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Civic Rhetoric: Rereading Isocrates for The A (RE)NEW(ED) CIVIC RHETORIC: REREADING ISOCRATES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COMPOSITION CLASSROOM by D. ALEXIS HART (Under the Direction of Michelle Ballif) ABSTRACT Arguing for a renewal of Isocrates’ pedagogical techniques, I revise the first-year college writing course and reinvent it as a course in which students not only learn how to produce “academic” writing and to critique or appreciate extant texts but also learn how to use their writing to become active, engaged citizens in communities beyond the classroom and workplace. My proposal incorporates many of the innovative practices of existing composition pedagogies while adding and emphasizing the (re)new(ed) Isocratean concepts of public performance, political deliberation, and social action. I begin by revisiting the history of how the rhetorically based liberal arts curriculum in American higher education evolved into a curriculum based on the pursuit of a professional degree in a major discipline. I demonstrate how the Isocratean goal of training students to become active, engaged public citizens largely has been replaced by the practice of training students to become individual wage earners and how the Isocratean model of a broadly based and extensive study of public and civic discourse generally has been replaced by a one- or two-semester course in “first-year composition.” Next, to construct a clearer picture of how Isocrates taught and how he developed his pedagogical practices, I examine Isocrates’ educational background and his unique ability to synthesize what he considers to be the most useful parts of previous and competing pedagogies. Unlike many of his predecessors, he did not view discourse simply as a technical competency, a way of conveying an already existing reality, or as an uncontrollable force. Instead, he understood speaking and writing to be practical ways of generating, organizing, and circulating ideas and of making judgments, which makes him an excellent model for us to emulate. I conclude by offering suggestions for applying Isocratean pedagogical practices in twenty-first century composition classrooms. I contend that students should be given more chances to produce and distribute discourses that might be read, considered, and acted upon outside the classroom, that explicitly attempt to contribute to and change what counts as knowledge, and that offer suggestions about what acts should be taken, what policies implemented, and what judgments made. INDEX WORDS: Isocrates, Rhetoric, Composition, Civic Discourse, Public Discourse, Pedagogy, First-year Writing A (RE)NEW(ED) CIVIC RHETORIC: REREADING ISOCRATES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COMPOSITION CLASSROOM by D. ALEXIS HART B.A., The University of Rochester, 1993 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 D. Alexis Hart All Rights Reserved A (RE)NEW(ED) CIVIC RHETORIC: REREADING ISOCRATES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COMPOSITION CLASSROOM by D. ALEXIS HART Major Professor: Michelle Ballif Committee: Christy Desmet Michael G. Moran Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2003 iv DEDICATION With thanks for the love and support of my parents, Bud and Debby Hart, and for Michael Crowley, without whom . v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee: Christy Desmet, Michael G. Moran, and especially Michelle Ballif, my major professor. Each of them played an integral part in the production of this text and in my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. In the fall of 1997, Mike Moran was kind enough to let a non-matriculated Navy Supply Corps Lieutenant enroll in and receive graduate credit for an undergraduate course in the eighteenth-century novel—one of only two night classes offered that quarter and my first graduate class at UGA. As fate would have it, the only graduate course offered in the evening the next quarter was Christy Desmet’s “Composition Pedagogy” class. Having no idea at first what I was getting into, I soon realized that I had kairotically discovered the area of concentration for my graduate work. Although no graduate courses were offered at night the following quarter, I asked Michelle Ballif if she would be willing to participate in a directed reading in literary theory with me, and she accepted. She both challenged and inspired me, and we soon established a rewarding professional rapport; the rest, as they say, is history. I would also like to thank Nelson Hilton, who, in both his position as Graduate Coordinator and as Head of the English Department, has given me numerous opportunities to advance in the profession and to experiment with technology. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Park Hall “Lady Rhetoricians.” All of them (men and women) offered many words of advice and encouragement, and they all vi served as insightful sounding boards for my ideas. Angela Mitchell and Laura McGrath deserve special thanks for being both superlative colleagues and good friends. Mary Miller and Robert Rhudy have been my surrogate family in Athens. They are a constant source of solace, joy, and good meals, as well as reliable pet-sitters. Having them here has made all the difference. I am deeply grateful for the continued love and support of my own family: Mama and Daddy, Maryelizabeth, John, and Emily. Many thanks to the members of the extended Hart, Mariotte, Ferns, Crowley, and McGrath families, too. Most importantly, I want to thank Mike Crowley, for he brings out the very best in me. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v PREFACE: Rereading and Rewriting History................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION: A Call for Isocratean, Context-Driven, Public Performances .............1 CHAPTER 1 Isocrates’ Legacy and Loss in American Higher Education.............................48 2 Isocrates’ Hybrid Pedagogy: Synthesizing Poetry and Politics, Mechanics and Morality, Ceremonial Display and Civic Duty.................................................88 3 Alongside and Contrary To: How Isocrates Places Himself Against the Ancient Sophists and Philosophers ..............................................................................128 4 An Applied Isocratean Curriculum.................................................................180 CONCLUSION: Following Isocrates’ Lead: Embracing New Communication Technologies........................................................................................228 ENDNOTES ....................................................................................................................238 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED............................................................................262 APPENDIX A: Sample List of Assignments...................................................................285 APPENDIX B: Sample Assessment Guidelines..............................................................290 Preface Rereading and Rewriting History As I embark upon my project to rewrite Isocrates’ place in the history of rhetoric and composition and to apply his pedagogical methods to twenty-first century composition courses, I wish to acknowledge James Berlin’s assertion that “any examination of rhetoric [. .] can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims” (“Rhetoric and Ideology” 477). I have also taken into consideration John Poulakos’s point that any discussion of the past “constitutes an interpretive construction from a particular perspective of the present” (Sophistical Rhetoric 3). In other words, I am aware that I am strategically motivated in my reading and appropriation of Isocrates’ texts by my particular historical consequences, my own ideological construction, and my specific political agenda. Through my situated and strategic application of Isocrates’ texts and pedagogical techniques to the present and my projection of them into the future, I am indicating that I am not interested primarily in preserving his texts as treasures of the past or simply hearkening back to “the good old days” of ancient Greece,1 but that I am taking advantage of the way that readings of texts can change based on the context and time during which they are read. Furthermore, as a “(re)constructionist” historian,2 I acutely realize that I cannot “disregard, untroubled, the distance separating our times, our society, and our culture from that of the ancients” (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 2). For instance, I want to acknowledge up front that the more obvious of the troublesome attitudes of fifth century Athens and of Isocrates himself include elitism, support of slavery, degradation of women, and barbarization of non-Greeks. While I certainly do not advocate any of ix these positions, I submit that the differences between contemporary America and ancient Athens, as well as between Isocrates and me, are not sufficient grounds for dismissing the contemporary applicability of Isocrates’ lessons and pedagogical strategies altogether. Instead, I maintain that Isocrates’ works can be reread and strategically adapted to the twenty-first century writing classroom despite what we recognize as these appalling flaws in his thinking. I also want to acknowledge the fact that I have not read Isocrates’
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