Today’s Plan
- Attendance
- Summer Research Applications
- Review Last Class
- Articles
- Lanham’s Strong Defense
- Discussion Post
Summer Research
Undergraduate Research/Creative Endeavor Stipends Available
The Office of Undergraduate Research is now accepting applications for stipends to support spring and summer semester undergraduate research projects and creative endeavors. UNC undergraduate students may apply for up to $1,000 per student, per semester. The deadline for spring stipend applications is Feb. 15. Complete information and application forms are available on the OUR website.
Let’s take a look at one of those forms.
Review Last Class: Cicero
I believe that morality should be part of curriculum, but I also think that the guidelines for morality should be based on something concrete, like our current laws. I think morality is one of those things that is too complicated to define, (which worries me about this upcoming paper as we try to define education) but if laws were studied then it wouldn’t be so arguable about if it is right or wrong.
As we were talking about literature today I was thinking about whether talking about morality through literature counts as teaching morality. In the secondary education program we talk about literature being a way for students to talk about these issues in a “safe” way. Today’s conversation made me wonder who it is safe for. Is it a safe way for the students to talk about it? Or is it safe for the teachers because they can default back to the response that they were only teaching literature not morality?
I interpreted that Cicero wanted the focus to be on the greater society instead of the individual especially based on this context:
The attack on philosophy by Cicero emphasizes his belief that political philosophy had abandoned its starting point, a concern with the happiness of men in cities, and replaced it with a concern for individual happiness regardless of city.
In my experience, perceptions, and readings, the improvement of society seems not merely a nebulous concept, but a rather religious one, in which the improvers-of-society set out upon a goal which has not (again, in my perceptions and readings) seen any progress except the technological, which can be easily argued to be a regression. I don’t believe it is, but as Emerson says “the notebook’s memory saps that of the mind,” so perhaps.
My favorite thing to cite in these discussions in Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza, which he intended to be a sort of manifesto for pacifism before WWII, and then immediately after publishing it he would see WWII and the Holocaust erupt in a massive defiance of all his touring lectures on non-violence, and after that fact begin to publish extremely pessimistic and individual-oriented works, claiming that “there is only one corner of the universe you can be sure of improving, and it is your own self.”
Another quote (reminds me of Richard Weaver): “As Rand put it, these people merely substitute the word “society” for the word “God” and act and worship accordingly.”
First, I have two (rather conflicting) takes on technology that I would suggest. The first is Walter Ong’s essay “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” Ong is a Jesuit studying Plato and recognizes how, even as Plato disowns writing, his entire ontological project is built upon it. Ong would argue that without the notebook, Emerson could never have come to think about transcendence.
The other is Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” This is an extraordinarily difficult essay, but I would say that it is THE most important essay of the 20th century. If you have any familiarity with Derrida or Foucault, then you can see how their work is indebted to the path that Heidegger lays down: that technology increasingly orients us to the world in a way that stresses “efficiency.” Everything we encounter becomes a means toward the ends of efficiency. Trees become “yet-to-be-paper.” Humans become “yet-to-be-labor” (although, in late capitalism, we would have to refine this. As Obama pointed out in his closing address, automation (technology) has become so efficient that it no longer requires humans to do many things it once did. Techno-efficiency, in effect, becomes the new religion.
Heidegger’s solution, though, isn’t to turn to individualism (he did in his earlier work, but not in his later work). Rather it is to stress the ways in which human existence is predicated on the environments in which we “dwell.” Attending to dwelling means attending to the ways in which humans are produced by their environments, their relations, even as they produce them. In essence, he offers an early articulation of what we might now call Actor Network Theory, or ecological theory, or new materialism, or eco-feminism.
The essays I think everyone in English/humanities/rhetoric should read:
- Ong, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought”
- Burke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” and Terministic Screens
- Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology”
- Lanham, “The Q Question”
- Rice, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution:From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies”
- Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”
- Coates, “A Case for Reparations”
Lanham
Questions from the blog posts:
- Lanham’s “Q” question” begs many questions. The overarching inquiry that can only be asked, yet wholly unanswerable: does education on rhetoric lead “to virtue more than to vice”? (155).
- What is the weak vs the strong defense (what is the strong defense? 156, 161, 166, 187-9–ends w/ individual vs public binary)
- Lanham’s relationship to Ramus (158-9, 73), Hirsh (172) and Bloom (178). Attempts to shelter, disconnect, control
- Lanham’s relationship to McKeon, What is architectonic rhetoric? (165-6, 187)
The grounds of the “What is Education?” essay: pg. 175
I’ve got a longer lecture I might read.
Homework
Read and blog on Proctor (pdf). Can you think of a poem you have been taught that stuck with you? One that you still occasionally think about?
