DOCSLIB.ORG

Open Dissertation-Apr13-2008.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Open Dissertation-Apr13-2008.Pdf The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Departments of English and Women’s Studies A RHETORIC OF TOUCH: DISABILITY AND THE RESHAPING OF RHETORICAL BODIES A Dissertation in English and Women’s Studies by Shannon Walters Copyright 2008 Shannon Walters Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii The dissertation of Shannon Walters was reviewed and approved* by the following: Susan M. Squier Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English Chair of Committee and Thesis Adviser John L. Selzer Professor of English Stuart Selber Associate Professor of English Carolyn Sachs Professor of Rural Sociology and Women’s Studies Michael Berube Paterno Family Professor of Literature and Comparative Literature Robert R. Edwards Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature Chair of Graduate Program *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract In “A Rhetoric of Touch,” I ask how rhetorical and composition studies can value the contributions of contemporary writers with disabilities. I trace a trend of tactile rhetorics among today’s disabled rhetors, such as Temple Grandin, Nancy Mairs, Dawn Prince-Hughes and Eli Clare, all of whom use the sense of touch in order to enable rhetorical production. After exploring the dominant tradition’s discomfort with touch and disability, I show that disability is actually integral to the shaping of the able orator. Theories from disability studies regarding how the disabled body has been medicalized, rehabilitated, and normalized illuminate how rhetoric and rhetorical bodies have been similarly treated by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. As an alternative to this tradition, I redefine the sophistic concepts of logos, metis, and kairos as tactile rhetorics, arguing that these flexible practices can reshape rhetoric for a wide range of rhetors. I draw on Empedocles’ theories of fleshy logos and integrate current writing by people with disabilities to redefine logos as multi logos. Similarly, I blend sophistic theories and disabled rhetorics to redefine metis as tactile intelligence (rather than cunning intelligence) and kairos as tactile timing (rather than simple timing). I construct a theory of “rhetoric reshaped” which stretches contemporary rhetoric and composition studies to respond to the needs and contributions of disabled rhetors. Rhetoric reshaped transforms the traditional rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos and logos and the traditional canons of invention, arrangement, style, delivery and memory, for a range of rhetorical situations. I coordinate between neo-sophistic studies, feminist rhetorics and disability studies to explore the possibilities disabled rhetors offer to contemporary rhetorical and composition studies. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………….. v Acknowledgements ……………..…………………………………………………….………… vi Introduction Untangling Disability, Rhetoric and Touch …………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 Rhetoric as Dis/Ability in the Dominant Tradition ……………………………………….…… 30 Chapter 2 Socio-Cultural Sensual Models in Disability Studies and Sophistic Rhetoric ……………....… 78 Chapter 3 Empedocles and the Redefinition of Logos for Disabled Rhetors ……………………...…….. 115 Chapter 4 Metis and the Reshaping of the Appeals for Disabled Rhetors ……………………………..... 154 Chapter 5 Kairotic Reshapings of the Canons for Disability ……………………………………...…….. 193 Conclusion Rhetoric Reshaped …………………………………………………………………………..... 236 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………..…. 251 v List of Figures Figure 1: Rhetorical Reshapings for a Rhetoric of Touch ………………………………. 242 vi Acknowledgements My partial attempt at acknowledging all of the support that enabled me to complete this project will surely only scratch the surface. I would like to thank my family: my parents Elaine and Charles Walters and my brother and traveling companion, Casey Walters. Your support, love and encouragement are invaluable. Thanks for understanding. I also thank Susan Squier, the director of this dissertation and mentor throughout my time at Penn State. I am continually amazed at your energy and enthusiasm as a scholar, teacher, community member and mentor. I think I am only just beginning to understand all that you have taught me. Thank you for your patience and your rigor. Thank you also to Jack Selzer, who convinced me to come to Penn State, as well as Stuart Selber, who introduced me to technical writing, and Michael Berube, who guided my interest in disability studies. This project was also shaped by the lessons I continue to learn from my friends, many of whom were also my gradate school colleagues. Thank you to my dissertation group, especially Marika Siegel and Melissa Littlefield, and to my Rock Ethics Group. Thanks in particular to my wonderful friends: Sarah Birge, Liz Kuhn, Erin Newcomb and Jessica Raley. Weight lifting with Sarah helped me relieve (some) stress, chatting with Liz always made me laugh, living with Erin and Jess and our three cats was fun, as were our late night draft workshop sessions. Thank you to my friends from college, Kelly Koscuiszka and Carly Zebuhr, for driving out so many times to the middle of Pennsylvania to visit me. Thanks especially to my friend from middle school, Jennifer Chang, who made sure I had fun this summer while revising in DC. Also, thanks to baseball, cats, travel, and running, which definitely helped me make it through. 1 Introduction: Untangling Disability, Rhetoric and Touch Touch represents a confirmation of our boundaries and separateness while permitting a union or connection with others that transcends physical limits. For this reason, of all the communication channels, touch is the most carefully guarded and monitored, the most infrequently used, yet the most powerful and immediate (S. Thayer Book of Touch 18). In one of the most well-known scenes of disability in recent history, Helen Keller, a deaf-blind young girl who had previously been deemed unruly, retarded and uneducable, experiences a communication breakthrough with her teacher Annie Sullivan, when she makes the miraculous connection between the letters that Sullivan signs into her hand and the feeling of cool water running over her hand from a pump. In her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller describes her experience: As the cool stream gushed over one hand [Miss Sullivan] spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. (35) Despite the fact that this scene, immortalized repeatedly on stage and on film in The Miracle Worker, is probably one of the most wide recognized and recalled scenes of disability in the United States, it points to gaps in knowledge, research and scholarship in the two main disciplines it so interestingly weaves together. The fields of rhetoric and composition and 2 disability studies have yet to fully explore the sense of touch, poignantly immortalized in Keller’s introduction into symbolic language, but noticeably absent from studies of language and disability. Touch becomes the main way in which Keller learns the world, as she writes, “I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world” (36). Despite her growing sense of confidence with language, Keller was prone to attacks on the credibility and authenticity of her character as a rhetor. Keller wrote her autobiography in collaboration with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, to whom she was extremely close, and Sullivan’s husband, John Macy. Charges of plagiarism and doubts regarding the authenticity of her work followed her throughout much of her life. People doubted her as a rhetor, questioned the credibility of her ethos, and were skeptical of her abilities. They suspected that others were contributing too much to her rhetorical success. As Keller’s example indicates, rhetoric produced in close connections, especially physical, embodied collaboration, elicits anxieties regarding authorship and authenticity. For this reason and others I will explore in the following chapters, touch has been ignored and denigrated in rhetorical studies because the sense of touch disturbs basic assumptions regarding the status of the ideal or able rhetor. Touch calls into question the accepted model of the ideal orator shaped by the rhetorical tradition, who creates communication independently, ably, and without messy interconnections between bodies. Touch disturbs the boundaries of bodies and of rhetoric. Although both rhetorical studies and theoretical studies of disability have largely ignored the sense of touch, a trend exists among contemporary writers with disabilities who use touch to enable communication, which I term “a rhetoric of touch,” or as “tactile rhetorics.” The kinship 3 that Keller describes through touch inaugurates us into an underappreciated but valuable nexus of rhetorical strategies shared among a variety of disabled rhetors. The
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Empedocles: Neurophilosophy and Neurosciences- Prophecy and Reality
    Journal of Neurology & Stroke Empedocles: Neurophilosophy and Neurosciences- Prophecy and Reality Keywords Editorial Volume 1 Issue 6 - 2014 Empedocles; Neurosciences; Neurophilosophy; Mitochondria; Limbic system; Amygdala Stavros J. Baloyannis* Editorial Aristotelian University, Greece *Corresponding author: Neurosciences are extended into a broad field, where the Stavros J. Baloyannis, Department scientific observation and research join harmoniously the of Emeritus, Aristotelian University, Thessaloniki, Angelaki 5, Greece,Received: Tel: +302310270434; Email:| Published: imagination, the intuition, the philosophy, the critic analysis, 2014 the enthusiasm and the skepticism, opening new horizons in the October 01, 2014 October 06, Fromtheoretic the perspectivesEra of Pre-Socratic and offering philosophers, new motivations soul and for mind research, have on the bases of an advanced multi-dimensional intellectuality. meditation [1]. Questions that the human being posed to himself, emotions, the feelings and the social behavior of the human being. been the subject of continuous speculation, study, research and soul in order to discover the interior power which motivates the concerning the existence, the soul, the psychosomatic entity, the regulatesHe tried to and identify controls the mainall the pivots spectrum of the of emotional the human interactions. emotions. cognition, the knowledge of the world, and the perception of time He insisted that Love and Strife are the ends of an axis, which and space used to exercise always an existential anxiety. According to Empedocles there is not birth or coming into Very frequently, human emotions have been the foci of existence and death. There is only a connection or mixture and insisting endeavors for right interpretation and detailed analysis. separation of four pure fundamental elements or “roots”, which Reasonably, the importance of the mental activities and interior are “the earth”, “the air”, “the fire” and “the water”.
    [Show full text]
  • The Formulaic Dynamics of Character Behavior in Lucan Howard Chen
    Breakthrough and Concealment: The Formulaic Dynamics of Character Behavior in Lucan Howard Chen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Howard Chen All rights reserved ABSTRACT Breakthrough and Concealment: The Formulaic Dynamics of Character Behavior in Lucan Howard Chen This dissertation analyzes the three main protagonists of Lucan’s Bellum Civile through their attempts to utilize, resist, or match a pattern of action which I call the “formula.” Most evident in Caesar, the formula is a cycle of alternating states of energy that allows him to gain a decisive edge over his opponents by granting him the ability of perpetual regeneration. However, a similar dynamic is also found in rivers, which thus prove to be formidable adversaries of Caesar in their own right. Although neither Pompey nor Cato is able to draw on the Caesarian formula successfully, Lucan eventually associates them with the river-derived variant, thus granting them a measure of resistance (if only in the non-physical realm). By tracing the development of the formula throughout the epic, the dissertation provides a deeper understanding of the importance of natural forces in Lucan’s poem as well as the presence of an underlying drive that unites its fractured world. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • From Hades to the Stars: Empedocles on the Cosmic Habitats of Soul', Classical Antiquity, Vol
    Edinburgh Research Explorer From Hades to the stars Citation for published version: Trepanier, S 2017, 'From Hades to the stars: Empedocles on the cosmic habitats of soul', Classical Antiquity, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 130-182. https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2017.36.1.130 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1525/ca.2017.36.1.130 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Classical Antiquity Publisher Rights Statement: Published as Trépanier, S. 2017. From Hades to the Stars: Empedocles on the Cosmic Habitats of Soul, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 36 No. 1, April 2017; (pp. 130-182) DOI: 10.1525/ca.2017.36.1.130. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of California. Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation.
    [Show full text]
  • ON TRANSLATING the POETRY of CATULLUS by Susan Mclean
    A publication of the American Philological Association Vol. 1 • Issue 2 • fall 2002 From the Editors REMEMBERING RHESUS by Margaret A. Brucia and Anne-Marie Lewis by C. W. Marshall uripides wrote a play called Rhesus, position in the world of myth. Hector, elcome to the second issue of Eand a play called Rhesus is found leader of the Trojan forces, sees the WAmphora. We were most gratified among the extant works of Euripi- opportunity for a night attack on the des. Nevertheless, scholars since antiq- Greek camp but is convinced first to by the response to the first issue, and we uity have doubted whether these two conduct reconnaissance (through the thank all those readers who wrote to share plays are the same, suggesting instead person of Dolon) and then to await rein- with us their enthusiasm for this new out- that the Rhesus we have is not Euripi- forcements (in the person of Rhesus). reach initiative and to tell us how much dean. This question of dubious author- Odysseus and Diomedes, aided by the they enjoyed the articles and reviews. ship has eclipsed many other potential goddess Athena, frustrate both of these Amphora is very much a communal project areas of interest concerning this play enterprises so that by morning, when and, as a result, it is too often sidelined the attack is to begin, the Trojans are and, as we move forward into our second in discussions of classical tragedy, when assured defeat. issue, we would like to thank those who it is discussed at all. George Kovacs For me, the most exciting part of the have been so helpful to us: Adam Blistein, wanted to see how the play would work performance happened out of sight of Executive Director of the American Philo- on stage and so offered to direct it to the audience.
    [Show full text]
  • Spectacular Pregnancies / Monstrous Pregnancies As Represented in Three Pliegos Sueltos Poéticos Stacey L
    University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well Spanish Publications Faculty and Staff choS larship Fall 2016 Spectacular Pregnancies / Monstrous Pregnancies As Represented In Three Pliegos Sueltos Poéticos Stacey L. Parker Aronson University of Minnesota - Morris Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/span_facpubs Part of the Spanish Literature Commons Recommended Citation Parker Aronson, Stacey L. "Spectacular Pregnancies / Monstrous Pregnancies As Represented In Three Pliegos Sueltos Poéticos." Hispanic Journal, v.37, no. 2, 2016, pp. 2-11. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty and Staff choS larship at University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. It has been accepted for inclusion in Spanish Publications by an authorized administrator of University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Spectacular Pregnancies / Monstrous Pregnancies As Represented In Three Pliegos Sueltos Poéticos Stacey L. Parker Aronson University of Minnesota, Morris “For as St Paul says, every sin that is committed is outside the body except this one alone. All the other sins are only sins; but this is a sin, and also disfigures you and dishonours your body, … [you] do harm to yourself, mistreating yourself quite voluntarily in such a shameful way.” (31) —“Hali Meiðhad / A Letter on Virginity for the Encouragement of Virgins” (1190-1230?) “The grotesque body, … is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.” (317) —Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965) In this age of advancements in procreative technologies that have increased the incidence of multiple births, we are at times fascinated and at others repulsed by these reproductive results.
    [Show full text]
  • Lucan's Natural Questions: Landscape and Geography in the Bellum Civile Laura Zientek a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulf
    Lucan’s Natural Questions: Landscape and Geography in the Bellum Civile Laura Zientek A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Catherine Connors, Chair Alain Gowing Stephen Hinds Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Classics © Copyright 2014 Laura Zientek University of Washington Abstract Lucan’s Natural Questions: Landscape and Geography in the Bellum Civile Laura Zientek Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Catherine Connors Department of Classics This dissertation is an analysis of the role of landscape and the natural world in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. I investigate digressions and excurses on mountains, rivers, and certain myths associated aetiologically with the land, and demonstrate how Stoic physics and cosmology – in particular the concepts of cosmic (dis)order, collapse, and conflagration – play a role in the way Lucan writes about the landscape in the context of a civil war poem. Building on previous analyses of the Bellum Civile that provide background on its literary context (Ahl, 1976), on Lucan’s poetic technique (Masters, 1992), and on landscape in Roman literature (Spencer, 2010), I approach Lucan’s depiction of the natural world by focusing on the mutual effect of humanity and landscape on each other. Thus, hardships posed by the land against characters like Caesar and Cato, gloomy and threatening atmospheres, and dangerous or unusual weather phenomena all have places in my study. I also explore how Lucan’s landscapes engage with the tropes of the locus amoenus or horridus (Schiesaro, 2006) and elements of the sublime (Day, 2013).
    [Show full text]
  • Cómo Citar El Artículo Número Completo Más Información Del
    Anagramas -Rumbos y sentidos de la comunicación- ISSN: 1692-2522 Sello Editorial - Universidad de Medellín Nitrihual-Valdebenito, Luis; Fierro-Bustos, Juan Manuel; Reyes-Velásquez, Carlos; Henríquez-Morales, Francisco Conspiración y nuda vida ¿The X-Files, I want to believe: mundo posible o mundo presente?* Anagramas -Rumbos y sentidos de la comunicación-, vol. 16, núm. 31, 2017, Septiembre-Diciembre, pp. 91-112 Sello Editorial - Universidad de Medellín DOI: https://doi.org/10.22395/angr.v16n31a3 Disponible en: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=491555087004 Cómo citar el artículo Número completo Sistema de Información Científica Redalyc Más información del artículo Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal Página de la revista en redalyc.org Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto Universidad de Medellín Conspiración y nuda vida ¿The X-Files, I want to believe: mundo posible o mundo presente?* Luis Nitrihual Valdebenito** Juan Manuel Fierro Bustos*** Carlos Reyes Velásquez**** Francisco Henríquez Morales***** Recibido: 2017-04-22 Enviado a pares: 2017-05-25 Aprobado por pares: 2017-07-18 Aceptado: 2017-07-25 DOI: 10.22395/angr.v16n31a3 Resumen El presente artículo problematiza, en general, la conspiración como una estructura política y narrativa fundamental de la Modernidad. A través de un análisis fílmico de la serie The X-Files, I want to believe, planteamos como objetivo revelar como el tópico de la conspiración, en un nivel superficial, es un articulador de la trama de la serie, pero en un nivel profundo y amplio entendemos la conspiración como una estrategia articuladora de la vida moderna y, en este marco, del control biopolítico.
    [Show full text]
  • The Laugh of the Medusa Author(S): Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen Source: Signs, Vol
    The Laugh of the Medusa Author(s): Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen Source: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239 Accessed: 30-03-2017 18:20 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs This content downloaded from 134.153.210.216 on Thu, 30 Mar 2017 18:20:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms VIEWPOINT The Laugh of the Medusa Helene Cixous Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past.
    [Show full text]
  • Metaphysical and Semantic Implications of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation
    Substance Made Manifest: Metaphysical and Semantic Implications of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation Joshua P. Hochschild Mount St. Mary’s University This paper responds to Bruce Marshall’s use of logic to clarify the metaphysical issues at stake in the doctrine of transubstantiation. While appreciating and agreeing with the general approach of finding connections between logic and metaphysics, on the one hand, and the communal and ecumenical significance of Eucharistic doctrine, on the other, this paper criticizes Marshall’s particular analysis as beholden to a distinctively modern approach to logic, and displaying a typically modern neglect of the notion of substance. The conclusion suggests that distinctively Catholic teaching on transubstantiation is significant today not only for proclaiming a mystery of Christian faith, but also for calling attention to classical categories of reality, categories once considered more natural and common but subsequently obscured by modern philosophical and theological developments. Verbum caro, panem verum verbo carnem efficit: fitque sanguis Christi merum, et si sensus deficit, ad firmandum cor sincerum sola fides sufficit. —St. Thomas Aquinas Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium 1. The Power of Language As the symposium’s designated philosopher, invited to talk about metaphysics, I confess that I will allow myself to be drawn into technical discussions in terminology Aquinas adopted from the Aristotelian philosophical tradition.1 With that in mind, I wish to make clear that I recognize that Aquinas was a theologian, and perhaps more importantly that he was a poet—a metaphysical poet, in the words of Sertillanges.2 The great literary critic Hugh Kenner, reflecting on the Pange Linga, describes Thomas’s poetic virtuosity as taking language to the very limits of 1 A version of this paper was originally given at the Metaphysics Colloquium of the Institute for Saint Anselm Studies at Saint Anselm College, June 5-6, 2013.
    [Show full text]
  • Empedocles 8
    ONE EMPEDOCLES 8 EMPEDOCLES OLYMPIAN Empedocles’ dive into Etna has fascinated scholars, poets, and artists from ancient to modern times. Diogenes Laertius was so taken with it, in fact, that he gives two versions of the event. Biographically speaking, the story becomes even more fascinating as it becomes ever more clear that Emped- ocles was destined to leave the world precisely in this manner, his fate determined by biographers and historians and ultimately through his own writing. Empedocles’ philosophical works, the Purifications and the Phys- ics, were considered raw autobiographical data fit for the gleaning, and the manner in which Empedocles’ philosophy was transformed into his biography reveals more about ancient biographers, such as Diogenes Laer- tius, than it does about Empedocles. Out of the philosophy itself grew a legend that has haunted and intrigued us through the years. There was a tendency in the ancient world, by no means restricted to the biographers, to approach any given text as biographical.1 The poets were favorite subjects of this approach: Homer’s life was pieced together 12 Empedocles 13 from the Iliad and the Odyssey; Aeschylus was presumed to have fought at Salamis because he describes that battle in his Persians.2 The same is true of the philosophers in general, and for Empedocles and other archaic philosophers specifically, because of their use of the first-person “I” in their work. For our purposes, the pursuit of a biographical tradition that emerges from a philosopher’s work, the life of Empedocles is particularly instructive. First, because Empedocles was such a popular figure for the biographers, they have given us an enormous amount of biography to work with.
    [Show full text]
  • 12 Soothing Lyres and Epodai Music Therapy and the Cases of Orpheus
    Antonietta Provenza Soothing Lyres and epodai: Music Therapy and the Cases of Orpheus, Empedocles and David The Charms of Music: Harmonia, Music Therapy and Musical Ethos The psychagogic efficacy of music, namely its power to act on the soul in such a way as to influence characters and behaviors, and even health,1 is based in ancient Greek thought on a likeness between soul and musical harmony.2 This idea involves also a “harmonious” order distinguishing human physis as being a part of the world order (kosmos), as it is possible to notice at least since the time of the pre-Socratics. From many of the surviving fragments of their works3 we learn of the shift of the term harmonia4 (Bonaventura-Meyer 1932; Lippman 1963; Lambropoulou 1995–1996; Franklin 2002) from material aspects of human life 1 *I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Joan Goodnick Westenholz and to Professors Yossi Maurey and Edwin Seroussi for the opportunity to present this paper and for their interest in my study of ancient Greek music. I would like also to thank Professors Salvatore Nicosia, Andrew D. Barker, John C. Franklin, Angelo Meriani, Eleonora Rocconi and the anonymous reviewer of this paper for their observations. See Anderson 1966; West 1992: 31–33 (quoting many references concerning the healing and soothing properties of music); West 2000: 51–68; Barker 2005. 2 This idea was discussed extensively in ancient Greece at least since the early Pythagoreans. Among the many evidence concerning the topic of soul and musical harmony, I mention here only the well-known passage in Plato’s Phaedo (85 e4–86 a3) where Simmias refers to the notion of soul as a harmonious blend of the elements composing the human body (verisimilarly recall- ing the physiological theories and the notion of isonomia of the Pythagorean physician Alcmae- on of Croton, see 24B4 DK = Aët.
    [Show full text]
  • The Search for Immortality in Archaic Greek Myth
    The Search for Immortality in Archaic Greek Myth Diana Helen Burton PhD University College, University of London 1996 ProQuest Number: 10106847 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10106847 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis considers the development of the ideology of death articulated in myth and of theories concerning the possibility, in both mythical and 'secular' contexts, of attaining some form of immortality. It covers the archaic period, beginning after Homer and ending with Pindar, and examines an amalgam of (primarily) literary and iconographical evidence. However, this study will also take into account anthropological, archaeological, philosophical and other evidence, as well as related theories from other cultures, where such evidence sheds light on a particular problem. The Homeric epics admit almost no possibility of immortality for mortals, and the possibility of retaining any significant consciousness of 'self' or personal identity after death and integration into the underworld is tailored to the poems rather than representative of any unified theory or belief. The poems of the Epic Cycle, while lacking Homer's strict emphasis on human mortality, nonetheless show little evidence of the range and diversity of types of immortality which develops in the archaic period.
    [Show full text]