Stephanie and I discussed how much easier it was to read the Quintilian section. We both brought up the fact that the translation issue and language difference (Latin to English versus Ancient Greek to English) could have made the difference. Is Latin closer to English and therefore make it easier to translate? Does anyone have any ideas about that? I also wondered if the fact that On Rhetoric is widely accepted to be Aristotle's lecture notes had much to do with the texts lack of readability. Contrasted with Aristotle's work, Quintilian's piece seems to be written for others to read and grasp the examples, if not for publication. I wonder t oo, if the reason Quintilian's reading was easier because we have read many other writers and are becoming proficient in reading such works. And he appears to write like Plato a little bit- by asking many questions and trying to answer them. This style seems a bit easier to grasp then long sentences with many asides.
I think it is interesting that both men struggle with the issue of 'good' and 'bad' rhetoric as well as 'good' and 'bad' orators or rhetors. In Book 12, Quintilian seems to be struggling with it. He does not answer the question directly but obviously finds the answers unsatisfactory because he keeps returning to the point.
My final point- which has been bugging me for sometime is 'is there a test or a way of knowing if someone is being sincere or simply faking it?' I ask because Quintilian makes the assumption that only a 'good man' can be a true orator, yet how can we really tell? Albert Einstein (recalling physics) said there is no experiment that can differentiate between the force of gravity and a body moving at 9.8 meters/(second)^2. Similarly, if someone 'acts' or behaves 'good' how can we differentiate that from someone who is genuinely 'good'? OK, that is my 2 cents worth!
Friday, November 30, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Wanted: Greek word for character
I have been working on my paper for this class, and I find myself in need of a Greek term to help explain my point. I am looking at the role characters played in Greek rhetoric. By this I mean the creation of "fictional" characters, not moral character (ethos). I am currently trying to make the distinction between these two types of character, but not getting very far in the clarity department, since both words are still character. I was thinking if I could find the greek equivalent to fictional character, (or something close) I could use that and ethos instead. I am currently looking for this word myself, but thought there might be a chance that someone else has run across something that is close in the wiki assignment. Anyone have any ideas?
Alyssa
Alyssa
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Lantham's teasingly serious question
I want to make it clear that I had to sleep for two days straight to be able to really comprehend Lantham, even though I found his style to be clear as glacier water and equally refreshing. If I hadn't, I'd be weeping softly into my keyboard right about now; I'm supposed to be shopping and then cooking for ten or so.
Lantham teases, I think, because this is such a stunningly obvious question, once you see it, yet one that is so intrinsically bound up in our ego that it is difficult to see. (Face it, deciding that we have something important to say, important enough to run out and spend a lot of money for a piece of paper that gives us the right to out our foot down on discussions and be experts requires loads of ego; also continuing to go after we get beat about by the mass of knowledge that does not flatter us nor make us happy. We're either masochists or there is something in the process and/or end that we value.)
The Q question: What is good? What should be valued, encouraged? What intersection can the inner being (the ethics, the morals) have with the knowledge we gain through study?
God, these are almost dirty phrases. I have to stop myself from giggling nervously and looking away, and I blush but rarely anymore. And for good reason: the humanities have been put into a position that makes it nearly impossible to justify anything with a straight face. We insist, when looking for funding or justifying what looks like a twisty sort of self-gratification to our relatives who are either in the hard sciences or without the ivory tower (yeah, yeah-- TMI), that the education we have will improve the world, full in the face of a total lack of direct correlation at anything more than a few times, as opposed to the total redemption we claim for our education. (p 164-5)
The divisions of Lantham's discipline of discourse (p 159) into our departments is not, I think without its benefits to us, but not in the sterile stagnation that Ramus intends it (p 157-9). In terms of the benefits of division, those greatly artificial distinctions provide us with the ability to skip along a great variety of points of view, of positional lenses, so that we may, at any given point in time (in potential, according to skill and training) chose to see a given subject a number of different ways.
Unfortunately, this results in a double-brained split when it comes to articulating the things we know to be true and the underpinning for our studies (p 160-61, 164); every single one of us has a goal to which we aspire, and the difficulty with splitting how we know, what we know and how we express it is that it has a tendency to obscure the most basic assumptions we make about the objects of our study. When we study, we assume a trend, a course of action, a necessity and, even unconsciously, a result. (p 162) We shape our study by these underlying assumptions, and the rigorous fragmentation of the humanities (though it is never rigorously observed) only encourages us not to think about what we're doing very closely. We are taught, to a great degree, to focus on larger concerns (like social justice, for those of us who plan to be teachers), obscuring why we're there and what, exactly, we think we're up to.
Of course, to ask that question is also to ask where we think good, bad and true come into the equation, hence the strong and weak defenses, respectively either the orator must be the site for morality or the practice must be. I think it's pretty clear that rhetoric assumes the lowest common denominator in audiences; as such it gives the appearance, when the morality of rhetoric is situated in the words themselves, of being negative and therefore inherently bad (p 160-61).
I'm not sure we should be uncomfortable with the practice our best values and hope for our students (p 164). If we do not treat the people we seek to teach as if they should be able to make their own decisions, it is deeply hypocritical. Genuine enlightenment you can take or leave. Coercion you must work much harder to get out from under. (p 165)
On page 166, Lantham makes a case for the weak defense being not only that which situates the morality of rhetoric in the outside world and the strong being the situation of morality in the ethos of the orator, making the person of the rhetor the place in which rhetoric must marry metaphysics and determine what of the orator enters the words (in other words, the truth value of a given rhetorical statement is maintained and defined by the orator as a discrete event in time.) The responsibility for rhetorical awareness and for the probable consequence also lies in the rhetor, in their ability and intentions.
That's some slick stuff, there.
Technology has a huge effect on the divisions between departments and fields of study; when we are forced to communicate effectively across culture as well as departmental tribe, it forces us to codify yet again and to examine our own subjectivity (p 167). Our communication, where it is formalized and codified (like in papers, say) force us to articulate false absolutes, in full knowledge that we know better, for the express purpose of simplification and focus. As we try to force that kind of communication on something a little more lively than a sheet of paper, we attempt to re-create that narrowing and cannot; technology forces us to try and restructure the system which we use to codify and also forces a confrontation with the Q question, because we have great difficulty maintaining those artificial distinctions between ethos and practice in the face of an audience outside our commonplace (p 167-8). The distinction, as Lantham points out all over, relies on an intellectual slight-of-hand, although I would add that the audience, whether they know it or not, have to agree to look the other way for the trick, something that we cannot rely on a new audience to do.
The response to shifting fields of meaning should not be to throw one's hands up in the air and resign the probing of the individual to the language which makes them so, nor should it be the refusal to address the ethos behind it (p 169). (And thank god for that, because some of the semantic fancy dancing I end up doing makes my head ache.)
But this does not posit the rhetor as free of being affected by his or her own rhetoric (and that kind of absolutist thinking should get one a spank; funny how post-modernism teaches us not to and yet we apply it every which way) (p 169). The actor is also acted on, the relationship is complicated and cannot be simplified to a 'you first' equation.
And, in what has to be rehashed, Lantham reminds the reader that to insist on the primacy of the facts is to ignore the fact that the facts are so influenced by the person assembling them that they offer up their own interpretation. (p 170-71) Rhetoric insists that any given set of facts is a pastiche of everything the presenter has to offer, and as such rhetoric must be 'big', or at least bigger than the individual presenting. The world will be saved by the current events club, indeed. The facts are neither dry nor virtuous, but they are sometimes useful.
See what lengths I'll go to not to bake a turkey?
And if I've heard my kids complain once, I've heard them complain a million times: why are we learning all this shite we aren't going to use? (p 171) My answer for them has been that real learning is a thing you do for the love of it, in your spare time. I spend a lot of time trying to illustrate to them, and to a particularly skeptical group of ten year olds down in the valley, that there actually are connections between the subjects, mostly in application. A short seminar on creative writing can quickly segueway into physics and how to present the death of a patient to their family. Sometimes I feel stupid because I feel as if I meander all over the damn place (no coherence here, no sir), but in retrospect, I think I won't sweat the cross-subject jaunts; if nothing else, I'm demonstrating that curiosity can be useful and somewhat satisfying.
As someone who's about to compose a MFA jeremiad (p 173), I was stung and amused. I should hope mine is not plaintive nor conciliatory in tone. I owe no defense of my study to anyone but my kids and bf, and to my mind the place of the humanities is, frankly, kinda obvious. (Which probably means I'm missing something.) How unsatisfying and amusing I find it, with my collective years of training in compartmentalizing and rigid classification, to hear that the defense of the humanities is in the person, not the institution. That view must make hiring a painful process of interviews and a giant pain in the hiney. We get certified to greatly simplify that process, don't we?
When in doubt, add a department (p 173). Well, it certainly guarantees more jobs. And if we all disagree, we can retreat behind our disciplinary walls, safe in the knowledge that we're so specialized (and much smarter) that the only people we need to have understand us are those that both agree with us and share our discipline. Hence the sterility, if you buy contact zone theory. And I do, but it might be because I like a good fight.
And now, having divided himself, Lantham has to conquer. He's already proved he sees (p 174). And by conquer, I mean provide a plan for replicating his theoretical viewpoint (I always have trouble trusting theories that cannot provide a plan for being implemented; they make me nervous, because they're usually trying to hide the terms by which the theory could be implemented.)
So if the books cannot teach themselves, they cannot be neutral, either. Same for rhetoric, Lantham has (reluctantly) persuaded me (p 174). Okay then, I suppose there can be bad arguments (although I usually save that distinction for arguments that are radically incomplete. Let's see how he splits this hair.
The feminist question to the 'Great Books' approach is very apropos to Lantham's argument. Their question has always been how these books are determined to be great (and by implication, who has been arbitrarily left out of the running) (p 176). I am guessing that Lantham's statement that religion will ruin the asking of the Q question has as much to do with a cannonical refusal to be self-aware or to self-examine as his objection to the Great books proposition for teaching/moralizing.
There is very definitely a tension between the people who practice and the people who prefer to theorize (p 177). Sometimes this is expressed as the tower versus everyone else, sometimes as people claiming 'freedom' for theory without realizing that their unexamined values have artificially limited it already and people whose conceptions of theory must stem only from their experiences. Think I'm a touch slimy, if that definition is to be trusted, all my years in college aside.
Oh, there's a meritocracy all right, it is just neither universal nor clear. Me and the other right-thinking humans all agree on it. Unfortunately, they're all at the top of theirs, too. And, on second thought, looks like we're all looking at something different. Nevermind. (p 178)
The artificial distinctions that Lantham is at such pains to point out do tend to breed closed rhetorical spaces, in which the mind at work re-arranges all to fit preconceptions while unaware of the re-arrangement. Being the only rational creature in the universe will do that to you (p 178.)
The disingenuous nature of the divisions we practice makes it easier for us to lie but creates cognitive dissonance that can cause us acute discomfort, so we band together in a show of solidarity in our collective not asking (180-81).
So how do we address that division? (p 180-85) Do we claim that we can live separated from the effects of our actions and theories, at play in a sheltered university campus somewhere? Do we feel compelled to confront and act on the dissonance of that division?
The answer is 'that depends'. On us.
Purity of motives my right cheek! (p 187) Only, and if that, which I doubt, in the sense that we might most want some particular geegaw or certification. Our rhetorical play is never without effect and consequence, going every which way. I tend to agree with Lantham; it's only exciting when it's applied, when the whole mess of theory could go every which way. Like splat. (p 187)
The strong defense as (fairly) consistent contingency is an interesting argument (p 188.) I tend to agree that pretending our motivations are completely 'pure' is dangerous and liable to fail spectacularly (ahem, the Catholic priest scandals), but Lantham is careful not to rule out the possibility that some of our motivations can be 'noble' in scope. They just don't make up the bulk of our motivation.
Hmm, replicating a basis for morality based on practice to filter out problems. Nice one (p 188). Planning for problems has to go one better than denial or thoughtless attack.
To look at language with self-consciousness (as in false modesty) does, in fact, play games with language in a way that is not terribly productive. (p 189) And modeling requires great exposure and a great deal out of the teacher. Our education system cannot handle this kind of thing.
God, this essay would have done a great deal to simplify the Pedagogy of Creative Writing class I had last semester. Wish we had read it.
And pages 189-91 should be required reading at business schools. What loyalty would inspire an employee to contribute creatively to a company in an environment which punished creativity? Hell, for that matter what inspires an employee to contribute at all outside the company's rent of his/her body?
And now, I go back to touching a turkey.
Lantham teases, I think, because this is such a stunningly obvious question, once you see it, yet one that is so intrinsically bound up in our ego that it is difficult to see. (Face it, deciding that we have something important to say, important enough to run out and spend a lot of money for a piece of paper that gives us the right to out our foot down on discussions and be experts requires loads of ego; also continuing to go after we get beat about by the mass of knowledge that does not flatter us nor make us happy. We're either masochists or there is something in the process and/or end that we value.)
The Q question: What is good? What should be valued, encouraged? What intersection can the inner being (the ethics, the morals) have with the knowledge we gain through study?
God, these are almost dirty phrases. I have to stop myself from giggling nervously and looking away, and I blush but rarely anymore. And for good reason: the humanities have been put into a position that makes it nearly impossible to justify anything with a straight face. We insist, when looking for funding or justifying what looks like a twisty sort of self-gratification to our relatives who are either in the hard sciences or without the ivory tower (yeah, yeah-- TMI), that the education we have will improve the world, full in the face of a total lack of direct correlation at anything more than a few times, as opposed to the total redemption we claim for our education. (p 164-5)
The divisions of Lantham's discipline of discourse (p 159) into our departments is not, I think without its benefits to us, but not in the sterile stagnation that Ramus intends it (p 157-9). In terms of the benefits of division, those greatly artificial distinctions provide us with the ability to skip along a great variety of points of view, of positional lenses, so that we may, at any given point in time (in potential, according to skill and training) chose to see a given subject a number of different ways.
Unfortunately, this results in a double-brained split when it comes to articulating the things we know to be true and the underpinning for our studies (p 160-61, 164); every single one of us has a goal to which we aspire, and the difficulty with splitting how we know, what we know and how we express it is that it has a tendency to obscure the most basic assumptions we make about the objects of our study. When we study, we assume a trend, a course of action, a necessity and, even unconsciously, a result. (p 162) We shape our study by these underlying assumptions, and the rigorous fragmentation of the humanities (though it is never rigorously observed) only encourages us not to think about what we're doing very closely. We are taught, to a great degree, to focus on larger concerns (like social justice, for those of us who plan to be teachers), obscuring why we're there and what, exactly, we think we're up to.
Of course, to ask that question is also to ask where we think good, bad and true come into the equation, hence the strong and weak defenses, respectively either the orator must be the site for morality or the practice must be. I think it's pretty clear that rhetoric assumes the lowest common denominator in audiences; as such it gives the appearance, when the morality of rhetoric is situated in the words themselves, of being negative and therefore inherently bad (p 160-61).
I'm not sure we should be uncomfortable with the practice our best values and hope for our students (p 164). If we do not treat the people we seek to teach as if they should be able to make their own decisions, it is deeply hypocritical. Genuine enlightenment you can take or leave. Coercion you must work much harder to get out from under. (p 165)
On page 166, Lantham makes a case for the weak defense being not only that which situates the morality of rhetoric in the outside world and the strong being the situation of morality in the ethos of the orator, making the person of the rhetor the place in which rhetoric must marry metaphysics and determine what of the orator enters the words (in other words, the truth value of a given rhetorical statement is maintained and defined by the orator as a discrete event in time.) The responsibility for rhetorical awareness and for the probable consequence also lies in the rhetor, in their ability and intentions.
That's some slick stuff, there.
Technology has a huge effect on the divisions between departments and fields of study; when we are forced to communicate effectively across culture as well as departmental tribe, it forces us to codify yet again and to examine our own subjectivity (p 167). Our communication, where it is formalized and codified (like in papers, say) force us to articulate false absolutes, in full knowledge that we know better, for the express purpose of simplification and focus. As we try to force that kind of communication on something a little more lively than a sheet of paper, we attempt to re-create that narrowing and cannot; technology forces us to try and restructure the system which we use to codify and also forces a confrontation with the Q question, because we have great difficulty maintaining those artificial distinctions between ethos and practice in the face of an audience outside our commonplace (p 167-8). The distinction, as Lantham points out all over, relies on an intellectual slight-of-hand, although I would add that the audience, whether they know it or not, have to agree to look the other way for the trick, something that we cannot rely on a new audience to do.
The response to shifting fields of meaning should not be to throw one's hands up in the air and resign the probing of the individual to the language which makes them so, nor should it be the refusal to address the ethos behind it (p 169). (And thank god for that, because some of the semantic fancy dancing I end up doing makes my head ache.)
But this does not posit the rhetor as free of being affected by his or her own rhetoric (and that kind of absolutist thinking should get one a spank; funny how post-modernism teaches us not to and yet we apply it every which way) (p 169). The actor is also acted on, the relationship is complicated and cannot be simplified to a 'you first' equation.
And, in what has to be rehashed, Lantham reminds the reader that to insist on the primacy of the facts is to ignore the fact that the facts are so influenced by the person assembling them that they offer up their own interpretation. (p 170-71) Rhetoric insists that any given set of facts is a pastiche of everything the presenter has to offer, and as such rhetoric must be 'big', or at least bigger than the individual presenting. The world will be saved by the current events club, indeed. The facts are neither dry nor virtuous, but they are sometimes useful.
See what lengths I'll go to not to bake a turkey?
And if I've heard my kids complain once, I've heard them complain a million times: why are we learning all this shite we aren't going to use? (p 171) My answer for them has been that real learning is a thing you do for the love of it, in your spare time. I spend a lot of time trying to illustrate to them, and to a particularly skeptical group of ten year olds down in the valley, that there actually are connections between the subjects, mostly in application. A short seminar on creative writing can quickly segueway into physics and how to present the death of a patient to their family. Sometimes I feel stupid because I feel as if I meander all over the damn place (no coherence here, no sir), but in retrospect, I think I won't sweat the cross-subject jaunts; if nothing else, I'm demonstrating that curiosity can be useful and somewhat satisfying.
As someone who's about to compose a MFA jeremiad (p 173), I was stung and amused. I should hope mine is not plaintive nor conciliatory in tone. I owe no defense of my study to anyone but my kids and bf, and to my mind the place of the humanities is, frankly, kinda obvious. (Which probably means I'm missing something.) How unsatisfying and amusing I find it, with my collective years of training in compartmentalizing and rigid classification, to hear that the defense of the humanities is in the person, not the institution. That view must make hiring a painful process of interviews and a giant pain in the hiney. We get certified to greatly simplify that process, don't we?
When in doubt, add a department (p 173). Well, it certainly guarantees more jobs. And if we all disagree, we can retreat behind our disciplinary walls, safe in the knowledge that we're so specialized (and much smarter) that the only people we need to have understand us are those that both agree with us and share our discipline. Hence the sterility, if you buy contact zone theory. And I do, but it might be because I like a good fight.
And now, having divided himself, Lantham has to conquer. He's already proved he sees (p 174). And by conquer, I mean provide a plan for replicating his theoretical viewpoint (I always have trouble trusting theories that cannot provide a plan for being implemented; they make me nervous, because they're usually trying to hide the terms by which the theory could be implemented.)
So if the books cannot teach themselves, they cannot be neutral, either. Same for rhetoric, Lantham has (reluctantly) persuaded me (p 174). Okay then, I suppose there can be bad arguments (although I usually save that distinction for arguments that are radically incomplete. Let's see how he splits this hair.
The feminist question to the 'Great Books' approach is very apropos to Lantham's argument. Their question has always been how these books are determined to be great (and by implication, who has been arbitrarily left out of the running) (p 176). I am guessing that Lantham's statement that religion will ruin the asking of the Q question has as much to do with a cannonical refusal to be self-aware or to self-examine as his objection to the Great books proposition for teaching/moralizing.
There is very definitely a tension between the people who practice and the people who prefer to theorize (p 177). Sometimes this is expressed as the tower versus everyone else, sometimes as people claiming 'freedom' for theory without realizing that their unexamined values have artificially limited it already and people whose conceptions of theory must stem only from their experiences. Think I'm a touch slimy, if that definition is to be trusted, all my years in college aside.
Oh, there's a meritocracy all right, it is just neither universal nor clear. Me and the other right-thinking humans all agree on it. Unfortunately, they're all at the top of theirs, too. And, on second thought, looks like we're all looking at something different. Nevermind. (p 178)
The artificial distinctions that Lantham is at such pains to point out do tend to breed closed rhetorical spaces, in which the mind at work re-arranges all to fit preconceptions while unaware of the re-arrangement. Being the only rational creature in the universe will do that to you (p 178.)
The disingenuous nature of the divisions we practice makes it easier for us to lie but creates cognitive dissonance that can cause us acute discomfort, so we band together in a show of solidarity in our collective not asking (180-81).
So how do we address that division? (p 180-85) Do we claim that we can live separated from the effects of our actions and theories, at play in a sheltered university campus somewhere? Do we feel compelled to confront and act on the dissonance of that division?
The answer is 'that depends'. On us.
Purity of motives my right cheek! (p 187) Only, and if that, which I doubt, in the sense that we might most want some particular geegaw or certification. Our rhetorical play is never without effect and consequence, going every which way. I tend to agree with Lantham; it's only exciting when it's applied, when the whole mess of theory could go every which way. Like splat. (p 187)
The strong defense as (fairly) consistent contingency is an interesting argument (p 188.) I tend to agree that pretending our motivations are completely 'pure' is dangerous and liable to fail spectacularly (ahem, the Catholic priest scandals), but Lantham is careful not to rule out the possibility that some of our motivations can be 'noble' in scope. They just don't make up the bulk of our motivation.
Hmm, replicating a basis for morality based on practice to filter out problems. Nice one (p 188). Planning for problems has to go one better than denial or thoughtless attack.
To look at language with self-consciousness (as in false modesty) does, in fact, play games with language in a way that is not terribly productive. (p 189) And modeling requires great exposure and a great deal out of the teacher. Our education system cannot handle this kind of thing.
God, this essay would have done a great deal to simplify the Pedagogy of Creative Writing class I had last semester. Wish we had read it.
And pages 189-91 should be required reading at business schools. What loyalty would inspire an employee to contribute creatively to a company in an environment which punished creativity? Hell, for that matter what inspires an employee to contribute at all outside the company's rent of his/her body?
And now, I go back to touching a turkey.