FoolsCap

One of my (increasingly) rare attempts poetry.  Fans of dreadful verse, it’s your lucky day!

 

so

snow

so snow
falls slow
in piles crushing
itself beneath itself

so

we

so we
drift slow
now hearts pressing
self into self

Because I am a)vain, and b)a compulsive packrat when it comes to my writing (do I still have the autobio I wrote in 10th grade?  Yup!), I’ve transferred by e-mail response for 7010 here.

Another function of blogs: as archive of ideas, sketches, fragments.  Might Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse today become A Lover’s Blog?

Barrett’s comments lately about the role of disciplinarity sort of formed the basis for my response to Hawhee’s essay.  What we learn from Hawhee (or at least, what I learned) is that rhetoric has always been an interdisciplinary practice.  In particular, the roles of music and athletic instruction in ancient rhetorical pedagogy were just as important as declamation and argument; perhaps more so, for, as Hawhee argues, the rhythmic repetition of music and wrestling practice served to habituate rhetoric students to particular forms of action.  This habituation, then, was paired with mimetic instruction (in rhetoric as well as music and athletics) in order to produce, it seems, a body of skills instilled through associative pedagogy (as Hawhee describes this model).

The interdisciplinarity of rhetoric instruction captures my interest because I find myself confronting a crucible of sorts.  I started this program a resolute lit/cult studies student, but I find the more I learn about current work being done in rhet/comp, the more compelled I am to succumb to the dark side (as I’ve playfully called it before).  Much of the current rhet/comp work I’ve read (in 6010) shares with Hawhee’s ancients an interest in expanding the purview of the field to include lit/cult studies, linguistics, history. . .as the essays for this week indicate, even studies of drug culture and social activist movements.  I’ve come to think (whether accurately or not) of some of this rhet/comp scholarship as applied cultural studies; that is, this new rhet/comp work (well, new to me at least) is not content to just study the artifacts of culture but rather to learn from them ways in which we can appropriate their rhetorical devices for our own ends.

We might even understand this as a return to ancient pedagogical practices.  Unlike Sarah, I didn’t read the emphasis on mimesis as suggesting an unthinking acceptance of rote behavioral patterns.  Rather, I recalled the work of Greg Ulmer, who, in _Internet Invention_, advocates a composition (practice and pedagogy) inspired by the Japanese poet Basho: "Not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought."  Ulmer, then, wants to approach texts as archive of rhetorical resources; while the aesthetic is what attracts us to a text, we can appropriate a text’s functionality as well.

This, I think, is what the interdisciplinary, mimetic rhetorical pedagogy of the ancients strove for.  As Hawhee describes it, rhetorical study–incorporating music and athletic instruction–may begin as memorization of rote performance, but is intended to eventually instill "a concomitant coveting of and agonistic striving after qualities embodied in an expert practitioner of the art at hand".  The struggle is embody the qualities of the expert–curiosity, eloquence, civic engagement–rather than to merely ape them.