetoric. But can Kant be reconciled to a sympathetic view of rhetoric?   Scott Stroud thinks so. Stroud, who works here at the University of Texas (hook ‘em horns) is the author of a book coming out in October called Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric that aims to rehabilitate Kant to rhetoric. He claims that Kant didn’t really have the same definition of rhetoric which we have—he too, was influenced by villains of rhetoric like Plato and Ramus, and when he says he hates rhetoric, he means he hates something different. Since the book hasn’t come out yet and my Delorian is out of gas, I can’t tell you all of the arguments that Stroud will make in Kant and the promise of rhetoric, but I can tell you what I’ve gleaned from his earlier articles. One of them goes in the back door of rhetoric but looking at education. In 2011, Stroud’s article “Kant on education and the rhetorical force of the example” approaches a possible Kantian rhetoric through Kant’s ideas on education.   Kant says he hates rhetoric, but he loves education and was looking for a way to teach without coersing. So remember how Kant called rhetoric a “beautiful illusion”? Stroud argues that what Kant is objecting to is what Kant else where calls the “aim of win[ning] minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of their freedom” (5:327). In this senese, Stroud says that Kant isn’t anti-rhetoric, but anti-bad rhetoric. The word rhetoric had been so pejorativized by Kant’s time that it came to be synonymous with manipulation and in opposition to individual consideration. So earlier, when we said that Kant was all about the freedom to think without the contraints of tradition? This is that same concern. As Stroud puts it, “What Kant is objecting to is the fact that such rhetorical deception moves people without their choosing the maxims of action, or without an accurate knowledge of what principle they are acting.”   Using illustriative examples, though, can enable the student (or the audience member) to think for themselves. Again, from Stroud, “Kant did not fear the skillful orator. He feared the skillful and non-moralized orator. Examples employed by a cultivated rhetor (a teacher, a preacher, etc.) are engaging because they partake in the lively form of narrative and they readily make themselves available for moral judgment.” Through the educational example, Stroud rehabilitates Kantian opposition to rhetoric. “The way examples operate in Kant's educative rhetoric is by evoking the experience of transitioning from the prudential stage to the moral stage of development in the subject's interaction with the example at hand.” Whether young students or adult audience members, these subjects can be taught without being coersed.   So maybe Kant isn’t truly a villain of rhetoric, but a victim of other villains who made rhetoric such a dirty word that he couldn’t imagine a rhetoric that could be moral and individually affirming. A rhetoric that could be called a Kantian rhetoric.  

Audio: Gorgias_Encomium_of_Helen.mp3   Just a heads up, this is a re-recording of an earlier podcast, so it's not chronologically accurate. Like, I didn't just submit my dissertation, I got it approved, defended and bound on linen paper. Boom! Okay, anyway, that's the warning, but really, if you've recently finished a dissertation and think its as interesting as I think mine is, you should email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. That way I can be all, "hey, that's great!" and maybe we can do an episode on it. There you go. Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people, and movements who shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren and I don't know how many of you actually noticed, but I actually was gone for a couple of weeks. I've been uh, eyebrow deep in my dissertation but I finally got it submitted to my readers so that means I have a little bit of time to come back and talk to you about Gorgias.  Now some of you who listen to my podcasts may think, wait a second, we've talked about Gorgias already. The Dialogue? Yeah, but this isn't the Gorgias. This is Gorgias himself. The actual man Gorgias. He was an actual person and he was extremely popular as a rhetorician. People loved him. He was like a rock star.  There are very few rhetoricians who get a shiny gold statue made of them. In fact, I personally don't know anybody who has a shining gold statue but there's one man specific - Gorgias who did. It was solid gold. This was one of the many honors that Gorgias was awarded that are usually reserved for citizens, but Gorgias was a foreigner. In fact he traveled from place to place. He never really stayed still -- a lot like a rock star. Because of this, he was also sort of had that rock star reputation of not really being the most level headed or moral, sort of a person. But he was really, really good at what he did. And when you're a rock star you have to find even greater challenges.  So one of the challenges Gorgias set for himself was to write and encomium of Helen. First let me explain a little bit about Helen. We're talking about Helen of Troy here whose position in Greek society was not eh.. great. [laugh] Helen of Troy was seen as sort of the personification of sort of just lustiness and sort of infidelity and things like that. She did not have a high position. An encomium is a specific genre of speech or writing where you sort of praise somebody who maybe didn't get a lot of praise. So you can think of analogies nowadays would be something like, maybe an encomium of Eve if you were writing in the middle ages or you might do an encomium of Bella from Twilight. So why did he do this? Why did he attempt an Encomium of Helen? Well partially he said, it was fun. He says I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a divergent to myself which is also a little bit cocky. He's saying oh, it's so easy. Look at me do something fun like an encomium of Helen. But there's also a deeper, philosophical meaning here with Gorgias, just like how people can find meaning in rock stars' lyrics that they think is far deeper than just something fun. Gorgias was also making an argument about the power of language. Arguing implicitly that his speech has been effective by saying that language is extraordinarily powerful and that was what was behind Helen's abscondence.  So while he's describing that Helen couldn't help herself, everybody else in the audience is being swept away too. This is a page [inaudible][00:03:19] . A really playful piece, not a serious piece of deliberative or judicial rhetoric. Something that's a little bit just you know, sort of fun and curious to think about. It's also sometimes called paradoxalogia which is sort of where you set up something that sort of is in contrast and because of this paradoxalogia, it does seem a little bit contrary to have an orator tell you to be wary of the things people say in beautiful ways because they can lead you astray. He's kind of saying watch out, I can make you do whatever I want you to do when he writes a speech talking about how powerful speech is. He's certainly not making a case for straight talking the way he's speaking. But he's mostly focusing that speech can be good and bad and immensely powerful and that makes Gorgias himself into a sort of you know, benevolent dictator of people's emotions and opinions. So how does he do it? How does he persuade people that speech is so powerful? Partially because the beautiful way that he speaks it. He is known for devices like antithesis that are sometimes even called Gorgiatic. So the way that antithesis works is you have one thing and an opposite thing. So he'll say a lot of things that sort of balance. "Opinion is slippery and insecure" he says, "emptying it into slippery and insecure successes." So you have sort of this really clear parallelism that he uses a lot. He describes cities and [inaudible][00:04:45]  power, body and beauty, soul and wisdom, action and virtue, speech and truth. By creating connections between these things, he sets the stage for his thesis about the necessity of the speaker to speak and potentially lead people astray against their inability to stop the speaker. So he uses two metaphors significantly when he talks about speech. One is that speech is a lord and the other is that speech is a drug. Two metaphors that describe the irresistible nature of speech as well as the speech's power to be both benevolent or maleficent. So he uses a lot of antithesis to sort of argue that speech is a powerful lord and overall he says that if Helen was you know, physically taken away, if she was kidnapped and drawn bodily, we wouldn't judge her. But being persuaded by speech is just as powerful as being carried away physically. So he says if she was persuaded by speech, she did not do wrong but was unfortunate instead.  Since speech and stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity, it has the power of drugs over the nurture of bodies. This is a really powerful view. With such a speech that sort of gaily twists the knife into his critics that say that what he's doing is useless or superficial, he creates a really fun speech that also makes a powerful argument for the power of rhetoric and lays the group for future rhetoricians and sophists. Now not everybody loved Gorgias as sort of the father of sophistry. Aristotle of course, criticizes Gorgias' showmanship and money grubbing. He is also Socrates’ foil in the Gorgias, but even so-called early sophists like Socrates felt like Gorgias didn't really write an encomium. Not really in praise of her, but in defense of her.  Next week we're going to talk about Isocrates' Encomium of Helen. And in the meantime, think to yourself, what are some institutions or people that are usually criticized that, through the power of rhetoric, can also be rehabilitated? Does rhetoric really have the possibility to sweep people away as powerfully as physical action? Well, we'll have to think about those questions next time when we think about Isocrates' Encomium of Helen.  

Bootstraps, Victor Villanueva   What does a rhetorician look like? When you imagine a rhetorician, maybe you see some white-toga-ed Roman, crossing his legs under his seat, holding a stylus to his chin. Or maybe you imagine a tweedy early twentieth century rhetorician, shaking out a newspaper and frowning. Or maybe you even imagine a contemporary rhetorician, presenting at the Rhetoric Society of America in front of a powerpoint presentation. But here’s a question for you--did you imagine a white rhetorician?   Today on Mere Rhetoric, we talk about Victor Villanueva’s book Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color, which interrogates our discipline’s white privilege and privileging. But before we get to that, let me start out by thanking some people. First off, much thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting the show, including letting me record in this great recording booth with great people like Jacob here to record and edit. Also, thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a review of Mere Rhetoric on iTunes. Also thanks to my fiance Krystian for always believing in me. Know how you feel when you get written comments on end of semester evaluations? That’s how I feel everytime someone leaves a review. Finally, since I just came back from a conference where I got to meet some great people who like the podcast, I’d like to give a big shout out to Clancy Ratliff for showing me a great restaurant in Lafayette and her student Nolan, who let me jabber about the connections between creative writing and composition while he showed me where my next session was. If you have strong opinions about the best place to eat in your hometown, or if you have a suggestion for the next episode, why not drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Okay, enough business--let’s get to it.   I first became aware of the racial imbalance in rhetoric at my first RSA conference. Sharon Crowley was giving one of the key addresses, talking about racism in our students, in our institutions, and at one point I looked around at the audience--and wondered about racism in our own field as well. There were a few black and brown faces, but almost everyone in the great hall was white. We couldn’t, I realized, talk about racism in our classrooms and our colleges without interrogating our own racial assumptions.   That’s exactly what Victor Villanueva sets out to do in Bootstraps. Villanueva is a hot shot rhetorician, by almost any standard possible. He’s received the David H Russell Award for Distinquished Research, the Exemplar Award and Scholarship in English and was Rhetorician of the Year in 1999. Side bar: I did not know there was an award for being Rhetorician of the Year. Somehow, I imagine a People Magazine spread like for Sexiest Man Alive, but with pictures of academics mid-gesture in a lecture or thoughtfully frowning at a computer. Villanueva has also published and edited over 80 books including the essential anthology Cross Talk in Composition and Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2013 CE. Guy knows his stuff. When you are literally rhetorician of the year, you must be the quintessential rhetorician, confident and poised in your rhetoricianness.   You’d think so.   In Bootstraps, Puerto-Rico-born Villanueva weaves autobiography, scholarship and teacher research together into an exploration of how the academic world can seem uncomfortable and unwelcoming to academics of color. He himself, for his PhD and his 80 books, when he writes about himself in the third person “He still  suffers [the fear that he isn’t as smart as he thinks] today, thirty years later, PhD, publications and all… He has seen the liberal’s fear of being honest with people of color about their abilities; the fear of being considered a bigot .. He has seen that tokenism, even when well-motivated, even though somehow necessary, makes things seem equitable when they aren’t equitable at all… he always wonders if, maybe, he isn’t as smart as people think” (13).   Little commentary here: this feeling, like you don’t belong, is called impostor syndrome and it’s pernicious among graduate students, more especially people who already feel like they don’t belong, as Villaneauva says about his own PhD “I didn’t know what I was getting into, but knew I was getting into something not intended for the likes of me” (xv). I remember when I got accepted at the University of Texas at Austin, I had nightmares that I hadn’t been, in fact, accepted, but had been allowed to complete on a reality to show to gain entrance into UT Austin. “Who Wants to Be a Longhorn?” Other graduate students, professional athletes and actors, and anyone who feels like they got into something for which they secretly might not be qualified suffers from this feeling. We’ll talk about more impostor syndrome in another podcast, but for our purposes here, the key thing to remember is that academics of color, even when they are invited into programs and departments warmly can still doubt the sincerity of the welcome. They can doubt themselves, when the culture has been insisting for their whole lives that academia is “not intended for the likes” of them.      Villanueva’s education in the 60s certainly didn’t forsee a brilliant rhetoric academic career for little Victor. His first school that assumed that “you people need to learn a trade,” in the words of one of his teachers (3) and at the next one the PE teacher shouted “Go home and get a haircut! And don’t come back until you do!” So, he didn’t (38). Yeah, that’s right--Villanueva, probably one of the most important rhetorical authors of the later 20th century didn’t graduate high school, but the high schools he would have graduated perpetually underestimated him. Only through detours in the military did he finally come to Tacoma Community college: “I wanted to try my hand at college, go beyond the GED. But college scared me. I had been told long again that college wasn’t my lot” (66).   So I started this podcast talking about Sharon Crowley’s speech at RSA, and she shows up at a crucial point in Villaneuva’s life because it was Crowley, “the first person he had ever read who had written of the sophists--a bigshot” (118) who offered him a job. It’s not a happy ending though--material conditions are hard for any young academic and more especially those who don’t have large family resources.   One of the reasons why he had been underestimated is that he was a minority in the nation. That’s a word that’s hard to pin down or used too casually, but Villanueva makes a distinction between the immigrant and the minority: “We behave as if the minority problem where the immigrant problem,” (19) and all we need is to make the minority sound or act like the majority. “The difference between the immigrant and the minority amounts to the difference between immigration and colonization” (29). He tells the story of two of his students arguing about English’s role in the composition classroom. “Both are Latinos, Spanish speakers, but Martha is Colombian; Paul is Puerto Rican. Martha, the immigrant. Paul, the minority. Martha believes in the possibilities for complete structural assimilation; Paul is more cautious” (24). “The immigrant seeks to take on the culture of the majority,” he suggests, “and the majority, given certain preconditions, not leaves of which is displaying the language and dialect of the majority, accepts the immigrant. The minority, even when accepting the culture of the majority,is never wholly accepted. There is always a distance” (23).   “The code switcher is a rhetorical power player,” he quips, pointing to how bilinguals recognize intuitively the fluid nature of language, the rhetorical nuances that comes from understanding the inexact nature of self-translation (23).Villanueva points out that we often assume that cultural shifting happens naturally, without any work, when, in fact, it’s very hard to try to keep both of your identities as an other-American.   Villanueva tells of his own personal experience with assimilation when he was drilled into strict prescriptivist English as a young boy in Puerto Rico. He was criticised for speaking with an accent, but “there was no verbal deprivation at play, just a process that takes time, ‘interlanguage’ to use a sociological term” (32). Eventually he read and listened and spoke more in English until “the accent disappeared, and Spanish no longer came easily, sometimes going through French or through Latin in my head, the languages of my profession, searching for the Spanish with which to speak to my family. Assimilation” (33).   But it’s very difficult to try to be perfect at Spanish and perfect and English. “Biculturalism,” he writes, does not mean to me an equal ease with two cultures. That is an ideal. Rather, biculturalism means the tensions within, which are cause by being unable to deny the old, ot the new ...I resent the tension, that the ideal is not to be realized, that we cannot be the mosaic … nor can we be the melting pot if that were the preference” (39). Those old metaphors, the mosaic and the melting pot, don’t do enough to describe all of the cultures in the country and the complex ways those cultures relate.   The first step, it is implied, is just to make the implicit explicit and recognize that culture is necessarily complex and changing. “It is not enough to recognize and make explicit our cultures. We need to recognize cultures in the context of other cultures, since none of us can be monocultural in America. Mexican americans may have a culture in common with many Mexicans, say, but Mexican Americans also have a culture in common with fellow Americans” (57). It’s like the classic 1997 film Selena where Selena’s dad points out the frustration of trying to navigate two culture and two languages, “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting!”   Selena’s dad is right. It’s additionally important not to essentialize. “Puerto Ricans may be ‘Hispanics.’ Yet our history in general and our history as it pertains to the United States is very different from the histories of both the Mexican American and the Mexican” (57). These differences are sometimes bluntly painted over, through terms like Hispanic or even “minority.” Villanueva tells ruefully of being asked to review an article on Mexican rhetoric, even though he isn’t Mexican, but even if had been Puerto Rican rhetoric, he’s a classicist, working on the sophists. He knows about Isocrates best, so why would he be pigeonholed in this way?   If it’s not obvious by now, Villanueva is also heavily influenced by Marxist thought. He suggests that the ultimate goal of the field of Rhetoric and Composition is to develop the “organic intellectual,” a theory from Antonio Gramsci about the combination of personal experience and academic learning--much like the book Bootstraps itself. Don’t ever say Villanueva doesn’t practice what he preaches. The organic intellectual doesn’t stay in the ivory tower, but “is involved ‘in active participation in practical life’ … an intellectual liaison  between the groups seeking revolutionary change and the rest of civil society” (129).   This perspective should influence everything we do in our weird academic culture--the way we teach our classrooms and the things we research and publish, the way we structure our departments and graduate programs and admissions and graduation requirements.   Villanueva ends the book with a call that I find pretty darn stirring. I’ll give him the last word: “As our status as workers becomes more apparent and as we come more in contact with more of those who are intellectuals from non-traditional backgrounds, we find ourselves in a potentially decisive moment. The  moment is right for America’s intellectuals in traditional academic roles to help organize intellectuals recognize themselves as such and to begin to fuse with them--creating Gransmi’s new intellectuals” (138)

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today or rather, the day I wrote this, I got some bad news, so to make up for it, I get to talk about Jeffrey Walker, who is one of my favorite people ever, and I get to talk about one of my favorite books, too, his Genuine Teachers of This Art, subtitled Rhetorical Education in Antiquity.   Basically Walker’s arguing that rhetoric as a field is, at its very core, pedagogical. It’s not just practice of rhetoric or analysis of rhetoric, but that both of these really come into being through the teaching of rhetoric. As he says “by defining ‘the art of the rhetor” as the art of producing a rhetor, one puts the other definitions into relation. The pedagogical project sets the agenda for the critical-rheoretic one and determines the appropriate objects of study… Its pedagogical enterprise is what ultimately makes rhetoric rhetoric and not just a version of something else” (2-3).   Walker’s title comes from a line from Cicero’s dialogs on the orator. Antonius describes Isocrates’ subsequent rhetoric teachers as the “genuine teachers of this art” and Isocrates does feature heavily in how we think about rhetoric and the teaching of rhetoric.   At the center of this text, Walker does the incredible work of reverse engineering the techne or art of rhetoric that Isocrates may have written. We think Isocrates wrote such a treatise. Zosimus’s Life of Isocrates in the the fifth century wrote “It is said that Isocrates also wrote an art of rhetoric bu in the course of time it was lost” (qtd. 57) Cicero, too, and Quintilian, seem to take it for granted that Isocrates had a complete rhetoric treatise. We might, Walker points out, not impose our own publishing tradition on what this would look like. Isocrates’ treatise on rhetoric would be, like Aritotle’s probably was “a  ‘teacher’s manual’ or ‘toolbox’ containing an organized and thus memorizable and searchable, collection of ‘the things that can be taught’ and a stock of explanations and examples” (84).   Combining shorter pieces of Isocrates’ with cited fragments and other sources’ admiration, parody and allusion, Walker reconstructs what this lost document might look like. He suggests that by looking at, say, the legal arguments of Isocrates, you can see evidence of a “rudimentary stasis system”: did they do it? how bad was it? was it legal or right? if it was right was that because of advantage, honor or justice? Of course there’s a bunch of stylistic rules some of which seem uniquely suited to Greek language and culture. And, of course, imitation is paramount. Over all, it seems that Isocrates’ pedagogical philosophy “assumes an ideal student of ready which who can take the imprint of the stylistic models set before him and can quickly come to imitate and absorb them” (153).   One of the key pedagogical assignments, then, is declamation. We don’t think of performance and acting as part of rhetorical discovery, but back in Isocrates’ day,speaking was extremely important, and the old debate practice of speaking your opponents’ words was a key pedagocial practice. Not just your opponent, but just “others” with whom you may or may not agree, sort of playing a part and trying on an argument. Think of it a little as if you were doing mock trial back in high school and some peopel are given the role of defense counsil and some are prosecution and some are witnesses: you have the facts of the case, but then you play the role the best you can within that structure. It’s invention, but also acting and it can be an effective pedagogical tool. As Walker puts it “the student was(is) freed from the pressure to discover the ‘correct answer’” (198) and “because the the student is playing a role, his or her youthful ego is not at stake, and it is possible to both play with the lines or argument and to reflect on them as well” (199).   If you have a question about some of the verbs and pronouns used in those last quotes, it’s because Walker doesn’t just study this stuff--he teaches it. Since his whole argument is that rhetoric is about being a teacher, he doesn’t shy away from describing how contemporary first year composition can embrace “rhetoric [as] an art of cultivating a productive, performative capacity” and unabashedly declares that “Rhetorical scholarship that made no consequential difference to what rhetors/writers do, or to how rhetors/writers are trained, would have little point. Perhaps that is obvious. Yet it is easy to forget” (288). Man, I get chills reading those words. I should take a moment here to say that if you use rhetorical methods from the ancients, like closely imitating exemplors or trying on other arguments, why not shoot a line at Mere Rhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? I’d love to hear about it and maybe we could do an episode just on the history and benefit of, say, imitation or declamation.   Okay, here’s the last word from Dr. Walker, though “Ancient rhetorical education appealed to the desired that brought the motivated student to it and that persists today: the desire expressed by Isocrates’ students to say admirable things; or Plato’s Phaedrus’ remark that he would rather be eloquent like Lysias than rich; or Plato’s Hippocrates’ wish to learn to speak  ‘awesomely’ like Protagoras … Rhetoric, as a paideia, was a ‘sweet garden’ where the young could experience and enact such things as theater, as game, and in so doing could cultivate their dunamis for wise and eloquent speech, thought and writing in practical situations as well as develop an attachment to a dream paradigm of democratic civic life” (293-4)    

[SHAKERS & INTRO SONG] Welcome to Mere Rhetoric. A podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements, and terms that have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren and today, I'm going to finally follow up on a promise that I made earlier. Do you remember when we were talking about Hermogenes? The hairy hearted hero who came up with a lot of extra ways of dealing with things. Well I said back then that I would come back and talk with you about stasis theory which is pretty fantastic and guess what? Now I'm finally living up to that promise.  If you haven't listened to the Hermogenes of Tarsis podcast, you can go back and listen to that for some more details but we're going to focus on the basics today. Think back of the last time you had a really bad argument. Not just like a shouting, throwing dishes argument, but an argument where everyone seemed to be talking past each other. Like you couldn't even agree on what it was that you were arguing. This is a pretty common experience. I've been through it and I'm pretty sure you've been through it too. And in fact, back in the earliest ages of rhetoric in fifth and sixth century B.C. in Greece, there were rhetoricians who were beginning to recognize that we need to think about what we're arguing about when we're arguing with other people. Sometimes you may think that you're arguing about what to do when really the person you're arguing with doesn't believe you need to have any action because nothing has happened. Trying to sort these out has become sort of stasis theory. Aristotle loosely references the topic by recognizing there's a need to know something about the facts, the definition, the quality and policy of arguments but he never really talked about the need for individuals to come to an agreement about what it was that they were arguing about. The first person to really articulate this is Hermagoras of Temnos who in the second century B.C. really went in depth in it. And he's the one who set out the four elements of stasis as we recognize them today. These four elements sometimes get a little bit tweaked into five elements or in fact all the way up to the 13 that Hermogenes did but in our context, we're just going to talk about the four.  These four are pretty easy to remember and they can make a real practical difference in the way that you argue today as well as the way that you look at other people's arguments. Stasis comes from the same place as sort of standing, right? So you know homeostasis for example, sort of where you are in your biology of not getting too much or too cold, your sort of standing in the middle. Stasis sort of lets you know where you stand in the argument and where your opponent stands. For me it's helpful to think about this as standing on a platform and if you and your interlocutor are standing on the same platform, you could have worthwhile conversation instead of trying to shout up to somebody standing above you or shout down to someone standing below you.  So let's go through these four stages and talk about how you might go up the staircase with your interlocutor to discuss a different issue. The first and most basic level is just fact. Did the thing itself exist? So famously, a rhetorical scholar named John R.[inaudible] applied this to talking about global warming. So if you're talking with somebody about global warming, the first thing to asses is do you both believe that in fact the Earth is getting warmer? Do you agree on fact? If you guys are already in agreement about this, then maybe what your discussion is is about the next level up. So go up those stairs if you both agree and talk about the next level. Definition. But if you don't agree about fact, that's what you're going to have to argue about. Did something happen? What are the facts? Is there a problem? Where did it come from? What changes happened to create this problem and is there anything our arguing about it can do? These are some of the facts you would have to argue out with your interlocutor. But if you both agree, you can go upstairs to definition. Continuing on with our example of global warming, definition is where you talk about what the nature is of the problem. So with global warming, is this a man-made issue or is this just a periodic cycle? What exactly is this issue? What is it related to? What are the parts of this issue? And how are those parts related? Once you agree about definition, maybe what you need to be arguing about is quality. Is it a good or a bad thing? How big of a problem is this? Who's it going to affect and how much? Is this a crisis we need to resolve? Again, thinking about global warming. Is global warming going to cause catastrophic climate change that destroys human life as we know it? Or is it just an excuse to break out the shorts for a little bit? Quality sort of talks about how big or how much the issue is. Also you have to think about what the costs are with quality. So with global warming, what's the cost of stopping global warming? Should we stop all manufacture for example? Or transportation? Is it more important to focus on "the short term health of the economy or the long term stability of the climate?"  Okay so when John R. [inaudible] says we've exhausted questions about quality, the next stage is policy. So if you and your interlocutor agree that there is such thing as global warming, it is man-made, and it is a really bad idea, the next step is to talk about what do we do about it? Is the better choice to ban plastic bags or make people ride only on commuter buses or change to nuclear power? Or any of the other things that people have suggested to try to stop global warming? All of these issues are about policy. What do we do now? You'll see lots of different applications to this idea of stasis. In fact, Quintilian goes through the stasis when he talks about making an argument. He gives the example of somebody saying, "you killed a man" and in response the accused says, "yes, I did kill." Okay so they agree on fact but the accused says, "it is lawful to kill an adulterer with his paramour."  So now he's making a discussion more about the quality and the definition. But then the person who accuses says they were not adulterers and so it contests that idea. So the argument has moved from a question of fact, was somebody in fact killed? To a question of definition and quality - was it murder? Was it a bad thing? And for whom? This is a really fun game to play when you watch law and order and I have to confess a lot of times I kind of geek out watching the attorneys make arguments that go from fact to definition even to policy when they get to sentencing. I mean is it better to send a troubled kid to a mental asylum or to juvenile delinquency? Mostly though I just love law and order.  Stasis is really useful, not just in sort of how we analyze things but also how we conduct conversations with others. Sometimes those bad arguments we have, don't need to be so bad if we just stop and think about what is it we're really arguing and how can we stand on common ground with those we speak?  

[acoustic guitar music] Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people, and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, and every time we do Mere Rhetoric, I hope you feel like it's a cozy introduction to some of the people who have been part of rhetorical history at different times and places. But it's rare that I actually get to talk about somebody who I've sat next to, and I've eaten lunch with. And in fact, I got to eat lunch twice with today's topic, Suresh Canagarajah. Canagarajah is kind of a hero of mine, and he's a really amazing scholar and just a really nice human being. I met him for the first time when I was a beginning graduate student, and I was at a really small conference -- small enough that they were willing to pay for us to eat lunch together every day, and I got to sit next to Suresh Canagarajah, who is one of the superstars of that particular conference, which focused mostly on multilingual writers and different writing traditions. So it was such a big honor to get to meet him. And not only did I get to meet him, but he was really nice and sort of soft-spoken. Later, I actually got to see him, talk with him a little bit at this last year's MLA in Vancouver. And again, he was just really nice and generous, and... I don't know, I just really enjoy spending time with Suresh Canagarajah. So today we're gonna talk little bit about him, and I hope you spend time with him right now and get to enjoy the time that you spend here. Okay, so the reason why I was a little cowed by Suresh Canagarajah is he's done some really important work. His book, Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching, won the MLA's Mina Shaughnessy award in 2000. Later, another book that he wrote, Geopolitics of Academic Writing, won the Gary Olson Award from the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition in 2003. So he's kind of a hotshot. His work focuses, like I said, mostly on different ideas of teaching English, and the ways that English becomes part of the cultural capital in other traditions. And to be able to get at this idea, he focuses at the very beginning in the former British colony of Sri Lanka, which is where he's from. Canagarajah himself is a multilingual writer who had to negotiate identities as a Sri Lankan, as well as a scholar in rhetoric. So his background sort of uniquely prepares him to be able to talk about resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. This book focuses on how, quote, "The classroom culture is a site where the agendas of the different interest groups get played out, negotiated, and contested," end quote. Teaching English in a country where they have other linguistic traditions is always going to be a question of power. And there's conflicting attitude and behavior about students regarding English study. On one hand it opens up a lot of possibilities for them, especially economically and in terms of power. But on the other hand, they have, quote, "conflicts in having to indulge in a communicative activity, from which they have to keep out their preferred values, identities, conventions, and knowledge content," end quote. So you can feel a little bit like you're betraying you own language, our own writing tradition, and even your own values when you engage in academic writing -- or any other type of writing -- in English. These students have to, quote, "negotiate with English to gain positive identities, critical expression, and ideological clarity." And they will become insiders and use the language in their own terms, according to their own aspirations, needs, and values. This seems like a high order for teaching English and making sure that the people who come from other language backgrounds aren't isolated, that they can use the dominant discourses from the perspective of their vernacular standpoint to creatively modify the codes, not just buy into the standard American English, but sort of have a way to feed back to American academic English from their own traditions, and bring what they have to the table as well. This of course has application in the classroom. So he says, "The end result of this pedagogy is a critical awareness of the rationale, rules, and consequences of the competing discourses in the classroom and outside." So there's a lot of emphasis in Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching, on the teaching aspect. But everything that he says about teaching can apply to other ways that English remains the lingua franca of academic writing. So you can think about this in terms of articles that get published in academic journals, or the way that conferences are conducted -- the fact that when I go here Canagarajah speak, he has to speak in English, and that puts us at a different power dynamic than maybe it would be if I had to meet him and speak in Tamil. So when he goes about talking about the potential for linguistic imperialism in teaching English, he comes at it from an ethnographic perspective. Particularly an ethnographic perspective that takes in his own culture. In some circles, talking about sort of your own lived experience can be called autoethnography. Autoethnography looks at your own group, your own circle, and sort of yourself as a participant in this particular group. Canagarajah defends the use of autoethnography because, he says, "It gets you into doors that you wouldn't get into otherwise." For example, he points to closed faculty meetings, or casual conversations. When he talks about autoethnography, it's perhaps a controversial methodology because there can be questions about how much disclosure he has in those closed faculty meetings and other situations. But on the other hand, it makes you sure that you're proceeding from an insider's perspective and not being imperialistic in the ethnography that you're doing. Now, his book about resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching was controversial sort of itself. Robert O'Neil argues that people learn English, quote, "to communicate with people who do not speak the same language," end quote, instead of communicating with your own people. And that it's not just about the sort of insider, talking to each other situation. There are nationalists, as well as universalists, who either reject English study as nationalists, or embrace an English that is, quote, "expansive, malleable, and neutral." Canagarajah is sort of proposing something else, where English is not neutral at all, but it's sort of a necessary -- I don't want to say evil, but a necessary [inaudible] for a lot of people to enter discussions of power. Canagarajah draws on a lot of other theorists, including Phillipson, who really focuses on the native speaker fallacy, which is this idea that if you're a native speaker, somehow you understand English than somebody who isn't a native speaker. And Phillipson's work has been really important in questions of TESOL. And it's kind of fitting that Canagarajah has just recently become the editor of TESOL Quarterly, which is the journal that focuses on teaching English to speakers of other languages. So it's -- You can see sort of a clear trajectory in the work that he does. More recently though, his work has sort of expanded from looking at world English’s in terms of groups that speak English outside of the United States, to linguistic and dialectic variety in all of its situations, including African American vernaculars. He's interested in how new forms of globalization, quote, "lead to fluid, discursive, and linguistic practices between communities." And he's interested in all of the different ways that we look at English, and why we can find other strategies that will treat English, quote, "as a heterogeneous language, made up of diverse varieties of equal status, each with its own norms and system." This work has also sort of applied to different ways that people publish in English in different situations as sort of diaspora communities. The panel that I was able to listen to him speak at MLA focused on these multiple English’s, and what might be termed as experts' right to their own language. That is to say, once you get enough cachet, you can bring in your own linguistic tradition and your dialect, and nobody's going to think twice of it. But if you're a novice, then you might be stuck speaking something that looks a little bit more like bland, imperialistic American academic English. So Canagarajah is a really amazing scholar, and he's really done some interesting things. I recommend you, check out some of the books from him -- especially Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. No matter how you feel about the role of English in American academic writing, it will definitely spark some conversations that you can have with other scholars, or even just thinking about it yourself. But even if you don't get a chance to read Canagarajah's work, I can hope for you even the greater honor that you will be able to meet him at a conference sometime. [guitar music]

[acoustic guitar music] Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms, and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably somebody who's interested in the power of language. You're probably an English major or a Rhetoric and Writing major, or you're at least taking a class in it. But there are a lot of different disciplines that we've all interacted with. Whether it was a required biology class when you were an undergraduate, or a course in statistics you're taking right now. One of the things that's difficult to tease out in rhetoric and composition is how different disciplines create different types of writing genres and different forms of writing. This is one of the things that Susan Peck MacDonald encountered in the early 1990s. In her book Professional Academic Writing, she thinks about writing in these different disciplines as a spectrum. She sees these academic disciplines may be roughly ranged on a continuum by the degree to which their knowledge-making goals and practices are in the foreground. But even though she puts them around a continuum, she's not saying that there's anything wrong with having different types of knowledge-making goals, nor is it too, as she says, "deny that there may be other goals in the social sciences and humanities, but it serves as a focal point for exploring the differences among the disciplines." So along the spectrum, she posits on one side, academic fields are arrayed more or less on a continuum, from the hard sciences to the soft humanities. And in this way, she realizes that a lot of the work that's been done by people in the humanities has been to what she calls "debunk" -- fields that are harder than the field that they're written in. So something about being in the humanities makes you want to prove that science isn't just objective. And she says that this debunking, quote, "suggests there is a strong tendency toward rearguard action, stemming from perceived loss of power, desire for enhanced status, and intellectual insecurity among social scientists and humanists." While that may be true, sometimes I do think we suffer from what she terms "science envy". So I think it's fair to sort of re-approach this question of disciplinarity from what it would be like within that actual discipline. So that's just what she's done. She's compiled these three sort of representative groups: the humanities, the social sciences, and science. And she's put them along this continuum. So representing science, she has psychology, specifically infant attachment research. So this is, you know, how much babies are attached to their mothers and what impact that has and how to test that. The sort of stuff where you actually have people in white lab coats standing behind two-way mirrors, observing stuff happening. Then in the middle, she has social sciences, which in this group is history, which sometimes looks a little bit more like humanities and sometimes looks a little bit more social studies-ish. Then on the far end, she has humanities. And the group that she looks up is new historicists, which in the mid-90s were kind of a big rising star in the world of literary studies. So she puts these groups along the continuum, and then she tries to find, what are some of the representative articles of it? So she gets some journals that are representative in the field of these three different studies. And what she does is she begins to look at the writing styles, even down to the very level of sentences. She says that academic writing may be readily described as a vehicle for constructing and negotiating knowledge claims. So she suggests that the different types of knowledge claims that these three groups are making is going to be represented in the type of sentences that they use. And so to be able to do this, she codes these sentences in seven different groups. The first group are the groups that she calls "phenomenological". These are things -- in the first place, particulars. Specific people, places, things. In the second place, she puts groups of things. So groups of people, places. In the third group, she talks about attributes of those things. So for example, Queen Elizabeth's desire is an attribute of a particular, Queen Elizabeth. And she suggests that these groups that are more phenomenological are probably going to be less based in really knowledge-dense disciplines. The next class are the epistemic classes, and these include reasons, research, -isms like Marxism or feminism, and appeals to the audience, like "we think this," "we think that". What she found is that literature leans heavily towards the phenomenal cases -- a lot of particulars and a lot of attributes. While psychology is a little bit more epistemic; reasons dominate, with a little bit of research as well, and some talk about groups. In between them, history focuses on groups, and then a little bit on attributes. So by looking at the distribution of the subjects of the sentences and these different disciplines, MacDonald has sort of teased out that the types of writing that they do, down to the very sentence level, may represent what the priorities are for the different disciplines. From this, she's sort of able to describe her theory that she articulates at the beginning of the book, that some disciplines are rural, and others are urban. I really like this metaphor, because it provides a really clear visual representation of what happens in the knowledge-making of these different groups. In the sciences, things are very dense. You have a lot of people working in a very small area. So you can imagine a skyscraper with thousands of scientists all working on one part of one gene, all the time. Things move very quickly, you have to publish very fast off of your results, things are always changing. This is why perhaps in the sciences, they favor a style like APA that highlights the dates. On the other side of things, you have very rural disciplines. So you can think of these as homesteaders, people who don't like to be fenced in. And in fact, sometimes in the humanities, if anybody gets too close to you and starts doing the same sort of research you're doing, you purposely might change your focus and get a little bit farther out into the frontier. These groups are focusing on individuality and novelty in the ways that they approach their research. So once MacDonald has sort of taken a look at all of these different disciplines, the next step is to think about, well how do you learn to write in a discipline? As she says, "Any suggestions about changing in academic writing involve understanding of the complexities of the different writings styles. So blanket condemnations of passive verbs for instance, or prescriptions for vividly concrete verbs, are largely ineffectual because they do not take into account either the historical situatedness, or the complex of knowledge-making goals and rhetorical situations represented in different kinds of academic writing," end quote. So if you worked in a writing center for example, it might be tempting to see a lab report and begin to criticize them for having passive verbs, when actually that's very appropriate in that kind of discipline. I think what MacDonald is suggesting here is that disciplines are unique from each other, and it might be worthwhile to sort of appreciate where they're coming from and just kind of accept it. If you're learning to write within a specific discipline, she suggests that you go through four stages. The first is nonacademic writing -- so casual personal writing. Texts, blogs, things like that. Then in stage two, you learn what she calls generalized academic writing, concerned with stating claims, offering evidence, respecting other people's opinions, and learning to write with authority. Level two is kind of the stuff that we think of as happening in first year composition. In level three, she talks about novice approximations of particular disciplinary ways of making knowledge. So this would be like as you move into your discipline, you begin to write more and more lab reports, or you co-author on a paper -- things like that. Finally, you've reached level four, which is expert insider prose when you're really deep in the discipline. So MacDonald suggests that disciplines aren't all the same. And the types of writing that they do may reflect different priorities. Even though you may be solidly entrenched in the world of English and words, think about that next time you talk with somebody who identifies as an economist, or a psychologist, or a physicist, or a chemist. The way that you talk about academic writing may be very different from the way they do. [shakers and acoustic guitar music]

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements that have shaped rhetorical history. Contact us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com or through Twitter @mererhetoricked. This is a rebroadcasted episode   And guys. Guys, today we address the last of the three traditional branches of rhetoric. This makes me sad. We had the Law and Order rush of judicial or forensic rhetoric and the pageantry of epideictic rhetoric and today we come to deliberative, or political rhetoric. And then we won’t have any more branches of rhetoric, because if there’s one thing Aristotle loved, it’s breaking things down into threes.   It is, of course, Aristotle who thought to divide rhetoric into the three genres of judicial, epideictic and deliberative and there’s nothing that says rhetoric always fits into these handy three categories, but it was convenient for Aristotle to do so. Think about it: Three branches of rhetoric. One of them, the judicial, focuses on the past—did the accused do something accuse-worthy? One of them—epideictic—focuses on the present—let’s celebrate how great this day is right now. And so one of them, deliberative rhetoric, will focus on the future. Judicial, epideictic, deliberative; past, present, future; law, community, policy.   It’s deliberative rhetoric that focuses on determining a future course to take. Traditionally, this was read strictly, as a matter of political debate by those who had authority to determine policy for a city state—should we go to war with Sparta? As Aristotle says, deliberative rhetoric "aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action; if he urges its acceptance, he does so on the ground that it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so on the ground that it will do harm." Aristotle gave two pairs of criteria for practitioners of deliberative rhetoric to keep in mind as they chose their debates. First, the moral—is it good or is it unworthy? Good or unworthy includes ethical concerns, but not exclusively that. Remember that for Romans “virtue” meant “manly” and “gentleman” used to mean a rank and not a compliment, so in some ways, worthy has to do with a specific set of political and social ideals and not just some sort of kindness-first morality that seems more natural to contemporary readers. It may be “good” to go to war to avenge some perceived slight to the country’s aristocratic pride, if pride is considered a moral priority. Aristotle lists things that are “good” like good birth, bodily stature, wealth and reputation, which might seem a little shallow alongside ethical virtues like justice, courage and generosity.   The second pair of criteria are even more pragmatic: is it advantageous or disadvantageous? In this pairing, you can see these less squishy values becoming more important. The country needs money and war with Sparta will bring spoils and rewards. War with Sparta will increase our reputation as a fearsome city state. Things like that. So that’s Aristotle for you: deliberative rhetoric deals with the future, and you can argue about whether an act is good or whether it is advantageous.   But a lot has happened in the years and centuries and millennia since Aristotle. Mostly we keep going back to the divisions that Aristotle came up with, even though we have changed our ideas of democracy and deliberative rhetoric for that matter. Oh, but don’t worry—Aristotle isn’t the only person willing to divide things into three parts! G. Thomas Goodnight, a rhetoric professor at the University of Southern California, studies argumentation, especially deliberative rhetoric, and he decided that deliberative rhetoric can take place in what he calls three spheres—the public, the technical and the private. The public is the one that is most familiar to us.   We think of deliberative rhetoric as necessarily political, but that is not necessarily that case. If deliberative rhetoric just means “forward looking,” and “policy deciding” it doesn’t just have to be about whether we should go to war with Sparta—and not just because the city state of Sparta isn’t much of a threat anymore. No deliberative rhetoric can also include private arguments: from questions as trivial as “where should we go for lunch today?” To as important as “should our family accept that job in North Dakota?” and “should Billy join the marines?” These instances of deliberative rhetoric are usually informal—we have a speaker of the house, but we don’t have a speaker of the home. They are, however, no less important. Consider the impact during the 60s and 70s of a hundred thousand private deliberations over how to treat people of other races, or the family debates about moving to the city during the industrial revolution. Private sphere deliberation matters.   Technical deliberation is the deliberative rhetoric that takes place among experts who have specialized knowledge of the subject matter. For instance, you might think about a group might come up with professional standards or expectations like the rules of conduct for lawyers or teachers. They set rules of their own group. Technical deliberation might also result in suggests or recommendations for other groups. A group of climatologists, for example, might write a brief on climate change, or a congress of feminist scholars might make a declaration on pornography, something that everyone argues over until they can agree on a common stance. These experts can debate in a very technical and in-depth register.   When private and technical deliberation can’t get the job done, it’s time for public sphere deliberation. Goodnight classifies the public sphere as the "argument sphere that exists to handle disagreements transcending personal and technical disputes." Once things enter the public sphere of deliberation, Goodnight says it’s time to focus on the common good—not just what’s right for individuals or families, and not just for groups of experts, but for everyone in the public.     And that’s the general gist of deliberative rhetoric.   Thanks for listening. If you like the podcast, why not go on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a nice review? Everyone likes good reviews. Or tell me directly by emailing mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com

Crisis looms in ancient Rome: the uneasy triumvirate between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus rests on thin bonds that seem inevitable to break. The Senate supports Pompey, but Caesar has successfully (and illegally) conquered Gaul, winning wide-spread military support. Everything seems primed for disaster. In fact, in less than a decade, the Great Civil War, the death gasp of the Republic, will spread across the whole breadth of the empire, changing forever the political and social life of Romans. This, of course, is the best time to write a treatise on rhetoric. Or it is if you happen to be Cicero. Cicero, a political player as well as rhetorician, saw in the dis-ease of Rome a need for leaders who could be well-informed about the issues, but also know how to effectively persuade those around them to order and peace. The risks are high and the need is pressing, both for the empire in general and for Cicero in general—he’s been exiled, his home has been destroyed by political thugs and his life is in danger for criticizing high-ranking leaders, including Ceasar. But he also knows that this isn’t the first time that the Roman world has been rocked by political instability and needed strong leaders versed in rhetoric. So when he sits down to write his rhetorical treatise, he sets it not in the current period (far, far too risky!) but back fifty years ago, just before another civil war would destroy the peace of the Roman Republic. The dialogue is written almost dramatically as three historical figures gather together in the peace of a patrician home “during the days of the Roman Games”: Lucius Crasses, Marcus Antonius, and Scaevola. They are joined by the young men Sullpicius and Gaius Cotta. Cotta suggests that in this peace “Crassus, why do we not imitate Socrates as he appears in the Phaedrus of Plate? For your plane tree has suggested this comparison to my mind, casting as it does, with its spreading branches, as deep a shade over this pot, as that one cast whose shelter Socrates sought “ (I. vii.28). You might remember from our Pheadrus podcast that Socrates normally engages in dialogues in the city, in the market or gymnasium or private people’s houses, but in the Phaedrus, Socrates gets a little topsy-turvey by going out in nature, giving long speeches instead of dialectic and—most shockingly of all—defending rhetoric. Well, looks like Crassus and Antoius are going to be similarly inspired by the setting to break with tradition—these are powerful Roman men who take action in politics and war and the business of running an empire. They are manly men, not like the Greek philosophers—the unmanly ninny GReekling-- who unambitiously ponder the meaning of things like philosophy and rhetoric instead of taking over the known world. In fact, Crassus seems to even have to describe rhetoric in terms of what it can do in terms of political power. And he starts by telling the most important creation story of the history of rhetoric. This story, as the legand goes and Crassus relates, starts with “brute creation” and the point that while human beings are slower, and weaker and less deadly than other animals they do have one advantage—they can discourse. So the orator created “our present condition of civilization as men and as citizens, or after the establishment of social communities, to give shape to laws, tribuals and civic rights?” (I.viii.33). Even today, Crassus says, the orator upholds his own dignity and the safety of “countless individuals and of the entire state.” Scaevola the cynical points out that orators also have caused great disaster to the state. So the discussion quickly turns to how to educate the orator to be the best kind of person, morally and intellectually, to lead the state towards greatness. Crassus (Cicero stand-in) and Antonio (C’s brother’s stand-in) debate requirements for the good rhetor—is it art or natural ability? It’s less of a clear-cut debate than you’d think, and Antonius sort of switches positions between the first and second book. Generally, both of the agree that “Good speakers bring, as their peculiar possession, a stule that is harmonious, graceful, and marked by a certain artistry and polish. Yet this style, if the underlying subject matter be not comprehended and mastered by the speaker, must inevilably be of no account or even become the sport of universal derision” (I.xi.50). That sport, incidentally, being the fruitless apolitical sophistry of the Greeklings that these political Romans despise.That’s what Crassus calls “Greeklings who are fonder of argument than of truth” But if there’s good content to oratory, then that’s worth while—that’s something that can actually DO something. But this education, to know everything you speak on, is hard to come by. Should orators be generalists or specialists? All of this takes a lot of “zeal and industry and study” (475), to be “he who on any matter whatever can speak with fullness and variety” (I. xiii.59) because “it is nearer the truth to say that neither can anyone be eloquent upon a subject that is unknowen to him. “ That means lots and lots of study—of Roman laws, above all else, but also on physiology, trade, astronomy grammar, all of it. Antonius, again the fly in the ointment, points out that it would be impossible to develop the kind of breadth that Crassus describes: “I cannont deny that he would be a remarkable kind of man and worth of admiration; but if such a one there should be or indeed ever has been or really ever could be, assuredly you would be that one man.” (I.vxi.) Wow. Ancient Romans had really mastered the art of the compli-insult. Okay, so what is rhetoric, then? Is it a specialized skill that only a few experts master or is it something added on to these other skills? Besides, Antonius observes “not a single writer on rhetoric has been even moderately eloquent” (I.xx.91). that’s a good burn, too, and one that you still here in rhetoric: we study this stuff all the time, so why aren’t we giving the speeches that inspire the world? How can we be so dull when we’re supposed to be experts in this stuff? Crassus points out that he’s talking about an ideal and that ideal is hard to achieve, maybe even impossibly, but it is important to have the idea “picture to ourselves in our discourse an orator from whom every blemish has been taken away and one who moreover is rich in every merit”—what would that look like? First there would be some physical characteristics—the orator who can’t speak, and speak loudly and clearly, won’t got far. And there whould be a “natural state of looks, expression and voice” for oratory (I.xxvvii.126) and good memory.There should be natural talent, but also passion and willingness to work to improve. This passion for betterment is critical, Crassus muses “What else do you suppose young Cotta, but enthusiasm and something like the passion of love? Without which no man will ever attain anything in life that is out of the common” (I. xxix.134). And even if someone doesn’t have all of these natural abilities, their training can help them to do a little better. “those on whome these gifts have been bestowed by nature in smaller measure, can none the less acquire the power to use what they have with propriety and discernment and so as to show now lack of taste.” (I.xxvii.132). Even if you aren’t the ideal orator, you can get much better with practice. The next day, the group is joined by Quintus Catulus and Gaius Julius Ceasar. Catulus for his part, argues that Oratorys “derives from ability, but owes little to art” in other words, it’s just a knack after all. This time Antonius fights back, kind of reversing his previous position. Antonius points out that “there are some very clever rules” that can make an audience friendly to a speaker and establish goodwill. But soon the whole conversation focuses back on the importance of being widely educated, especially in law and civil right. So what are the takeaways from The Orator? Over all it’s a long description of the importance of eloquence. “Eloquence is dependent upon the trained skill of highly educated men” (7) and “no one should be numbered with the orators who is not accomplished in all those arts” of the well-educated (53), because “excellence in speaking cannot be made manifest unless the speaker fully comprehends the matter” (37). Good will and delivery also emphasized. To educate, imitation comes first (265), then gradually more serious argumentation, although there are rhetorical geniuses. Performance should have genuine emotion behind it (335). There are a variety of acceptable styles (II. 23). (which we’ll talk about in a later episode) and different parts to speech and preparing a speak—and I know it sounds like we’re deferring, but we’ll talk about those in the future too. We have an entire episode prepared for talk about these parts of preparing a speech. Generally, thought, this treatise argues that over all Eloquence “is one of the supreme virtues” (II.43) But the fact that this treatise talks so seriously about rhetoric and its philosophy is in some way worth remarking on in itself. There’s some jingoistic feelings that manly Roman empire-building is much cooler than sissy Greekling philosophizing going around the culture and De Oratore is no exception that. I always think it’s funny how the speakers in this dialogue go out of their way to insist that they aren’t really sitting around philosophizing, and if they are, it’s only because it’s a state vacation and they kind of have to. The comparison with Plato’s Phaedrus are apt: here are Roman politicians who are acting out of character because of the circumstances and talking like philosophers. But while Cicero has his characters insist that the via activa is paramount, the circumstances suggest otherwise. These politicians are all doomed—the crisis in the Republic is about to reach full swing and soon many of the participants will be dead or exiled. Their political influence will be only fleeting, but Cicero’s dialogue invoking them keeps them relevant. The same could be said for Cicero himself in his own time: a brilliant politician, he was unable to stem the tide of violence as the republic descended into autocracy. Cicero was eventually exiled and then murdered.   He wasn’t just murdered but he was also posthumously beheaded, his hands chopped off and his tongue repeated stabbed with a hairpin. Sort of an ignomous end to a great politician. But Cicero the rhetorician seemingly had no end—the impact of his treatises, including de Oratore, dominated medieval and renaissance rhetoric. So for all of the insistence that sitting around theorize isn’t as important as the work of government, it turns out that theory has the longest-lasting influence. Situating de Oretore in the real violence of the Roman republic demonstrates not only the sometimes futile work of rhetoric, but also how high the stakes are in developing rhetors who are well-educated, balanced, virtuous and eloquent.  

  Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke by Gregory Clark Welcome to Mere rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms and movements that shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and if you’ve like to get in touch with me you can email me at mererhetroicpodcast @gmail.com or tweet out atmererhetoricked. Today on Mere Rhetoric I have the weird experience of doing an episode on someone who isn’t just living, but someone who was my mentor. If you’ve ever had to do a book report on a book your teacher wrote, you understand the feeling. But I really do admire the work of Gregory Clark, especially his seminal work in Burkean Americana. Clark is was been the editor of the Rhetoric Society Quarterly for eight years and recently became the President Elect of the Rhetoric Society in America, which means, among other things, he’s responsible for the RSA conference, like the one I podcasted about earlier this summer. He also wrote a fantastic book called Rhetorical Landscapes inAmerica, that became the foundation for a lot of work that looks that the rhetoricality of things like museums, landscapes and even people. In the final chapter of Gregory Clark’s Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, he poses the question “where are we now?” (147). We’ve certainly been many wonderful places. In Rhetorical Landscapes, Clark has packed up Kenneth Burke’s identification theory of rhetoric and applied it to the national landscapes of America. Clark suggests that our identity as Americans comes, largely, from our experiences with common landmarks. To demonstrate this power of Burke’s concept of identification, Clark has taken us through more than a century of American tourism, from New York City in the early 19th century to Shaker Country to the Lincoln Memorial Highway. We’ve been convinced by Clark of the rhetorical power of these places to create a national identity. We’ve seen how mountains and parks and even people can evoke a feeling of identification. It’s been a long, lovely ramble by the time we get to Clark’s question. Reading his words, one can’t escape the image of a wanderer who, having ambled through one delightful landscape after another finds himself suddenly disoriented as to his current location. Clark himself describes his project as “a ramble” and it is this apt description that encapsulates both the dizzying strengths of the book (147). Surely one of the most striking strengths of this ramble is the remarkable company we keep. Clark has brought the human and extremely likable specter of Kenneth Burke along for this meander through American tourism. The Burke of this book has not only provided us with the language of identification in our community of travelers to “change the identities that act and interact with common purpose;” he’s consented to come along with us (3). Clark presents Burke as one who was “himself a persistent tourist in America” (5). Burke very charmingly has written about his traveling “’go   go    going West, the wife and I/.../ “Go West, elderly couple”’” (qtd. Clark 7). When Burke’s theories of national identification are presented to us chapter-by-chapter, we enjoy their application in the presence of a critic who is not cynically immune to the process of identification, only acutely aware of it. Presented as accessibly and understandable, Clark has written us a Burke we can road trip with. If Clark has presented for us a clear, insightful and accessible version of Burke through this rambleit is because of his own remarkable prowess as a teacher. He is willing to let Burke be a fellow-traveler with us and he is willing, himself, to join us personally in the ramble. We readers are fortunate to have Clark with us, just as much as we are to have his clear explanations of what Burke would say if the deceased were alongside us. Just as Burke is not immune to the seduction of American tourism, Clark gives us ample insight into how the American landscape affected his own identification as an American as a child. In the chapter on Yellowstone, Clark describes how, as a child from “a marginal place in America” he had been taught that “America was in faraway places like New York or Washington, D. C., or Chicago or California” (69). When Clark first went to Yellowstone National Park, he noticed the variety of license plates in the parking lot and could suddenly feel “at home among all those strangers in a new sort of way—at home in America” (69). While Clark gives us every possible reason to respect him as a serious, meticulous scholar of both rhetoric and American tourism history, he never lets us forget that he, like Burke, like us, is also another tourist in awe of the places we define as quintessentially American. With knowledgeable and accessible teachers like Burke and Clark at our sides, we readers feel comfortable seeing how we, too, fit into this landscape. While the scope of the book covers the extremely formidable years of American nation-making (from the days of “these” United States to when the country is solidly coalesced into “the” United States), the institutions then established are still foremost in the psyche of Americans of all generations. Readers of Rhetorical Landscapes in America will be hard-pressed to read a chapter without immediately applying the Burkean theories to their own individual experiences with these ensigns of American identity. Have you been to NYC? Have you been told that you have to see Yellowstone? All of these places are part of how we structure our American identity. Where are we going? Working topically, vaguely chronologically, Clark and Burke accompany us through New York City, Shaker country, Yellowstone, The Lincoln Highway, the Panama-Pacific world’s fair and the Grand Canyon. It’s almost like a car game on a long road trip: okay, what do these six things have in common? While each of these locations lead themselves to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a touring American (eg, in the chapter Shaker country we discover how guides to the region have lead to identification “not with the Shakers, but with the other touring Americans who gather to wonder at the spectacle the Shakers create” and thus objectified Shakers), (52). Including a city, a people, a park, a road, an event and a building in a park could arguably be a way to expand the definition of the “landscape.” Why are we rambling through these American landscapes with Burke and Clark, after all? The argument appears to be, after all, to situate a Big Rhetoric theory of identification into a series of Big Rhetoric artifacts—so big, in fact, that it includes mountains and highways. Those who are resistant to wholeheartedly adopting Burke’s expansion of rhetoric to include not just persuasion, but also identification, will find Clark’s scope of artifacts as unconvincing; those who are frosty towards opening the canon of rhetoric past the spoken word, and past the written word into the very land we travel will bristle at the idea of giving something as Big Rhetoric as a city, a people, a landscape a “meaning.” These two groups of reader are by-and-large impervious to the convincing and meticulous readings that Clark provides of these locations. They’ve already made up their minds and aren’t likely to change them, despite the quality of Clark’s argument. Clark and Burke are observant, meticulous and personable traveling companions, This is an excellent book, one that opens up rhetoric to more than just written texts, but something that can encompass views and groups of people as well. I love thinking about the implications of place on national identity and I’m not the only one: scholars from Diane Davis to Ekaterina Haskin have taken up the idea of how a tour of places and spaces and people can create an argument for national identity. So when you come back from your summer vacation this year, think about not just what you saw, but who it made you become.    

What’s the difference between writing and composition? Writing, we think we know what that is: it’s maybe typing out letters on a computer screen, or maybe it’s holding a pen above a legal pad. But what if writing is bigger than that? What if it’s also the prewriting that takes place in your brain, as you drive around town or play racquetball or stare into space? And how about composition? What does that mean? It’s not just writing so could it be arranging speech, or images or even moving bodies? Is dance part of composition? Jody Shipka’s landmark text, Towards a Composition Made Whole, expands our understanding of what we mean when we say “writing and composition.” Today on Mere Rhetoric.   *Intro music*   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’d like to give a shout out to our sponsors at the Univesity of Texas Humanities Media Project for their support, but today’s topic is right up their alley too--what are the limits of humanities and media?   Shipka is sick and tired of the way that two words are deeply misused in the feild of rhetoric and composition. The first is the word composition itself. Composition, Shipka argues, does not have to be text-based media. Shipka is a proponent of teaching students to compose in a broad sense--using images, music, dance and motion alongside words and letters to create meaning. Drawing on Cheryl Ball Shipka sums up resistence to non-print composition in that “texts are often labeled experimental when (or simply because) audiences are not used to recognizing their meaning-making strategies” (133).   That leads to the other term that Shipka takes issue to--technology. If composition is often view in very conservative terms as something done with pen and paper or a computer, technology is perhaps too-hot. Technology, Shipka claims, does not equal digital. The ferver for “technology” can be just as bad as a prejudice towards newfangled technology.  In her words, “I am concerned that emphasis placed on ‘new’ (meaning digital) technologies has led to a tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multi-media, or still more broadly speaking, composition with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitalized, screen-mediated texts” (8) and “we have allowed ourselves to trade in one bundle of texts and techniques for another: pro-verbal for pro-digital” (11).   Technologies are only seen as technologies as long as they are difficult and electronic, she argues, while other methods of multimodal composition can be as or more effective while employing other means. The example that Shipka leads the book with concerns an essay written by a dance student on a pair of ballet slippers. The essay was researched, ‘composed’ and transcribed in a way that uses multiple approaches, but nothing that needs a cord. She quotes Wertsch that “all activity is mediated by tools, whether by psychological tools and/or by technical tools such as hammers, nails [etc]” (43). Elsewhere she writes “when our scholarship fails to consider, and when our practices do not ask students to consider, the complex and highly distributed processes associated with the production of texts (and lives and people), we run the risk of overlooking the fundamentally multimodal aspects of all communicative practice” (13).  Okay, and one more quote just to really underline her position: “ “To label a text multimodal or nonmodal based on its final appearance alone discounts, or worse yet, renders invisible the contributions made by a much wider variety of resources, supports, and tools.” This understanding of how we mediate even when we use “analogue” technology lets us expand our concept of buzzwords like “multimedia” and “multimodal.”   These two terms lay the groundwork for what she suggests in her manifesto: a composition made whole, with all processes, projects and media enveloped in the process of composition.  In her words “A composition made whole recognizes that whether or not a particular classroom or group of students are wired, students may still be afforded opportunities to consider how they are continually positioned in ways that require them to read, respond to, align with… a steaming interplay of words, images, sounds, scents, and movements” (21).   Something about Shipka’s work is extremely freeing, both in our research and in our pedagogy--we can expand our work to anything. But it’s also terrifying--what do I know about document design? about video production? about dance?  This same free fall feeling comes when I read about the processes Shipka describes her composers taking. Here in A Composition Made Whole she talks about the process of writing in a big way, similar to how big her definition of composition is. This part reminds me of a chapter that she co-authored with Paul Prior in another place. What Prior and Shipka did was to give their participants a piece of paper and have them draw their writing spaces and their writing practices. What they found is that people’s writing practice goes far beyond the “prewriting, writing, rewriting” steps that we often inculcate our students with. Objects like cigarettes, cats and washing machines and activities like talking over beer, walking the dog and calling a friend become part of the writing process.   Shipka describes some of these writers’ processes in a a composition made whole. For instance, when a writer goes for a run to clear her mind, “what might otherwise look like nonwork--taking a break from the task at hand--functioning as an integral part of the composer’s overall process” (60).   This creates some messy borders of a process we simplify in our research and teaching. If taking a run is part of the compositing process, what else is part? What can be excluded? I found this a difficult question to ask when I began keeping track of my time while working on my dissertation. If was I reading a text or coding data, that was definitely just as much a part of writing my dissertation as putting words on the paper. Meeting with my advisor? Yes. Talking it out with my mom? yes… Thinking about it on a run? I think. Thinking about it when I’m driving?...maybe? It can hard to say for sure what 40 hours a week of academic work looks like because it’s so dispersed. If our students say they have to clean their apartment, or walk the dog or  watch six episodes of Broadchurch in a row before they can write the paper, it’s hard to say whether this is part of their writing process or a procrastination effort. Shipka makes composition as an object and composition as a process very messy or rather, she exposes its inherent messiness to us. If you have a messy writing process, you know what? I’d like to hear about it. You can send us an email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com or if you don’t want to send us text, you would send us a picture, a short video or even ballet slippers.  

Dewey Part Deuce   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric. Or maybe welcome back, because last week we talked about John Dewey and today we’re talking about John Dewey again. You don’t have to go back and listen to the last week’s episode on Dewey and aesthetics, but if you like this, Dewey part the Deuce, then you migh want to go check out the previous episode on Dewey and the artful life. Today, today thought,we get to talk about Dewey’s political and educational contributions.   Dewey was a huge fan of democracy and of education for democracy. He said, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." One scholar summarized Dewey’s politics in this way: “First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising their beliefs in light of new evidence, provided Dewey with a model for democratic decision making…Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society.” Dewey was big on democracy. this idea, especially about participation in democracy instead of just representation inspired much of his writing in education. The kind of progressive education that Dewey endorsed was education for democracy, education that focused on making student empathetic and engaged citizens.   Dewey’s most articulate thinking about engaged democracy comes as most good thinking does: in response to an interlocutor whose ideas make our blood boil. For Dewey this was Walter Lippmann. the famous Lippmann-Dewer debates begne in 1922 when Walter Lippmann wrote s book called Public Opinion. In Public Opinion, Lippman says that democracy is demo-crazy--public opinion is actually shaped by adverstisers and demogogues who can manipulate the public into thinking what ever they want. The people as a whole can’t make any decision that hasn’t already been made by sleezy Madison Ave. types. So Lippman says that instead the government should be led by experts, preferably scientitic and objective types who would be immune to propaganda. Instead of democracy romantically conceived, he suggested representation and political experts.   Well this got Dewey’s goat and in The Public and its Problems, he responded to Lippmann’s view of democracy. Instead of relying on experts for democracy, Dewey recommends that “"it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns." Sure, he admitted, there could be ignorant publics swayed by propaganda, but the solution was not to toss the baby with the sludgewater--education was what the populace needed if they were to engage in participatory democracy.   The Dewey Lippmann Debate has gotten a lot of press from recent rhetoricians. Search for it on Google scholar and you’ll find over a thousand entries since 2011. In the 2008 meeting of the Rhetorical Society of America, a “lively panel” discussion took place where, according to one witness “Jean Goodwin effectively advanced journalist Walter Lippmann’s critique of the “omnicompetent” citizen against Robert Asen’s John Dewey, who represented hope for collaborative dialogue.” And in the most recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, another scholar pointed out how the Lippmann-Dewey debate relates to the current expert-laden political rhetoric. A recent collection of essays on called Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds. also reminds us of the perrential importance of asking ourselves “Are our citizens trained for democracy? Can they be?” The debate, so it seems, continues.   The kind of education you would need to particpate in democracy includes not just information about the value of nuclear energy or the political history of the middle east: you need to have some sense of how you fit in to a democracy, what the moral obligations you have and what the society can provide you. For Dewey, America’s ideal model of civic engagement wasn’t a selfish, me-first mentality, but neither was it entirely collective and socialist. In Individualism Old and New, Dewey says it’s time to move past the old, rugged, wild-west homesteader kind of individualism that theAmericans he was writing to could possibly remember, or at least could remember stories of their parents and grandparents. while his audience of early 20th century Americans idealized that kind of independence, they were also increasingly aware of how to connect. The experience of world war have taught them that “Most social unifications come about in response to external pressure” (11) and “personal participation in the development of a shared culture” (17). Defining that interconnectivity against the struggles and hardships of war and poverty may seem intutive but the move from frontier rugged individualism to an individualism that recognizes our interconnectivitity is at the core of Dewey’s political philosophy.“Each of us needs to cultivate his own garden. But there is no fence around this garden” (82).   Now just so you know that last week’s episode on the aesthetic of Dewey wasn’t totally separated fromt his sort of thing, Dewey also talked about how that “shared sulture” happens through art, and how this art educates, cultivating the skills that are necessary for democracy: “The art which our times needs in order to create a new type of individuality is the art which, being sensitive to the technology and science that are the moving force of our time, will envisage the expansive, the social culture which they may be made to serve” (49). Or, another way, “The work of art is the truly individual thing” (81). Even though this is the end of our Dewey Duo, if you have thoughts about John Dewey’s influence in rhetoric, art, politics, philosophy, or any of the many wonderful things he was invovled in, drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. Until then, go cultivate that fenceless garden, recognizing the capacity of those around you to contribute to a democracy made whole.

Dewey aesthetic Today on Mere Rhetoric, we talk about John Dewey. John Dewey was a big ol’ deal, even back in his day. Just after his death in 1952, Hilda Neaby wrote”Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not just a philosopher, but the philosopher.” And what does a person have to do to be compared to Aristotle? I mean to be compared in a serious way to Aristotle, because I’m like Aristotle because, you know, I enjoy olive oil on occasions, not because I’m the philosopher. I think one thing Neaby means is that Dewey was involved in everything. Just like how Aristotle had huge impact in politics, theology, science and rhetoric, John Dewey seemed to have a finger in every pie. By the time he died at age 92, he had written significantly on education, politics, art, ethics and sociology. But it’s not enough to be a big freakin’ deal a hundred years ago, but Dewey is a big deal in rhetoric today. It’s rare to search too many issues back in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly or Rhetoric  and Public Affairs without hitting on an article either directly about or draws on Dewey, and books about Dewey are popping up all over the map. John Dewey is hot real estate.   So because John Dewey is such an important thinker for rhetoricians today, we have to take more time than today to talk about him. That’s right-- a Mere Rhetoric two-parter. A to-be-continued. A cliffhanger. If that cliff is carefully divided, I guess and that division is this: today we’ll talk about John Dewey’s contribution to aesthetics, his book Art as Experience  and responses to that book from contemporary rhetoricans. Next week we’ll talk more about his politics, the dream of his pragmatism, what he means by Individualism Old and New  and the famous Dewey-Lippmann debate. So that’s what we’ll be doing the next two weeks. So let’s get started on the first part of this Dewey-twoey.   Like many great thinkers, Dewey started his career by realizing that what he thought he wanted to do, he  really, really didn’t. In Dewey’s case it was education. It’s ironic that Dewey became one of the 20th century’s most important voices in education because he did not teach secondary or primary school for longer than a couple of years each. Good thing he had a back-up plan as a major philosopher. He joined the ground floor of the University of Chicago and became one of the defining voices of the University of Chicago style of thinking, although he eventually left, somewhat acrimoniously, and taught at Columbia for the rest of his career. Somewhere along the way, though, he became president of the American philosophical association and published Art as Experience.   The title kind of gives away Dewey’s claim--he situates art in the experience which you have with art. As he says “the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience” (1). But he also means the opposite, that experience can be art. Instead of thinking of art as something that happens in rarified situations behind glass and velvet ropes, Dewey opens up “art” to mean popular culture, experiences with nature and even just a way of living.   Being in the moment is a big part of this artful living. If you’re experiencing or rather, to use the particular philosophical parlance Dewey insists on “having an experience” then you are totally being in the moment: “only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturning is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now is” (17). In such a view, any time we live the moment artfully, in full presence of being, we’re having an artful experience. In having an experience, you have some sort of awareness and some kind of form.   As Dewey says, “art is thus prefigured in the very processes of life” (25).   This idea may sound radical. How can sitting in a crowded bus be art the way that the Mona Lisa is art? But Dewey is insistent. He sighs, “the hostility to association of fine art with normal processes of living is a pathetic, even a tragic, commentary on life as it is ordinarily lived” (27-28).   That’s not to say that there can’t be objects of art that concentrate the sensation of having an experience. But it’s the whole experience. For example, “Reflections on Tintern Abbey” isn’t really about Tintern Abbey any more than it’s about Wordworth and evenings and homecomings and 1798 and that sycamore and all of it. It expresses a complete experience of Wordsworth. And that expression is always changing as times change.“the very meaning,” Dewey writes “of an important new movement in any art is that it expresses something new in human experience” (316). Meanwhile the art that remains after the moment passes and the movement becomes cliche. “Art is the great force in effecting [...] consolidation. The individuals who have minds pass away one by one. The works in which meanings have received objective expression endure. [...] every art in some manner is a medium of this transmission while its products are no inconsiderable part of the saturating matter” (340)   And the value of art is moral. First off, Dewey says that“The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic’s office is to further this work, performed by the object of art” (338).   Pretty cool stuff, huh? But wait, there’s more. The process of having an experience, that complete being, has its own moral value, or so argues Scott Stroud in John Dewy and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, aesthetics and morality. There he claims “I want to examine how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation” (3) because“At various places, Dewey’s work provides us with tantalizing clues to his real project--the task of making more of life aesthetic or artful” (5) Put in other words: “art can show individuals how certain value schemes feel, how behaviors affect people, etc.--in other words, art can force the reflective instatement (creation) of moral values” (9)   Stroud connects the pragmatists like Dewey with mysticism in Eastern philosophy and medieval monastic Christianity. Remember how Dewey is all about having an experience, really being in the moment? So Stroud says, “The way to substantially improve our experience is not by merely waiting for the material setup of the world to change, but instead lies in the intelligent altering of our deep-seated bahits (orientations) toward activity and toward other individuals” (11). “The important point,” writes Stroud, “is that attentiveness to the present is a vital way to cultivate the self toward the goal of progressive adjustment and it is also a vital means in the present to do so” (69)   For Stroud, as for Dewey“the art object [...] imbued with meaning partially by the actions of the artist, but also because of the crucial contributions of meaning that a common cultural background contributes to the activity of producing and receiving art objects” (97)--the way that the artistic object is received popularly and by critics. And for that aim “criticism does more than merely tell one what an important work of art is or what impression was had; instead, it gives one a possible orientation that is helpful in ordering and improving one’s past and future experiences” (122). And in that, criticism, or even appreciation, is also a moral act. Stroud’s argument has immediate application of the artful life. He ponders “How can we render everyday communication, such as that experiences in mundane conversations with friends, cashiers, and so on, as aesthetic?” (170). To answer this, he draws on dewey to suggest that we avoid focusing on a remote goal, cultivate habits of attending to the demands of the present communication situation and fight against the idea of reified, separate self (186-7). Next week we’ll continue our Dewey Twoey by talking about Dewey’s political and educational contributes and Individualism Old and New and modern responses to it. Between then and now, I hope you have the chance to enjoy some great art, even if that great art is popular art, or even just this moment you’re in ...right ...now.

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, Jacob is in the booth and the Humanities Media Project is making this all possible.   Quick note: this is a rebroadcast, so you might want to take the next couple of sentences with a grain of salt. That is all. Starting…now.   We’ve spent this month talking about the villains of rhetoric, but since mere rhetoric isn’t just abtout rhetoric, today we’re going to talk about one of the villains of composition. But first   Mere Rhetoric is now at your disposal for feedback! You can check us out on Twitter @mererhetoricked or you can email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com send in suggestions, feedback, questions— and I’ll try to answer them because every question is a rhetorical question. And of course I want to shout out the University of Texas RSA student chapter for their support of this podcast. I’m, as ususal, Mary Hedengren.   Today’s villain is not one mustache-twirler, but the very most villainous type of villain: the committee. And even worse than a committee is a report written by a committee. The villans of compositions are often reports written by committee, and the first major villainous report in question goes all the way back to the 19th century Harvard Reports.   Harvard, the site of the very first frist- year composition classes, was also the place where complaints about those freshman were most acutely embattled. Because Harvard was, you know, Haaahvaaad, it pioneered an entrance exam for its applicants. Soon, preparatory schools were gleefully teaching to the test, a test which, however well it kept out the riff raff, was woefully inadequate in, well, helping students learn how to write. Soon these students entered actual classes at Harvard or any of the copycat schools that required an entrance exam, these students having learned only the minutia of grammatical correctness, pedantary and the art of the all-night cram-fest, were dismayed to discover they couldn’t in fact write.   Their instructors were the more distraught by the realization, not least because there were dreadful lot of terrible writers to be taught. The late 19th century saw a boom in educational enrollment, the likes of which are inadequately compared to increases post-WWII or in the 70s. Albert Kitzhaber reports that in 1894, more than a thousand students at Univeristy of Michage were served by a staff of 4 full time teachers and 2 part-time graduate instructors. That means not only was the writing often awful, but there was an awful lot of awful writing. So there was a crisis—Quick! To a committee!   The report that Harvard’s committee wrote compained “It is obciously absurd that the College—the institution of higher education-should be called upon to turn aside from its proper functions [those are left un specified by the way] and deovte its means ad the time of its instructors to the task of imparting elementary instruction which should be given even in ordinary grammar schools, much more in those higher academic instituions intended to prepare slect youth for a university ocourse” (44) According to Kitzhaber, it goes on in that same tone and he reports drily that “there was a good deal of sarcasm in the Report. (45). “It is little less tha absurd to suggest ath any human being who can be taught to talk cannot likewise be taught to compose,” fumed the report “writing is merely the bait of talk with the pen instead of which the tongue!” The report grumpily pointed the finger at the lower schools for not preparing students better, and suggested raising the standard for admissions even higher. In total, three reports were issued from Harvard: 1892, 1895 and 1897. The three castigated the lower schools for “the growing illiteracy of American boys” and urged more mechanicall correctness from preparatory schools.   There’s nothing new about complaining about the awful writing of freshmen. Complaining about lazy, illiterate students is one of the oldest and most time-honored traditions of teachers, alongside wearing silly hats for official ceremonies and calling people you hate “my esteemed colleague.” What made the Harvard Reports so villainous was the immese influence they had in 19th century America.   These reports spread all over America, creating a sense of crisis in the popular press. Eventually the US government took not and in response to this crisis—wait for it—appointed a committee. This committee saught to standardize entrance exams and require more writing in the secondary schools. In the end, the Harvard reports had succeeded in creating a sense of crisis and creating action to address the crisis, lifting standards “by the hair of the head” as Fred Newton Scott said. Still, all they had done was ensure that the superficial complaints that these teachers and administrators had were the only complaints to be addressed.   A focus on mechanical correctness has dogged composition ever since. Every few decades, newspapers and magazines will find that some percentage of college graduates are dangling their participles and the education world will find itself again playing the blame game. It happened again in 1975 with NEwseeek’s incidenary article “Why Johnny can’t Write” which again highlighted “the illiuteracy of American boys” (why don’t these reports ever concern themselves with girls’ inability to diagram a sentence, I leave to the audience to deduce). “Why Johnny can’t write” led to further committes, further reports and further books all declaring a “back to bascis” curriculum, where basics meant the identification of linguistics terms. This coninutes today. While searching for a copy of the original “why Johnny can’t write” I found an article published on the nbc website in 2013 that starts with the sentence:   Can you tell a pronoun from a participle; use commas correctly in long sentences; describe the difference between its and it's? If not, you have plenty of company in the world of job seekers. Despite stubbornly high unemployment, many employers complain that they can't find qualified candidates. Often, the mismatch results from applicants' inadequate communication skills. In survey after survey, employers are complaining about job candidates' inability to speak and to write clearly. The reporter seems to have made a sudden slip—can you spot it? She’s jumped from the skills of identitying a pronoun or punctuating a possessive to the “inablitiy to speak and write clearly”. Sadly, I do not believe this will be the last article to make a similar leap and for that matter, we don’t see the end of that sort of reasoning in books or committee reports.   We can’t blame the Hardard reports of the 1890s specifically—maybe these complaints are just eh easiest writing errors to identify and castigate—but whenever an English major is confronted with a horrified acquaintance who says “I better watch my grammar in front of you” we’re dealing with some of the popular fall out from the 19th Century Harvard reports.

Jeffrey Walker’s Aesthetic/Epideictic   Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movement who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, Samantha’s in the booth, Humanities Media Project is the sponsor and Jeff Walker is the subject. Jeffrey Walker is kind of my hero in life. I get weird around him, the way some people get around Natalie Portman or David Beckham. I came to the University of Texas, in part, because I so admired his work, but when I got here and saw him at parties I found that I mostly awkwardly stood four feet behind him, which—incidentally, is the exactly position the camera takes behind the protagonist in horror movies and I suspect that that didn’t help me much in meeting him. Since then I’ve taken a class from Dr. Walker, had him speak at official RSA student chapter meetings, even had a one-on-one seminar with him, where every week I would exit his office to a world where the sun shone brighter and the birds sang sweeter. That’s how much I like Jeffrey Walker. He’s a great human being, but he’s also a darn fine scholar.   Dr. Walker’s first book in 1989, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem may sound on first blush like a piece of literary criticism, but it’s actually about persuasion, the very particular kind of persuasion that demands that the listener put in as much or more work than the rhetor. In this book, Walker looked at a very specific genre—the American Epic—and a specific period and school, and inquired about what kind and amount of rhetorical work being done. The main difficulty here seems to be audience. To write an American epic that can both express and inspire the nation en masse, the poet has got to speak to those masses. But to be a high literary, post-Romantic bard, the poet has to deal in the kind of textual, allusion, and thematic obscurity that is incomprehensible to the masses. In hisconcluding paragraphs, he sums up the struggle nicely: “The bard, in short, is obliged to reject the available means for effectively communicating his historical, political, and ethical vision to the public mind insofar as he wants to succeed with his tribal audience” (240, emphasis in original). Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem traces the American literary attempts at prophecy without populism from its origins in Whitman’s “moral magnetism” (30). First identifying both high poetic speech (93) and “conventions and expectations” for the audience (118), as the reasons for Pound’s failure to be a “Whitman who has learned to wear a collar” (2), the book then examines Crane’s inability to “use his mythic ideal to redeem or bless the present” (136), in part because “’the popular’ in a modernist context is generally beneath respectability” (145). While William Carlos Williams what Walker on another occasion called the “good guy of the book” (15/2/2011) in trying to write Paterson for “a public at least partly comprise of actual people” (157), he, too, fails to write a work that is accepted in both popular and literary circles. Olson’s Maximus Poems seek a similar project, but in describing the few that can transform many sometimes becomes almost eugenically elitist, even to the point of justified genocide (234). In the end, it seems as though these modernist bardic writers must chose between a literary and a popular audience (240), usually coming down on the side of the literati, ultimately described as the “tribe with whom [the author] is marooned” (243).       I’m very interested in this book’s premise of irreconcilable audiences. You might see how this concept could coordinate with Wayne Booth’s image of the author sitting around waiting for an audience. While Booth dismisses this idea, this book kind of suggests that it happens, regardless of the author’s intention; these writers sought a broad and a specific audience, but only the specific audience came to the table. I always think about the hero of Nightmare Abbey, who wrote a metaphysical tome so boring that it only sold seven copies. The hero then perks up, calling his readers, in his mind, the seven golden candle sticks. If you write obscure stuff, you probably aren’t going to reach a wide audience.   The other hugely influential book Walker wrote about the rhetoric of poetics is his 2000 Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. The book goes way beyond Whitman and his prophetic bards to ancient Greek lyric poetry. Poetry back then was always publicially performed and that, Walker argues, means that it was always public persuasion. One of the key ways this happened what through the lyric enthymeme. The Enthymeme, to refresh, is when the audience supplies part of the argument. So [shave and a haircut]. Or, to make it poetic, when Ol Yeller is, spoiler alert, put down, the 20th century American audience things “Oh, dogs are like friends and it’s sad when they die” instead of, like 14th century Aztecs, thinking, “what’s the big deal? We kill dogs every day—and eat them.” The audience supplies part of the argument of any aesthetic piece. It seems like the main argument Walker’s making in this book is that the epideictic isn’t derivative and secondary to the other genres of rhetoric, but actually primary and of almost “pre-rhetorical” origin. In supplying many examples of ancient poets who were able to produce the best lyric enthymemes, Walker not only builds up evidence to support his over all claim, but he creates sub-categories and conditions for this kind of lyric enthymeme.. One of the most interesting of these divisions is the “Argumentation Indoors/Argumentation Outdoors” distinction Walker illustrates with Alcaeus and Sappho’s lyric poetry. So some of the public performance weren’t big publics. If Alcaeus spoke only to his hetaireia (remember them? The geisha like prostitutes like Aspasia?) or that Sappho make have written for an intimate circle of acquaintances and devotees doesn’t have to imply that their poetry could appeal only to those small groups. In fact, Walker claims that “just the opposite is true” and the poems “offer enthymematic argumentation that engages with the discourses of a wider audience” to cement their continued influence (249). The ideal situations for this kind of poetic influence disintegrate, though. The book is, after all, called Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity and it’s understandable that the tracing of suasive lyric has to end somewhere, so Walker seem to mark the beginning of the end, in both Greece and Rome, with the literaturaization of poetry and the Aristoltization of rhetoric. The former leads to a paradigm that literature is removed from everyday life, erudite, a “decorative display” (57) that “cannot escape the rhetorical limitations of symposiastic insider discourse” (289); the latter downplays the rhetorical nature of poetry (281) while emphasizing rhetoric’s relation to the civic responsibilities of the forum and the court. So you can see why I have so much hero-worship for Jeffrey Walker. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced this is going to be our last podcast on his work. Yeah. If you have a reason why you love Jeff Walker, or –I guess—if you want to suggest a podcast about your own rhetorical heroes, send me an email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. I’ll just be sitting here, dreading the possibility that Dr. Walker might hear this podcast, getting embarrassed and awkward for a while.      

Demosthenes   Welcome to Mere rhetoric a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren. And special thanks to the Humanities media project. This is a re-recording, so you might want to take the next sentence with a grain of salt   Last week we continued our conversation of deliberative rhetoric by talking about Saving Persuasion, a contemporary book about how rhetoric doesn’t have to be rhetortricky. Today we’re going to talk about one of the figures in political rhetoric who was really, really good at what he did and that made everyone around him very nervous. I’m talking about one of the most engaging political figures of ancient Athens: Demosthenes.   That name may sound vaguely familiar to those of you who are regular listeners because we mentioned Demosthenes as one of the great orators who got his start in logography. Logographers, as some of you might recall, were the pre-lawyer lawyers. They could be hired to write speeches for people going to court. They had to be savvy about what the jury would respond to and they had to write in a way that would represent their client. What they didn’t have to do, though, was deliver the speech.   We also mentioned that Demosthenes was all about delivery when we talked about the canons of rhetoric [canon boom] Really? Well, when we talked about the canons of rhetoric, one of the last ones was delivery, and Demosthenes reportedly thought delivery was the most important. He had an unnatural time at it, though, because he was allegedly born with a serious speech impediment. Plutarch says that Demosthenes had “a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.” More likely, Demosthenes said his “r”s like “l”s. I have a lot of sympathy for this, as someone who went to speech therapy herself until she was in junior high. I also had problems with my r’s and l’s and on top of it, I had a retainer. My mom, a writing teacher, thought this was fantastic, because Demosthenes learned to over come his speech impediment by way of—not a retainer—but pebbles in his mouth. As he learned to talk around the pebbles in his mouth, he became hyper aware of his diction and became a great orator. All of this is cold comfort to a twelve-year-old with orthodonty, but it worked out well for Demosthenes.   Really well. Demosthenes, who had been taking a sort of back-seat position as a logographer began to get more of a toehold in politics, by way of taking on “public” cases. You see, if you hated someone’s politics, you could sue them. Remember how some Republicans were going to sue Obama for abuse of power? It was like that. All. The. Time. So Demosthenes gets more into politics and begins writing public speeches like Against Androtion and Against Leptines and then Against Timocrates and Against Aristocrates Are you noticing a theme in these titles? Demosthenes was really taking to town all of the politicians who were allegedly corrupt and politics in ancient Athens were always personal. “Pretty much you try to paint the other guy as a villain beyond all villainy. Athens did smear campaigns better than anyone who ever put their opponent in grainy, slow-mo footage. Here’s a taste of Demosthenes’ accusations: “For on many occasions, men of Athens, the justice of the case has not been brought home to you, but a verdict has been wrested from you by the clamor, the violence and the shamelessness of the pleaders. Let not that be your case today, for that would be unworthy of you.” “In this court Leptines is contending with us, but within the conscience of each member of the jury humanity is arrayed against envy, justice against malice, and all that is good against all that is most base.” “do not think, gentlemen of the jury, that even Timocrates can lay the blame of the present prosecution upon anyone else: he has brought it on himself. Moved by desire to deprive the State of a large sum of money, he has most illegally introduced a law which is both inexpedient and iniquitous.”   These are awesome. But as anyone running a good campaign knows, it’s not enough just to slam the opponent; you also need to make a few campaign promises yourself. In 354 BC, Demosthenes outlined his policy of moderation and a scheme for financing in his first political oration, On the Navy, which is not to be confused with the Village People’s immortal classic, In the Navy. [sound bite, maybe]. With this speech, first of many, Demosthenes launched his political career in earnest. But what really drove Demosthenes’ career was a great opponent and that he had in Philip II of Macedon. As you might infer from the name, Philip II wasn’t an Athenian, but a Macedonian who was taking over other city states that were alarmingly proximate to Athens. Demosthenes saw Philip as a huge threat and warned the Athenians in his rousing First Phillipic. Unfortunately, Philip still conquered Athens.   This led to Demosthenes being able to give the second and third Phillipic, criticizing the attacker of his city and declaring it "better to die a thousand times than pay court to Philip." The Third Phillipic was his magnum opus in a lot of ways.   “But if some slave or superstitious bastard had wasted and squandered what he had no right to, heavens! how much more monstrous and exasperating all would have called it! Yet they have no such qualms about Philip and his present conduct, though he is not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave.” Ooh, that’s good.   Philip did conquer Athens. But then he died. Demosthenes loved that. After Philip’s assassination, Demosthenes put a “garland on his head and white raiment on his body, and there he stood making thank-offerings, violating all decency” according to one account. In fact, after Philip was assassinated, Demosthenes’ classy rhetoric led an uprising of Athenians to finally break the Macedon army. It wasn’t successful and Philip’s son Alexander was in charge and—big surprise—Demosthenes hated him too. It was mutal. Alexander demanded the exile ofDemosthenes.   But the Athenians still loved him and he loved the people. “A project approved by the people is going forward,” he wrote in a public speech commemorating the defeat of his political enemy. Because of the way that Demosthenes had opposed kings and led the people into riot, he became vilified by all good monarchists for centuries. Here was this sneaky demagogue who could manipulate the people into rebellion.   If political types were antsy about Demosthenes, rhetoricians adored him, especially those with a republican bent. Cicero idealized Demosthenes’ orataional and political career, and Longinus and Juvenal praised him highly. Renaissance rhetoricians who were comfortable with his anti-monarach stance loved him too—John Jewel and Thomas Wilson. John Jay, Hamilton and Madison, the American founding fathers and authors of Federalist papers, also admired Demosthenes’ style. So if you like people and rhetoric, chances are, you’ll like Demosthenes.   In some ways, Demosthenes was an orator of the people all along. His style is relative plainspoken, abrupt and built on the assumption of sincerity. As Harry Thurston Peck puts it, Demosthenes "affects no learning; he aims at no elegance; he seeks no glaring ornaments; he rarely touches the heart with a soft or melting appeal, and when he does, it is only with an effect in which a third-rate speaker would have surpassed him. He had no wit, no humour, no vivacity, in our acceptance of these terms. The secret of his power is simple, for it lies essentially in the fact that his political principles were interwoven with his very spirit.” But even though Demosthenes gave the appearance of speaking out of the conviction of his soul 100% of the time, allegedly, he refused to speak off the cuff. He put a lot of work into making his words seem artless.     And that’s what our topic for next week is going to be—Sprezzatura, the art of making what you say seem artless. It’s a prime skill for politicians in our day as well as back in the Renaissance where the term was coined. We’ll talk about why the idea of pretending that you haven’t worked on your speech is so important again in this age of sincerity. If you have things that you’re sincerely interested in, why not write to us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? You can send us ideas for podcasts, feedback or stories of your own orthodonticure. And until new week, happy political season!    

Hermogenes of Tarsus   Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today is a rebroadcast of an old episode, thanks to the Humanities Media Project here at the University of Texas. Hope you enjoy!   Hermogenes of Tarsus was a bit of a boy genius: he wrote many important rhetorical treatises (of which we only have sections) before he was 23 years old. And when Hermogenes was fifteen years old, in 176 AD, something remarkable happened. The philosopher emperor of the Roman empire, Marcus Aurelius himself, came to listen to him speak. This is all the more impressive because Hermogenes was of Tarsus, which, if you know your ancient geography well you’ll note is pretty far east from Rome. Marcus Aurelius heard him declaim and speak extemporaneously. “You see before you, Emporer,” Hermogenes reported said, “An orator who still needs an attendant to take him to school, an orator who still looks to come of age.” The emporer was duly impressed with the boy’s rhetorical powers and showered him with gifts and prizes   From such auspicious beginnings, things quickly went downhill fast for poor Hermogenses. While still young he lost his brilliant mind. It’s impossible to know for certain what led to Hermogenes’ deterioration. Some propose that it was a psychological breakdown from the stress of being such a shooting star, and certainly that sounds reasonable—once you’d declaimed for the emporer of the world, where do you go from there? Others suggest that there was a physiological reason, like meningitis from a bout of infectious disease or early onset dementia. Ancients as well as moderns were fascinated with how someone who showed so much promise could so quickly become the butt of cruel jokes. Antiochus the sophist once mocked approach of the once-brilliant Hermogenes: “Lo, here is one who was an old man among boys and now among the old is a but a boy.” Byzantine texts, who loved a local rhetorical hero, speculated that when he died that his heart was huge and…hairy. Do you remember that JK Rowling story about the hairy heart? Every time I think of Hermogenes I think of that. But let’s talk about his ideas instead of whether his heart could be hairy.   We actually know surprisingly little of Hermogenes’ works. We know a lot of rumor about how great he was, but of the five treatise under his name, only one and a half are likely to be genuinely his work. The one is called “On Types of Style” and in it Hermogenes describes seven types of style: Clarity, Grandeur, Beauty, Rapidity, Character, Sincerity and Force. Some of you who are familiar with your Roman or medeval rhetoric are maybe scratching your heads here—seven? Seven types of style? What ever happened to high, medium and low? And what the heck is “character?” These are legitimate questions. Remember two things: first this is the period of the Second Sophistic, when there’s a heightened interest in rhetoric and in Greek rhetoric in specific, so that means that people are looking for something a little more off the beaten path. Rhetoric plus. Instead of just aping Cicero, Hermogenes comes up with these seven categories that are more specific and less immediately associated with rhetorical situation. It’s like a more byzantine approach to style. And yes, that’s a Greek empire pun.   The other thing to remember about Hermogenes’ style guide is that he was probably a teenager when he wrote it. And a celebrated prodigy at that, so that just accelerates the cocky self-assuredness. Remember those kids in high school who insisted that they were smarter than all of the teachers and were pretty certain that they could be president—if they wanted to descend to politics? Yeah, Hermogenes was probably that kid.   Wow, it’s hard not to talk about Hermogenes the person instead of his ideas. He’s just an interesting guy. Okay, so these 7 kinds of style.   Clarity comes first because clarity is most critical. But don’t think that just because clarity is important that it’s simple. Oh no, clarity consists of two parts—purity, which is sentence-level clarity, and distinctness, which is about big-picture organization. So you need to have each sentence clear as well as the organization over all.   The next style point is grandeur. Oh, don’t wory, grandeur, too, has sub parts—six of them, arranged in 3 groups: solemnity and brilliance come first. Solemnity is using abstract statements about elevated topics. “Justice comes to all.” “Honor never tarnishes” “Love is a many-splendored thing.” Solemn statements are short, bold and unqualified. Brilliance takes those abstracts down to specifics, and becomes longer: “It’s good when two friends meet around the board of fellowship.” They may sound similar because they are pretty close.   The third part of grandeur is amplification. It’s not just talking a lot, but expanding the topic to make it seem “bigger” than it would be if discussed in casual conversation. Nuff said.   The last chunk of grandeur comprises three parts: aperity, vehemence and florescence. In short, sudden strong emotion. Asperity for shart criticism, vehemence for distaine and florescence to ease back off a bit and sugar coat the strong feelings.   Having done with grandeur, Hermogenes points out that beauty is also useful, although, surprisingly, he doesn’t break this category down too much.   The next type of style is rapidity—quick short sentence, rapid replied, sudden turns of thought in antithesis. “Am I happy? No. You disappoint me. No, you destroy me.” That sort of thing. The fifth style is that mysterious character. Strangely this is pretty muh what Aristotle calls ethos. You migh have to think a little abstractly about how character can be a style, but Hermogenes insists that this type of what we might classify as argument I actually a style. Okay. He’s the genius, not me. The subcategories of character are simplicity, sweetness, subtlety and modesty, which do sound a little more like something you can create in style.   Finally, Hermogenes recommends to us Sincerity. The speaker must let his audience know that he is “one plain-dealing man addressing another in whose judgement he has perfect confidence.” The idea is to create the illusion that the speaker is talking more or less extemporaneously. They can’t appear to be written into the speech or that ruins the whole effect. Imagine how different you feel when someone in the heat of a speech says, “Oh, I can’t stand it!” versus when you see written in the notes “Oh. I can’t stand it [with vehemence.]”   The last style is actually just the correct balance of all six of these types of style. By using these types of styles well, the speaker has force with his audience. He sums up “the ai of clarity is that the audience should understand what is said, whereas Grandeur is designed to impress them with what is said. Beutyf is designed to give pleasure. Speed to avoid boredome, ethods helps to win over the audience by allying them with the speaker’s customs and character and verity persuades them he is speaking the truth. Finally, Gravity sitrs up the audience and they are carried away by the completeness of the performance, not only to accept what they have heard, but to act upon it.”   If you’re curious about whether Hermogenes in thoughtfully preparing such a philsphy of style was adroit in it, the sad fact is that nothing in “On Style” suggests the boy rhetor who capitvated the emporer Marcus Aerlious. Translater Cecil W. Wooten says succinctly “he is a brilliant critic of style whose own style is really quite atrocious” (xvii)   In the same way that young Hermogenes took the basic divisions of style and expanded them, he did a very similar thing with the stases. We’ll talk more about the stases in a later podcast, but briefly, they’re a way of categorizing what it is you’re arguing about. Are you in conflict with your interlocutor about whether global warming exists or are you just debating what’s the correct policy to decrease warming emissions? In the stases of HermaGORAS ( who is not to be confused with our current hairy-hearted hero) and others throughout the classical world, there were four different stases: fact, definition, quality and procedure. Hundreds of years later, in the second sophistic, HermoGENES has expanded on these four. How much? Okay, fact, definition and procedure get to stay pretty much the same, but quality? Oh, quality gets blown up. Now instead of 4 stases we get—13. Yep, 13.   Hermogenes makes a big deal on whether an argument actually has issue—whether it can be argued about. Because, after all, he himself points out that “It is not the function of rhetoric to investigate what is really and universal just, honorable, etc.” but real, public issues. To have issue he set some requirements. All parties have persuasion that are (1) different and (2) have force. This means you can’t have straw men you’re fighting against The verdict is (1) not self-evident but (2) in principle can be reached . this means you can’t really argue whether chocolate or vanilla are better.   As the scholar Malcolm Heath has pointed out, this stuff was important for ancient rhetoric: “At the heart of ancient rhetoric in its mature form was a body of theory […] which sought to classify the different kinds of dispute […] and to develop effective strategies for handling each kind” (Heath). But classifying stases kind of lost its luster after the Renaissance. Heath’s translation and interest came as a result of work done by Kennedy (1983) and Russell (1983) opened up interest in Hermogenes again.   I think we’re primed for an increase in interest in the work Hermogenes, the boy wonder. I have to admit, though, the story of his life is especially touching to me. I can’t help but speculate what the young man would have achieved in his future if he had been able to continue to work and produce texts. Would he have expanded on other categories of ancient rhetoric? Would he have refined his definitions? It makes me remember the juvenile work of Cicero or Isocrates and wonder whether we’d honor them so highly if those were the only treatises we had from them. We’ll never know what Hermogenes could have become, what contributions he could have made in the second sophistic period, because his career was so tragically cut short before he could refine and develop his ideas.  

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. And today I want to talk about the pedagogical tool of making kids have an argument. And an argument doesn’t just mean bickering.       Okay, even if there’s a difference between arguing and bickering , I will say, that hen I was a kid, I bickered a lot with my brother Dave. Dave is three years older than me, which meant he was farther along in school and knew more things. This bothered me, so if he said something, I said the opposite. If he said that hippos were more dangerous than lions, then I had to prove that lions were more dangerous than hippos. If he said that indoor games were better than outside, I have to prove that outside were better than inside. Sometimes, like boxers circling each other, we would switch positions and suddenly I was arging for hippos and indoor games and Dave was arguing for lions and outdoor games. It must have driven my mother crazy, especially on a long Sunday afternoon, but it turns out that what Dave and I were do has a long tradition in rhetorical education. We just didn’t have a word for it yet—dissoi logoi.   Dissoi logoi means “contrasting arguments” in Greek. You can sort of tease that out from the root word for “dissent” and “logos.” It goes really really far back, and we don’t know who came up with the first time, but the idea is that you argue your opponent’s position to better understand your own. There are two ways to practice dissoi logoi. One is the way I did as a 7 year old, by having an interlocutor and then switching positions. This method works great for school kids all learning together and you can see this practice in speech and debate classes even today. You research and write and then argue your heart out and then after you finish, the teacher holds up their hands and says, “Okay, switch.” When I argued what Dave would said, I’d know how to respond to his arguments, because I have heard his arguments.   The other way to practice dissoi logoi is to do it all yourself. You run through all the arguments on one side and then you run through all the arguments on the other side. You’re arguing with yourself in a sense. There’s a philosophical and cynical view to the practice of dissoi logoi. If you’re cynical you might say that this is an example of the relativism of the sophists at the worst. This is what people hate about lawyers and sophists—they don’t really care about the argument, but they only care about the language and winning, so they could arguing one thing just as impassioned as the other. It looks like you are two-faced or insincere if you can switch from caring deeply about one side and then, on the turn of a dime, care just as deeply about the other side. But the philosophical perspective sees dissoi logoi as an exercise for coming at a truthier truth. In fact, another term for dissoilogoi is dialexis, and the term is related to dialectic—the opposing forces method of getting at truth espoused by Socrates, Plato and other heavy hitters of classical Athens.   The practice of Dissoi Logoi is articulated in a text called the Dissoi Logoi, which was found at then end of a much later manuscript, and wasn’t published until the renaissance. It was proably written around 425 BC, based on its references to historical figures and style of writing. The Dissoi logoi looks like student notes, which is what a lot of rhetorical tezts are, but there’s no way of saying it was one thing or another for certain, and we don’t know whose class the author was sitting in. It kicks off by saying that good and bad “are the same thing, and that the same thing is good for some but bad for others, or at one time good and at another time bad for the same person.” All of this is to say that some actions have different moral weight, depending on who you are and under what circumstances you engage in them. Then follows a series of examples—in sports, a certain outcome will be good for one team, but bad for the other; shoddy workmanship is bad for customers and good for the manufacturers, etc. The same event could be good or bad depending on who experiences it. Then there’s a list of the circumstances which are shameful in one setting and praiseworthy in another, like ow for Spartans, girls would walk around bare armed or naked while Ionians would never. You can kind of imagine a list of examples from an instructor. And some of the examples seem awfully sensational—not just regular suicide, murder, exhibitionis, and adultery, but drinking from your enemies’ skulls and eating your parents and cross dressing and incest. It’s all these off-color examples that make me think the Dissoi Logoi was an educational text—nothing gets kids’ attention like sex and violence.   And as a bit of a tangent, the question of education comes up explicitly at the end of the tract, where the question is asked whether wisdom and moral excellence can be taught. The author takes care not to claim that wisdom can be taught, but dismantles the arguments against such an education and argues for the ideal of the person who can “converse in brief questions and answers, to know the truth of things to please one’s cause correctly, to be able to speak in public, to have an understanding of argument-skills and to teach people about the nature of everything” (8.1). Oh, if that’s all an education takes… But it sounds a lot like the education which Cicero describes in the dialogs on the Orator.   It doesn’t seem like a big stretch to say that two thinkers could have independently come up with the idea that the best education would be to know everything, but there’s also a possibility that the ideas of the dissoi logoi made it over to Roman thought. But heading back the other way, there may have just been a common ideal floating around in the Greco-Roman world. So did the Dissoi Logoi influence Cicero?   Yes, I think, and no. Whatever one Dave doesn’t think.

When last we left our intrepid hero, Chaim Perelman was describing universal audiences with his collaborater Lucie Obretch-Tycteta and setting up what he called the new Rhetoric. Today, we’ll talk about his solo text, The Realm of Rhetoric and critical responses to his philosophies.   The first thing you’ll notice about the Realm of Rhetoric is that is it around a fourth of the size of the New Rhetoric. I think that’s probably a function of having writing a ground-breaking magnum opus and then following it up.   Let’s start with the spoilers. What is the realm of rhetoric? It is“communication tr[ying] to influence one or more person, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions” of which dialectic is one part (162). In another place, Perelman says “Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning” (11). Some of this sounds a little Burke-y, doesn’t it? All this talk about how talk isn’t about force, even psychological force.   Perelman’s words here state that, “the new rhetoric is concerned with discourse addressed to any sort of audience” (5) not just a specific group of people hanging out in the marketplace listening to speakers.   The presence of controversy means that dialectical reasoning always involves audiences, and always involved received opinion. For instance, if I try to tell you that we should visit Italy for vacation this year, I’m relying on opinions that say that Italy is a good place for vacations, that traveling for vacation is a good idea, etc. Perelman says that dialectical reasoning is about justifiable opinion and it isn’t invalid because it deals with opinion, but just different. And different disciplines require different types of argument: “It is as inappropriate,” he writes “to be satisfied with merely reasonable arguments from a mathematician as it would be to require scientific proofs from an orator” (3).   So the realm of rhetoric is different: “A argument is never capable of procuring self-evidence, and there is no way of arguing against what is self-evident… argumentation… can intervene only where self-evidence is contested” (6).   That isn’t to say that there are constraints in this realm of rhetoric. Even if you decide to make every argument to support a proposition, so that it can reach all audiences, there are “psychological, social and economic limits that prevent a thoughtless amplification of the discourse” (139). And if we have to limit the arguments we make, we have to think about making the best ones, the ones that have efficacy and validity in various forms. Efficacy is mercenary: does it work for that audience? Does it, to use PErelman’s term, persuade?The other option is validity, which is linked to convincing, to the universal audience “above and beyond reference to the audience to which it is presented” (140).   Perelman ultimately accepts a big version of rhetoric “As soon as a communication tries to influence one or more persons, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions, it belongs to the realm of rhetoric” and get this “Dialectic, the technique of controversy, is included as one part of this larger realm” (162). Dialectical reasoning needs to get off its high horse, Perelman suggests because “We can immediately see that dialectical reasoning begins from theses that are generally accepted, with the purpose of gaining the acceptance of other theses which could be or are controversial” in other words “it aims either to persuade or convince” (2). So yeah, what’s the realm of rhetoric? Everything.

  Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people, and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, and this last week, I had the fantastic experience of meeting one of you. That's right, an actual listener in the actual flesh. Somebody who wasn't just one of my colleagues, or one of my friends, or my mom, who listens to this podcast. It was a really cool experience. And she was very nice and very enthusiastic, and I'm really grateful that I got the chance to meet her. But it made me think a little bit about who I think you guys are when I make these podcasts, how much I create who you are in my mind, and how much you respond to the way that I've created you. This made me think of a really important article that came out back before I was born in May of 1984. The article is called "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." And it was written by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, who are kind of the dynamic duo of composition theory. They co-authored a lot of articles together, and kind of became synonymous with each other.  In this groundbreaking article, they summarize a debate that's taking place at the time -- a debate with sort of two sides. On one side, audience is concrete and should be appeased. You think about the audience that is out there, and you respond to their own needs. On the other side is audience invoked: an audience that is invented -- that comes from the imagination of the writer. In describing the audience addressed, Ede and Lunsford sort of pull to this new movement -- this writing in the disciplines idea where in some ways the degree to which the audience is real or imagined and the ways it differs from the speaker's audience are generally either ignored or subordinated to a sense of the audience's powerfulness. Audience, in this situation, is everything. And writers should respond to the needs of the audience.  This is the stuff that you will often get in a first year composition class, where you're asked to go read the newspaper that you want to publish in, you might go to a website like Wikipedia or Quantcast to find out information about who subscribes to that newspaper, and sort of do everything you can to respond to that audience that is sort of out there. In some ways, this is a great way. Especially to teach young college students who might have a hard time thinking outside of their own lives. But in another sense, this model puts more emphasis on the role of the audience than it does on the writer itself. As they say, one way to pinpoint the source of the imbalance in this formulation is to note that they emphasize the role of readers, but are wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role that writers play throughout the composing process, not only as creators, but as readers of their own writing as well. Instead, this perspective says in a typical writing in the disciplines way, "we defend only the right of audiences to set their own standards and we repudiate the ambitions of English departments to monopolize that standard-setting. If bureaucrats and scientists are happy with the way they write, then no one should interfere." There's sort of a "you do you" theme going on here that, in some ways aeems a little unethical. Listen to this example that they give. "The toothpaste ad that promises improved personality, for instance, knows too well how to address the audience." But such ads, they say, “ignore ethical questions completely." After all, as they cite Burke, "we're in the art of discovering good reasons. There's an imbalance that has ethical consequences. For rhetoric has traditionally been concerned not only with the effectiveness of rhetoric, but been concerned also with truthfulness." Another concern that they have is that envisioning audience as addressed, something out there, suggests an overly simplified view of language. Discourse isn't just something that we put on our words and our ideas. You need to have some sort of unifying, balancing understanding of language use, and not overemphasize just one aspect of discourse. Now on the other hand, they're not entirely off the hook on those who are on the audience invoked side. These audience invoked sorts believe that the audience is a created fiction. The best example that they have is Walter Ong's study, which is -- appropriately enough -- titled "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction". In this, Ong says -- and they quote him – "What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? Two things at least. First, that the writer must always construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role... Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself." In this sense, the writer is creative. They're able to project and alter audiences. But Ede and Lunford do take issue with Ong's idea that you can do whatever you can to create a reader, but there are still "constraints on the writer and the potential sources of and possibilities for the reader's role. And they're more complex and diverse than this perspective might imagine." Ede and Lunsford point out that the reader is willing to accept another role, but also perhaps may actually yearn for it. They may be willing to accept some roles and not others. In this sense, there are constraints what the writer can do. The writer can't make her audience into something that they don't want to be. In accepting a certain role, her readers do not have to play the game of being a member of an audience that does not really exist, but they do have to recognize in themselves the strengths and the characteristics that the writer describes, and accept the writer's implicit [inaudible] of these strengths and characteristics to what the writer hopes that the audience's response will be to any proposal. This is because a reader's role "has already been established and formalized in a series of other conventions. If a writer is successful, they will effectively internalize some of these conventions and present the material in a way that will be effective for the audience." So the answer that Ede and Lunsford give is that both are appropriate. At times, the reader may establish the role for a reader that indeed does not coincide with the role in the rest of their life. At other times, one of the writer's primary tasks may be analyzing the real life audience, and adapting discourse to it. As they say,  "One of the factors that makes writing so difficult is that we have no recipes. Each rhetorical situation is unique, and thus requires the writer, catalyzed and guided by a strong sense of purpose, to reanalyze and reinvent solutions."  Think about it. As they say,  "All of the audience roles we specify -- friend, self, colleague, critic, mass audience and future audience -- may be invoked or addressed. It is the writer who, as writer and reader of her own text, one guided with a sense of purpose and with the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play. There needs to be, in some sense, a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed 'audience addressed' with its focus on the reader, and 'audience invoked' with its focus on the writer.  One last quote, I promise. Ede and Lunsford finally say, "A fully elaborated view of audience then must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important creativity of the reader, and must account for a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences. Finally, it must relate the matrix created by the intricate relationship of writer and audience to all of the elements in the rhetorical situation." I think this is a really useful model to think about the ways that we deal with audience. In some ways, any sort of writer needs to know what her audience is like, what are some of their characteristics and constraints? What are they willing to see themselves as, and what seems beyond the pale? This sort of audience analysis is really useful in a lot of situations. Additionally though, the writer can invoke the audience -- talk to them in a certain way that encourages them to respond. This is something I thought about in meeting this listener of the podcast earlier this week. In some ways, I thought about who she was. An advanced and graduate student, somebody who is going to go to graduate school soon, who is interested in rhetorical history in some way. And I thought about what her needs might be in terms of a podcast for something like this. To keep it interesting, keep it relevant, keep it focused on rhetoric. But in another way, I invoke her and the rest of you when I make a podcast. I talk to you as if you are interested in rhetoric. As if this is something important to you. And you somehow willingly fill the role. Well, thanks for doing that. Thanks for being the audience. If you want to show me how real you are, or invoke me right back at you, please feel free to send me an email. My email address is mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. And until then, thanks for being real and addressed, and thanks for being imagined and invoked.