Liner Notes

In this episode, Kimber Harrison, Hannah Hopkins, Rachel Spencer, and Rebecca Yaksuknenko talk with Michele Kennerly, Vessela Valiavitcharska, and Jordan Loveridge about Kennerly’s recent book, Editorial Bodies (U of South Carolina Press, 2018). (0-4.30) Harrison, Hopkins, Spencer, and Yaksuknenko introduce themselves and summarize Editorial Bodies (4.30-9). Kennerly’s book blurs key distinctions: orality and literacy, publicity and privacy, rhetoric and literature, the material and the intellectual. (9-10) Kennerly’s notion of corpus care and canonicity in antiquity. (10-13.56) Kennerly’s contributions to the field of history. (13.56-21.50) Kennerly’s contribution to scholarly questions about material and digital culture. (21.50-29.15) The pedagogical potential in Kennerly’s work. (29.15-end) Conclusion.

Transcript

Intro [2-3 minutes] 

Welcome to another sonic rhetoric review, a series of podcasts where we discuss contemporary scholarly works about classical and medieval rhetoric. In this series, we hope to remediate the genre of the scholarly book review, accomplishing everything that a book review achieves. Each review will summarize a recent book, situate it in contemporary scholarship, and offer thoughts about the future scholarshipmade possible by each work. 

Today, we’ll be exploring Michele Kennerly’s Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, published in 2018 by The University of South Carolina Press. 

But before we go any further, let’s introduce our hosts.

Kimber: Hi, I'm Kimberlyn Harrison, and I'm a first year PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing at UT Austin. I’m interested in digital rhetoric, organizations, and visions of the future.

Hannah: Hi, I’m Hannah Hopkins. I’m a second-year PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing at UT Austin. I’m interested in digital rhetoric, rhetorical ecologies, and environmental rhetorics.

Rachel: I’m Rachel Spencer, and I’m a first-year PhD student in English at UT. My research interests include early modern drama, the genre of the history play, and Shakespeare and Marlowe inperformance.

Becky: I’m Becky Yatsuknenko, and I am a second year PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing at UT Austin. I’m interested in feminist rhetorics, place/space theory, and film. 

Rachel: We had the great pleasure of talking with Jordan Loveridge, Assistant Professor of Communication and English at Mount St. Mary’s University, as well as Vessela Valiavitcharska, Professor of English at University of Maryland. 

Kimber: Jordan and Vessela will help us situate Editorial Bodies within the history of rhetoric and help us figure outhow this text might be helpful for scholars in fields outside rhetoric. 

Becky: Finally, we talked with Michele Kennerly herself, asking her what she hoped to accomplish with this book.and how it relates to her more current work in digital rhetoric. Dr. Kennerly is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences and Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. 

Hannah: Spoiler alert: we loved Editorial Bodies, and we’re excited about what this book does for scholars inrhetoric, history, Classics, and other disciplines. 

Rachel: We can’t wait to share these conversations with you.

Summary [2-3 minutes]

Hannah: In Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, Michele Kennerly surfaces often-overlooked practices of ancient editorial labor, and she argues that “behind all bodies of work are bodies of workers” (211). Her cast of ancient Greek and Roman writers, orators, friends, fellow poets, and anonymous scribes and laborers bring a text to life through editorial attention to the text’s material parts. 

Kimber: As Kennerly shows us, these poets’ editorial practices became central to developing Athenian, Alexandrian, and Roman textual cultures. She explained that at first, she only thought she would examine poets: “I went into the dissertation thinking it was only poets as consummate writers that would be overt about their editorial labor, and then, as I started to read around in the work of orators with whom they were contemporary, I found that this language actually pervaded the work of orators as well” (1:14-1:33). 

Hannah: Did you catch that Editorial Bodies began as Michele’s dissertation project? Not only is she writing about editing, she’s practicing her own version of the editing processes she observes. She notes that she was even inspired to burn the midnight oil by the ancient poets and rhetors she was reading about, who, even then, had to write by candlelight when their days were full. Editing, for her, was a visceral experience that happened at particular times of the day and in particular conditions. 

Kimber: As we’ll talk about later on in the episode, our group has been really interested in the questions of materiality and visible labor that Editorial Bodies raises, especially in the context of the kinds of writing we do as graduate students. 

Rachel: When we talked to Vessela, she reminded us that the book both troubles the line between orator and poet. She even makes the point that this leads us to question the lines between rhetoric and literature: “We think of literature that artistic expression of subjective experience, and we think of poetry as the lyrical expression of an intensely subjective experience as well, but what Michele's book stresses is that literature and rhetoric have a much more close relationship in antiquity, to the point where it was a matter of literary form, it was a matter of language or genre more than a matter of content, and so now we have dichotomized literature and rhetoric in a way we have them in, you know, we have them housed in separate departments like they're two different disciplines, especially prose and poetry, especially American poetry, but, in antiquity, that was not really the case, and it wasn't so much the case in the Renaissance, either, where rhetorical arguments could be made in poetry and prose equally, and literary arguments or arguments about literature and fiction about drama could be made in rhetorical pieces, as well” (18:22–20:00). 

Becky: Continuing with the theme of troubling boundaries, another of Kennerly’s major contributions is that the language of the body is inseparable from the language of editing. In the book, she notes that “the human body became an organizing principle of composition and criticism” (14). She explained this further in our interview that this is how language is and has always been embodied: “The editorial language that I was most keen to examine is very material, and, once you start looking at the materiality of it, you start to see that it's the language of the body that's the concept that makes all the verbs of editing come together and make sense. No matter where you’re looking in terms of scale, if you're looking on the level of sentence, ancient writers are working with cola (limbs) in a sentence, those are the little bits of meter; they are dealing with the spine of a book, they’re dealing with a book walking around a city, so the book itself circumambulates, so really at every level of writing and putting something into the world, the body is there” (18:30-20:33).

Hannah: So thinking about Kennerly’s first two major contributions—one, troubling the distinction between rhetoric and poetics; and, two, noticing the inseparability of the language of editing and the language of the body—leads us to what we see as the third major contribution. 

Rachel: Through her engagement with what she calls “textual cultures,” or “[formations] whose participants enjoy, make use of, experience, benefit from—the material form and memorializing potential” (8) of circulating texts”—Kennerly notes that the easy distinction between oral and literate cultures posited since Walter Ong and George Kennedy just doesn’t hold water. In the ancient world, we can’t separate orality and literacy, and that imbrication has a lot to do with how we think about editing. 

Kimber: Yeah, I see where you’re going with that. Kennerly reminds us that editing is both a private activity and something that gets worked out in public as those texts circulate. She has a really great line on page seven that captures this: “one has to write to be preserved and edit to endure and be endured” (7). By focusing ancient editing practices as preparation work for public presentation, Kennerly argues that the explicit care of the writer’s editing process points to editing’s crucial effects on ancient composers and texts. 

Becky: Right, that’s what her term, “corpus care,” is meant to capture—it shows how metaphorical language of the body binds these orators and their composition practices together. Kennerly reveals that these ancient writers understood that only the best texts were published and reproduced. If they wanted fame and lasting endurance, they needed to engage with the texts from orators and poets before them. 

“Because of Cicero’s own machinations, because of the machinations of Tiro, who was his scribal slave whom Cicero liberated, that all the work they did to manage “Cicero” ends up being featured in the most hot literature debates of the day, and that was only possible because Cicero was convinced he was up to something that not only served a purpose in his own time but would help guide and instruct and teach later readers. So it’s weird for me that these ancient authors keep making these predictions about how endlessly useful they would be, and then we actually see them keep popping up. They had no control over that, but conditions conspired for their work to be preserved and endlessly debated about in subsequent periods” (14:53-14:49).

Rachel: In this way, ancient rhetors effectively, as Kennerly puts it, “created the critical conditions for their own canonicity” (17). 

Jordan offered a really nice explanation of this idea by describing the reciprocal relationship of these authors and the cannon as an ouroboros: “somehow they have created something lasting that is then interpolated into this broader literary culture, but, in that being the move that is made, they also kind of end up getting enshrined as being these exemplars of the period.” (7:08-7:30).

I’m fascinated by this idea of the canon constantly consuming/repeating itself because, as an early modernist, so many of the authors, poets, and playwrights I study are often looking back on these ancient writers and further assisting this growth in canon. 

Kimber: Speaking of the canon, in our next section, we’ll talk more about how Editorial Bodies contributes to conversations in rhetorical history. 

Rachel: Do any of us consider ourselves historians? No, not really. 

Becky: But, as you’ll hear from Michele, Jordan, and Vessela, the work that Editorial Bodies does to revisit and revise history has implications for writers, editors, and scholars across fields.

Hannah: We’ll start by thinking about how the book counters long-held assumptions around rhetorical history, and then we’ll get to talk more about how Editorial Bodies speaks to some of our own scholarly interests. Let’s get into it.

Contributions to rhetorical history [6 minutes]

Rachel: Michele’s perspective is part of a growing body of revisionist work in rhetorical history. 

Hannah: Yeah, that notion of “revisionist” is key–both Vessela and Jordan spoke about how Kennerly’s work pushed back on current assumptions about rhetorical practice in ancient times. 

Rachel: I personally loved how Vessela contrasts Kennerly’s argument with those of long-revered scholars like Jacques Derrida and Walter Ong: “Another important argument she makes is that speech and writing existed in a relationship of complementarity. We’ve so far assumed that speech is the dominant and privileged mode of doing rhetoric and poetry in antiquity. In other words, we've bought into Derrida’s arguments about the hegemony of speech, so he makes a sweeping claim about all of Western metaphysics and then makes it a project to subvert this perceived hegemony. Another study from the mid-20th century, very different from Derrida’s but also very influential, is Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy, which I admire very much, but which also dichotomizes the relationship between speech and writing and between oral cultures and cultures that developed high degrees of literacy. Michele’s book does the opposite—she collapses the opposition, simply by demonstrating how much speech and writing depended on each other in ancient practice” (9:45-11:00). 

Hannah: So Kennerly revises not only common narratives about the rhetorical tradition, but fairly recent assumptions about the nature of communication. In our interviews, one of those assumptions really stood out. 

Kimber: Jordan explained that he thought one of the central contributions of Michele’s book was her pushback on George Kennedy’s concept of the decline narrative: “It’s a little bit of a challenge to George Kennedy's narrative of the decline of rhetoric, which is important because his whole kind of thesis about the decline of rhetoric is tied to this concept, where he tries to show that the discipline is essentially undergoing a literature-ization and—forgive me—I'm not even going to try to pronounce the actual Italian term that he is using there—I'm just not going to do it. And, essentially, he's arguing that this process of literature-ization is following the loss of what he terms the traditional democratic fora in both Athens and Rome. And so, because of this, he is arguing that, as rhetoric becomes less central, less kind of purposeful in its usage around civic life, it becomes more focused on the literary kinds of concerns, like sort of stylistic innovation or delivery or performance” (1:18-2:23). 

Hannah: I think a lot of us begin our training in rhetorical history with this narrative, so it definitely has a specific place in the field. Was that a part of anyone else’s training? 

Kimber: I know I learned about the decline narrative when I was an undergraduate in rhetoric. That’s why I think Jordan’s comment was particularly helpful: because he explains that Kennerly’s book offers alternative perspectives on the historical narrative of our field: “And I think this is really important from a historiographic perspective right because she's basically challenging the way that we kind of approach and understand the change of rhetorical practice over time in the ancient world” (2:41–3:02).

Rachel: In addition to challenging past conceptions of writing and speaking in ancient times, Kennerly’s work is important to us in our own moment. Her contributions to the field complements other recent scholarship on bodily rhetorics and material culture. 

Becky: So I know we said we’re not all rhetorical historians, and we’re still not. But each of us does engage materiality in different ways. Kimber, can you talk a little bit about how you think about materiality in your own work? 

Kimber: Materiality is an interesting concept for me since I do work in digital studies. We often think about the internet as this in-between space, detached from what’s happening in our physical world. But rhetoric helps us see how the communication practices that exist online—whether through hashtags or subreddits or Facebook groups—very much affect the material world. Even though we might think of our digital avatars as disembodied, there is still a very real human behind the screen. I thought about this specifically when Kennerly discusses Tiro, Cicero’s editorial assistant who helped compose most of his speeches. Kennerly really draws our attention to all of the bodies behind screens, whether those screens were made of parchment or papyrus or glass. 

Vessela gives us a little more to think about here, too: “Michele's book complements really well other people's work that has drawn attention to the body with dimensions of intellectual labor. Deborah Hawhee, for example, in the Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Antiquity, and also her other book Moving Bodies on Kenneth Burke (9:07-9:27). 

Becky: We’ve noticed how rhetorical studies in general is taking a turn towards embodiment, and Kennerly’s book participates in that turn by focusing on materiality and the body in the texts of staple orators like Cicero. 

Kimber: Vessela notes that this section on Cicero was her favorite part of the book: “Michelle brings out the full palette of bodily and kinesthetic associations inherent in Cicero's argument: phrases and clauses and sentences or limbs that running down, the pace speeds up, it slows down, the narrative arguments are elongated or truncated. It's the orator’s duty, she says, to cut and shape and polish a wide swatch of the raw material in order that the polished published words might fulfill the public purpose. Notice the alliteration.” (12:30–13:10) 

Rachel: Jordan, too, appreciated Michele’s orientation towards the body and notes that it allows rhetorical scholars to approach rhetorical history in a new way: “And so, when we talk about a corpus of text, Kennerly is suggesting that it's no accident that we see this term used right in common between these two things between physical bodies, but in between bodies of texts. And the crux, I think, of what she's trying to get at here is that, while there might be the shared vocabulary between bodies and editorial bodies, our bodies are, of course, all very different. And, as societies kinda look at different bodies, they code them sometimes as strong, sometimes as weak, sometimes as masculine, sometimes, as feminine, sometimes it's healthy, sometimes it's not. The important thing, then, is that, by understanding the shifts in the vocabulary around these two related bodies, we start to basically understand some of the cultural attitudes, or we get a kind of cultural insight into how these processes informed one another. And so one of the things that I think that Kennerly does a great job with is that she talks about these shared vocabularies in a way that gives us a window into culture more broadly, right, and this lets us kind of understand editorial practice not purely from this perspective of, like, the rhetorical tradition, but also in terms of how does it relate to issues like gender identity, how does it relate to issues of like textual production, how does it relate to issues of materiality, right in text technologies, and this is kind of a really great strength, I would say” (4:29–6:07).

Hannah: Let’s take a listen to that one more time: “There might be a shared vocabulary between bodies and editorial bodies—our bodies are all, of course, very different.” This was just huge for me, this connection that Jordan is building between Editorial Bodies and textual production and materiality. I’m reallyinterested in digital infrastructures—data centers, internet connectivity, stuff like that. At the same time,looking at the physical infrastructure isn’t enough. This is something that Shannon Mattern has writtenabout several times: it’s not enough to point to the buildings, servers, and cables where we can find data. Let me just read you what she writes in her latest book, A City is Not a Computer: “it’s not only theinfrastructural object that matters, but also the personnel and paperwork and protocols, the machines andmanagement practices, the conduits and cultural variables that shape terrain within the larger ecology ofurban information.” The more I think about that moment from Mattern, the more it sounds like so much ofwhat Kennerly is doing in this book. It’s not just the data center. Or it is that, but it’s the people, the bodies, the labor that matters, too. 

Rachel: And Editorial Bodies doesn’t just approach embodied composition from a conceptual standpoint—Kennerly delves into the actual physical labor that went into producing texts, and frames ancient editorial practices as a multi-faceted process that often included contributions from people beyond the author. 

Becky: Yeah, what Jordan is about to say here really helped me imagine more ways that any of us might work with Editorial Bodies: he reminds us that what Kennerly is surfacing here are the “full material complexity of the social connections” that allow authors to participate in textual cultures. 

Hannah: In a lot of ways, what this book does for me is give me a glimpse into how one might go about working with that full material complexity. 

Kimber: As you’ll remember from our introduction, we’re a pretty interdisciplinary group ourselves. It’s part of the reason we enjoyed Editorial Bodies so much, and why we’re eager to recommend it to scholars working in a variety of fields. If you’re a teacher, a writer, or an editor (or, like a lot of you, all three at once), then you’re really going to want to hear what Jordan has to say about this. 

Hannah: As promised, here’s Jordan again: “I think one other really kind of great areas where Kennerly does this work is when she talks about Cicero's slave and scribe Tiro, and so this is really where she tries to bring in the place of enslaved peoples by in the construction of the rhetorical canon. And the thing that I really appreciate about her claims here is that she's asking us really to consider the full material complexity of the social conditions that allowed authors to claim status and canons and all. In other words, whose labor are we really recognizing here? It may be true that the author kind of now coming up with the words to be put down, but we also can't ignore the fact right that scribe culture was based on the labor of enslaved people, and so how does rhetoric’s disciplinary history change if we kind of try to highlight or understand or even maybe, for the first time, consider this otherwise ignored scribe and editorial labor because I don't think that that's something that our field has really touched” (15:27–16:34). 

Becky: One of the great things about this book that I think Jordan’s last comments point out is that this book is accessible and important not just for rhetoricians, but for other scholars, as well, as rhetorical history intersects with a lot of other subjects and disciplines. 

Rachel: I definitely see how it connects to my home discipline of literature. As an Early Modern drama scholar,you could argue that I work with texts that also have an odd relationship with materiality; performance is a fleeting, unique experience which is impossible to recreate exactly as you’ve delivered it or witnessed itas an audience member. But it’s also a field entirely dependent on a material culture with costumes, props, scripts, and, of great interest to me, source materials. There are so many layers of labor andmateriality which go into the texts and productions I study. 

Thinking about performances and audiences, in our next section, we’ll discuss how Michele’s book could be used in the classroom. 

Pedagogy [6 minutes] 

Rachel: When we started thinking about questions to ask Vessela, Michele, and Jordan, pedagogy was top of mind. Michele reminds us that a history of rhetoric is “a pedagogical tradition, and we wouldn’t have the vocabulary being as iterative as it was and as centripetally forceful culturally if it weren’t taught almost without change over centuries. Of course, there are little cultural adjustments to the vocabulary, terminology, and the exercises remain largely the same.” 

Jordan is a historian of rhetoric, and he reminds us that the text helps us show “how ongoing debates move and work in a discipline.” 

Jordan actually teaches an undergraduate course on rhetoric and poetics, and he shared a little more with us about how he might use Editorial Bodies in the classroom. “Currently, the way I designed my course is that the course is kind of situated around the debate that I see constantly between Kennedy’s idea about primary and secondary rhetoric and then, relatedly Jeffrey Walker’s idea about the value of epideictic rhetoric and how this challenges Kennedy’s conception of the role of primary rhetoric. And so, while Kennedy is maintaining that true rhetoric has to be related to civic, oral expression; Walker is insisting that we have to reconsider the centrality of epideictic rhetoric to all persuasion. And I think that Kennerly, her text, her book, is another great kind of option to pair alongside Kennedy and Walker to show how that debate continues to play out. Because I really think that she’s pushing back against so many of the key claims of Kennedy. And one of the things that I really value about that is that she does this in two different ways: she approaches Kennedy’s argument on his own terms and engages it that way, but she also does really important work to try to challenge and move beyond Kennedy’s positions about rhetorical practice and value. And so I think that that’s a really valuable set of skills to show students. Like how do we enter an ongoing debate, while to some extent we have to approach on its own terms; we have to approach the argument we are responding to from its own merits. But that doesn’t mean that we let the people who come before us define every single term of a conversation.”

When we asked Michele a similar question; see reminds us that the educations of the writers she spotlights leads to instruction seeping out of their writing. “Most of these writers featured had the best rhetorical educations of their day. And just the rhetorical sensibilities are such that they speak out in a kind of instructional form even if they are not being overtly pedagogical.”

Hannah: So thinking about how Editorial Bodies contributes to conversations in adjacent fields, we were thrilled to hear Michele share with us that the history of information was on her mind when she told us a little more about the range of her scholarly interests, and how Editorial Bodies brings together scholarship in digital studies, information studies, and ancient rhetoric. “My interest in both digital studies and historical vocabularies of editing are placed together because of the superintending category, which is history of information. I’m really interested in not just the engineering heritage of the 20th century, but the way they were earlier information regimes that had vocabulary, you know, information overabundance, attention, these kinds of terms that we associate with maybe our own digital and creational era but have precursors in a lot of different cultural and historical periods. And one of the things that I attended to in my book that I think brings digital studies or informational studies and the ancient together is that all of these writers with whom I’m reckoning are highly aware that there’s a lot of noise. A lot of people are writing, a lot of people are talking; so how is it that we get traction or purchase in a communication culture that’s so loud, that has so many books being published, that has so many people speaking in the forum, how is that you get heard.”

As anyone familiar with the book will likely have guessed, Jordan and Vessela were quick to point out that Editorial Bodies will be really exciting for scholars in Classics who have interest in textual cultures and editorial labor. “Kennerly is really focusing on the idea of canon construction and in doing that that means that you have a built-in audience for a lot of chapters, because there will be plenty of people who work on these figures. So in that way, there is kind of an invitation for scholars in Classics to engage.”

Vessela also reminds us that rhetoricians have inherited this less-than-useful dichotomy between rhetoric and literature. 

Kimber: Part of what Kennerly is doing so well here is addressing how that dichotomy Vessela identifies is incomplete to define the scope of work we do: we have to rethink it. 

Hannah: Right, and, later, Jordan reminds us of the possibilities at play when it comes to teaching multimodal composition. “Some of the like text technologies that Kennerly talks about in the book are ultimately unfamiliar to us, like most of us don’t use pumice stones or files to kind of approach our editorial practice now. Ultimately, all writers everywhere have had the common experience of the blank page and the work that it takes to fill it up with words that you’re proud of. So I really see that as that kind of central commonality that maybe the book can engage outside of our very specific bubble.”

It’s this kind of commonality that we want to end this section with. We agree with Jordan: we’ve all had the experience of the blank pumice, the blank page, the blinking cursor, some of us a little more recently than others. 

Rachel: For Jordan and for us, this is one of the most compelling reasons to read and share Editorial Bodies: the book is for “anyone who has written any extended piece of writing like a dissertation or a book or a master’s thesis or whatever, anyone that has written anything that has written anything that requires a lot of revision should honestly read this book. [laughs] And the reason for that I think is that Kennerly does a great job capturing the care and labor that is at the heart of the very idea of editing and I think that as writers, that’s just something that we can all relate to on some level whether or not you’re interested in the rhetorical tradition or the ancient world or classics and so on and so forth; it’s just that as writers that’s just something that we do. And I’m kind of kidding here, but I’m also kind of not. [laughs] Right, because, I think that if we as writers broadly, not as some kind of disciplinary identity, but just as writers, if we think about how we frame our editorial practice, what kind of metaphor frames editing or revision work broadly. And of course, revision is so central to the whole idea of rhetoric and composition as a discipline and I think that is an inroad there.”

Conclusion [2-3 minutes] 

Becky: As our time together comes to an end, we hope this podcast and discussion of Michele Kennerly’s Editorial Bodies has encouraged many avenues of thinking about and applying the history of rhetoric to your own pursuits and projects. The task of understanding how the study of rhetoric has made it to today in its present form is crucial for educators, scholars, and students at all levels—and I think we’d all agree Michele’s book has made a significant contribution to our understanding of this evolution. 

Kimber: Of course, we would like to thank Michele, Vessela, and Jordan for their outstanding interviews and for being key contributors to this project. Extra thanks to Eric Detweiler and Caddie Alford at enculturation for supporting this podcast series and putting time and energy into polishing this digital body of work. 

Hannah: And, of course, we extend thanks to our peers and colleagues in Ancient Rhetoric and Politics at UT Austin this fall, whose thoughtful engagement with this text shaped and reshaped our own approaches to Editorial Bodies. 

All: Thanks for listening!

Rachel: This episode of sonic rhetoric review was completed as a part of “Ancient Rhetoric and Politics” at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2021. For more episodes completed via this graduate course, please check out the other recent episodes in this series.

Liner Notes

In this episode, Christos Kalli, I. B. Hopkins, and Patrick Sui (interviewers) talk with Robin Reames, Richard Enos, and Kathleen Lamp-Fortuno about Lamp-Fortuno’s recent book, A City of Marble (U of South Carolina Press, 2013). After brief introductions by the interviewers, Lamp-Fortuno introduces and summarizes her book (-3.50). Hopkins and Kalli then discuss the book’s structure, turning it over to Reames and Lamp-Fortuno to examine how the book’s organizational strategies help lay down its arguments and work against the Decline Theory (3.50-13.15). Kalli, Enos, and Sui then delve into the Augustan coinage program and its rhetorical implications (13.15-19.50). Kalli, Hopkins, Sui, and Lamp-Fortuno finish the episode by looking at the contemporary parallels and political intersections of the book (19.50-22.55). Conclusion and credits (22.55-24.06).

Transcript:

IBH - I.B. Hopkins

CK - Christos Kalli

PS - Patrick Sui

RR - Robin Reames

RE - Richard Enos

KLF - Kathleen Lamp-Fortuno

[Introduction]

[IBH] Welcome to Sonic Rhetoric Reviews, a series of podcasts where we discuss contemporary scholarly works in the field of rhetoric. In this series, we hope to remediate the genre of the scholarly book review while still accomplishing everything that a book review achieves.

[CK] Each review will summarize a recent book, situate it in contemporary scholarship, and offer thoughts about the future scholarship made possible by each work. Today, we’ll be talking about Kathleen Lamp-Fortuno’s A City of Marble: The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome, published in 2013 by The University of South Carolina Press, as part of the Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Series, edited by Thomas W. Benson.

[PS] My name is Patrick Sui, and I’m a graduate student in English and Information Studies at UT Austin. My main research interests are posthumanist theory, digital humanities, and the intersection between Continental Philosophy and literary theory.

[CK] My name is Christos Kalli, and I am currently a first-year PhD student in English at UT Austin. My research focuses on contemporary American poetry and poetics, and I have a special interest in the contemporary epic.

[IBH] And my name is IB Hopkins. I’m a second-year PhD Student in English literature, also at UT Austin, where I focus on drama and performance in early America, as well as adaptation and new play dramaturgy.

[CK] So, as you can tell, we are not scholars of rhetoric by training, but we did not let that stop us. In fact, we have gathered insights from two experts in the field, Drs. Robin Reames and Richard Enos. Talking to them about A City of Marble has helped us better understand its disciplinary implications, and where it fits into the broader arc of how scholars think about ancient rhetoric.

[PS] Right, and there’s really no replacement for speaking to the author herself, so we are especially excited to share Dr. Lamp-Fortuno’s perspectives on what she hoped to accomplish with her book.

[IBH] Well, should we let her introduce the book, then?

[C] Yeah, let’s do it!:

[KLF] Basically, what A City of Marble is about are the Augustine cultural campaigns. Right, so I think that I'm engaging with a lot of different disciplinary narratives that we can talk about a little bit more, but, really, the argument that the book makes is that non-traditional rhetorical media—so things like art and architecture, monuments, coins—that these are functioning rhetorically, and that they have a great rhetorical significance. So we're dealing with a time, not necessarily of political chaos, but of great change. And so I look at how these artifacts are instructing the Roman people in what is expected of them as citizens. I think also part of the contribution that the book makes is that in looking at visual material artifacts I’m getting outside of the kind of narrow political elite that are addressed in the textual tradition. Even though I'm still in the heart of empire, I’m trying to look at how rhetoric works in the daily lives of Roman people who are often excluded.

[CK] That’s a very rich summary of what she’s doing in this book!

[PS] So, maybe I can elaborate on how Dr Lamp-Fortuno accomplishes that, how she uses these “visual material artifacts” to support the argument. In seven chapters, she discusses case studies from the period of Augustus’s reign from 27 BCE to 14 CE that demonstrate the rhetorical significance of public works beginning with a prominent altar dedicated to the peace Augustus brought to the Empire, the Ara Pacis. She then examines the Augustan Forum and state coinage programs and reads these alongside vernacular art like those created by formerly enslaved people, neighborhood organizations, and a mural parodying Augustus. She draws on this wide range of examples to establish the reciprocal rhetoric of the public to state cultural campaigns beyond the “narrow political elite.”

[IBH] So it seems to me that the progression of these case studies is arranged so they move from rhetorical objects that are subject to the tightest control by Augustus, there in the very center of Rome as the seat of power, to those that fall further and further outside his (and really his administration's) capacity to strictly regulate. To my mind, there is a range from controlled messaging at the Ara Pacis all the way to that same messaging being used against him in the graffiti that uses parody to push back against the state.

[CK] Of course, there are alternative interpretations of the book’s configuration. To me, for instance, it seems that Dr. Lamp-Fortuno’s structure follows the evolution of the Augustan visual-rhetorical strategy, as it mutates from artifacts as grand as the Ara Pacis and the Forum of Augustus to something as miniscule as the Roman coins. Dr. Reames, a scholar of classical rhetoric and co-editor of The Rhetorical Tradition, found the book’s structure particularly compelling.

[RR]: I thought it was a solid organization. I thought the way she allows herself to dance between public art and private art—public physical spaces and private physical spaces—and yet see similar types of rhetorical structures and moves happening. I think that that way of thinking about the different venues and the different places where the same sort of phenomenon is occurring again and again is a really good way of bolstering her argument. It’s just like example after example. It was like, by the end, I was like, “Okay, yeah, she's right. She's absolutely right.” Right? But it created a really panoramic sense of how thoroughly infused this material world would have been with artifacts and structures that interface with and play off of the rhetorical forums and structures that really make it no longer feasible to think about rhetoric as isolated to speaker and hearer, oratory and eloquence.

[PS] Dr. Reames suggested we talk to the author about the strategic organization of the book for further insights, and we took her up on that suggestion:

[KLF] The way that I organized this was to start with, like, the clearest, boldest, best example I could give of that, right? So the Ara Pacis, it is an epideictic text. The kind of features of the genre that are there, and I think it's very hard to argue that they're not, right? And so I wanted to start with something that just would be very accepted as a rhetorical artifact in terms of genre and then in terms of form. The Ara Pacis is a touchstone to understanding the rest of Augustan rhetoric.

[CK] In fact, in her book, Dr. Lamp-Fortuno refers to the Ara Pacis as “the most complete illustration of the Augustan political myth in verbal or visual form” (39), connecting Augustus’s reign to Rome’s mythological past and idealized virtues like piety and bravery. Through the carvings on the outer and inner altar space, Augustus augments the actions of heroic icons, like Aeneas and Romulus, and then puts himself on par with them.

[IBH] So, basically, he’s spelling it out in the clearest terms possible: Augustus = Peace = Prosperity. That’s the message.

[CK] And. I think it is interesting that the author “wanted to start with something that just would be very accepted as a rhetorical artifact,” and not something that could be easily contested as one. Perhaps one of the reasons why Dr. Lamp-Fortuno choses to do this is because she is working against the once-popular idea of the “decline theory.”

[P] Yea, one of the main undertakings of Dr. Lamp-Fortuno’s project is to push back on what most rhetoric scholars call the “decline theory,” which posits that rhetoric has been fundamentally removed from political relevance since the foundation of the empire. Tracing its origins back to Tacitus, it remained dominant in many disciplines until the late 20th century. We asked Dr. Reames about the origins and early dynamics of decline theory, and she gave us some useful context for understanding that paradigm.

[RR] What she's calling the decline theory, though, is a more kind of specific historiographical manifestation, and it’s a really—she's summed it up in a really good and effective way. There is a sort of boilerplate take on imperial rhetoric in the Roman era: Free speech was in decay, free speech was in decline. Why? Well, because it was imperial, so it wasn't free. It's imperial, so it's not democratic. So, therefore, it must have been in decline. So you can already kind of tell where some of those arguments would have come from just by thinking in those kinds of binary terms. about democracy = good; empire = bad; democracy = good; monarchy = bad. Free speech = good (and also possible), and not free speech = bad. Right? That way of thinking kind of arises from Western metaphysics. But it's kind of a false lead to start searching for the origins of that [because] searching for the origin of that is a way of reinforcing that same structure of thought that gives rise to it in the first place. And I think one of the real strengths of this work is the way that she does that. She offers a really solid historiography for just stretching the boundaries of that—and enough to make it seem less plausible, enough to make it seem less solid. I can't really give you a solid answer for, like, where it started, who came up with it, why they came up with it, or what they stand to benefit from it. That kind of, like, cabalist thinking—that, like, somehow there are people in a hidden room coming up with a historiography that's going to perpetuate the structures of oppression and perpetuate empire, perpetuate the structures of Western rationality and Western metaphysics—doesn't exist. It's encoded in the way we speak. It's encoded in the way we think. Those things have enormous staying power.

[CK] In addition to Dr. Reames’s explanation of the complicated origins of the decline theory, Dr. Lamp-Fortuno elaborates on the even more complicated dynamics of its influence.

[KLF] I think that the decline narrative creeps back in, in judgments about the quality of rhetorical practice, if that makes sense. So people will be, like, “there was still, you know, rhetorical practice in the empire, it just wasn't very good.” Right? And so it's like, well, that's still the decline

[IBH] This description of her historiography got me thinking about the book's broader scholarly relevance. Lamp-Fortuno is drawing a clear connection between rhetorical theory composed for spoken orations and visual rhetoric created for popular display. What fascinates me about this intervention is where she places the role of scholarship in historicizing the Augustan period. Chapter One focuses on the historical/political context that marks Augustus’s ascent to power. And then, in Chapter Two, she covers some theoretical foundation for thinking about visual culture in Rome, tracing the influences of Quintilian, Cicero, and back to Aristotle, and finding in them a current that makes it possible to theorize the city of marble—Rome itself—as a rhetorical text (36). And then it’s from that theoretical argument she makes this turn at the end of Chapter Two, writing:

[IBH, quoting] “Scholars are in a unique position to uncover the interplay of dominant and popular rhetorics … and to show how the end result of Ausustus’s reign narrative. So I wanted to make an intervention there and say: Look, there's still a lot of rhetoric happening. And it’s really important.

systematizes public memory… [W]hat at first appears uniform is actually a subtle give and take, even an exchange, between a rhetorical program on the part of Augustus’s administration and the people that contributes to systematize responses, including those of scholars” (37).

[IBH] So for me this is one her argument’s most provocative contentions: it’s not just what scholars can see differently when historicizing the ancient world, she’s propounding a scholarly self-reflection that says Augustus’s rhetorical campaigns were actually so dominant that they continue to shape our conceptions of that period. And, in part, that’s because he was transmitting this messaging through every medium available to him. It’s this multivalent approach that’s just so pervasive, so ubiquitous that it could eventually become undetectable.

[CK] Yeah, and one such medium that Dr. Lamp-Fortuno paid particular attention to was coinage. As part of his cultural campaigns, coins provided Augustus the opportunity to reach the broadest possible audience. Dr. Enos, who has written extensively on ancient rhetoric, architecture, and material culture, shared some rich context on state coinage programs with us:

[RE] The Romans, especially of the Republic, minted their own coins. Some wealthy ones had their own coins. You would be wealthy enough, and you would put on the coins (both sides) symbolic representations of what you wanted associated with your coins. Now, for example, Athens, as a community, when they did the famous Athenian owl with the half moon and the olive branch, thought it was important to remember, like, for example, references to the Battle of Marathon in the moon, where the Spartans couldn't come and help because of religious reasons. So, in the symbols of the coins themselves, there is the opportunity for rhetorical messages. And the value—and I mean this literally—the value of the coin, increases the authority (or the auctoritas) of the owner. So the fact that somebody who is fabulously wealthy, such as Croesus, could (and I believe, I'd have to look this up, but I believe he minted his own coins) would have a constant association of authority and power because of the value of his coins. That authority went also to cities where some of the most spectacular coins also literally shed light on the polis of having those. In fact, one of the reasons why Athens became so powerful was after their conquest, because they were one of the leaders against the Persian Empire, they had the Delian Confederacy. The wealth in part was in Athens; there was also great wealth in Delphi. And the currency controlled so much of the policy. So when you talk about hegemony, and you talk about thalassocracy (like, rule by sea), all of that relates to the Athenian economy, and that economy on a daily basis is reminded every day by the power of the currency.

[CK] In the chapter, Dr Lamp-Fortuno examines these state coinage programs, she focuses very keenly on the visual element of the coins, and this focus, I think, makes possible future research on the implications of other types of sensory contact in the reception of rhetoric. For instance, the tactile dimension of the coins—the fact that they are physical, tangible items that were held—seems like a particularly potent area of future inquiry because that tangibility has a relationship with the formation of public memory. New Materialists and scholars of visual rhetoric might find these insights especially useful. Holding the coins must have done something rhetorically. Having a small portion of the principate in their pockets must have made the public feel like they were participating in the government. Dr Enos has a lot to say on this topic:

[RE] - It has a functional use, of course, and that's valuable, but I have some of these as replicas, which are just works of art, and they're large! They're very large. Probably even cumbersome in some ways. But they’re such a presentational statement. Just like we can say art is presentational, like you just look at it, and you get an image all at once, as opposed to discursive which is like strings on a bead where you argue and you lay out things. Coins can have presentational rhetoric in that they just—look at it, and they just look magnificent.

[PS] The aesthetic dimension of coins certainly interests Classicists like Enos, but her attention to this aspect of ancient material culture also invites Marxist scholars like me to reflect on the mass production of aesthetic artifacts. In his influential essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin identifies coins as one of the few artworks that was reproducible in the ancient world. From this standpoint, the mass mintage of coins challenges the aesthetic integrity of public-works projects like the Ara Pacis and the Forum Augustum. By replicating the images of Augustus as a rhetorical message, mass mintage also dissipates their aura of uniqueness. Contrary to Benjamin, Dr. Lamp-Fortuno doesn’t think that anything has been lost through the coins. She argues that they reinforced the public works by making them more accessible. For Augustus, the aesthetic value of these artworks takes a backseat to how well they support his political myth. This makes his endeavor a case of aestheticizing politics, the very cultural phenomenon that Benjamin associates with Fascism. Dr. Lamp-Fortuno herself reflected on the connection between ancient coinage and modern fascism by drawing the distinction between what we call “propaganda” and what she calls “rhetoric.” She marks this distinction especially when talking about the Lares and monuments built by Roman citizens in response to Augustan imperial rhetoric:

[KLF] And I just felt that was incredibly anachronistic. If you think of it that way, then you're really losing what I think was popular support, right? So where was that popular support coming from is a different question. Was it fear or sycophancy, or, you know, like what were the origins of it? And that's—That's a little bit of a different question. But I think there was a popular repetition of Augustan imagery, and I don't think that that can be conflated with propaganda. There has to at least feel like there is open communication between ruler and ruled, whether that's democracy, or whether it’s not. I think the point that I was trying to make is there's more going on here than we think, and we can't just dismiss it.

[PS] Though I definitely agree that we shouldn’t dismiss the nuance of Augustan cultural campaigns by bracketing it off as mere propaganda, it doesn’t mean we can’t say they aren’t qualitatively similar. Propaganda can be very nuanced, too—broadcast and reception are rarely unidirectional in real-world political situations since authoritarian regimes are not monolithic machines that are automatically in control. It’d be interesting to see what future studies can do if they apply these principles on the material rhetorical artifacts and practices, and their corresponding popular responses, to examine authoritarian regimes like fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and modern China.

[CK] Yeah, but don’t forget that what’s really fascinating in Dr. Lamp-Fortuno’s book is what she calls the “open communication between ruler and ruled.” In fact, the final two main chapters shift the focus from state-produced, rhetorically infused artifacts to those produced by the Roman people. During our conversation, she related this concept to our current political moment in the US.

[KLF] Our political elite are so inaccessible, and that's what's creating a lot of the frustration right now. Kristin Sinema is my Senator. She has turned the answering machine back on in her office. A human being still will not answer the phone. She didn't even have the answering machine turned on there for a while. You just got disconnected when you called. I think that's something that resonates with me, just this feeling that, whether it's genuine or not, just the feeling that you can express your concerns to somebody in political power is, I think, important. It’s something I think Augustus had a good grasp on in many ways.

[CK] And in the final two chapters, perhaps more than elsewhere in the book, the author’s examples suggest illuminating contemporary parallels with street art like graffiti and performance art pieces that are currently being used to write back to the state and the empire, in a very public manner. For instance, we might relate this framework to the proliferation of murals of George Floyd to protest police violence seen from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Idlib, Syria, to right here in Austin, Texas.

[IBH] I like that connection, Christos. Even though Minneapolis-based artist Peyton Scott Russell didn’t paint his original mural as a part of a state-sanctioned cultural campaign, we can see how popular reappropriations of the image amplify and refract the call to reform anti-Black and other discriminatory policing practices. People around the world aren’t being compelled to depict George Floyd on the sides of buildings. They did so and do so to voice their outrage and demonstrate their sympathy with the political philosophy it evokes.

[PS] Right, and we might say that city officials who left these murals in place likely did so in part because they knew—like Dr. Lamp-Fortuno says—“that, whether it's genuine or not, just the feeling that you can express your concerns to somebody in power is important.”

[CK] At least for me, seeing the quiet but powerful possibilities of these contemporary parallels in this book highlighted how awfully relevant this work is, and how much it speaks to the persistent nature of the political and rhetorical issues she examines. So, in addition to its relevance to the study of classical rhetoric and its capacity to inform our understanding of modern propaganda, A City of Marble can help scholars to investigate contemporary attempts to speak back to power in a variety of media. All these possibilities mark a great place to pause the conversation for now!

[Outro]

[PS] We want to offer our sincere thanks to Drs. Robin Reames, Richard Enos, Kathleen Lamp-Fortuno for their insights and generosity in contributing to this review. We also owe our thanks to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting this project, as well as to Eric Detweiler and Caddie Alford for sharing their expertise.

[IBH] This podcast would not be what it is without Prof. Mark Longaker and our colleagues in Ancient Rhetoric and Politics. Finally, we want to dedicate this series of sonic rhetoric reviews to University of Texas at Austin Professor Emeritus and rhetoric luminary in his own right, Jeffrey Walker.

[CK] To everyone who made this possible, including you listening, thank you.

 

Liner Notes

In this episode, Casey Boyle and Mark Longaker talk with Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Marjorie Woods about Woods's recent book Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom (Princeton UP, 2019). Longaker and Boyle summarize the book (.05-5.10); relying on Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Jorie Woods, Longaker and Boyle situation Weeping for Dido in the scholarly conversation about medieval rhetorical pedagogy (5.11-16.57), and they additionally explain why scholars in composition studies, gender studies, and digital rhetorics might enjoy Weeping for Dido (16.58-26.00). Jorie Woods teaches Longaker how to pronounce Achilleid and Deidameia (26.01-27.18). Conclusion and credits (27.18-28.06).

Music featured in this episode is sampled from "leaves"(cdk Mix) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/34427 Ft: Reuse Noise

Transcript

Mark Longaker: Welcome to the first sonic rhetoric review, a series of podcasts where we discuss contemporary scholarly works about classical and medieval rhetoric. In this series, we hope to remediate the genre of the scholarly book review, accomplishing everything that a book review achieves. Each review will summarize a recent book situated in contemporary scholarship and offer thoughts about the future scholarship made possible by each of the books that we discuss. Today, we'll be talking about Marjorie Woods's Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

My name is Mark Longaker. I'm a historian of rhetoric focusing on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Together with Casey Boyle, I'll be your host.

Casey Boyle: Hi, I'm Casey Boyle. I am a professor here at Texas. I am not a historian of rhetoric. I do not focus on the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries. My scholarly focus in teaching is on digital rhetoric and media studies.

Mark Longaker: Casey, you and I are not experts in classical or medieval rhetoric. Is that right?

Casey Boyle: That is correct.

Mark Longaker: And that's why we've consulted with Martin Camargo, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Jordan Loveridge, a professor of communications at Mount St. Mary's University. Martin and Jordan will help us to situate Weeping for Dido in contemporary scholarship. They'll also help us to see the scholarly potential made possible by Woods' recent book. Additionally, we've talked with Marjorie Woods herself, asking her what wanted to accomplish with her most recent scholarly project.

Casey Boyle: While we situate Weeping for Dido in the existing work on the history of classical and medieval rhetoric, we'll also try to understand what the book has to offer rhetoric scholars in other sub-disciplines, such as my own digital rhetoric and composition studies, as well.

Mark Longaker: Now, before we do any of that, we should start with a summary. The main argument in Marjorie Woods's Weeping for Dido is that, during the medieval period, teaching the classics mattered more than the classics themselves. Woods contends that medieval schoolmasters used Latin texts to emotionally engage students by allowing them to explore gender roles, by permitting students to experience emotional connections, and by encouraging them to perform rich speeches. Woods pursues this argument by closely examining the glosses in medieval manuscript reproductions of three texts. These are Virgil's Aeneid, the anonymously authored Achilleid, and the anonymously authored Ilias Latina.

Now, everybody knows the Aeneid. Casey, I know you read the Aeneid front to back probably last week, but not many people know about the Achilleid or the Ilias Latina. Just a brief introduction. The Achilleid is the story of Achilles's time as a boy living on an island in a woman's court hiding because his mother did not want him to die in the Trojan War. And the Ilias Latina is like a comic-book version of the Iliad, focusing on main characters, their heroic speeches, and their brave deeds. Woods sees this project as a counterpoint to another recent book that she's published, that is, Classroom Commentaries that was published with the Ohio State University Press in 2017.

Marjorie Woods: The book that I wrote before this on all of the manuscripts of the Poetria Nova was meant to be a book that would stand the test of time. That it would be as useful 40 or 50 years from now as now because no one else would go through the same material. But I wrote this one for now. Fine if people read it later, but this is something I want people to look at now and think about. It feels urgent because I think it can understand a period presented so problematically that, even just if you say you're working on it, people think you're crazy. For me, this is a new book. It's very contemporary in what I want to get back from it, whereas the other one can sit on the shelf and talk to people for a long time.

Mark Longaker: In the effort to make her book relevant to contemporary teachers of writing, Woods focuses on the medieval glosses to these classical works, glosses indicating how young boys might have studied these classical works while learning Latin. She notices that these medieval glosses indicate where teachers and students would've invested their time. The teachers’ glosses note which passages students might have performed in the classroom, sometimes to comical, sometimes to tragic effect. These glosses also highlight the opportunities for play and experimentation. Fun classroom experiences that emphasize what Woods calls "three interrelated aspects of medieval teaching: emotion, gender, and performance."

That's on page two. Casey, you and I have already talked about how Jorie offers a refreshing look at medieval rhetorical pedagogy. In my conversation with Martin Camargo, he raised an interesting question about the medieval glosses and about Woods's emphasis on play as a way to make the Latin language and Latin literature more engaging and more memorable.

Martin Camargo: You're talking about highlighting emotions, encouraging students to re-experience those emotions. The big payoff for them is memory. So then someone might say, "Okay, memory of what?" Pedagogy is designed to impart certain kinds of skills. What are the skills that this is supposedly imparting?

Casey Boyle: I liked Martin's question, but I liked Woods's reply even more.

Marjorie Woods: I thought that was interesting because they're using these texts, not so much to emphasize content, but to teach Latin.

Casey Boyle: But she also points out that medieval teachers must have been teaching some Ciceronian rhetoric because they often wrote marginal analyses of the speeches using Ciceronian terms. Many of these speeches in the Ilias Latina, for instance, are glossed using the five parts of the Ciceronian oration.

Marjorie Woods: That was one of the first things I noticed when I was working on the manuscript. I actually thought they were kind of boring. They were just pointing out the parts of a speech. And when I started going through them and comparing different manuscripts, the best example isn't actually in the book. Comparing two copies that I think were copied from each other, one of them actually is in the book, about particularly Aeneas's response to Dido's outrage. In one of the manuscripts, it says he gives a positive response and then a negative response. And what it means by that is he gives a reason for leaving and then a reason against staying.

And then another manuscript just said a reason, another reason, another reason. In one of them, it's cumulative, and, in the other, it's a zigzag. The distinctions between these are important. I started just looking at them.

Mark Longaker:

Mentioning Cicero also raises something that both you and I noticed about Jorie's book. We liked her emphasis on Cicero's rhetorical theory. In my own work on modern rhetorical theory, I noticed a lot of attention to Aristotle's analysis of the emotions and rhetoric, but I've long thought that Cicero offers valuable resources for contemporary rhetoricians.

Casey Boyle: I agree. One of the things that is important for Cicero, at least in my area, is he's one of the first rhetoricians who were involved in the theory of rhetoric, but also the practice and the teaching of it.

Mark Longaker: While we were reading Weeping for Dido, we appreciated Jorie's attempt to put aside Aristotle. She told us that she's been trying to sideline Aristotle for some time.

Marjorie Woods: I think that's one of the most important things that I'm interested in. First of all, I don't find Aristotle myself particularly useful, and he wasn't used as a teaching text in the Middle Ages. In fact, he wasn't used really as a teaching text until much later, several centuries later. One of the things that I'm trying to do is belligerently anti-Aristotle as a way of throwing people off their normal stance because I think Cicero is much more interesting from a literary point of view. I'm very much a text person using rhetoric to inform and generate responses. I'd like to make literature students more cognizant of rhetoric and historical modes and have rhetoric students work with texts that are memorable.

Mark Longaker: And Martin Camargo agreed that this attention to Cicero as a resource for emotion performance is one of Jorie's most important scholarly contributions.

Martin Camargo: In terms of the history of emotions, what I think she does particularly well is to show how a different theoretical construct from the one that's typically used by medievalists — it’s straight from Aristotle. And that makes a lot of sense. Replacement of Aristotle with Cicero means that you're focusing not on emotions as sources of argument, but emotions as components of performance. She does a really great job, I think, of showing what parts of Ciceronian rhetoric are most relevant to that, so, clearly, attributes of persons and actions but also, less obviously, the modes of delivery associated with the different parts of an oration.

Casey Boyle: Since we're talking about what we liked about the book, I want to say that I enjoy the stylistic and typographical features in Weeping for Dido. Woods writes in an engaging, playful way, and she reproduces images in the manuscripts themselves, showing the reader what it's like to hold and maybe even teach from a medieval book.

Mark Longaker: You'll be glad to know, Casey, that Martin Camargo agrees with you completely. He said that one of Woods's most important scholarly contributions is her use of these glosses to teach readers about classroom pedagogy.

Martin Camargo: She's obviously making maximal use of evidence that doesn't typically get used and doesn't get used in the way that she uses it. That's what strikes me. I mean, I've used the glosses to make points about pedagogy. But what's interesting about this particular book of Jorie's is the way that she actually recreates the experience, partly because she writes in a way that is lively, scholarly, but accessible, but even typographically. There are all kinds of techniques that she uses that help us understand that experience of the emotions within the classroom as students are reading these texts under the guidance of teachers using techniques that go back to antiquity and that, Jorie being Jorie, she would like to see revived.

Mark Longaker: And Jordan Loveridge said that Woods's analysis of these manuscript glosses would help future scholars to better understand the medieval culture of creative reappropriation.

Jordan Loveridge: I would just add, one additional area that I consider myself to work in to some extent, and I think this book engages with – maybe not explicitly in terms of how it's naming its method, but certainly in terms of the concerns – and that would be classical reception or reception studies. Resituating what we take to be important from a period and by focusing on glossing and commentary practices and the pedagogical experience, as Martin mentioned, that is so difficult to learn about without looking at this type of evidence.

I think that, by engaging that type of evidence or that type of historical material, Jorie is really doing an excellent job of, I think, challenging something that often rubs me the wrong way about the treatment of the medieval period, and that's this focus more on what is, like, novel or noteworthy for the future. When you look at it that way, you bring a particular bias or a lens to it that obviously affects how you see it and interpret it. But, when you focus instead on the practice of classical reception, if you try to understand instead the period as one that is focused on this long tradition of receiving and reinterpreting and reevaluating and reapplying all of these ancient texts for new ends, when you see it that way, the period starts to look a lot different and one of the questions that I think that this book raises, that I think that field could grapple with maybe even more than it does currently, which is, how would we see this period differently if we change the framework of our evaluation for understanding it? How might looking at the period in that way maybe make our understanding of the period more complete, more inclusive, and more just intellectually interesting?

Mark Longaker: Martin Camargo elaborated on this point, saying that we're too caught up in novelty, but Woods's book would help us to understand that, all the way up through the Renaissance, people didn't want new literature; rather, they wanted elaborate and creative performances of classical texts.

Martin Camargo: Part of the medieval reception of those classical works is what you could call “remaking.” But there's a tendency for people to see that as kind of quaint. One of the things that Jorie does is legitimate the form of reappropriation, which is heightened language, very artificial language, expressing intense emotion. All these speeches, this is how they're reading the Aeneid, and The big point is it's how they read it in generations after Virgil's. It's not like the Middle Ages invented this way of reading it. They're actually continuing an authentic tradition, and early modern writers are the same way. They wanted heightened language expressing intense emotion, artificiality up the wazoo.

Mark Longaker: And Jordan added that many aspects of contemporary culture similarly champion creative reappropriation, prompting Martin to hope that Woods's work might help contemporary teachers and students to creatively appropriate classical texts in their own classroom.

Jordan Loveridge: But one of the other things that I thought that Jorie did a great job with in making it accessible was some of the parallels that she drew between the medieval practices and more contemporary ones. And something that Jorie brought up, which is this parallel to practices associated with fandom and fan fiction, and so many of my students are interested in those things. I loved seeing that and Jorie in her serious consideration of it. She was citing scholarship in fan studies and putting that pedagogical element in conversation with the scholarship that's happening in those areas.

Martin Camargo: We have to overcome certain habits our students form. It's uncool to lose yourself in the way that this kind of pedagogy demands. This is what students were taught to do for most of human history, and she brings that up in the book itself, that this kind of pedagogy is liberating for students.

Casey Boyle: Weeping for Dido did encourage me to see the medieval period as a time for creative appropriation, not just static repetition of the classics. But I was surprised to learn that Woods herself was pursuing yet a different goal. She said that her playful writing style, her graphic reproduction of manuscripts, and her references to popular culture were an effort to make the manuscript more approachable.

Marjorie Woods: One of the things I would like to do is to make people a little bit more open to actually looking at manuscripts. The first time I opened a medieval manuscript in The British Library, even though I'd had a whole year of paleography, which was based on very clear, simple texts, I remember looking at the person who gave it to me, and I said, "How are we supposed to read this?" And I just got up and left. That's one reason I think there's such a gap between what we see and what is in the manuscripts that it's almost impossible to bridge that gap, and I wanted to make it possible for the book to maybe help people to do that later on, too.

Mark Longaker: So, based on our interviews with Jordan Loveridge, Martin Camargo, and Jorie Woods, it seems like Weeping for Dido makes three major contributions to scholarship. The book asks us to see the medieval classroom as a playful space, using emotion and performance to enhance the teaching of Latin and classical rhetoric. Weeping for Dido also asks us to reevaluate the medieval period so that we can see the creative reappropriation of classical texts, rather than the stale preservation of Western tradition. And, finally, Woods asks contemporary scholars to see that research in medieval manuscript culture can be enjoyable and approachable.

Casey Boyle: Yeah. These are the book's main contributions to the history of rhetoric, but I think what Weeping for Dido and Woods have accomplished there also speaks to scholars in other sub-disciplines. I was particularly taken by Jorie's attention to gender. She makes the medieval classroom seem like a feminine space by noticing that medieval students and teachers paid their closest attention to the female characters in these literary works. The book's title and the first chapter both emphasized the attention given to Dido's speeches in the Aeneid.

Mark Longaker: It's funny that you mentioned that, Casey, because Jordan Loveridge also commented that, even today, his students are more drawn to Dido's speeches than they are to Aeneas's orations.

Jordan Loveridge: I teach at a small liberal-arts school, and we have a core curriculum, and one of the required texts is the Aeneid. In a very Jorie-esque assignment, I actually asked the students to compose and perform speeches in character, and they have the option of either choosing Aeneas sort of bidding farewell to Dido, or Dido upon hearing that Aeneas is going to leave. No one chooses Aeneas. I think that, we're considering that almost like a test of some of the hypotheses in her book. I think she's right, right? No one chooses Aeneas. Dido is by far the more compelling character, and it does not matter, sort of, the gender identity of the student.

Mark Longaker: Jordan also noticed, however, that many of the speeches given by female characters were triggered by moments of sexual violence or misogyny. One of the most oft-repeated speeches in the Achilleid is in response to Achilles's rape of Deidamia.

Casey Boyle: I think those are pronounced “the ack-ILL-ee-ad” and “die-duh-ME-ah.”

Mark Longaker: I honestly have no idea. We can at least agree about how to pronounce “Aeneas” and “Dido.”

Casey Boyle: For now, yes.

Mark Longaker: And maybe we can agree with Jordan Loveridge, who said it's alarming that one of the most commonly and comically performed speeches in the Aeneid is prompted by Aeneas's abandoning of Dido, who then burns all of Aeneas's stuff and throws herself on the pyre of his belongings.

Jordan Loveridge: There's a lot of positive evaluation of emotion. That struck me because what is the emotional or, like, the affective trigger for so many of these events in these ancient texts. It's largely sexual violence and misogyny. And I wonder about the more negative potential aspect of such a sustained emotional confrontation or engagement with those kinds of scenarios, especially for young men, which, as Jorie mentions, a lot of this was probably performed somewhat comically. She notes the potentially troubling implications of approaching some of those scenes from the comic mode that might have been common, and so my point there is just simply that I think that there's probably a whole other book project just with that.

Casey Boyle: I agree that there's a lot of scholarly potential here, opportunities to discuss the construction of gender and gender-bending. I was taken, for instance, by Woods's analysis of Achilles’s cross-dressing in the ack-ILL-ee-ad.

Mark Longaker: You're not going to let that go, are you?

Casey Boyle: No, because in the ack-ILL-ee-ad, Achilles's mother has hidden him on an island and in the company of other girls his age. Achilles has to pretend to be a girl to fit in. Woods analyzes Achilles's gender-bending, suggesting that school boys would have to read his story and would have been given an opportunity to explore taboo subjects and scandalous gender roles.

Mark Longaker: When I talked to Jorie, though, she didn't emphasize her contribution to gender studies. She said the main takeaway should be the emotional investment, the play, afforded by these episodes. She conceded that comic performance of sexual violence is troubling, but she also said it may have served an important pedagogical function in the medieval classroom.

Marjorie Woods: What I wanted to emphasize was exhilaration and joy in the classroom, and also funny things. I do think there are ways that people can imitate Dido dying in a pretty funny way, although to me, she's the most tragic of all characters. But one of the things about the fact that these were all read by younger students is really important. I believe in what students can respond to, and I think emotions are what they respond to the most when they're younger.

Casey Boyle: I also thought that Woods offered a revisionist account of the medieval classroom. Now, I'm not a historian; I admit that. But, when I think of medieval pedagogy, I don't think of playful exercises or comic performances. Nevertheless, that's what Woods describes.

Mark Longaker: Martin Camargo also noticed the contrast between the common perception of the medieval classroom and the joyful exercises that Woods describes.

Martin Camargo: What I was trying to do was imagine myself as somebody who came to this book never having read any of Jorie's work. The account Jorie's giving is a very positive one. But anybody who comes to a book about the emotions and the medieval classroom is immediately going to come with the stereotype. If you've seen a picture of Grammar, she's carrying a rod. Okay? Everybody's familiar with the idea of fear as the emotion that dominates. One of the questions that somebody might raise is: how does that jibe with the focus here on the positive emotions?

Mark Longaker: And Woods admitted that there were stern medieval school masters, as well as abusive pedagogical practices, but she explains that the popular may overstate the medieval reality. She furthermore explains that she wanted to account for another aspect of medieval rhetorical pedagogy.

Marjorie Woods: Well, one of my most interesting exchanges about this happened many years ago when I was first in Austin, and I was at a conference with Peter Elbow, very famous in composition studies, but he also started out as a medievalist. He turned to me, and he said, "How can you study a period when they beat children in the classroom?" And I'm like, "They beat children when I was in the classroom." I mean, we have a very sanitized or very demonized picture of education in any period. I don't think everything was, like, super fun. Some of the most insightful periods of my own education were in very fraught classrooms, but I still responded incredibly positively to the material.

Anything that generated a sense of fun from that was something that I held on to. I'm trying to point out what I find really consistent, a consistent element in the medieval classroom. We used the Middle Ages as a sort of dumping ground for everything we don't like about teaching without realizing how complex some of it can be because, otherwise, if you're not doing this, what do you do with the fact that often Dido's speeches have the most glosses on them? Or they're the ones that have the most musical notation that we know, that boys were singing Dido's laments in the classroom?

Casey Boyle: This is a revisionist account of medieval pedagogy.

Mark Longaker: Yeah, I think so. Jordan Loveridge suggested that contemporary teachers of composition can learn from this revisionist account.

Jordan Loveridge: I'm from a rhetoric and composition background, and I think that that's relatively uncommon for people approaching medieval rhetoric from a scholarly perspective. I think that most people are probably trained more in literary studies or history or medieval studies, but my intellectual background and my training and my PhD is in rhetoric and composition, and so one of the things that I ask myself or think about is the historiography associated with that discipline in particular. For me, bringing my very particular background and my very particular concerns, looking at it, I would've loved to have seen more consideration of, well, what could this book do for people who maybe have these not quite accurate or distorted understandings of what rhetorical education or the history of rhetoric or the theory of rhetoric in the medieval period looks like?

Mark Longaker: In response to Jordan, Woods explained that her most recent book, Classroom Commentaries, and her next scholarly project both demonstrate what contemporary composition teachers can learn from medieval pedagogues.

Marjorie Woods: I have written bits and pieces on this. The last part of my book before this, called Classroom Commentaries, talks about how the examples of exercises from the Poetria Nova, the medieval text I studied the manuscripts of, relate more to creative-writing exercises you use now than more traditional exercises. I think those should be more combined. One of the things that's really great about this is it's inspiring me to really make sure that I write this last book that I want to do, which is about using, on the one hand, historical exercises for teaching literature and, on the other, to use the ones that I call the big four: imitation, variation, amplification, and abbreviation in a transhistorical way.

I want to write it for both rhetoric and literature people because historically, these two things have always been connected. The separation of them, I think, makes each of them drier, less interesting, and less emotionally engaging.

Casey Boyle: So, even if you're not a historian of rhetoric, Weeping for Dido can teach you about gender, performance, and composition pedagogy.

Mark Longaker: Yep, that's right.

Casey Boyle: Just out of my own curiosity, did Jorie teach you how to pronounce some of these ancient names and titles?

Mark Longaker: She did.

Marjorie Woods: Yes. Yes. I think my answers will make you laugh. “die-duh-ME-ah,” which is, I think, what Casey said, looks like the way it's pronounced from what I can tell historically. But what I did was check the translation by Stanley Lombardo of the text, and he says “die-duh-ME-ah.” And the other one, I know the other one you're going to ask me, is the Achilleid. Okay, so here's what's happened with this because I wasn't sure, either. I was asking my classist friends, and, mostly, they would say, “ack-ill-LAY-id.” I would say to my students, we would be talking about the Achilleid and the Aeneid. It was very hard for them because those are essentially two different ways of pronouncing words that look very similar and actually are quite similar.

Because people were doing both, I again went to Stanley Lombardo, and I said, "Well, how do you pronounce it?" He said, ``I pronounce it like ‘ah-KNEE-id.’” I say, “ack-ILL-ee-ad." And I'm, like, okay, if Stanley can do it, I'll do it.

Casey Boyle: So I was right.

Mark Longaker: Yes. I've learned a lot from Jorie and a little from you. Thanks to Casey Boyle for being my co-host. Thanks to Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Marjorie Woods for offering their insights. Thanks to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting this project. And, finally, thanks to Eric Detweiler and Caddie Alford for helping us to improve the format for this and all the other sonic rhetoric reviews. We dedicate this first episode to Marjorie Woods, whose scholarly career has proven that academic work can be both erudite and enjoyable.

Liner Notes

In this episode, Myles Jeffrey, Jo Hurt, and Kat Williams talk with Diane Davis, Susan Jarratt, and Debra (Debbie) Hawhee about her recent book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw (Chicago University Press, 2017). After opening remarks and introductions are made (0.0-4.25), Davis and Jarratt provide their readings of the book’s main arguments (4.26-6.57). Hawhee, Davis, and Jarratt then discuss the complicated but crucial role Aristotle’s work plays in Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw (6.58-12.06), leading to commentary on the relationship between alogos and pathos in both ancient and contemporary rhetoric (12.07-17.35). Finally, the hosts situate the book in current scholarly conversation by talking with the three scholars about how the Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw has impacted the fields of ancient studies, animal studies, rhetoric, and their own work (17.36-21.38), then discuss what the book makes possible in the field of rhetoric and the kinds of projects they may engage in using the book’s insights (21.39-29.18). To conclude the podcast, the three hosts note some undiscussed aspects of the book that readers may be interested in and give thanks to the contributors of the project (29.19-30.57).

Music featured in this episode is sampled from “Leaves, ft. Vidian” by airtone, (c) copyright 2016, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/34427

Transcript

[“Leaves” Music]

Myles: Welcome to Sonic Rhetoric Reviews, a series of podcasts from Enculturation where we discuss contemporary scholarly works about classical and medieval rhetoric and put various scholars in conversation with one another. In this series, we hope to remediate the genre of the scholarly book review, accomplishing everything a book review achieves by summarizing a recent book, situating it in contemporary scholarship, and offering thoughts about the future scholarship it makes possible.

[INTRODUCTION OF HOSTS]

Myles: We’re your hosts: PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m Myles Jeffrey. I’m a student in the English department, and I study narrative theory, adaptation, and novel theory. I’m particularly interested in screenplays and find them to be fascinating rhetorical objects. But my burgeoning interest in animal studies is what initially drew me to the book we will be discussing today.

Jo: And I’m Jo Hurt, and I’m a student in the Rhetoric and Writing Department. And, although I’m broadly interested in discourses of criminality and reform, affect studies, and new materialism, lately, I’ve been interested in what Greek mythology as an affective and situated compositional method might have to offer rhetorical studies.

Kat: And my name is Kat William. I’m a student in Communication Studies, and I specialize in rhetoric and language. My interests lie in the intersection of ideology, media studies, social justice, and popular culture, primarily in how rhetoric is used through media to disseminate hegemonic codes, which tend to work towards sustaining various kinds of inequality, but also how it can be used to resist and foster modes of social change.

[INTRODUCTION OF SCHOLARS]

Debbie: [fading in] So, when I was up for tenure at Illinois, my colleague, Catherine Prendergast, she was like, ‘do you know that you mentioned dogs in everything you wrote?’...there’s a dog on the cover, right? I didn't even pick that cover, but when Chicago sent it to me, I was like, ‘It’s perfect!’ So, dogs, I will say….[fading out]

Kat: That’s Debra Hawhee talking about her 2017 book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw.

Debbie: So I’m Debra Hawhee. I go by Debbie. I am a professor of English and of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University, and I work on history of rhetoric, on bodies and rhetoric and sensation animals, and I am also working on climate rhetoric, as well.

Myles: Today, we’ll be talking with Debbie about her book, and how it pertains to animal studies and affect—both in rhetorical studies and beyond.

Debbie: When we pay really close attention to what non-human animals are doing in the texts and traditions of early rhetoric—especially I’m working in early Western rhetoric—they have a lot to tell us about feeling and sensation in relation to rhetoric and even help us think about a version of rhetorical theory that is itself relational across species.

Jo: You’ll also hear from a couple other scholars in rhetorical studies who will help us better understand what this book has meant in the field, and what it might make possible. The first is Dr. Diane Davis, who we hope can speak in particular to the work Debbie does on the rhetorics of nonhuman animals.

Diane: I'm professor and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. I work at intersections of rhetorical theory and continental philosophy, which just means that I try to read aspects of rhetorical theory through theoretical lenses developed in continental philosophy.

Kat: And the other is Dr. Susan Jarratt, an expert in ancient rhetoric who should be able to help us better understand how this book contributes to and opens up rhetorical scholarship on ancient Greece.

Susan: I'm Susan Jarratt, and I'm a professor emerita at the University of California in Irvine in the Department of Comparative Literature, and I spent my career working on the history of rhetoric, especially on ancient Greek rhetoric.

[MAIN ARGUMENTS OF BOOK]

Myles: Debbie framed the book in terms of how animals show up in early rhetorical texts, and what they can tell us about feeling, sensation, and cross-species relationships in rhetorical theory. Do you all want to add anything to that?

Jo: Only that I was struck by how she takes familiar figures and ideas from early rhetoric: Aristotle, the progymnasmata, writing manuals from the classical through medieval era, and, in sort of passing them through the filter of the animals that show up there, she paints a fresh and nuanced picture of early rhetorical history that has a lot to offer current dialogue around animals and affect. Susan and Diane felt similarly but had their own takes on what stood out in their readings.

Diane: I think the main argument is that rhetoric involves, at its most elemental level, both logos as speech and reason and alogos as sensation and perception, so that means at least three things. First, that rhetoric is not reducible to human language, that human language is but one instantiation of an unfathomable range of rhetorical engagement. Second, it means that the relation between logos and alogos is not oppositional. Humans and non-human animals share the mode of existence called alogos, which is already rhetorical. And, third, it means that when certain thinkers of rhetorical style from Aristotle to Erasmus encourage the use of animal imagery to bring sensation to life in the imagination, they're acknowledging that a major goal of human language is to communicate or even, she says, transmit sometimes the force or the energy of sensation.

Susan: There are two arguments that are connected with each other. The first one has to do with Aristotle’s theories of aesthesis, of sensation. And what Hawhee does is to trace this concept, this phenomenon, as it appears in Aristotle through a number of different texts, and she finds a kind of complex interplay of  meanings in these texts. The other argument is that rhetoric scholars and historians of rhetoric should stop with Aristotle’s characterization of non-human animals as a-logos, a-logos.

[transition using “Leaves”]

[ARISTOTLE] 

Kat: Both Diane and Susan point out the nuance of the arguments in this book, but they also both home in on the ways animal imagery breathes a sort of liveliness into ancient texts and ancient theory by bringing sensation to the fore, as well as both naming Aristotle as a key figure in that discussion.

Myles: Yeah, and Debbie had a lot to say about her perhaps… contentious relationship to Aristotle, and how he made his way into the book

Debbie: Aristotle, he haunts me and a lot of us, right? I tried to write this damn book without talking about Aristotle, and I couldn't do it! When I finally committed to writing the Aristotle chapter, it was toward the end; I was almost done with the book, and I was like ‘Okay, I just have to do this, and it changed the whole book. 

Jo: I was really surprised to hear that the Aristotle chapter came about when she was almost done with the book because, as she says, his presence seems really integral to her project.

Myles: Yes, absolutely. And maybe that’s also because the Aristotle chapter is the first one in the book. In Chapter One, she uses careful reading of the animals in Aristotle’s work to introduce the concepts of alogos (which we’ll come back to in a few minutes), aisthēsis (or different forms of perception), and energeia (or the liveliness and energy that animals bring to the fore). These three concepts carry through the rest of her work.

Kat: Especially in how they work together to form what she calls “zoostylistics”: an approach to style that utilizes the capacities of alogos, aisthēsis, and energeia . Am I saying those right, Jo?

Jo: Yeah, just about! Energeia was spot-on. And that’s how I hear and say alogos in rhetorical classes, but, well, I’ll spare you an obnoxious lesson on Greek rules for syllable emphasis, but alogos should technically emphasize the AH: AH-log-os. It’s kind of hard to make that emphasis fit smoothly into the flow of English, though. But aisthēsis is a little different. For some reason, most English transliterations of the Greek letter eta are given as a macron over an e. But that letter makes a long a sound, so it’s actually ays-THAY-sis.

Kat: Ok, got it! Thanks! The way she brings alogos, aisthēsis, and energeia to bear on the rhetorical canon of style allows her to play with the terms as she also plays with concepts like memory and the progymnasmata elsewhere in the book, by both returning them to their ancient origins and suggesting what attention to animals can do to unlock new possibilities to bring language to life, and life to language.

Jo: She begins by examining Aristotle’s own stylistic engagement with animals, and once she explores Aristotle’s works in that first chapter, he not only carries into her discussion of zoostylistics but seems to permeate the rest of the book.

Myles: Definitely. She uses the word, “haunted” to describe her relationship to Aristotle, and I think the ways he haunts rhetorical history clearly show up in the book. Diane talked about how this offers us important new ways of approaching Aristotle in rhetorical history.

Diane: Debbie digs up in some of the field’s founding texts as evidence that rhetoric was not necessarily or always considered a specifically human or even linguistic operation. So, in digging up and framing this evidence in the way that she does, she presents us with parts of our own heritage that we have not yet properly inherited or, with a way to inherit it that we haven't yet been able to consider, or probably a little of both.

Kat: This re-framing of rhetorical history is critical to Debbie’s project here. She uses a method that she describes as pan-historiography, which “offers an expansive view of a cultural/disciplinary trend…  resulting in a focus on durability and also change.” Her work on the history of rhetoric with respect to the animal and to sensation is not limited to Aristotle, but he’s certainly an important part of the conversation.

Debbie: To this point, my work has focused on trying to recover stories about rhetoric and histories of rhetoric that have been ignored but are secretly hiding in the texts that have not been ignored. Everybody was saying, ‘Since Aristotle, animals and humans have been seen as, you know, hierarchically related. There's so much else in those same texts like the Politics and what-not. There's a richness and even an ambiguity that might present a different, or, I argue, does present a different view of animal-human relations.

Jo: Susan also commented on what this book has to offer in uncovering new formulations of long-standing rhetorical ideas. And, unsurprisingly at this point, the challenges to rhetorical histories and traditions that she raises are especially connected to Aristotle.

Susan: I think it contributes a very interesting formulation about sensation, thought, cognition, impression-making in the rhetorical tradition, specifically in Aristotle. I think it takes up a topic of importance and interest in the long canon of rhetorical works, and I think it's something that people haven't really worked with before in rhetoric, and so I think it needed and deserved some attention.

[hard transition using “Leaves”]

[ALOGOS/PATHOS]

Myles: Another important topic that Debbie takes up and re-formulates is alogos.

Kat: Alogos refers to the other-than-speech and the other-than-rational capacities for rhetorical expression, but that’s not the way most people have understood the term historically. Hawhee’s book suggests we read the “a'' part differently. Susan Jarratt put it like this:

Susan: We shouldn't place so much weight on that privative character of the alpha, that, to be alogos can be something other than privative. That can be more, be more creative, and in this case, specifically, more feeling or active or lively, and that that should lead us to attend to the roles of animals more carefully in rhetoric’s texts.

Myles: Susan points out two things Debbie simultaneously does with alogos in Rhetoric in Tooth in Claw. First, she approaches alogos in terms of its own capacities, rather than in terms of its limitations when compared to logos. But she specifically does that by bringing forward the potential for finding pathos in animals through alogos. Early in the book, she opts to translate pathos as ‘feeling,’ but using queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich’s sense of feeling  as an imprecise word that “retain[s] the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences.” Doing so not only obviates some of the arbitrary judgment calls a narrower definition might necessitate, but it also mirrors Debbie’s larger goal of expanding possibilities instead of closing them off. In a footnote, she mentions that she believes Cvetkovich’s willful handling of the “terminological reach” of these words is akin to the ancients’ treatment of the terms. All this is to say that Debbie’s project skillfully treats ambiguity as opportunity and tends to favor connections over distinctions.

Jo: So feeling and sensation get rolled in together as pathos and aesthesis. But there can also be distinctions between those terms and a couple other ideas that get bandied around in similar texts: affect and emotion. We asked Diane about the impact of these distinctions, and about how Rhetoric and Tooth and Claw connects them.

Diane: I’ll say there have been some intellectual scuffles, let’s say, about the specifics, like what's the difference between affect and emotion? Feelings? Sensations? And so on, and how much difference do those differences make? But whatever form it takes, it reenergizes the study of pathos in rhetorical studies, it highlights unconsciously persuasive bodily forces, and it emphasizes corporal exposedness.

Myles: That exposedness drives home just how large the rhetorical world can be when you accept that thinking in terms of alogos actually opens new doors rather than shuts them.

Kat: You know, this reminds me of an argument that Marxist communication scholar Dana Cloud makes in her book Reality Bites, that academia and social movements have ignored affect and see it as dangerous because it lies in the pre-cognitive realm and therefore can be easily exploited. While that’s true, Cloud says that, instead, we should embrace it because rationality only serves to privilege those who can “afford to ignore the brute realities of physical existence.” So, for example, anti-choice organizations have been effective in their use of grotesque images of fetuses because it makes the audience feel something. Debbie mentions in her book that “before the mind can think, the body knows.” So, attempting to only debunk or fact-check that rhetoric is an unfitting response. Instead, Cloud argues for frame-checking, perhaps by emphasizing the grotesque and tragic feelings associated with death from unsafe at-home or back-alley procedures that people without access to safe abortion care have to resort to. Of course, these arguments are still rational, but they can be employed in a non-rational, affective way that works for social justice. Like you said, Myles, alogos opens new doors rather than shuts them. Part of what Debbie is doing here is showing us that this isn’t a new concept, but something even ancient rhetors were keen to. In fact, she goes right back—again—to the father of rhetoric himself, Aristotle.

Debbie: So, in the De Anima, Aristotle compares phantasia to spectators looking at something dreadful in a picture. He talks about how, because of the distance, a lot of different feelings can come in, including pleasure, and he's very taken by that. But if the dreadful thing were right in front of us, it would be a very different, very sort of imminent, almost singular, almost unmixed set of feelings.

Myles: What Debbie just laid out for us suggests the rhetorical power of animals. A real lion roaring in front of us might cause us to experience the psychic pain of fear, but a speech that makes us conjure an image of a roaring lion in our mind’s eye might commingle that fear with excitement, pleasure, and the memory of previously encountered lions all at once.

Jo: [laughing] Her book is full of examples, and you chose to make one up?

Myles: I did, yeah… But, from bees and boars to wasps and wolves, the book lays out a long history of rhetorical animals.

Kat: And each of them, large or small, injects feeling, sensation, energy, and imagination into rhetorical history.

[hard transition using “Leaves”]

[ANIMAL STUDIES + ANCIENT STUDIES]
Jo: Something that all three of our interviewees stressed was that Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw complicates common assumptions about what topics are of value or are worthwhile for rhetoric scholars to engage. On one hand is ancient studies, which Susan mentioned.

Susan: I think there's some people who study rhetoric and communications, rhetorical theory, who don't feel that ancient studies are important, or they feel that they’re sort of static and maybe detract from doing more urgent contemporary kinds of study, and I disagree.

Jo: And, on the other hand is animal studies, which Diane discussed.

Diane: Rhetoric is supposed to be cultural, situated on the cultural side. And so to say ‘animal rhetorics’ is already to kind of touch off some conceptual explosions and challenge a long history of metaphysical prejudices.

Kat: It’s a pretty ambitious project, then, for Debbie to bring together two sub-disciplines that often tend to be brushed off, but she makes a convincing argument nonetheless.

Myles: She does! And Diane talked about how to understand that argument within the historical context she argues from, rather than trying to shoehorn the book into conversations where it doesn’t quite fit the way other perspectives—or even other disciplines—might expect it to.

Diane: I’ve seen some of this in reviews of the book: people who are in animal studies who are frustrated that at certain points Debbie doesn’t stop to argue with the ancient texts. They want all the new stuff in there. Well, let’s talk about the new stuff—talk about them in a way that articulates with a history and a legacy, rather than pretends to be brand new. That’s why I'm so careful to say we’re approaching this from different angles. Debbie’s trying to do something else. From her historical angle, that wouldn't make sense to stop and argue with the ancients. She's trying to show what has always been open there.

Jo: So where animal studies is often faced to the future like Diane noted—you know, it’s typically situated within a posthumanist philosophy—ancient studies is often viewed as oriented towards the past. And Debbie’s work is a great example of bringing the ancient world into the present and future, but she wants to investigate them as they were, on their own terms. That’s the pan-historiographical approach she brings to her arguments.

Myles: Right, and it’s essential because the work the ancients contributed in their lifetimes laid the foundations for many fields and schools of thought that we’ve continued to study today. And, even though rhetoric and language studies might be taken for granted or viewed as more niche disciplines, Debbie wants to show how rhetorical theory and practice nonetheless influence nearly everything else.

Debbie: And also to shake my finger at people in animal studies and other traditions that are going to comment on animals, and, you know, Western traditions need to pay attention to rhetoric because it was such a bedrock set of educational practices for things like law and literature and philosophy. Those are the poetic sort of traditions that followed Aristotle, and that’s where Homeric texts are super important and where animals, they do the work of bringing rhetoric to its senses, as I argue.

Kat: When asked how her book moves the needle for animal rhetorics and rhetorical studies, she emphasized that one of the most important things her book aims to accomplish is to demonstrate the importance of rhetorical studies to other disciplines like animal studies.

Debbie: I wanted to say, ‘hey, everybody, rhetoric existed, and it still does!’ You know, I think that a lot of us have to do that. It's hard to get traction as a rhetoric scholar outside of rhetoric. And so I think that it's up to all of us to try to be ambassadors for rhetoric and show how it's really important and central to a lot of things that are being talked about in humanities.

[hard transition using “Leaves”]

[CONCLUSION: FURTHER POSSIBILITIES]  

Myles: So we’ve talked a little bit about how Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw interacts with classics, non-Western traditions, and animal studies, but each of the scholars we spoke with also talked about what it makes possible, specifically for the field of rhetoric.

Jo: Yeah, and there are a lot of things that this book opens up for rhetoric. Diane and Susan both spoke a little bit about how they might use aspects of Debbie’s arguments as the jumping-off points for their own inquiries and questions.

Diane: For my part, I might want to further interrogate the categories themselves, the clean distinction between them along with any presumption that non-human animals inhabit the one, but not the other.

Jo: But Diane recognizes that it goes beyond simply reconfiguring our understanding of animals.

Diane: If language were not conceived from the start as a specifically human capacity, if it were not immediately reduced to linguistics, in other words, then we'd be faced with the actual question of language. Is it even a capacity, is it necessarily representational, or is there a way to think about language that doesn't already presume a nature-culture dichotomy? From my angle, I would want to then dive into all of the research that shows that in animal studies. What species are doing what to challenge that very, that very distinction between the one and the other?

Kat: So the implications of work in animal rhetorics could be far-reaching; once we’ve moved away from traditional dichotomies such as nature and culture, we’re suddenly faced with larger questions like ‘what exactly are the differences between humans and non-human animals?’ And, as Diane asked earlier about distinction within sensation and affect, ‘what differences do those differences make?’

Myles: And also, to Diane’s other point, non-human animals communicate all the time. Is that language? Is there any reason to reduce language to strictly linguistic communication, and, if not, then what is language? 

Jo: These questions of rethinking the relationships between humans and animals, as well as between linguistics and communication, remind me of some of the other ‘rethinkings’ happening in New Materialist scholarship. I’m thinking particularly of Karen Barad’s work, and how they open up broader notions of agents and of communication that trouble a lot of the humanist reductions that have haunted the kinds of relationships we’re talking about here. For instance, in their essay, “Posthumanist Performativity,” Barad rejects a humanist frame that’s dependent on static boundaries, hierarchizing boundaries, arguably like the ones that elevate the human over the animal, or linguistics over bodily and affective communication. They instead favor a frame that explores the relationships between practices through which “part of the world [is] making itself intelligible to another part” within a “field of possibilities [which] is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity.” That idea of parts making themselves intelligible to other parts, I think, gets at just what we’ve been talking about.

Kat: Yes, absolutely! How, for instance, animals might make themselves intelligible to humans (or even vice versa), can be remade over and over again, especially when we expand the means of making oneself intelligible beyond the linguistic. I think Debbie’s book, in opening up questions of the relationships between animals and the means by which we encounter them, offers rhetorical studies a great many inroads for thinking about not only those animals, but about what constitutes communication.

Myles: For sure. And that’s not all. Susan brought up some very different ways Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw challenges rhetorical study, especially in our understanding of ancient Greek texts, and, in fact, offers one way to push that work forward, which she discovered during research for her own book.

Susan: I’m always, of course, very interested in what, you know, a very accomplished scholar of ancient Greek rhetoric has to say. But what I found was something really interesting about sacrifice, about animal sacrifice, and it led me to read in that area, which I hadn't done too much before, and Debbie’s book, and, also working on that reminded me of the fact that this Greco-Roman rhetoric all up until the Christian period was all happening during a period when the cult religions, the traditional religions, were based on animal sacrifice. So animal sacrifice was a very, very key element of culture, and so I think that that was a potential link.

Jo: You know, as classicist James Garland points out, the Greeks didn’t actually have a word for ‘religion.’

Myles: That can’t be right! I mean, this is the same language that has, like, five different words for ‘love,’ right? But they don’t have anything for religion?

Jo: They had at least eight different words for love. But it’s true: no word for religion! That’s not to say they didn’t have what we’d call today ‘religious practices.’ And, I should point out, this doesn’t go for the Romans: the word, “religion” itself comes from Latin. But the Greeks didn’t have a word for religion because their beliefs and practices about the gods were so intertwined with their daily lives, political obligations, and domestic habits that they didn’t see those beliefs and practices as a system unto itself. Anyway, I bring it up because, as Susan says, the culture was steeped in religious practices, inextricably tangled up with them, even, and animals were an integral part of those practices, both through sacrifice, as Susan says, and through the stories that Debbie herself brings up both in her discussion of fable in Chapter 3 and in the many mythological examples she pulls from ancient texts. These religiously charged, animal-filled stories, and the sacrificial practices they operated alongside, actually made a different kind of reality possible for the Greeks. As classicist Sarah Iles Johnston recently argued in her book, The Story of Myth, “these stories that we call myths are able, through their charm and their power, to make us imagine another reality that lies beyond our daily reality.”

Myles: Whoa, okay. So the stakes for rethinking animals might be so high as to offer us totally new ways of envisioning reality?

Kat: Actually, I think both Diane and Susan had things to say about how Debbie’s work helps us re-envision realities: both realities, widely construed, and realities of contemporary rhetorical scholarship.

Diane:  So, when linguistic exchange is situated as one instantiation of an irreducible rhetorical existence, that is, when when rhetoric is understood to function as an undeclinable affectability and responsivity, it becomes possible to imagine our place in the biosphere and our relation to all living things in a very different way.

[fade out Diane speaking, fade in Susan]

Susan: …talk about what does it make possible? I think it makes possible, you know, many more books about animals in rhetoric. I think this book makes an argument that ancient studies really do remain important and vital and lively and hold out the potential for connections with contemporary interests in rhetoric and communications.

Kat: So this book functions as kind of a bridge between the study of animals in rhetoric and ancient studies. Debbie very effectively illustrates that these foundational texts were really conscious of animals in a way that the discipline has largely forgotten. She hopes that the book will connect with both scholars of ancient rhetorics, like Susan, and scholars of animal rhetorics, like Diane.

Debbie: I’m thinking even more of the people who are doing what I would call animal rhetoric, that is, non-human animals. You know, a turn to sensation and feeling that I think has been really important in the field. I’m happy to be part of that, I think I’m part of that, maybe?

[ENDING]

Jo: We definitely think Debbie is an important part of that work, and Susan and Diane have helped us to unpack and better understand how this phenomenal book meaningfully contributes not only to animal rhetorics, but so much more as well.

Myles: Absolutely. There are also plenty of other things this book has to offer that we just didn’t have time to cover today—

Jo: —from the progymnasmata to fables to imagination to memory and style to classical emblems, and so much more—

Kat: But our guests today have really helped us unpack some fundamental arguments around historiography, alogos, and animal rhetorics, as well as what Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw has to offer our field, and others, going forward.

[“Leaves” starts to fade in]

Myles: Thank you to Debbie Hawhee, Diane Davis, and Susan Jarratt for appearing in this episode. 

Kat: And thanks to both the Digital Writing and Research Lab and to Moody College of Communications’ Digital Media Lab at UT Austin for providing resources to support this project. 

Jo: Thank you, also, to our collaborator, Erin Akins, and Mark Longaker and our colleagues reviewing other contemporary books on classical and medieval rhetoric. 

Myles: And, finally, thank you to Enculturation for hosting the Sonic Rhetoric Reviews podcast series.

[“Leaves” Music and Closing Walla]