4th of July, State College

In recent weeks, it has been reported with sadness that because of the financial crisis, corporate sponsorship of the local fireworks show, reportedly the biggest such private 4th of July fireworks show in the United States, will be smaller this year.

Shown here are two photographs from the Farm Security Administration collection at the Library of Congress. The photographs are both by Edwin Rosskam, and were taken in State College, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1941. Rain during the day had threatened the annual 4th of July fireman's carnival downtown.

The first photograph shows an evening bingo game in progress on a main street. The second shows a group of small boys with cap pistols in a doorway earlier on the same day.

Happy 4th of July.

Sarah Palin: Devotion and Resignation

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's resignation speech is really very peculiar. The New York Times reprints the full text of the speech here. It is worth a read.

My guess is that those who were most enthusiastic for Sarah Palin during the recent presidential campaign will find a way to be enthusiastic about the resignation speech and the prospects for a Palin presidential campaign in 2012.

But the peculiarities of the speech do little to put aside the doubts of many Americans -- including Independents and Republicans -- that Palin is a lightweight, non-serious politician and would be a disaster in the White House.

A strange time for governors.

Gail Collins in the Times quotes a typical passage from the speech: “And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time ... to BUILD UP.” Collins then comments: "Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter."Gail Collins, "Sarah's Straight Talk," New York Times, 4 July 2009.

Governor Palin's speech is peculiar in so many ways. It is fairly long, and it rambles, and in rambling it offers contradictory logics about matters that never had to be raised in the first place. It is hard for a rhetorical critic not to notice that no self-evident situational exigence, strongly visible to her public, was in circulation before the speech, and so part of her rhetorical task would be to offer a convincing depiction of the situation that called forth her resignation. This she really did not do, thus creating an immediate stampede on the part of commentators in the news about her possible motives -- the most likely of which, in their view, is that Palin is planning to run for president and has just further damaged her chances.

Or that there is some further scandal about to burst forth, following a long trail of ethics investigations into the behavior of Governor Palin and her cabinet and family.

Or that the motivation was temperamental and psychological -- that Palin is basically either (1) a committed family person and Christian who has higher priorities; or (2) that she is a flake and a lightweight. There is plenty of evidence for both of these competing views, the choice perhaps depending on one's degree of political sympathy for Palin.

This resignation might be illuminated, at least rhetorically, by recalling Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). Hirschman's fascinating little book considers the varieties of individual response to a failing organization -- one can simply leave (or leave under protest); one can stay and try to give voice to arguments and appeals that might bring about change (or leave while giving voice to such arguments and appeals). Hirschman shows how one can act loyally, creating surprising and productive relations between voice and exit. Thinking of Palin's exit in Hirschman's terms invites us to consider other recent actions by leading Republicans dealing with the widespread perception of the Republican Party as a failing operation--consider Arlen Specter, for example, and the chant of Rush Limbaugh and others that Republicans who don't follow the line should get out. Palin and Specter are exiting in very different directions, but perhaps Hirschman's perspective helps us to see their similarities.

See also:

Todd Purdum, "It Came from Wasilla," Vanity Fair, August 2009.

Maureen Dowd, "Now, Sarah's Folly," New York Times, 5 July 2009.

Video of the speech is here.

The photograph of Governor Palin is from her governor's web page.

Moving Bodies

Debra Hawhee's new book has just been published:


Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).


From the publisher:

Kenneth Burke may be best known for his theories of dramatism and of language as symbolic action, but few know him as one of the twentieth century's foremost theorists of the relationship between language and bodies. Moving Bodies presents him as a major transdisciplinary theorist of the body. Debra Hawhee focuses on Burke's studies from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s while illustrating that his interest in reading the body as a central force of communication began early in his career and continued to inform his work over more than six decades.

Burke examined the human body as a participant in thought rather than as the mind's binary Cartesian opposite, grappling with notions of physical form as a corporeal intellect, the mental and biological interwoven within one life. By exploring his extensive writings on the subject alongside revealing considerations of his life and his scholarship, Hawhee maps his recurring invocation of a variety of perspectives in order to theorize bodies and communication, including music, mysticism, endocrinology, evolution, speech-gesture theory, and speech-act theory, as well as his personal experiences with pain and illness. Hawhee shows that Burke's goal was to advance understanding of the body's relationship to identity, to the creation of meaning, and to the circulation of language.

Her study brings to the fore one of Burke's most important and understudied contributions to language theory, and she establishes Burke as a pioneer in a field where investigations into affect, movement, and sense perception broaden understanding of physical ways of knowing.

Debra Hawhee is an associate professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece and coauthor of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students.

Flaneur of the Times

A new animated short film by Jeff Scher, "The Parade," at the New York Times, celebrates walking through the city, reading faces, costumes, bodies.

Scher joins a long tradition of the flaneur, walking through the city -- Paris, London, New York, Berlin, Rome -- reading the people.

Scher's animation suggests the evanescent mental images and associations he reads in the people he encounters.

Rhetoric, Science, and Magic

Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009).

Powell's Books

Amazon

From the Amazon description provided by the publisher:

Rhetoric operated at the crux of seventeenth-century thought, from arguments between scientists and magicians to anxieties over witchcraft and disputes about theology. Writers on all sides of these crucial topics stressed rhetorical discernment, because to the astute observer the shape of one's eloquence was perhaps the most reliable indicator of the heart's piety or, alternatively, of demonry. To understand the period's tenor, we must understand the period's rhetorical thinking, which is the focus of this book.

Ryan J. Stark presents a spiritually sensitive, interdisciplinary, and original discussion of early modern English rhetoric. He shows specifically how experimental philosophers attempted to disenchant language. While rationalists and skeptics delighted in this disenchantment, mystics, wizards, and other practitioners of mysterious arts vehemently opposed the rhetorical precepts of modern science. These writers used tropes not as plain instruments but rather as numinous devices capable of transforming reality. On the contrary, the new philosophers perceived all esoteric language as a threat to learning's advancement, causing them to disavow both nefarious forms of occult spell casting and, unfortunately, edifying forms of wonderment and incantation. This fundamental conflict between scientists and mystics over the nature of rhetoric is the most significant linguistic happening in seventeenth-century England, and, as Stark argues, it ought profoundly to inform how we discuss the rise of modern English writing.

Ryan J. Stark is assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Cost of Study Abroad

Part of what is happening to the cost of study abroad is illustrated in this graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis illustrating the history of the dollar-to-euro exchange rate. One Euro will today cost about $1.40 in U.S. dollars.

Study Abroad on Trial

In a New York Times op ed, Timothy Egan writes about the trial in Italy of an American student who is accused of murdering her roommate. Egan and the many readers who have commented on the piece in the Times reveal something of the perils of study abroad, and very different views of the legitimacy of this prosecution.

Meanwhile, it is reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the House of Representatives today passed the Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act, which proposes to vastly enlarge the number of U.S. students enrolled in study abroad.

Timothy Egan, "An Innocent Abroad," New York Times, 11 June 2009.

Taking Note

Ever since I began using computers for teaching and writing at the end of the 1970s, I have been hoping for a really good note-taking application. I have tried a lot of them, including making notes on a word processor--easy to type and store, but not so easy to sort.

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times writes of new note-taking software, and makes a special case for Evernote, which has the advantage of storing notes on the Internet, thereby accessible from any computing platform. Google Notes would do this for you as well, but Google has announced that it is no longer developing the application, and this emphasizes the problem with using any computer application for note-taking -- it needs to stay in business or your notes won't be of any use to you.

Manjoo reports that the best current application is Microsoft's OneNote, but the application is available only for the PC--there is no Mac version. In addition to the applications mentioned by Manjoo , there are of course database applications such as Filemaker, and bibliography programs, such as EndNote. For another free application, I'm also currently exploring Scribe, developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. CHNM is also the developer for Zotero , which CHNM advertises as a successor application to Scribe, able to handle both bibliographic entries, with web capture, and standalone notes. CHNM has developed a number of other useful applications.

Most of the dedicated note-taking programs are based on one or both of two assumptions -- that the researcher is making notes that copy, comment on, or amplify parts of a published source the primary reference to which is part of a bibliography; or that the notes are being saved as part of a process of clipping from web-based pages. Most of the programs make it possible to take free-standing notes -- something like the old-fashioned 3x5 or 4x6 card -- but that is not the standard metaphor for all of them.

Farhad Manjoo, "Bringing Order to the Chaos of Notes," New York Times, 27 May 2009.

Five Chapters on Rhetoric

Michael S. Kochin, Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).



From the publisher's description:

Kochin’s radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence—to create a political movement out of a crowd, or an army out of a mob.

Five Chapters on Rhetoric explores our path to things through our judgments of character and action. It shows how speech and writing are used to defend the fabric of social life from things or facts. Finally, Kochin shows how the art of rhetoric aids us in clarifying things when we speak to communicate, and helps protect us from their terrible clarity when we speak to maintain our connections to others.

Kochin weaves together rhetorical criticism, classical rhetoric, science studies, public relations, and political communication into a compelling overview both of persuasive strategies in contemporary politics and of the nature and scope of rhetorical studies.

Michael S. Kochin is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Tel Aviv University and has held visiting appointments at Toronto, Princeton, and Yale. He is the author of Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought (2002), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice.

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Boundaries of the New Frontier

Joanna S. Ploeger, The Boundaries of the New Frontier: Rhetoric and Communication at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

From the publisher:

Joanna S. Ploeger examines the communicative practices of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in suburban Chicago to show how the rhetoric of science functions as an indicator of the intellectual and political interests of scientific institutions. She delineates the rhetorical strategies by which Fermilab's founders, especially Robert R. Wilson, sought the consent, cooperation, and goodwill of its neighbors. Wilson's rhetoric was an attempt to distinguish Fermilab from other laboratories in the national network by emphasizing that Fermilab was not a nuclear-weapons laboratory and that its sole purpose was to advance theoretical physics for the sake of knowledge. To dissociate itself from weapons research, Fermilab incorporated the aesthetic of sublimity, emblematic of the laboratory's focus on high-energy physics, into the design of its buildings, grounds, public art, and outreach materials. Ploeger tests the success of Wilson's rhetoric through extensive interviews with researchers, administrators, and visitors at Fermilab.

Wilson's visual rhetoric strategies were unable to counteract the persistent belief that Fermilab was involved in nuclear-weapons research. In later years the end of the cold war diminished the urgency of physics research. This change in the national climate induced Fermilab's subsequent directors to stress the many potential uses of experimental physics, thereby opening Fermilab to a variety of projects at the cost of the aesthetic Wilson had tried to project. In tracking the evolution of the lab's representation of itself to its public, Ploeger's work combines rhetorical criticism, visual rhetorics, and qualitative analysis of interview data in studying a salient example that comes into focus only when all three methods are deployed collectively.

Joanna S. Ploeger (1967–2006) was an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa and California State University, Stanislaus.

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