Mere Rhetoric

What’s the difference between writing and composition? Writing, we think we know what that is: it’s maybe typing out letters on a computer screen, or maybe it’s holding a pen above a legal pad. But what if writing is bigger than that? What if it’s also the prewriting that takes place in your brain, as you drive around town or play racquetball or stare into space? And how about composition? What does that mean? It’s not just writing so could it be arranging speech, or images or even moving bodies? Is dance part of composition? Jody Shipka’s landmark text, Towards a Composition Made Whole, expands our understanding of what we mean when we say “writing and composition.” Today on Mere Rhetoric.   *Intro music*   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’d like to give a shout out to our sponsors at the Univesity of Texas Humanities Media Project for their support, but today’s topic is right up t

Dewey Part Deuce   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric. Or maybe welcome back, because last week we talked about John Dewey and today we’re talking about John Dewey again. You don’t have to go back and listen to the last week’s episode on Dewey and aesthetics, but if you like this, Dewey part the Deuce, then you migh want to go check out the previous episode on Dewey and the artful life. Today, today thought,we get to talk about Dewey’s political and educational contributions.   Dewey was a huge fan of democracy and of education for democracy. He said, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." One scholar summarized Dewey’s politics in this way: “First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on

Dewey aesthetic Today on Mere Rhetoric, we talk about John Dewey. John Dewey was a big ol’ deal, even back in his day. Just after his death in 1952, Hilda Neaby wrote”Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not just a philosopher, but the philosopher.” And what does a person have to do to be compared to Aristotle? I mean to be compared in a serious way to Aristotle, because I’m like Aristotle because, you know, I enjoy olive oil on occasions, not because I’m the philosopher. I think one thing Neaby means is that Dewey was involved in everything. Just like how Aristotle had huge impact in politics, theology, science and rhetoric, John Dewey seemed to have a finger in every pie. By the time he died at age 92, he had written significantly on education, politics, art, ethics and sociology. But it’s not enough to be a big freakin’ deal a hundred years ago, but Dewey is a big deal in rhetoric today. It’s rare to search too many issues back in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarter

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, Jacob is in the booth and the Humanities Media Project is making this all possible.   Quick note: this is a rebroadcast, so you might want to take the next couple of sentences with a grain of salt. That is all. Starting…now.   We’ve spent this month talking about the villains of rhetoric, but since mere rhetoric isn’t just abtout rhetoric, today we’re going to talk about one of the villains of composition. But first   Mere Rhetoric is now at your disposal for feedback! You can check us out on Twitter @mererhetoricked or you can email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com send in suggestions, feedback, questions— and I’ll try to answer them because every question is a rhetorical question. And of course I want to shout out the University of Texas RSA student chapter for their support of this podcast. I’m, as ususal, Mary Hedengren.   Today’s villain is not one mustach

Jeffrey Walker’s Aesthetic/Epideictic   Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movement who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, Samantha’s in the booth, Humanities Media Project is the sponsor and Jeff Walker is the subject. Jeffrey Walker is kind of my hero in life. I get weird around him, the way some people get around Natalie Portman or David Beckham. I came to the University of Texas, in part, because I so admired his work, but when I got here and saw him at parties I found that I mostly awkwardly stood four feet behind him, which—incidentally, is the exactly position the camera takes behind the protagonist in horror movies and I suspect that that didn’t help me much in meeting him. Since then I’ve taken a class from Dr. Walker, had him speak at official RSA student chapter meetings, even had a one-on-one seminar with him, where every week I would exit his office to a world where the sun shone brighter and the birds sang sweeter. That’s how much I

Demosthenes   Welcome to Mere rhetoric a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren. And special thanks to the Humanities media project. This is a re-recording, so you might want to take the next sentence with a grain of salt   Last week we continued our conversation of deliberative rhetoric by talking about Saving Persuasion, a contemporary book about how rhetoric doesn’t have to be rhetortricky. Today we’re going to talk about one of the figures in political rhetoric who was really, really good at what he did and that made everyone around him very nervous. I’m talking about one of the most engaging political figures of ancient Athens: Demosthenes.   That name may sound vaguely familiar to those of you who are regular listeners because we mentioned Demosthenes as one of the great orators who got his start in logography. Logographers, as some of you might recall, were the pre-lawyer lawyers. They could be hired to write speec

Hermogenes of Tarsus   Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today is a rebroadcast of an old episode, thanks to the Humanities Media Project here at the University of Texas. Hope you enjoy!   Hermogenes of Tarsus was a bit of a boy genius: he wrote many important rhetorical treatises (of which we only have sections) before he was 23 years old. And when Hermogenes was fifteen years old, in 176 AD, something remarkable happened. The philosopher emperor of the Roman empire, Marcus Aurelius himself, came to listen to him speak. This is all the more impressive because Hermogenes was of Tarsus, which, if you know your ancient geography well you’ll note is pretty far east from Rome. Marcus Aurelius heard him declaim and speak extemporaneously. “You see before you, Emporer,” Hermogenes reported said, “An orator who still needs an attendant to take him to school, an orator who still looks to come of age.”

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. And today I want to talk about the pedagogical tool of making kids have an argument. And an argument doesn’t just mean bickering.       Okay, even if there’s a difference between arguing and bickering , I will say, that hen 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 each other, 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 l

When last we left our intrepid hero, Chaim Perelman was describing universal audiences with his collaborater Lucie Obretch-Tycteta and setting up what he called the new Rhetoric. Today, we’ll talk about his solo text, The Realm of Rhetoric and critical responses to his philosophies.   The first thing you’ll notice about the Realm of Rhetoric is that is it around a fourth of the size of the New Rhetoric. I think that’s probably a function of having writing a ground-breaking magnum opus and then following it up.   Let’s start with the spoilers. What is the realm of rhetoric? It is“communication tr[ying] to influence one or more person, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions” of which dialectic is one part (162). In another place, Perelman says “Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning” (

  Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people, and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, and this last week, I had the fantastic experience of meeting one of you. That's right, an actual listener in the actual flesh. Somebody who wasn't just one of my colleagues, or one of my friends, or my mom, who listens to this podcast. It was a really cool experience. And she was very nice and very enthusiastic, and I'm really grateful that I got the chance to meet her. But it made me think a little bit about who I think you guys are when I make these podcasts, how much I create who you are in my mind, and how much you respond to the way that I've created you. This made me think of a really important article that came out back before I was born in May of 1984. The article is called "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." And it was written by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, who are kind of the dy

Sometimes I make a podcast and I think, “Golly I hope I did justice by that idea, person and movement that shaped rhetorical history.” Sometimes I make a podcast on the work of someone living, like Scott Stroud’s book about John Dewey, and sometimes I make a podcast on someone dead, like Kant. If I misrepresent a dead person, who will stop me? A living one. today, on Mere rhetoric, not exactly a retraction, but a revision of a previous episode on Immanual Kant, the philosopher who has been long-identified, including by me, as diametrically opposed to the field of rhetoric. Scott Stroud’s Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, today on Mere Rhetoric.   Intro music   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, specially thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas for their support in making these new episodes both possible and awesome. Also thanks to Jacob in the booth, and Scott Stroud,

Audio: Modern_Dogma_and_the_Rhetoric_of_Assent.mp3 In 1969 in Chicago, Illinois, a group calling themselves The Committee of 5000 Plus Against Disciplinary Procedures issued demands. They demanded that the issue of discipline would be seen in context that expulsions would be rescinded, that cases against protesting students be dropped. At the end of the list of the demands, they demanded that the failure of the Committee of the council, which is to say, the council of the University of Chicago, to respond satisfactorily to these demands by Tuesday noon March fourth will in and of itself constitute grounds for further militant action. The University had a series of different ways to try to respond to this. There were a lot of faculty discussions about what to

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements and people who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today we get to continue on in our theme of the villains of rhetoric. Today though, instead of just focusing on one person like Raymus or Hobbes. We get to talk about three and the reason why we get to talk about three is because a fantastic book that Wayne A. Rebhorn wrote. It's called “Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric.” This is a great volume. It's a compilation of a lot of short pieces by a lot of different authors during the renaissance, starting pretty early and going pretty late. You can see the way that they respond to each other and how they respond to voices that you don't even really see in the book that are just sort of out there. Like, people say this or people say that. But today we're going to be talking about distinct criticisms of rhetoric. The first is from Agrippa. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa who was German as you might suspect and he

When you were learning math, I bet you didn’t start by trying to solve P versus NP. When you were learning Spanish, I bet you didn’t start with creating your own translation of Don Quixote. When you were learning to write, did you start with writing thirty-page rhetorical analyses and speeches? Probably not.   The ancient Greeks thought it was probably not such a good idea to start out young rhetors on writing full speeches, so they came up with a series of exercises that teachers could lead their students through, exercises that would help students become more comfortable with language, learn the conventions of their culture and generally ease their way into the kind of speech writing they’d be doing when they became generals and politicians and whatever else they were planning on doing when they grew up. These exercises were called progymnasmata, which mean “early exercises.” You may recognize that middle part as sounding like “gymnasium,” so it’s easy to remember what progymnasmata means—exercises.   Ancie

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements that have shaped rhetorical history. It’s a new year and a new semester here at the University of Texas, and it’s time for some new years resolutions. We got a lot of old episodes re-recorded last semester, and by golly I’m glad we did, but it’s time to get some fresh episodes out. So, thanks to the Humanities Media Project here at the University of Texas at Austin, we’re going to have some brand new episodes. Okay, we had like six new ones last semester, but this time I’m keeping a promise I made to a Belgian. Victor Ferry wrote in last august or something and when we talked about episodes, he said that he’d love to hear about the great Belgian rhetorician--Chiam Perleman. “Sure, Victor,” I said. “We’re doing some old episodes, but I promise, we’ll do Perleman this year.” So, in the name of keeping promises, we’re not only doing one episode on Chiam Perleman, but we’re doing two. That’s right, a Perelman two-parter. T

James Berlin     Welcome to MR. I’m Mary Hedengren, Jacob is in the Booth and we’re supported by the Humanities Media Project and UT Austin.   Was English in an identity crisis in the 80s and 90s? Maybe. But it’s certain that it thought it was. Interdisciplinary projects such as cultural studies and the voluntary expulsion of groups like English language and composition from English departments was inspiring a lot of ink in the PMLA and other journals and conferences between such illuminaries as Gerald Graff and Stanley Fish. And when people are anxious about who they are, they often look back to how they ended up here. How did English get so weird? What is the background behind composition’s complaints against literary studies? What led to everyone in the department being in a department together?   Enter Professor James Berlin. Berlin, a compositionist who had taught at U of Cinninati and Purdue. Berlin was a disciplinary historian who wrote two important books that tried to create a historical context for

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements, and people who shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren. Quintilian was a transitional figure of rhetoric. Born in a Roman province of Spain to a Spanish family at around 35 CE, he lived both geographically and temporally at the peripheries of the Roman Empire. Quintilian was, as everyone was, influenced by Cicero and the Greek instructors, Progymnasmata, which we've talked about in an earlier episode. He was deeply concerned with questions about the education of rhetoric. As a teacher of rhetoric, his students were mostly historians, like Tacitus, or authors, like Juvenal, instead of politicians. In fact, his student Tacitus will later argue that there wasn't much space for rhetoric as the Roman Empire became more authoritarian. Who's going to argue with an Emperor? But Quintilian was deeply interested in not just creating better rhetoric, but better rhetors. The most famous idea from Quintilian is probably his in

[guitar music]   Welcome to New Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, events, and ideas that have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren and today I actually get to respond to a listener who wrote in, named Greg Gibby. And Greg wrote in saying that he would love to know some sort of ranking system; some way to see who are some of the most important figures in rhetorical history and sort of how they might relate to each other. So because of Greg, for the next month, we are going to be counting down the villains of rhetoric. Not that there are any you know, mustache twirlers per say, but these are folks who sort of give rhetoric a bad name, and contributed to rhetoric becoming a pejorative.  So today, in honor of Greg, we are going to be start out our series. We are going to be starting with, Thomas Hobbes. Now, you probably remember Hobbes from your political science classes. He's the one that came up with the idea of the social contract. You remember this. You have a bunch o

And today we have news: ast week something finally happened, something I always dreamed of, ever since I was 18 years old—I got called up for jury duty. I’m thrilled to be able to do my civic duty, not just because since I was 18 years old I’ve been mainlining old episodes of Law and Order, but also because because it gives me a front row seat to the world of forsensic rhetoric. Today on Mere rhetoric, we’re going to talk about the illustrious history of forsensic rhetoric. But first just a reminder that you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, or follow us on twitter at mererhetoricked (that’s mererhetoric followed by a ked) or email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com.   Ok, so when we think about rhetoric, we often think of it as a foil to philosophy. Something completely unrelated to everyday life, abstract and smartsy-artsy. But for the ancient greeks, rhetoric was a cold, hard necessity. The Ancient Greeks of around 467 BC were a litigious group, constantly hauling each other into court. It was one

Sor Juana     Juana Ramirez y Asbaje had a lot going against her from the beginning. She was born to unmarried parents and her father took off after two siblings were born. Being illegitimate with no dowery in 17th century Mexico was not a recipe for an easy life, but Juana had one thing going for her—she was very, very talented. Her overall brainyness was evident form her eariliet childhood. She used to sneak off to go read, in a time and culture when few people of her class and sex were literate, and she even learned to read and compose in Latin.   ** But because “boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Juana was also helped out by her intense physical beauty and charm. These helped get her noticed by the king’s representative in Mexico, who patronized her studies.   One of the moments that I’d love most to observe in the Wayback Machine would be when Juana’s patron arranged for her to publically field questions from learned men. I can just imagine it: charming and beautiful Juana, still in her t