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.