The name of the game is...I WIN!

Oh yeah...take that blog! Justine just accosted your ass! Sorry, just checking to see that the blog is working for me. Enjoy the rest of your net experience.

Plato and Gorgias on rhetoric

I believe that Gorgias is certainly a very polemical and persuasive piece that demonstrates Plato's own need to use persuasion to capture and lecture to his audience, to which he wants the reader to understand as well as completely agree with his assertions against the sophists, Gorgias and his friends. In effect, Gorgias and Plato are one and the same, especially in their view of trying to persuade others into accepting their orations as doctrine. Interestingly enough, we do not really know if this meeting of the minds ever really took place, and therefore, Plato is using "untruthful" logic to persuade the reader that truth is of a higher being than flattery. Similarly in Phaedrus he attempts to dislodge writing as an acceptable form of communication, when in reality, it is through the medium of writing that he gets his point across to the masses.

Jen

Kairos Redux

John Poulakos, in his article Kairos in Gorgias' Rhetorical Compositions, gives several definitions of the term 'Kairos' in regards to Hellenic rhetoric. He says on page 89 that kairos is both a rhetor and audience phenomenon--for the first an "awareness" by the orator of an "opportune moment" and in the second a realization by the audience of the "timeliness" of the orator's words. Both orator and audience work kairos together, each playing off each other and (it seems to me) modifying the moment together. The orator must adapt his speech to the tenor of the audience and the audience consequently is continually manipulated by the orator.
Though this appears rather clear cut for spoken speech, I've been wondering about kairos regarding written material. If in speaking, kairos allows for customizing to the moment, for writing it seems far more rigid. Written rhetoric will either succeed or fail according to situational forces far outside the author's control. Does this make writing devoid of kairos? I don't think so. Rather, I think moments, movements, and periods come and go throughout history that continually put a written work in kairos flux--making it more and less "timely" in a given circumstance. Reading love poems while one is in love (or horribly depressed about not being in love) may increase the kairos quality of love poems. Likewise, reading about war in a time of war, or ancient rhetoric texts in the midst of a college class all seem to contribute to a sense of appropriateness and effect of documented sources.
What written items lack is the adaptability and consequently they are at the mercy of the fickle nature of kairos. This implies Art that is said to be great, timeless, or eternal is just fantasy; instead, its value must be interpreted according to the time in which it viewed.

I am getting under way with the readings for the week. After 154 Sonnets of Shakespeare, my brain is very tired, but I am looking forward to another set of writers. ( I thought I should say something at least after signing up for this blog).
Jen

Rhetoric you say?

First, I want to welcome all of you to ENG 430. This is a course that is relatively new to KU. Two years ago, I taught a "pilot version" of this course as a ENG 470 Selected Topics class. This course was developed by several of us in the English Department, in particular those of us whose primary interests lie in the field of Rhetoric and Composition (or Composition and Rhetoric, depending on your leanings--more on this throughout the semester).

Why this course? Well, frankly the department needed it. Rhetoric and Composition is one of the fastest growing areas in English Studies and one that has had a significant impact upon the shape of English Departments across the country (and increasingly, throughout the world). We thought it would be important to provide a course that both introduced students to some of the histories of the field, some of the current developments in the field, and some first-hand experiences thinking and writing from a rhetorical perspective.

So, whether you are an upper-level undergraduate interested in rhetoric (hello to my former students on the list!), a graduate student looking to explore the range of perspectives within English Studies, or someone who needed an upper-level night course to fulfill elective requirements, welcome!

At this point, our class has one major advantage over the last time I taught the class. Due to a mistake made in the on-line registration system the class is smaller than we first expected. Basically, for over a week of the registration period, the class appeared "closed." But alas, this was not the case. As a result, one that stands in stark contrast to developments in other places on campus, our course can actually be a real seminar.

I look forward to a wonderful semester!