This article positions the progymnasmata, an ancient sequence of rhetorical exercises, as a rich resource for contemporary scholarship on rhetoric and sound. Drawing on work at the intersection of rhetoric and sound studies as well as scholarship that repurposes ancient rhetorical concepts to study digital media, I argue that refiguring the progymnasmata can significantly expand rhetorical studies of digital sound. I ground my argument in podcasts, a popular sonic medium that has garnered attention in rhetoric and writing scholarship, ending with a series of six exercises designed to help students learn to make podcasts. Few aspects of rhetorical education have survived longer than the progymnasmata, a "series of set exercises of increasing difficulty" meant to prepare students for the writing and speaking they would do in their public and professional lives (Kennedy ix). 1 The sequence took shape as early as the fourth century BCE and, despite periods of relative obscurity, remained a pedagogical staple well into the English Renaissance (Kennedy xi; Woods, "Boys"; Enterline 20). In this article, I argue that the exercises are particularly resonant with emerging sonic media as well as recent scholarship on sound. I propose a reworked progymnasmata designed to help students and scholars conceptualize and create with sound. This project is part of an ongoing progymnasmatic revival. While the exercises' popularity waned in recent centuries, David Fleming points to a recent resurgence of interest that began in the late twentieth century and has continued into the twenty-first ("Quintilian" 132). Fleming advocates for "the very idea behind this cycle of exercises, the attempt to make rhetoric. .. a complete and developmentally attuned curriculum in written and spoken discourse" ("The Very Idea" 114), arguing that the progymnasmata should be tied to a broad "civic humanist" mission as part of a "comprehensive language-arts curriculum" à la Quintilian ("Quintilian" 125). Fleming notes some challenges involved in resituating the progymnasmata within contemporary curricula: "The very stability of the progymnasmatic tradition. .. suggests that it was a highly conservative pedagogy in a culture given to educational inertia" ("Quintilian" 132-33). His concerns and hopes resonate with those of Kathleen E. Welch, who claims that we "need the tremendous knowledge base of the Greek and Roman classics. .. [b]ut we do not need the racism and sexism" with which that rhetorical tradition is entangled (196). However, in addition to Fleming's "Quintilianistic" framework, the progymnasmata have recently been reimagined as exercises in "translingual style," incorporated into the textbook Ancient Rhetorics for
This essay introduces the archive created by the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA)'s Oral History Initiative. The archive consists of 21 audio interviews recorded at the 2018 RSA conference, transcripts of those interviews, and miscellaneous supplementary materials. Recorded on the occasion of RSA's fiftieth anniversary, the interviews feature long-time RSA members, past and present officers and board members, and those who were otherwise a part of key moments in the society's history. The essay's authors explore the contents of the interviews, emphasizing three key terms frequently invoked by the interviewees themselves: interdisciplinarity, intimacy, and inclusivity. The authors also provide instructions for accessing the archival materials and invite readers to make use of them.
This article pursues an antihermeneutic conception of Socratic irony that troubles the borders between pedagogical authority and humility. One of the most tenacious ways of troping the teacher-student relation, Socratic irony is often figured as a way for a masterful teacher to exercise authority over a student. Drawing on the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Avital Ronell, this article repositions such irony as an uncontrollability in language itself-one that can humble and humiliate teacher and student alike. Via divergent readings of Plato's Gorgias and Aristophanes' Clouds, as well as Bruno Latour's interpretation of the former, I question how this approach to Socratic irony might re-and unwork rhetoricians' positions of mastery with regard to both students and systematized bodies of knowledge.
This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.
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