Today’s Plan:
- Cavarero (30 minutes)
- McComiskey (15 minutes)
- Free Write Time (10 minutes)
- For Next Class (10 minutes)
Cavarero
I’d like to try something. What is a question that you think I should ask you about Cavarero?
- What type of rhetoric most strongly persuaded you of Cavarero’s view of Penelope’s defiance of feminine symbolism?
- What rhetorical techniques amplify Cavarero’s argument that ?
- How does Penelope’s act of rebellion reinforce Cavarero’s definition of the feminine/
- According to Cavarero, is Penelope a sophist? Would she be according to Plato?
- How does the inclusion of women into the philosophical world help us understand rhetorical theory?
McComiskey
First, let’s take a second and explore a really complicated term. Logos. Okay, a few questions on McComiskey’s argument:
- What is a relativistic epistemology? (p. 18)
- How does McComiskey frame Gorgias’ rhetorical methodology? (p. 18)
- How might Plato respond to McComiskey’s characterization of ambiguous laws? (p. 20)
- Key paragraph on oligarchy vs democracy, key term: nomos, nomoi (p. 20, p. 28)
- Gorgias and kairos (p. 22)
- What if there is no spoon? (p. 24)
Finally, let’s look at a few pages from McComiskey’s second chapter:
- Pg 32: three purposes to Gorgias’ rhetoric.
- Pg 33: what does McComiskey identify as Plato’s primary gripe about rhetoric in the Phaedrus?>
- Pg 33: Aristotle’s (sophistic?) defense of rhetoric
- Pg 34: What does Gorgias see as a problem with logos?
Free Write
We are meeting in the computer lab today because I wanted to get a sense of how you are handling/processing the readings thus far. Your first major assignment calls for a conference length paper (8-10 pages double-spaced) that ties our readings together. In that paper I will ask you to group our readings to find relationships between them. Your paper will be tied to a central rhetorical term, idea, or question. For instance, you might construct a paper around the idea that rhetoric is merely pastry-baking. Or the idea that rhetoric is driven by ethos. Or the idea that it is driven by pathos. You might focus on how different rhetorical theorists approach or ignore the importance of location and time (context, kairos). You might trace how a theorist establishes her own ethos, and the ethos of the sources she uses. We’ll talk more about the papers later. But I want to plant a seed today.
And I want to give you an opportunity to build/synthesize some of the writing you have been doing in the shared reading space. To be honest, I haven’t been spending enough time in that space. And, because you are a large group, I don’t have a sense of how everyone is handling the reading. So, a quick free write. Pick one of the following questions and run with it. Just write. Don’t worry about mechanics. Don’t worry about transitions. If you don’t like where an idea is heading, just write something like “Wait. No. Let my try that from another angle.”
- Question #1: Traditionally, we translate the Greek term metis as both wisdom and cunning. The God for which metis is named is Metis (duh); note how Wikipedia’s short article on Metis cites Odysseus as its best representation. The article cites Brown’s (1952) claim that “Metis was both a threat to Zeus and an indispensable aid.”
Cavarero isn’t directly addressing rhetoric in her text, but how might we see her deployment of Metis/metis (pp. 13, 18-19) as a response to Socrates’ critique of rhetoric? Is it a response?
- Question #2: Cavarero makes note of the centrality of death in Greek philosophy (p. 20), noting that from Plato’s perspective “those who lament the fact of death, which is the definitive untying of the soul from the body, are bad philosophers” (pp. 23). Because the body is bad, because its wants and desires cause us hunger and pain, we should look forward to the day when we are free of it. How does Cavarero respond to this premise? How might that response speak to a defense of rhetoric (especially when one highlights that for Plato’s theory of forms we do not *invent* new knowledge but merely “remember,” “rediscover,” existing knowledge).
- Question #3: Lost into the void. Something about how does Plato’s presentation of Callicles compare to McComiskey’s presentation of Gorgias and sophistic rhetoric? To what extent does Callicles resemble McComiskey’s idyllic (though not Ideal) democratic agent? To what extent does Callicles anticipate and offer a critique of McComiskey’s arguments?
For Next Class
Read Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, pdf #1.
Note that we will be reading pdf #2 for Thursday.
