A late post

I want to apologize for being so late about posting to this blog. I have enjoyed what everyone else has said and can see some interesting ideas formulating.

As I do not know most of you I am going to start with something of an introduction. My name is Paul Dahlgren and I am finishing my dissertation on the history of rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. I have provided a description of that project at the end of this post on the off chance that anyone is interested.

I think like many scholars in our field, I have been motivated by an interest in disciplinary history. I am fascinated by Daniel’s post on discovering and working with a usable past for what and I am hoping you’ll read my post as in part a response to his.

My quotation is from Alain Badiou and will require some explanation:

“To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking… the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course—since the event was excluded by the regular laws of the situation—compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation” (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil 41-2).

This passage describes what Badiou calls elsewhere “fidelity to an event,” the process through which both the world itself and the subject within that world change. Put simply, for Badiou events are radical transformations in the state of the world (what he calls the situation) which happen for any number of reasons. They are, simply put, revolutions. This happens because something within the situation cannot be accounted for given the governing logic or ideology of the situation. By declaring one’s fidelity to an event, one commits oneself to transforming the situation so that what was not represented before becomes part of a new and presumable better world. To take an example, according to Badiou, a scientific revolution happens because people slowly notice that certain phenomenon cannot be accounted for and individuals need to radically transform the way science is preformed in order account for these phenomena. I realize that may or may not be the way science happens, but I hope it serves to clarify what is going on in the passage.

Anyhow, it seems to me that by writing histories of rhetoric we are all, in a sense, declaring our fidelity to certain events that have happen within our discipline and outside of it. I’m interested in the way disciplinarity itself serves as part of the rhetorical situation of our own work and, in my dissertation, work to explore those places where rhetoric goes that are not related to our current disciplinary identities in composition, speech, and literary studies. As promised, here is a description:

My dissertation argues for disentangling the history of rhetoric from its current disciplinary identities in composition, communication, and literary studies. Harvard developed one of the earliest and most influential programs in composition, a program that according to one literary critic educated over one third of major male American authors before the Civil War, but whose restrictive elitism and over-emphasis on grammatical correctness have long troubled scholars. Though historians of rhetoric have, in recent years, turned to places other than Harvard (including normal schools, historically black colleges, and women’s universities), I examine Harvard’s other places, those parts of the curricula and extra-curricula where rhetoric was taught but which do not resemble the current disciplinary homes for academic rhetoricians. For instance, while scholars in rhetorical studies have long concentrated on the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (one of the first positions in rhetoric in the United States), less well studied are the chairs in theology, law and what was once called “moral philosophy.” Furthermore, I complement my study of Harvard’s curriculum with an examination of its extra-curricula including the orations and poems read at the annual celebration of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, part of the university’s yearly commencement and an annual literary event in its own right. My investigation suggests that the increased importance of the rhetorical canon of style was not a retreat from civic life, as is customarily argued, but rather the result of a merging of neo-Lockean rhetorical theory and Germanic materialism, which was designed to reinvigorate citizenship as civic republican thought was challenged by liberal political theory and market capitalism.

Thank you for comments and challenges