Insignificant Wranglings

Today I want to do two things. First, I want to share the postmortem form for the first project so you have an idea of what kinds of questions I will ask you to consider as you finish the first project. Second, I want to introduce Project 4, the Podcast Project, so you/we can begin thinking about what topics you might work on (and begin looking for criteria).

Project One Postmortem

• In three sentences, tell me about your project (what is it trying to say/do?)
• How would you, in two or three sentences, explain to someone what Ong has to say about literacy?
• How would you, in two or three sentences, explain to someone what Ulmer has to say about electracy?
• What do you perceive as a connection between Ong and Ulmer? How did you attempt to highlight this connection in your web site?
• What tools did you use to make your project? Tell me about your workflow process
• What went right? What is your favorite part of the project?
• What went wrong? What could have worked out better?

Project Expectations

I will ask you to work in groups of 2-3 to create a Podcast series of three episodes on a common subject or theme (understood loosely). Each episode should be around 10 minutes. I have casually titled the project “Fly Your Nerd Flag High” in hopes that you will geek out over a particular activity or topic (we’re all nerdy about something, right?). Toward the end of class today, I will ask you to tweet out a pitch idea for a Podcast, and we will spend some time favoriting and retweeting pitches.

The podcast should have some theme music (must be original composition or copyleft/CreativeCommons).

You will publish your podcast episodes on iTunes and create a tumblr page and twitter account to promote the project.

Podcast Resources

I’ll be up front with you: this is my first attempt to teach a podcast project, and so I will ask for a bit of patience (and any help!) collecting resources for this project. In fact, I am going to start by having you do a little bit of work for me. I want you to spend the next 15 minutes in class searching for materials related to podcasts: post links to these materials on our class twitter feed (use the #enc3416 hastag). What is a podcast? What do I need to do one? What are some exemplary podcasts? How can I set up a studio space at home? Can I record a podcast using Google Chat?

We should be able to see resources posted here in live time:

#enc3416 Tweets

I will add them all to a delicious feed on podcast resources that will be available here.

Some starter resources:

• Teachers’ Guide on the Use of Podcasting (2012)
• Apple’s instructions for publishing a podcast and their podcasting FAQ
• Auphonic’s “How to Podcast for Free” article (2013)
• Adam Wilcox’s How to Podcast with Tumblr tutorial
• Mashable’s list of 70 Resources for Podcasts (2007)
• Audacity (free audio editing software)
• HongKiat.com’s guide to setting up and basic editing

Some sample podcasts:

• Slate’s list of the top 25 Podcasting episodes of all-time
• Flimspotting
• KairosCast
• Not Your Mama’s Gamer
• Slate’s Hang Up and Listen
• Fangraphs baseball
• DiceTower
• BBC’s “In Our Time”
• My Brother, My Brother, and Me

Eventually we will want to listen to enough podcasts to get a sense of their genre conventions and arrangements. But for right now, we want to think about ideas for topics and format. What I hope you see is that a podcast is neither a completely scripted reading nor an entirely spontaneous conversation: it is a kind of planned spontaneity.

Today we will focus on Isocrates–the final of our 4 Greek rhetoricians. First, however, I want to provide some details for your first project.

Project One: What is Rhetoric?

The first project asks you to draw upon our readings, lectures, and discussions thus far to provide a more robust definition to the question “what is rhetoric?” I have asked that you compose your answer as a PechaKechua, which is a name for a presentation format (not a software, just a format). The format consists of twenty images, each lasting 20 seconds. Thus, the whole presentation should be about 6:30 minutes (which means your written script should be about 3-3 1/2 pages, typed and double-spaced).

There is two ways to think about this assignment. First, I am asking that it tell me what rhetoric is (and, perhaps, what it isn’t). Second, I am asking that it show me what rhetoric is by itself being a self-conscious, strategic, rhetorical performance. So, while it doesn’t necessarily have to deploy them explicitly, it should at least perform logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos. Think of Aristotle’s topoi as a recipe guide–how many of those common topics (recheck the Lanham handout) can you incorporate into your response?

I encourage you to be inventive in the way you approach your response, especially as it comes to kairos. What is the time and place for this response? How do you frame it? In light of a contemporary event? And do you call attention to that event through word or image? Both? Can you use images to create provocative juxtapositions between, for instance, what you say and what you show on the screen? Across all the various theorists we have read, I would argue that the first principle of rhetoric is audience (for better, as in Isocrates, or worse, as in Plato). Know your audience: if you haven’t figured it out yet, I am not particularly interested in projects that play it safe.

In terms of what your project has to say, I will try to keep it to a minimum (you only have 3 – 3 1/2 pages, or about 800 words–that is not a lot of room). In addition to offering a definition, I want you to support your definition by referencing two ancient theorists and two contemporary theorists (in either support or definition). Finally, your response must offer one analogy for rhetoric.

In addition to invention, I will be thinking about your project in light of the other major canons:

• Arrangement
• Style
• Delivery
• And, in place of Memory, I will be evaluating your use of images

Finally, a word on recommended technology. For this project, I would recommend using Windows MovieMaker (PC) or iMovie (Mac). Both are pretty easy to use. Chances are you have used one of these programs in another class. It is also possible to automate a PowerPoint, although I believe that is actually more difficult than using MovieMaker (which is free on just about every PC with Windows).

Also, think about how you can play with images. Cropping. “Zooming.” Color. Etc. You might not know it, but you all have free access to Photoshop via the USF Apps portal (assuming you have high speed Internet at home).

Haskins Readings

We have read two articles on Isocrates in preparation for today’s class. Let’s start off by tweeting out one observation from Haskins’ Memesis essay, using the hashtag #enc3371

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Homework

For homework I will ask you to read two more essays (two of my personal favorites) that address the question “what is rhetoric?” The first is Richard Lanham’s “The Q Question” (I will send this out as a .pdf) and the second is Ernesto Grassi’s “Rhetoric as First Philosophy.” Both will think of rhetoric through the Romans: Lanham begins his essay dealing with Quinitilian’s difficulty addressing whether rhetoric is “good.” Lanham identifies two ways to respond to this question. The first he calls the weak defense of rhetoric–we might call this the Platonic defense–and that is that rhetoric is good when I (a good person) uses it to advance (what I consider to be) good truths, and bad when bad people deliver bad ideas. One should quickly recognize the problems such a defense manifests. The strong defense, according to Lanham, should resonate a bit with the charitable reading of Callicles I offered earlier in class: and that is that if we accept that truth doesn’t exist outside of human agreement, then rhetoric is both good and necessary as the art that helps to legislate human disagreement and communication.

Grassi will work out of the Humanist tradition, and make a similar argument based on the work of an ancient Roman rhetorician (Cicero) and a Renaissance humanist (Vico). Enjoy.

Today’s class reviews 5 separate articles we’ve read over the past week. The concern here is two-fold:

• First, we want to get a handle on sophistry, to disambiguate it from Plato’s critique, and identify its key players and terms
• Second, we want to trace out the contours of “postmodern” or “poststructuralism,” and try to identify why these movements resonate with non-Platonic conceptions of sophistry

Halloran

What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?

In “Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or if not His Somebody Else’s,” what does Halloran mean when he argues that “ethos emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic?

In “Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or if not His Somebody Else’s,” Halloran connects ethos to?

Sullivan

What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?

In “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter,” what does Dale L. Sullivan mean when he identifies epideictic rhetoric as a conservative activity?

Which term below does Sullivan use to fill in the blank: “Since epideictic is about ________ and ethos is the portrayal of ________, there is a natural link between the two.”

Carter

What, according to Carter, is the ancient primary purpose of stasis theory?

What are the four levels of stasis?

Carter notes that, unlike stasis,kairosis quite difficult to define. He ties the term to Gorgias and a “relativistic epistemology” (an idea that gets picked up and explicated by McComiskey). Tell me something about what “relativistic epistemology” means. Bonus: why does a relativistic epistemology make rhetoric necessary?

At its simplest, kairos refers to?

What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?

Jarratt

What political archetype does Jarratt connect to sophistry?

I want to pick up Jarratt’s complicated discussion of Moi, Alcoff, and whether poststructuralism can advance feminism, or whether the two movements are ultimately at odds (see p. 31).

Moi’s interest in “exclusion”: “Each individual must agonistically take sides in full knowledge that any position involves unpalatable political choices, acts of exclusion” (p. 32). Rhetoric and exclusion will come up again when we discuss Burke later in the semester. Alcoff’s interest in “positionality” (p. 32). Spivak and the importance of kairotic discourse.

Jarratt’s defense of Cixous’s “women’s writing” and why reverse racism or the menist movement isn’t a thing: “cultural, political, historical context” (p. 33).

When style functions as a disruption (an argument).

What is nomos? How does nomos differ from logos? Why does Jarratt believe nomos is important? (Jarratt, offering a Nietzschean reading of rhetoric: “It [Rhetoric] always reads the “real” both present and past, in terms of future possibilities, specifying “real” for whom, under what conditions, and toward what ends” (p. 38). In other words, rhetoric–by denying any access to a universal or divine Truth–insists that every law, every truth, is a matter of human-cultural production and maintenance. It looks at how these truths get maintained and supported (epideictic) and how these truths might be confronted (Gorgias’s poetic style, Protagoras’s antithesis, Cixous’s “bisexual” writing). It contextualizes truths, pays attention to who truths include and who gets excluded. It decides the undecidable–who must be hurt and forgoes any idealist notion that a Truth can be universally inclusive. It doesn’t, as Nietschze chastises, simply synthesize history into a neat, easily digestible set of laws, binaries, “Truths.” Rather, it reaches for its hammer. (See Beyond Good and Evil or Truth and Lies in An Extra-Moral Sense).

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?

McComiskey

Homework

There’s links to two pieces on the syllabus by Haskins on Isocrates. Wikipedia offers a succinct introduction to Isocrates. I would call attention to one particular passage from his long work, the Antidosis,

Today in class I want to show you a few more CSS fundamentals, including floats and fixed positioning. Like last class, I have sent out a .zip folder with a files we can use.

In class I am going to follow this 3 column responsive layout from CodeOpen. You can also use a similar tutorial on page 387 of the Robbins.

Here is an updated reminder of the rubric for project one:

• Image quality (at least one purposely cropped image)
• Links that work
• HTML is W3C compliant (it validates, or if it doesn’t validate, there are minor errors)
• Every .html page shares one .css sheet
• Every .html page has at least a header and a footer
• Code uses at least one span and at least one class
• Uses a Web Font
• Uses a .css reset
• Thought-provoking, non-trivial, juxtapositions
• Beyond quotation, offers some kind of understanding of Ulmer (either in the project, or in an introduction/preface, or in an afterword, or in an about page)
• Uses color strategically
• Demonstrates the ability to position images and includes alt tags
• Thinks about and executes layout
• Upload to USF server space