For more on addiction research at Emory, see the October / November 2001 issue of the Academic Exchange.
October 2, 2001
September 11: Scholarly Responses
The New Urgency of Understanding Rhetoric
Jeffrey Walker, associate
professor of English, begins this Academic Exchange series of
brief comments on the terrorist attack of September 11. Throughout
the fall, faculty from religion, public health, sociology, nursing,
and other fields will offer some thoughts on September 11 as seen
through the lens of their discipline.
After the outrage of September
11, teachers everywhere began thinking about the possibility and
propriety of using it as a "teachable moment." As a
writing teacher, I see that reflection and writing on the events—even
as they continue to unfold—can give students the opportunity
to do the valuable work of articulating and developing their thought
in the context of open and honest discussion, and help them move
toward a matured, shareable judgment. This kind of discussion
can give both teacher and students an opportunity to examine critically
the public discourse that emerges in response to events. We can
apply the rhetorical lessons we typically teach in the examination
of anthology pieces and selected "literature" to matters
that are omnipresent in everyone’s thoughts. No "mere
rhetoric," the arguments about terrorism promise to have
real and possibly dramatic consequences for our students’
lives as well as our own.
Here I mean "rhetoric" in the larger sense (as Aristotle
defined it), as a "faculty of observing" and acting
upon the processes of argument and persuasion that lead to practical
judgment, in both the public sphere and private life. The term
"rhetoric" of course includes the overt structure and
tactics used to present an argument in various types of discourse
(whether an opinion piece, a story, etc.). But perhaps more importantly,
rhetoric also encompasses tacit reasoning systems and habits of
feeling. These are the assumptions that endow arguments with greater
or lesser degrees of reasonability and persuasive force. Such
examination leads to critical reflection on both actual and possible
arguments, and to judgment on which ones ought to earn the assent
of thinking, morally responsible people.
Students sometimes all too easily regard rhetoric as "English
class stuff" with only slight bearing on their "real"
concerns. Now, however, the fundamental rhetorical lessons we
teach in any writing course can be made present to them as utterly
and pragmatically real indeed. Perhaps this gives us the opportunity
to also make real the oft-cited justification of a liberal arts
education: to help students come to terms with matters of profound
importance in their lives.
-------If you are interested
in adding your thoughts to this series, contact Amy Benson Brown
at: abrow01@emory.edu.
September 27, 2001
The Civil War and American Memory
With
memories of the terrorist attack still forming in the American
psyche, Professor
David Blight argued that "the very process by which societies
remember the past has a history that needs to be studied."
Analysis of how war in particular becomes remembered demonstrates
that "collective memory is an instrument of power,"
said Dr. Blight, a historian at Amherst college. His talk, “The
Riddle of Collective Memory and the American Civil War,”
was sponsored by the Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life
on September 19, 2001. Below are three highlights from his talk:
--"Looking
at the fifty years right after the American civil war, I found
three overall visions of Civil War memory which collided and combined
over time. The first is a reconciliationist vision which took
root in the process of dealing with the dead and the injured and
developed earlier than the embittered history of Reconstruction
has sometimes allowed us to believe. The second is a white supremacist
vision of Civil War memory, which took many forms early including
terror and violence during reconstruction. It locked arms with
reconciliationist vision many times and delivered the country
an essentially segregated memory of the war by the turn of the
century. The third is the emancipationist vision, embodied in
African Americans’ complex remembrance of their own truths
and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic
and the liberation of blacks. In the end this is a story of how
the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision
in the national culture."
--"For so long after the civil war, Americans faced an overwhelming
task of trying to understand the tangled relationship between
two profound ideas: healing and justice. On some level, both had
to occur. . . . Human reconciliations are a good thing, but sometimes
reconciliation comes at a terrible cost. The reunion after so
horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth
century, but it was not or could not have been achieved without
the re-subjugation of many of those people the war had freed from
centuries of bondage."
--"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we have
a politics of Civil War memory. For Americans, the Civil War has
been the defining event upon which we have often imposed unity
and continuity. As a culture, we have often preferred the theme
of reconciled conflict to unreconciled complexity. "
Dr. Blight's
most recent book is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory (Harvard UP, 2001).
September 19, 2001
Scholarship on Disability at Emory
Emory's gaining a new
scholar of disability studies. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson will
join the Women's Studies Program in the spring of 2002. She is
the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability
in American Culture and Literature (Columbia University Press,
1977). For more on Garland-Thomson and the emergence of disability
studies, see "Disability
and the Academy: A field comes of age" in the December
2000 / January 2001 issue of the Academic Exchange
September 6, 2001
David Lodge Coming to Campus
If you enjoyed Shalom Goldman's
review essay in the September Academic Exchange, "Academic
Life by the Book: A campus tour of satiric fiction,"
you'll be glad to know one of the great satirists of academic
life is coming to campus soon. Novelist and critic, David Lodge,
whose many books include Changing Places, Nice Work,
and Small World, will be on campus October 7—10, 2001.
He will give three lectures on "Consciousness and the Novel"
as part of the series of Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literture.
On October 10th, he will give a reading and be available to sign
copies of his new novel, Thinks (Viking, 2001). Below is
a list of dates and places:
• October 7, 4 p.m.,"Consciousness
and the Two Cultures," Woodruff Health Sciences Auditorium
• October 8, 8:00 p.m.,"First Person and Third Person,"
Goizueta Business School Auditorium, Room 130
• Oct. 9, 8:15 p.m.,"Surface and Depth," Goizueta
Business School Auditorium, Room 130
• October 10, 8:15 p.m., reading and book signing, Glenn
Memorial Sanctuary.
A Book Jacket Description of
Thinks:
"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally
gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling
Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester,
he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in
artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness.
Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a
tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie to refrain from
philandering in his own backyard. This resolution is already weakening
when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a recently widowed
novelist who has taken up a post as writer in residence at Gloucester.
Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a worldview radically
at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph's bold advances
but resists on moral principle. The standoff between them is shattered
by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm
the truth of Ralph's dictum that 'we can never know for certain
what another person is thinking.'"