I'm a rhetorician, no doubt, but I'm also interested in language qua language, not just as it's used for rhetorical purposes. So things like this analysis with NYTimes' On Language columnist Ben Zimmer (rest in peace, William Safire) are particularly interesting to me. You don't even have to watch the video to ponder what commenter #3 says, which is what I want to bring to your attention here anyway: linguists should be linguists, not rhetoricians.
Interesting. I don't know that the two are so easily separated. Perhaps what we ought to be arguing for isn't that one discipline should be in its corner while others with shared interests are in different corners; perhaps the linguists need rhetorical knowledge and awareness and that rhetoricians need to be able to talk about language (if written and oral communication, as opposed to visual, etc. communication, is what they do) with some level of expertise.
Your thots? The comments are open!
KU Ars Rhetorica is a graduate student organization of the University of Kansas, recognized by the Rhetoric Society of America. Our mission is to provide graduate students with interests in rhetoric opportunities to share their scholarship and find excuses to socialize with one another.
27 January 2011
26 January 2011
Welcome, welcome
So, here's KU Ars Rhetorica. You can call us KUAR or Ars Rhetorica for short.
When Rachel and I sat down last semester to discuss forming an RSA grad student group, we both talked about needing opportunities to do something with our rhetorical interests among our fellow rhetorically-minded grad students. Knowing that interests in rhetoric aren't the exclusive purview of English studies folk, we started thinking of ways to make this an interdisciplinary group. So we invited Kundai to be in on the organizing action, and that's the story of that!
We're still getting things settled and organized ahead of our first meeting. This blog is one of those preparatory things: we'd like to have a common site for posting things of interest to rhetorically-minded grad students (so we can stop cluttering each other's Facebook feeds) and for keeping everyone abreast of goings-on in KUAR. And we're hoping for a lot of goings-on... More about that in the near future.
Ultimately, we're hoping that KUAR will give us all a chance to talk about and do the things we'd like to do as grad students in rhetoric but haven't had the opportunity to (yet). So the group is going to be pretty fluid: it will be whatever you make of it. You're welcome to come help us start that making process!
When Rachel and I sat down last semester to discuss forming an RSA grad student group, we both talked about needing opportunities to do something with our rhetorical interests among our fellow rhetorically-minded grad students. Knowing that interests in rhetoric aren't the exclusive purview of English studies folk, we started thinking of ways to make this an interdisciplinary group. So we invited Kundai to be in on the organizing action, and that's the story of that!
We're still getting things settled and organized ahead of our first meeting. This blog is one of those preparatory things: we'd like to have a common site for posting things of interest to rhetorically-minded grad students (so we can stop cluttering each other's Facebook feeds) and for keeping everyone abreast of goings-on in KUAR. And we're hoping for a lot of goings-on... More about that in the near future.
Ultimately, we're hoping that KUAR will give us all a chance to talk about and do the things we'd like to do as grad students in rhetoric but haven't had the opportunity to (yet). So the group is going to be pretty fluid: it will be whatever you make of it. You're welcome to come help us start that making process!
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