Rhetoric and Embodiment

This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Parenthood’s 1955 conference, _Abortion in the United States_. Conferees recalled a culture that was diseased, remembered both through social data on abortion pathology and epidemiology. The essay conceptualizes how to think of social data as a collective memory of secrets that is incumbent to biopower, particularly regarding statistical anonymity as a form of strategic amnesia. Although primarily a study of this conference, the essay notes the broader importance of collective memory and secrecy for the study of biopower.

The dominant discourse surrounding the teaching of writing focuses on texts and thoughts, words and ideas, as though these entities existed apart from the bodies of teachers, writers, audiences, communities. As a discipline, broadly speaking, we in composition and rhetoric have not acknowledged that we have a body, bodies; we cannot admit that our prevailing metaphors and tropes should be read across the body, or that our work has material, corporeal bases, effects and affects. Yet some recent attention to embodiment and to body politics in composition theory and research, and indeed the creation of a collection like this, suggests that we are beginning to recognize the corporeal entailments, foundations, and connections in the teaching of writing (see Fleckenstein, Hawhee, Couture, Lewiecki-Wilson and Wilson, McRuer). In this essay, I will build on this momentum as I argue that, in fact, ignoring the body has serious consequences. As we compose media, we must also—always—compose embodiment. I will also argue that we must be careful about which bodies we conceptualize. In this essay, I will critically investigate the ways that embodied pedagogy can be developed without invoking normative models of embodiment. And I will make some modest suggestions about ways that we can develop technologies and pedagogies for writing that not only affirm the body, but that affirm all bodies.

A Brief Presentation of the Two Volumes The language sciences are currently undergoing significant radical change and realignment. My two-volume project is a contribution to these developments. In this brief presentation, I will not offer a summary or overview of the contents of the two volumes. Instead, what follows provides some general indications of both the terrain covered and the overall context in which I have undertaken this project. The two volumes are an open-ended exploration of a series of arguments and concerns that leave many loose ends still to be taken up and developed in further work.

It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of ‘tabula rasa’ originates with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an ‘originary’ state of human nature.

In More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue that poetic metaphors are simply variations and extensions of basic conceptual metaphors that structure everyday language. Based on examples from William Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, this article reconsiders the question of poetic metaphor with a particular focus on the function of emotion metaphors in literary texts. Poetic metaphors of emotion, this study argues, can capture affective states that have no stable place in the English emotion lexicon, such as the feeling of "heaviness" described in Shakespeare's sonnet 50 or the feeling of "worthlessness" described in sonnet 87. Even though poetic metaphors may be derived from basic conceptual metaphors, they can potentially function as absolute metaphors that make historically as well as culturally remote affective states accessible to the intellect.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.

Heart function is beginning to be understood beyond the vagaries of introspection and the idiocy of reducing the heart to a mere organ.  As the indispensable “organ” of embodied transduction and Life, itself, powerful new scientific evidence is emerging relative to the function of the “Holy Grail of the Heart”. (Institute of HeartMath) Now as always, the heart is useful both as a metaphor and a cosmic scientific “embodied” fact used for the purpose of transducing cosmic frequencies of light into human-planetary frequencies.  As heart-mind research ensues, the process of transduction may be applied to proactive research in-order to discover relationships among multi-scaled dimensions of heart function. For example, relationships among heart-mind coherence, cosmic-human morality, and entangled spin-types is particularly valuable—especially spin 1 and spin ½ (Ayur-vedic Tejas/Fire and Jala/water) which characterize the Gauge super-field. (Sharma, pp. 38-39)  Due to the fundamental moral law of “Human Free Will”, the only authentic way for humanitarians to wage the War in Heaven is to be informed as to the context of the W, its First-Cause Purpose, and the human responsibility of Embodied Transduction of Personality frequencies into Soul frequencies in electromagnetic fields.

An essay is presented on rhetorical strategies used to create relationships between people. It offers the views of a cultural outsider observing waitresses at a Southern United States Waffle House restaurant, where staff often use the epithet "honey" when speaking to customers. The author describes a shift in power where the restaurant staff are in control rather than the customer and the psychological implications, sexual aspects, and relationship defining results of his being called "honey" by the waitstaff.

What does the evolution of upright posture have to do with the origins of creative analogy? I propose that the two are vitally related. This book[*] documents the first phase of a larger project devoted to testing and refining this basic hypothesis. To do so, it becomes necessary to pay extensive attention to arms and legs—our appendage sets and the relationships that hold between them in movement and memory across our horizontal and vertical midlines. At their most extreme, the relationships that hold between our appendages give rise to new possibilities—prominently including the felt meanings, rhetorical powers and modeling affordances of X. The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare. In these pages, I explore the possibility that the X-mark is a figure of extremes and reversals—not primarily because of arbitrary cultural encoding but more basically because of entrenched body memories. These body memories involve our extremities, extended at extreme angles to form an extreme posture—a posture that is approximated across a wide range of experiences, many of which are extreme opposites. 

Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as “chiasmus”, a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like creative analogy or "double-scope conceptual integration". The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world.

In short, the book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world. The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.

*[Note: the uploaded pdf includes title pages, Table of Contents, Preface and Chapter 1 only].

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

Critical rhetoricians are increasingly adopting in situ rhetorical methods such as participant observation at protests, consumer sites, and memorials. Despite their value, the ad hoc development of central methodological and analytic commitments of such approaches is cause for concern. In this essay, we synthesize these efforts to name a methodological approach—rhetorical field methods—for analyzing everyday rhetorical experience and articulate the commitments and concerns that motivate this approach, thus creating a focus for debate about in situ rhetorical study. We elaborate on three commitments, articulate some critical problematics, and identify heuristic questions and possibilities of this approach. We conclude by discussing rhetorical field methods' contributions to intradisciplinary communication research.

"This anthropological study describes a specific form of mediation, as it is practiced in Ethiopia (Northeast Africa) by members of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. It introduces elders as male household-heads in their advanced ages, who settle conflicts and arrange marriages for the members of the junior generations. There are not only 'easy' cases dealt with, which one might assume to be too 'unimportant' for state courts or other juridical institutions but also aggravated cases that may affect the wider group or that have inter-ethnic dimensions. The study uses specific case studies of marriage, bride abduction, physical injury and homicide for illustration. Within the book, reference is made to speech-act-theory and the 'new ethnographic' approach related to it. Both rhetoric strategies and non-verbal means of communication are discussed, such as postures, gestures, spatial arrangements, numerical symbolisms, or the deliberate use of certain kinds of dress and of material objects. Special attention is paid to the use of ritual in mediation procedures. The book brings to light significant regularities that are inherent to the different types of elders' proceedings. Peculiar elements and phases can be distinguished that re-occur in all types of processes analysed in the study. This cannot exclusively be explained by reference to 'process', as a general idea of people negotiating law. It moreover hints to the existence of a formal 'procedure', which follows its own rules. Accordingly, a change of perspective 'from process to procedure' is suggested in the book's programmatic title.

http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_2776.ahtml

Book Order US:
http://www.amazon.com/From-Process-Procedure-Aethiopistische-Forschungen/dp/3447066113/

Book Order Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/Process-Procedure-Mediation-Formality-Ethiopia/dp/3447066113/
http://www.buchhandel.de/detailansicht.aspx?isbn=9783447066112"

New media technologies have created new ways of being in the world. As Marshall McLuhan put it, media are extensions of the body, and that “in this electric age, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”  Still, even as scholars shift the focus to the digital entity, the body remains at the center of our experience as humans. One cannot ignore the material realities of the person who may seem momentarily to exist only in the aether. Because rhetoric is an embodied art, it is important to understand the ways that new media influence our rhetorical strategies and alter how we experience of our rhetorical environments and even ourselves. To that end, I will examine two specific elements of digital rhetoric as it relates to embodiment. First, I will explore the utopian ideal of egalitarian discourse on the internet, where an ostensible Habermasian public sphere in which differences of race, class, gender, and other identifiable markers of identity are, in theory, bracketed out is the desired aim. I argue that this ideal has more to do with a distrust of the body that is rooted in equal parts in cyberpunk fiction and American Puritanism than in a desire to engage others as peers. Moreover, I suggest that this erasure of bodily differences weakens the potential for serious rhetorical engagement. Second, I consider the malleability of digital identity and the rhetorical and material consequences for the body when it is “outed,” especially those bodies deemed “other.” In short, we must consider the explicit link between the physical body and the virtual body.

Summary

The Involved Reader. Immersive Reading Practices in Late Medieval Reception of Mysticism


The article approaches the immersive potential of Mechthild von Magdeburg’s "Fließendes Licht", dispensing the reader from his role as a spectator and turning him into a participant, something which has frequently been claimed by the new German medieval studies. This particular kind of recipient is certainly an ideal-typical reader, a literary construct with the function of displaying the strategies of persuasion in "Fließendes Licht" and the special literacy or the functional inclusion of the text. It should be all the more interesting to have a look at a specific historical recipient as this allows making the text’s calculated aesthetic impacts plausible as well as outlining them with regard to the history of receptions. The instructions by Heinrich von Nördlingen from the first half of the 14th century, which told Margareta Ebner and the Dominican nuns of Maria Medingen near Dillingen how to incorporate and read "Das Fließende Licht", as an particular example and the recourse to circulating thoughts about the phenomenology of immersion shall show which requirements have to be fulfilled in a special religious context of reception to obtain the effect of immersion. Heinrich's directives are perfectly suitable for this line of questioning as they create the model of an involved reader, amounting to the requirement to get into the diegesis of the text and to identify with the literary figure.

Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nathan Stormer's work moves beyond general histories of medicine, science, and women; it provides specific insight into how the earliest medical writings on abortion served to create cultural memory. Nineteenth-century medical texts presented the act of abortion as a threat to the carefully circumscribed concepts of nation and race. Stormer analyzes a wealth of literature (and illustrations) from the period to explore the rhetorical techniques that led early Americans to presume that abortion put the integrity of all of American culture at risk. The book's first part provides a layered context for understanding medical practices within the rhetoric of memory formation and sets early antiabortion efforts within the wider framework of nineteenth-century biopolitics and racism. In Part II of the study, Stormer examines the substance of the memory constituted by these early medical practices. Making a major contribution to the study of rhetoric, Articulating Life's Memory will be invaluable to scholars researching reproductive rights and feminist and cultural histories of medicine.

Reviews:

Articulating Life's Memory is a timely and provocative book that restores a now-forgotten history to contemporary rhetoric and debates about abortion. Not only does this book give us new insight into the historical development of antiabortion rhetoric, it also illustrates how physicians and medical practices contributed to an understanding of abortion as a central threat to the national, racial, and sexual 'integrity' of the United States. (Carol Stabile, University of Pittsburgh )

This book contains a number of fascinating themes, particularly with respect to the evolving relationship of male physicians to their female patients, as they read the body using new instruments and techniques. (Journal of American History )

This book is a fascinating read and makes a major contribution to the history of the abortion debate and to application of rhetorical theory. (Rhetoric & Public Affairs )

This book does an admirable job of synthesizing significant works written on the wider topics of gender, women's bodies, and women's health. (Deborah Kuhn McGregor, University of Illinois, Springfield )

The book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. (Women and Language )

This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing work in the cultural dynamics performed by biomedical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is also an important case study into the value of post-humanist rhetorical methodologies for generating new knowledges about the constraints placed on traditional forms of public argumentation. (Ron Greene, University of Minnesota )
(from Amazon.com)

This essay suggests a way to historicize different rhetorical practices--in effect, alternative ways to write genealogies of diverse rhetorics. A certain distinction between culture and nature is a fundamental organizing concept in humanistic rhetoric that has circumscribed scholars' ability to appreciate rhetoric that does not emanate from the subject as conceptualized in Greco-Roman theory and the theory derived from it. Accordingly, scholarship is preoccupied with the ways that the motivated discourse of subjects leaps the gap between discourse and things to affect the material world. Rather than treating it as natural, the formation of a gap between discourse and things is defined in this essay as a performance articulated through everyday practices, which shifts the focus from human agents to practices. Articulation is a performative concept about the ordering of matter and meaning. To articulate is to produce bodies, language, and the space of their relative disposition through shared acts. Ultimately, practices establish different orders of discourse and things and, thus, condition the relationships that enable diverse modes of rhetoric to function. Historicizing the order articulated by practices becomes a way to trace genealogies of diverse rhetorics.

Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars’ uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry’s (2006) notion of the “socially inhabited car,” the article assumes sociological and ethnomethodological sensibilities and sensitivities in researching in-car interactions. Specifically, a single strip of a familial dispute that takes place in the car on a routine trip to school is studied. The audiovisual data was taken from recordings of five urban families living in Jerusalem, Israel, during daily trips to school. A camcorder was supplied to the passengers — children of elementary school age — which served as a mobile recording device that captured the car’s interior spaces and the interactions therein. Studying up-close verbal and gestural interactions reveals how family members, including driver (in the front seat) and passengers (in both the front and back seats), make use of the unique material design of the car’s inner spaces as semiotic resources for communication and for affiliating and disaffiliating with the overall argumentative interaction. The article illuminates how an immediate physical context, in the shape of the car’s interior, acts simultaneously as a material given and as a socially emergent or accomplished semiotic environment.

Less attention than might be imagined (particularly in the age of the selfie) has been given to how particular consumers appropriate, animate, and embody recognizable cues, referential themes, and repeatable gestures derived from readily available advertising images: what we call "embodied figurative tropes". That consumption practices play a dominant role in constructing, maintaining, and making comprehensible human identity, including gender identity, has been widely suggested (Bourdieu, 2001; Miller 1987). Furthermore, advertising's creation, detailing, and manipulation of visual cues evocative of gender identity is fairly well researched ( Hirschman & Thompson, 1997; Patterson & Elliot, 2002; Schroeder & Borgerson, 1998). Meanwhile, the conceptual link between advertising images and gendered, enacted embodiment in consumer culture remains less explored (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). Mythologically relevant and culturally coherent brand attributes help explain consumers' attraction to, and desire to appropriate, these (Holt, 2003). Nevertheless, an understanding of the relation between advertising images and human identity as enacted and embodied grounds fundamental issues of product and brand appeal, representational ethics, and cultural change. Of course, alternative understandings of what we call embodiment of advertising images may also prove useful – invoking processes of interplay, interaction, or intertextuality, for example. However, we believe our elaboration highlights otherwise elusive insights around advertising images and enacted embodiment.
In this paper’s pre-Facebook era, we interrogate how an exclusive group of partying consumers, the Stockholm "brats," act out, or perform, their gender identities by embodying traits, poses, and gestures – building blocks of figurative tropes, or pictured persuasive arguments – prominent in and provided by advertisements that exist within their digital consumer environment, including what we call ‘brat brands’.

Naked Politics: Nudity, Political Action, and the Rhetoric of the Body by Brett Lunceford, examines the rhetorical power of the unclothed body as it relates to protest and political action. This study explores what the disrobed body communicates, and how others are invited to make sense of this display. The actions examined range from grassroots protests to those of professionalized social movement organizations. Specifically, Lunceford examines PETA and the use of chained women and the Running of the Nudes; lactivists, or women engaging in public breastfeeding as protest action in both online and physical space; the World Naked Bike Ride’s worldwide protest against oil dependency and attempt to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists; and a contest held on College Humor that invited women to write their preferred presidential candidate on their exposed breasts and send the picture to them to post on the site. Although these actions may seem to have little in common beyond their use of body exposure, they all share the notions that something can happen when you take your clothes off and that the act of disrobing can have social and political consequences. Moreover, these groups illustrate the often paradoxical views of the exposed body—by both the participants and the observers—and how such bodies operate in the public sphere. Even when the voice is silent, the body still speaks; Naked Politics considers what is being said.

Objectives: This article aims to elaborate chronotope disruption - a changed relation to time and space - as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives. Methods: Sixteen men and 16 women with Type 2 diabetes were purposefully sampled. Each was interviewed about his or her experience of diabetes self-management using the biographical-narrative interview method. Transcripts were inspected for key moments defined as emotionally laden stories relevant to the purpose of the research. We present dialogically inflected discursive analysis of exemplar extracts. Results: The analysis demonstrates how the concept of chronotope disruption helps identify, and understand, important aspects of patients’ chronic illness narratives. First, we investigate how medical advice can conflict with embodied experience and how progressive bodily deterioration can provoke a reevaluation of past illness (self-mis)management. Second, the increasing temporal and spatial intrusion of chronic illness into participants’ lives is examined. Finally, we focus on the masquerade of health as an attempt to manage, hide, or deny that one is physically challenged. Conclusions: Chronotope disruption offers a useful sensitizing concept for approaching chronic illness narratives and around which to organize analytical insights and to develop practice. Chronotope analysis fills an important gap in the science
through compensating current health sciences’ focus on rationality, cognition, and prospective time (prediction) with a patient-oriented focus on emotionality, embodiment, and retrospective time (nostalgia). Chronotope disruption could be used to develop practice by gaining empathic understanding of patients’ life-worlds and provides a tool to examine how new technologies change the way in which the chronically ill have “being” in the world.

This essay argues for articulation as a mediating logic for the analysis of biopower. Prenatal space, particularly as it emerged around biomedicine and abortion, is used to demonstrate this idea. Prenatal space divides life within itself, forming a heterotopia “before life” where regimes of living converge in new and sometimes threatening ways around how to reproduce ethically. However, the history of abortion indicates a general strategy for controlling the political contingencies made possible through prenatal space. Relying on modernist space-time logic, nineteenth and twentieth century physicians reduced the practice of abortion to a sign of civilization, with some physicians contending abortion befitted savagery of the past, and others contending criminalized abortion was a relic of outmoded moralism. Wanted and unwanted regimes of living were reduced spatially to representations of time and segregated on a historical scale of value. From this example it is argued that mistaking the mediation of biopolitics as essentially representational diminishes the materiality of space and mutes biopolitical analysis.

This study resumes elements of pioneering research initially conducted in Internet addiction and dependency (Thompson, 1996). Further study of Internet phenomena over the 15 years since, has taken the author into the realm of iconic mediated messaging as a struggle between global media, terrorism, and the viewer (Thompson, 2010). Having grown in access and privilege within the consumer Web -- initial concerns over usage and expectations as laid out in 1996 whereby Internet addiction and dependency were determined to be more along the lines of investment and empowerment vs. self-destructive habit -- the maturation process from initial usage to full-fledged Internet literacy has been fraught with obstacles, yet with deep reward.

As a scholar well-versed in interdisciplinarity and cybercultures, and having moved away from the fears of Internet addiction to the reality of empowerment, one recognizes a plethora of reasons why Internet literacy has molded scholarship and individual into a new creation of cybernetic origin: cyberspace provides and subscribes opportunity for humans to communicate as more than the sum of their parts. In the process of literacy change and alteration over this time period, there has also been adjustment in the cyber network, which has been fed both the good and bad that humanity has been able to conjure and upload: a vast, endless, exponential archive of every human conception.

What have we learned in the last 15 or so years as a species interacting with the virtual species that has seemingly aligned itself with our purposes and future, a future that has taken on the permanent persona of an ever-presence in which we are? This study evaluates emerging information literacy trends, the media, and individual participatory freedoms and consequences that confront those trends within the Internet.

Kenneth R. Chase has defended a robust Christian rhetorical theory based on the doctrine of the incarnation and called for further investigation into historical resources for such a rhetoric. I offer George Herbert’s rhetoric of the rural pastor as such a resource. Herbert weds a Christian approach to audience (derived from Augustine) to a thoroughly incarnational rhetoric extending beyond the pulpit to the parson’s household and way of life. As such, he offers a model of incarnational rhetoric that challenges histories of rhetoric premised upon a simple opposition between philosophy and rhetoric.

'Et in Arcadia ego'-music performance is an auditory garden deriving its inspiration from 17th-century European meditation gardens. It was premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in autumn 2016 and performed again in summer 2017 as a part of the Venice Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki.The performance was initiated as my KeKe-project 2014 (Sibelius Academy’s former Development Centre, KeKe) and the research question was, how to develop classical music’s performance practices by subtly varying its performative parameters.
By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes.
Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

Tiivistelmä

Kun barokin laulumusiikin esittäjänä tutkin retoriikan actiota (ääni, ele, ilme, asento, liike) osana muusikko-tutkijan tutkimushankettani, pyrin työssäni yhdistämään toisaalta esittämiskäytäntöjen tutkimusta ja toisaalta fenomenologista lähestymistapaa, jossa huomio on kehollisessa kokemuksessa. Hanketta voisikin kutsua historiallisten esittämiskäytäntöjen keholliseksi tutkimukseksi. Monitieteellisen ja -menetelmällisen tutkimuksen aihe on ajankohtainen, koska se liittyy laajaan historiallisesti tiedostavan esittäjän emansipaatiota käsittelevään keskusteluun.

Musiikillisen retoriikan muodoista itse actiota on tutkittu vähemmän verrattuna notaation retoristen ilmiöiden tutkimiseen. Jotta aihetta voisi tutkia, on ymmärrettävä kohteen luonne kehollisena, tilallisena ja ajallisena ilmiönä. Retoriikan action harjoittaminen sekä rikastaa että muuntaa barokkimusiikin esittämiskäytäntöjä, suhdettamme rekonstruktioon ja käsitystä omasta muusikon roolistamme tämän musiikin äärellä.

Artikkelissani käytän tutkimusesimerkkinä André-Joseph Exaudet´n säveltämään menuettiin laulettua tuntemattoman kirjoittajan arkkiveisua La Guillotine (1789), joka on ilmiönä monitasoisen kehollisen ironian läpäisemä. Tutkin  esitetyn La Guillotinen kehollista ironiaa ja retorisia tehokeinoja, kuten antiteesiä, ciconiaa ja épimonea.

Mukana on myös video baritoni Teppo Lampelan ja Elysionin kedot-työryhmän esittämästä  La Guillotinesta ja kuvaus arkkiveisun esityksestä, jossa ironia kehollistuu retoristen tasojen sisäistämisen kautta. Käyn läpi retorisen ironian historiallisia kuvauksia ja kuvaan niiden ilmenemistä omasta basso continuon soittajan, kamarimuusikon, intersubjektin ja korrepetiittorin näkökulmastani.

Avainsanat:  Kehollisuus, musiikin retoriikka, historiallisesti tiedostava esittäminen

Recent experimental work by psychologist Helen Intraub and her research team has confirmed a phenomenon which may be extensible to the reading of narrative texts.  The experimental evidence suggests boundary extension of visual memory occurs during the time period between briefly viewing images and a subsequent request to recall and draw those images.  That is, when asked, the viewer reproduces an image which includes peripheral information not in the originally viewed image.  This phenomenon is more pronounced for images with a narrower field of view than for those with a wide-angle view.  It also appears to be time dependent in that the amount of extension decays with time after viewing.  Yet, it always manifests as extension, never compression.  Intraub suggests boundary extension is grounded more in the perceptual schemata of the viewers than in other memory-related functions.  Working from the idea that readers’ representations of texts are not unlike viewed images, I map Intraub’s notion of boundary extension onto the mental images constructed from the text(s) as we read—visual images being the most prevalent, but aural, tactile, and olfactory images occur as well.  This notion is supported by Sven Birkerts’ writing on the concept of depth of field in reading where he raises the idea that as we read we “hear” but do so without aural stimulation.  From this point it is a logical and not unreasonable extension to suggest that we also “see” without visual stimulation (that is, the eyes are not seeing anything but words on a sheet of paper yet the mind “sees” the images evoked by the text), “smell” without olfactory stimulation, and so on.  Consequently, it is not uncommon that recollections of texts are somehow greater than the texts themselves.  In this paper, I suggest that—just as with viewed physical images—a created mental image produced as a consequence of engaging with a narrative text is also grounded in and enlarged by our perceptual schemata.  I also suggest that the more senses engaged by a text the greater the opportunity for boundary extension: this is what I mean by “reading polyaesthetically.”  Perceptual schemata are not merely visual; they involve all of the senses such that from a single stimulus—e.g., the act of reading—textual depth is developed by the consequent response of manifold senses.  This paper extends earlier work on my project on Depth of Field in Narrative, as presented at the Narrative Conferences in 2005, 2007, and 2008.  Examples from the works of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf support the discussion.  Critical foils will include aspects of Emma Kafalenos’ recent book on causality in narrative and H. Porter Abbott’s discussion of under- and over-reading of texts.

This course introduces and invites students to integrate their communication studies knowledge with a broad, interdisciplinary conversation on critical-cultural theory, and to understand how communication scholars engage with other disciplines and thinkers in struggles for social justice, social change, and solidarity. In general, critical-cultural theories and their schools that have influenced and been influenced by the study of communication include Marxism, the Frankfurt School, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. Within the purview of this particular course, we will focus on historical and contemporary critical-cultural scholarship at the intersections of feminist, critical race, and queer theories. Since even these three different and interconnected approaches tend to serve a broad net of socio-political interests and positions, we will sharpen our focus within these works through the inflection of embodiment and materiality. First, we will try to understand how we communicate notions of embodiment: what is the body? what is embodiment? What is its relation to the materiality of everyday life? Then we will consider how different critical-cultural frameworks latch on to embodiment along with how and why they enhance, unpack, and politcize the body through their specific vocabularies. In other words, throughout the course we will anchor our understanding of these theoretical approaches around the socially negotiated meanings and materializations of the gendered, sexualized, racialized, and non-normative body.  Students will explore how critical-cultural theory is linked to and emerges from socio-political struggle in different historical moments. In sum, the course invites students to apply critical theory to contemporary socio-cultural debates and challenges to better understand questions of power, civic participation, identity, and social organization.

Research on image schemas in language and cognition (containment, path, blockage, etc.) is largely based on de-contextualized linguistic expressions. This results in a view of image schemas as somehow detached from experience, constituting source domains for fixed conceptual projections from the concrete to the abstract. By showcasing creative examples of the poetics of containment throughout the long diachrony of Greek poetry, this article proposes that image schemas reflect the early attentional preferences of the human mind. These central features of image schemas are further selected for their suitability to create ad-hoc, non-perceptual meanings. Templates for conceptual integration involving image schemas also offer coherent patterns of variation, which opportunistically exploit arising connections with culture, context, and goals. Understanding the role of image schemas in meaning construction and verbal art requires the study of both the entrenched patterns and the know-how associated to their usage.