Today’s Plan:
- Schedule Update
- Lanham Write Ups
- Lanham Discussion
- For Next Class
Schedule Update
Lanham Write Ups
Let’s read/listen to 3 or 4 of these.
Lanham Discussion
I’m hoping discussion emerges. In case we need them, here’s a list of the passages that people cited in their papers:
- “The modernist route is easy to teach, which is one reason it is taught so widely. This is a pity, because the way we teach becomes the way we think.”
- “Thus begins modern inquiry’s long history of looking for its lost keys not where it lost them but under the lamppost, where they are easier to find.”
- Lanham says that the Strong Defense “assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man made
- Lanham writes, “Turned language, man’s best friend, into a potential enemy” [Note: this leads to a bunch of stuff I want to talk about later–human relationship to language, and whether rhetoric *first* divides or collects]
- Quoting Ramus: “For although I admit that rhetoric is a virtue, it is virtue of the mind and the intelligence, as in all the true liberal arts, whose followers can still be men of the utmost moral depravity.”
- “And so, on a very large scale indeed, McKeon puts our crucial question back into time precisely as Castigleone did, suggesting as answer to our “Q” question that is sprezzatura writ large. If we make the Platonic or Ramist assumptions, then to the “Q” question the obvious, indeed the tautological, answer must be “No!” If, on the other hand, we make the rhetorical assumptions, the assumptions built on a dramatistic theory of human reality and a metaphorical theory of language, then the answer, equally obviously, indeed tautologically, must be, as Quintillian has it, “Yes!” How could it be otherwise, since the orator creates the reality in which he acts? He must be at one with it, “just” and “good” in its terms, since it is created for his purpose. Now it becomes apparent that either answer, in its pure state, is logical, true, and useless. And so both sides, once they have returned the answer of their choice, proceed to hedge it. Quintillian brings philosophical coordinates into his discussion continually, so that the basic tectonic oscilation is set in motion without his aknowlegding or, most of the time, even knowing it. Ramus, having separated the two, trusts that they will get all mixed up together again. Who cares, since the purpose is not to describe reality, but to make inquiry and teaching easier?”
- Lanham paraphrasing Bloom on scholars: “Society exists to serve the university and not vice versa, and the scholar remains a “perpetual child,” pure in heart and motive, professing a set of canonical texts…in an environment insulating political pressures–without, in fact, any social context whatever. The scholar does not act in society except by being what he is. He is…what the culture exists to create”
- Lanham, in response to Bloom, on mixing “formal pleasure” (learning for learning’s sake) with real world problems: “Finding the means to resituate this mixing into the curriculum, giving it both a theoretical and administrative home, is the primary item on our current agenda”
- “Philosophy and rhetoric, taken as two great opposites of the Western cultural conversation, can be harmonized only by reversing the Platonic effort, by putting them back in time.” [note: “what does “time” mean here?”
- Anthony Blunt example
- “Sculley calls Apple a “third wave” company and Pepsi a “second wave” one. “Second wave” organizations are hierarchical, focus on stability, institutional tradition, and stable markers; “third wave” wave organizations are flexibly networked, focus on interdependency, individual entrepreneurship, and growth.” AND ““We humanists are becoming ever more career-oriented in the purely competitive Pepsi way
“ - “Much as we want to evade it, the “Q” question is coming after us these days. It presses on us in the university, for the university is like the law courts: it cannot dodge the “Q” question. It must design a curriculum.”
- Passage worth sharing: Later Lanham compares the traditional viewpoint of rhetoric to the weak defense, because it is two sides of the same extreme: good and evil. The belief that a thing or concept is wholly good and that the opposition is entirely wrong, is just not feasible because every action has a corresponding reaction. The strong defense is attributed to this new definition of rhetoric, which basically takes bias out of the word jumble and takes what is good from several arguments to create a solution instead of a fallacy. Lanham is basically saying that the root of the problem is the bias of extremist ideology and that what questions the virtue of those who use and study rhetoric is in question only because rhetoric is used as a tool for division instead of a tool for unity.
My passage: “Perhaps now we can comprehend how Quintillian might have felt that a rhetorical education as he had traced it conduced to civic virtue. It trained people in the Strong Defense, in the skills needed to create and sustain a public, as against a private, reality. It did not simply train, it created, the public person” (189)
For Next Class
A few things.
- If you did not submit a Lanham Write Up, you can do that for 4/5 points
- Read Miller pages 1-35
You will need to use Miller to analyze a text for our first major assignment. Pay attention to how Miller describes demagoguery, and how she thinks we can combat demagoguery.
