Mere Rhetoric

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, Samantha’s in the booth and we have a brand new episode here for you. If you like new episodes, or if you have an episode to suggest, you can email me and tell me. The email is just mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and we’d be thrilled to hear from you. Here’s the thing, though, today’s episode isn’t on rhetoric.   It’s on rhetoricality. Psych! What, you may ask, is the difference between rhetoricality and rhetoric? Well, John Bender and David E Wellbery wrote this article in 1990 titled “Rhetoricality: on the modernist return of rhetoric” where they argue that for too long rhetoric had been deeply misunderstood and maligned and it was time to dust off rhetoric for the last 20th century.   They start with a metaphor about architecture to describe their plans. Imagine a Classical building of, say, Athens. You’ve got your triglyphs, you’ve got your stylobate

  Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movement that have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and   the University of Texas’ Humanities Media Project supports the podcast and     Today we’re doing a podcast on Dionysius of Halicarnassus, not least because it’s so fun to say his name. Some people just have the kind of name that makes you want to say it all out, in full. Say it with me: Dionysius of Halicarnassus. It’s lovely. Fortunately, we’ll lget to say Dionysius of Halicarnassus several times today.   Dionysius of Halicarnassus, being of Halicarnassus, was Greek, but he wasn’t one of the 5th century golden age Greek rhetoricians--he lived around 50-6 BC during the Roman empire. Indeed, he studied in Rome and gave lessons there as part of the Greek educational diaspora. Dionysius of Halicarnassus could be seen as a great reconsiler between Roman and Greek thought, or he could be seen as a stoolie for the romans. He wrote of the Romans as the h

Aspasia   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 a rhetorician who may have influenced everyone, or may not have even existed.     Aspasia is one of the most historically elusive, even mythical rhetoricians. As with Socrates, we only have second-hand accounts of her life and work, but unlike Socrates, she was a woman, which meant that much of the accounts we have of her are fragmented and often disparaging.   Aspasia is one of the few women from classical Athens who is listed by name and certainly one of the first female rhetoricians we have record of. What kind of rhetorician she was and how she was able to leave such a legacy is shrouded in jealousy, lies, and accusations. Anything we think we know about Aspasia has to be tempered by the historical circumstances of 5th century bc Athens.   And

Expressivism   Doot-do-do…doot-doot-do-do…Welcome Mere rhetoric a podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have shaped the rhetorical world. Special thanks to the Samantha in the booth and the Humanities Media Project for the support as we head on into the podcast. First though, I’d like to remind you to swing on over to iTunes and leave us a review. Hopefully a good review, but, you know, you have to take what you get. Or you can check out our Twitter page @mererhetoricked. Also, if you want to reach out to me in more than 140 characters, you can send me an email at mererhetoricpodcast @gmail.com. That’s a lot of ways to send me a message. It wasn’t like that for poor Peter Elbow.     In the early 1960s, Peter Elbow was an over-worked, over-stressed grad student. He was homesick as an American in Oxford, rejected by an English girl whom he loved and, just as bad, he couldn’t writing. Week after week, he failed to turn in the essays assigned him.   He felt burned out on sc

Welcome Mere rhetoric a podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have shaped the rhetorical world. Special thanks to the Samantha in the booth and the Humanities Media Project for the support I’m mary h and today we’re talking about Mina Shaughnessy’s book Error and Expectations   Errors and Expectations was published in 1977, but the story that led to it begins earlier, in the late 60s. After centuries of higher education being limited t the elite classes, universities began to open up. In fact, many universities, including Shaughnessy’s City College in New York, began open admissions. This meant that college education was now available to many people who had never before thought that they could attend college. This also meant that many of the new students were underprepared for college. This led to the development of what was called “basic writing”—what had previously been called “remedial writing.” Shaughnessey had to develop a program that would help the students to le

The classic, the first episode in better form! (Except this transcript is a little was-translated-by-someone-unfamiliar-with-rhetoric-and-American-politics. Thanks, Fivrr!)   What is Rhetoric?                   Welcome to MereRhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movement that have defined the history of rhetoric. Sponsored by the University of Texas Student Chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America.   I'm Mary Hedengren at the University of Texas Austin and thank you for joining us on our inaugural podcast. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about "What is Rhetoric?"               "No more rhetoric," says a politician or "Let's stop the empty rhetoric. It's time to cut the rhetoric and get to action." These are expressions that we hear all the time. Rhetoric is one of the only fields that's consistently used as a pejorative. We know better than that though. We know that rhetoric is a dynamic field with really important thinkers and a lot of contributions to a lot

    Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and outsiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Send us feedback or suggestions at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com if you’d like, or go on iTunes and give us a rating—hopefullly a good one, but whatever you do... I’m Mary Hedengren and I was an English major.       We English majors are always being accused of loving metaphors. “We write clearly,” our science friends say smugly. “We don’t use any of that flowery language.” We, because we love our science friends, refrain from pointing out that “clear” writing and “flowery language” are, in fact, metaphors. Metaphors are often seen as deliberate and poetic in the hands of our greatest literary minds: from “It is the east and Juliet is the sun”, to “Love is a battle field” we think that metaphors are purposeful and avoidable and exclusively for poets or English majors.       Not so! Say conceptual metaphor scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In Lakoff and Johnson’

Welcome to Mere rhetoric, a pocast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’d like to take you back, back in time…       It was 1985. As Bowling for Soup would later describe the year, “there was U2 and Blondie, and Music still on MTV” And in the pages of College English a debate was raging. Two scholars, careful and smart, battling over a question that still haunts beginning composition instructors: should we teach punctuation to first year writing students? The debate between Martha Kolln and Patrick Hartwell describes some of the difficulties in navigating the question of teaching grammar and punctuation, but it doesn’t begin with the Hartwell-Kolln debate of the 80s: it begins with the Braddock Report of 1963.                   The Braddock report, or, more properly, “Research in Written Composition" by Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer was commissed by the National Council of Teachers of English to answer the question o

Kairos Podcast       Two definitions of time for ancient Greeks:, chromos and kairos   While chronos chucks around relatively constantly, one minute after minute hour after hours, without any particularly change, kairos is a moment of exigenence, where everything matters on timing. There’s a graph that I like about kairos that I would love to show you, but since I can’t paint you a picture, I’ll have to sing yo a song. While Chronos moves forward like this [solid pitch], Kairos starts low, comes to a fever pitch and then descends again. It sounds like this [assending and descending pitch].  If Chronos is time, Kairsos is timing.       So let’s break down the parts of the kairos song with an example, say, slavery in America:   (low tone) down here might be called the moment that slavery in American begins to be a public issue. This could be called the origin. It might be the 1619, when the first African slaves were brought by the Dutch, but only if the issue of slavery was contested. The origin isn’t necessar

Canons of rhetoric       Today we’re going to talk about the canons of rhetoric (sound: boom). That’s silly. The canons of rhetoric (sound: pachabel’s canon). Okay, now this has just devolved into a morning show called something lik Zaph and the Pigman in the Mornings. The canons of rhetoric were the five parts of rhetoric that were emphasized in ancient classical rhetoric. They were canons the same way that people in literary studies might talk about whether Moby Dick or Huck Finn belongs in the canon—as essential to being an educated individual. They were the five elements that every good Roman rhetor had to study and develop as a student and also practice as a public speaker. The five canons are also kind of arranged in the order that you go through in working on a public speech. So without further introduction, here’s the canons:       Invention   Arrangement   Style   Memorization   Delivery       I like to remember these by a mnemonic: I always state my demands, just like I’m a bank robber. But   Inv

Kenneth Burke       Welcome to Mere rhetoric a  podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have shaped the rhetorical world. I’m mary h and today we’re talking about KB       Burkey was a major rhetorican who lived May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993. Also, his middle name was Duva and his grandson wrote this song. [Cat’s in the Cradle]       But Burke didn’t always want to be a rhetorican. In fact, rhetoric was kind of out of favor as an academic discipline when Burke was coming of intellectual age: he wanted to be a poet, live in Greenwich Village and be part of the Marxist bohemians. But events conspired to develop Burke as rhetorican. For one thing, he got the Marxists mad at him when he suggested the word “people” as a replacement for “worker.” Also, his poetry wasn’t taking off. That made him begin to move away from politics and production of poetry and start thinking more about criticism.       His first critical work counter-statement is still powerful today as a respon

Today, as promised, the sequel to last week’s episode on I.A. Richards. Last week we learned about Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric, where he sought to redeem rhetoric from a pejorative by recognizing that every word is intimately tied to its social context. Today we get to talk about his other major work, the Meaning of Meaning. Some initial thoughts: first off, this is a somewhat cheekier title. Second, The Meaning of Meaning is always filed under the works of I.A. Richards, but actually it’s a joint effort by Richards and CK Ogden. Ogden was a bit of an eccentric linguist. He invented a language called Basic English, which was like English but...Basic. He figured this would lead to world peace because people could communicate more easily. Because a simple English is a better idea than a simple other language? I donno, but he brought a hefty dose of old-school linguistics to Richard’s already linguistically inclined bent. The Meaning of Meaning  was a fundamental text for much of the 20th century’s obs

Gorgias podcast       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 have--       Big news! Thanks the generous support of the University of Texas Humanities Project, you may notice that this is a beautiful recording. We’ve got a real microphone and not just my iPhone and a real editor and not just—me. So it sounds nice, yeah? That means we’ll be rerecording and rebroadcasting Vintage Mere Rhetoric in this snazzy, cleaned up and impressive new form as well as recording all our new episodes this way.       Tell us what you think about the new quality and suggest new episodes, because summer reruns are what?—the worst. Our email address is mererhetoricpodcast, all one word, at gmail. I totally read every email I get and it can change how the series goes, so that’s internet fame for you.       For instance, remember how listener Greg Gibby recommended we do a series or a countdown and now we’re co

  “Today,” I.A. Richards begins his 1936 lectures, rhetoric “is the dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it--unless we can find reason for believing that it can become a study that will minister successfully to important needs” (3). this is just what Richards sets out to do in a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr that eventually became the thin book The Philosophy of Rhetoric.   For Richards, a literary scholar by training and one of the founders of the Close REading and New Criticism, rhetoric had been for too long about disputes and argumentation. Instead he proposes that rhetoric should be “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” and investigation in “How much and in how many ways may good communication differ from bad?” To this end, the proposes a sort of philological rhetoric, one where there is to be “persistent, systematic,

When 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 eachother, 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

    Henry Hume, Lord Kames (1696-1782)       Henry Hume, Lord Kames was a distant relative as well as friend to David Hume, although they spell their names differently.  David Hume changed the spelling so that his English readers would pronounce it properly.  Henry Hume kept the original spelling H-O-M-E.               Unlike David Hume, Lord Kames did not go to university nor even have the benefit of a sojourn to France to broaden his education. Much more like Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet, Kames was born the third son out of nine children to a heavily indebted but well-respected family.  He was educated at home with his siblings and was apprenticed as a solicitor.  Unlike Lizzie Bennet, who faces limitations due to her gender, Kames was able to participate in a number of philosophical societies and gentlemen’s clubs.  He further expanded his knowledge through jobs such as Curator of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh which gave him access to a wealth of books.        There are a number of factors contribut

Today we’re doing a podcast on Dionysius of Halicarnassus, not least because it’s so fun to say his name. Some people just have the kind of name that makes you want to say it all out, in full. Say it with me: Dionysius of Halicarnassus. It’s lovely. Fortunately, we’ll lget to say Dionysius of Halicarnassus several times today.   Dionysius of Halicarnassus, being of Halicarnassus, was Greek, but he wasn’t one of the 5th century golden age Greek rhetoricians--he lived around 50-6 BC during the Roman empire. Indeed, he studied in Rome and gave lessons there as part of the Greek educational diaspora. Dionysius of Halicarnassus could be seen as a great reconsiler between Roman and Greek thought, or he could be seen as a stoolie for the romans. He wrote of the Romans as the heirs of Greek culture and was always talking up the qualities of the Romans.   But he did love Greek rhetoricians. He writes admiringlyof Greek poets like Homer and Sappho of Greek rhetoricians Isocrates and Lysius, and even of Dinarchus, whom

Remember when you were a freshman and you took first year critical reasoning? Or in high school, when you took the AP thinking exam?   Of course not, because we don’t really teach philosophy or critical thinking. What we do teach is writing.   [intro]   Welcome to MR the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements and people who have shaped rhetorical history. today we’ll be talking about the mid nineties text “Rhetoric of Reason,” winner of the 1997 MLA Mina Shannassy book prize. Titles one chapter “The end of Philosophy and the Resurgence of Rhetoric” Provocative idea. but can rhetoric and writing classes take over the millenia of philosophy and logic instruction that have long been cornerstones of a liberal education?   Crosswhite conceives his own book to be “a challenge to teachers of writing… to become much more philosophical about the teaching and theory of argumentation” (8).Motivated by “a social hope that people will be able to reason together” (17) in a civil responsibly taught i

Shownotes (transcript available upon request) 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 imp