Today’s Plan:
- Paper Questions
- Isocrates Exercise
- For Next Class
Paper Questions
From the syllabus: Our first project will ask you to synthesize the first 8 weeks of readings into a definition paper of 1800 to 2000 words.
From a previous class:
We are meeting in the computer lab today because I wanted to get a sense of how you are handling/processing the readings thus far. Your first major assignment calls for a conference length paper (8-10 pages double-spaced) that ties our readings together. In that paper I will ask you to group our readings to find relationships between them. Your paper will be tied to a central rhetorical term, idea, or question. For instance, you might construct a paper around the idea that rhetoric is merely pastry-baking. Or the idea that rhetoric is driven by ethos. Or the idea that it is driven by pathos. You might focus on how different rhetorical theorists approach or ignore the importance of location and time (context, kairos). You might trace how a theorist establishes her own ethos, and the ethos of the sources she uses. We’ll talk more about the papers later. But I want to plant a seed today.
Let me add something new: your goal in this paper is to simultaneously map a conversation taking place in ancient Greece while positioning yourself in that conversation all the while providing us with a definition of rhetoric and identifying some of its central elements, techniques, and concerns. Let me warn you 2000 words is not a lot of words. Be ready to draft, revise, and condense.
What else would you like to know? What do you think the paper should have to do or mention?
This is a thing I will show you.
Isocrates Exercise
I’d like you to work out of the questions in our reading space today. Collaboratively, let’s see if we can pin down responses to these questions, and tie them to specific passages in the readings.
Here’s our questions:
- What is rhetoric? Or sophistry? Or oratory? or dialectic? How do we make sense of these terms? That is, how does the theorist in question define rhetoric?
- What analogies for rhetoric does she offer?
- Why/when should/must we study rhetoric?
- How do we study rhetoric? Is there a curriculum, a pedagogy, a project/assignment? What does the study of rhetoric look like? Where does this study happen?
- What constitutes rhetorical invention? From where do ideas come?
- What are the core dimensions, terms, elements of rhetoric? If I were to give a vocabulary quiz, what terms from the reading would I need to include?
For Next Class
Readings:
- Jarratt (focus on pages 35-39, her discussion of sophistry)
- Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”
For next Tuesday, we will be reading the Lanham essay (my personal favorite, already in Canvas) and two chapters from Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope (I still need to .pdf these).
