OT - Just something to spark conversation

[DirtyMartini]

BTW, language and English lovers, you would all no doubt enjoy Stephen Fry's 5-part series from last year, Planet Word:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb

Wonderful from stem to stern, and the last episode (to make this OT thread a little less O) finishes with a discussion of song lyrics.

ETA:
I've no doubt the Herzog is excellent, and thanks for sharing it. I haven't quite gotten to read it as I keep getting stuck trying not to correct EQ's "to(o)". *ducks*

[TheEqualizer]

I haven't quite gotten to read it as I keep getting stuck trying not to correct EQ's "to(o)". *ducks*

D'Oh!

[luddite lady]

I'm far too bogged down with work to do more than skim a few posts in this thread at the moment. Perhaps on the weekend, I'll find the time to sit down with a glass of wine and absorb all the gorgeous geekery this thread has to offer. Thanks for getting our blood boiling, EQ.

[Chatchka]

If misuse of reflexive pronouns ever becomes officially accepted, I'm going to have to change languages. Every time I hear, "If you have any questions, please feel free to call myself or...." I cringe. If that wasn't punctuated correctly, just try to think of it as PUNKtuated.

[Lynne]

Another pedant weighing in, at the end of a looooonnnnnngggg work week (midterm exam time, and I'm also team-teaching an additional class this quarter, so my head is spinning) -- fewer, less, they're, there, their, aarrgh!

But my bete noire is the inaccurate apostrophe when there's a plural and no possessive needed. For example, the sign I saw on the door to the "family bathroom" in the North Bridge Mall on Michigan Avenue this afternoon: "Dad's welcome". Dad's *what* is welcome? His help in changing the soggy diaper? His taking the other toddler in tow? His attention to anything other than his phone while his family are shopping?

Grrr.

[quote="GinaSuperCat"]What I love about Fry's pretentious rant against pretension is the way in which it highlights how grammar (correct speaking and writing) is only one dimension of language use--rhetoric (what language can do), the other. A document rife with typos is like to showing up to a professional interview in ripped jeans (in Fry's terms). It has a substantial effect and makes a difference. The focus on what language "is" should not eclipse what language can "do"...[/quote]

Thanks for the link GSC; very nice. Love Stephen Fry. Do you have any recommendation for learning more about rhetoric? In the fall I read a great book, Classical English Rhetoric by Farnsworth, and I'd like to learn more. If we taught a classical rhetoric class I'd sit in on it, but I haven't found it yet, and am not even sure in which department it would be located.

[GinaSuperCat]

Lynne: I'd suggest George Kennedy's Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition as a general historical introduction. Not without its problems, this is, however, a really good overview of the story of rhetoric in its twists and turns from antiquity (both Greek and Roman) forward. The general narrative traces the ways in which originally pagan classical rhetoric (oratory in its three occasions: courts, political deliberation, and ceremonial occasions) takes up different forms in changing political, religious, social contexts. One standard story of rhetoric involves a nostalgia positing the golden age of Greece as the high point, from which everything subsequently is seen as a "fall." You'll recognize the same story in politics, alongside the further confusion surrounding "democracy" these days. Kennedy's story, however, shows that rhetoric merely takes different forms in response to different contexts--somewhat countering the golden age nostalgia (which, even on its own terms, was hardly was "golden" after all).

[DirtyMartini]

Thanks for the rhetoric text request and recommendation, Lynne and GSC. I never got to study rhetoric formally and would love to learn more.

Lynne, Gina could say better, but I've seen rhetoric generally living as a subset of an English department (sometimes in association with a writing program) or as a multi-/interdisciplinary mashup of English, Classics, Philosophy, History, Law, and/or Cultural Studies. I'd start with the English department, though.

One standard story of rhetoric involves a nostalgia positing the golden age of Greece as the high point, from which everything subsequently is seen as a "fall." You'll recognize the same story in politics, alongside the further confusion surrounding "democracy" these days. Kennedy's story, however, shows that rhetoric merely takes different forms in response to different contexts--somewhat countering the golden age nostalgia (which, even on its own terms, was hardly was "golden" after all).

Golden age nostalgia is such a wonderfully ridiculous yet viscerally understandable theme that persists back to seemingly the beginning of time. Funny how even the ancient Greeks looked back at ancienter Greeks as living in a mythical golden age. Hesiod (8th/7th c BCE?) set up the golden age man as living in a veritable Eden of easy living, in sharp contrast to us (then) iron age suckers toiling away four ages later; and even Homer(or "Homer")'s heroic men who fought beside/with gods lamented back to earlier, better men/times and even (if I'm remembering correctly) earlier, better gods. You can't read ancient Classical poetry of Greco or Roman stripe without tripping over some Arcadia that is no longer.* The Christian tradition has its Eden (and fall), of course; Tolkien had Middle Earth, which itself has whatever the precursor to Middle Earth was (sorry, Tolkien fans; not my area); not even the reality of recorded history and living memory from only X years before can stop that tendency to elevate that earlier something. It's all over politics, as you mentioned, Gina, and just think of how many of us think/talk of the '50s or '60s or '70s or '80s longingly, despite the massive reality of shit that accompanies each of our slices of era nostalgia. It's like we're genetically inclined to wish back and idealize. Yeah, sure, things may have sucked then, but man, nothing ever sucks more than right now. Yet tradition begets revolution begets tradition begets revolution…


*Not that the golden age idea was not without its ambiguities. I can't remember if Hesiod wrote outside party lines, but I know Virgil and Ovid, at least, later added complication that put into question the pristine ideal.

[ETA Homer above cuz I forgot to mention him.]

[GinaSuperCat]

The equivalent of the Norton Anthology for rhetorical studies (a huge, weighty tome of excerpts from antiquity to the present on onion skin paper--truly the rhetoric bible, so to speak): Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition. As long as you don't have to carry it around, it's an indispensable compendium of excerpts from primary texts that constitute the rhetorical tradition edited with helpful general time-period, context, and specific figure introductions.

The "origin myths" of rhetoric are one of my occasional areas of interest. I've done some work on the pre-Socratic Heraclitus of Ephesus (of his lost book, only fragments survive) and some others that point to a road not taken before the double-team of Plato and Aristotle. Plato "coins" the term rhetorike, only to name a practice that had already been long underway in order to malign it in favor of philosophia; Aristotle writes the first systematic extant "treatise" on the subject, which turns out to be lecture notes transcribed by his students. A bloody mess, in short. To further complicate question of the "golden age" of rhetoric, some recent work examines evidence that the Greeks, ostensible "inventors" of Western/European civilization, actually "borrowed" many of its innovations (without attribution, of course) from North Africa--particularly the Egyptians. One provocative (and much debated) work along these lines, Martin Bernal's Black Athena (1987)...

As for "locating" rhetoric: this is a pretty complicated question and largely depends on the program. I'll spare y'all the snooze-fest details of the early twentieth-century American institutional history, but, long story short, rhetoric has two primary departmental locations: English and Speech or Communication (distinguished oftentimes from Communications, including journalism, telecom, broadcast, production/tech side). Rhetoric represents the humanities side of speech and or communication studies, often sharing a department with social scientists who study things like group, interpersonal, organizational, family, and health communication. The English side oftentimes focuses on composition and pedagogy. If you are interested in the history of rhetoric (and less "theory" which operates at a shared intersection of many critical humanities and some social sciences), knowing a bit about the programs/people where you are at, Lynne, I'd guess the courses that might interest you along these lines would be offered by "Communication."

[ltwoman]

What?

[GinaSuperCat]

Rhetoric, once defined as oratory and persuasion, has taken transformed in many different ways from antiquity and is generally now considered something like this: the ways in which collective symbol use affects, influences, and moves us in different ways.

Looking back nostalgically to the ancient Greeks for our models of direct democracy and for the accompanying models of public oratory and civic participation conjures a fiction that never was (and helps us ignore our present situation).

Areas of academic study and inquiry, sadly, are balkanized and distributed across different academic departments so that people with similar interests are structurally discouraged from talking to one another.

Stephen Fry is rad.

[GinaSuperCat]

Also, since it's about that time, dedicated to anyone who's under a pile of grading (and from the site that featured the monologue "I'm Comic Sans, Asshole":

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the- ... of-grading

and, also:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/line ... ion-papers

[Lynne]

GSC and DM, thanks for the insights! Yeah, I figured given my institutional configuration that "Communication" would be the place to look. I just want to be better at recognizing, and using, rhetorical devices like litotes etc.

[GinaSuperCat]

If your interest is in the canon of style particularly (tropes, figures, etc.) this site might be even more useful than the histories: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

[Lynne]

[quote="GinaSuperCat"]If your interest is in the canon of style particularly (tropes, figures, etc.) this site might be even more useful than the histories: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/[/quote]

Thank you for the additional erudition that I hope will accompany the giant, massive time sink that such a website will be for me! That's awesome.

[DirtyMartini]

If your interest is in the canon of style particularly (tropes, figures, etc.) this site might be even more useful than the histories: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

Ooooooh.

I love this thread.

I just want to be better at recognizing, and using, rhetorical devices like litotes etc.

I find I must put not inconsiderable effort not infrequently into editing out my litotes; they are so not difficult to fall into!


Not entirely unrelated: Despite knowing all the tropes and themes and plot already, I'm finally reading Orwell's 1984. (Yes, I'm only about 20+ years late for my age group.)




[ETA: Communications! I totally forgot about them somehow!]