Students always benefit from more rhetorical analysis. This is a simple statement that our disciplinary identities, the connotations that automatically form in our brains as rhetoricians and writing teachers, perhaps might function to cloud. What I mean to say here is not that (or not only that) students benefit from more rhetorical analysis assignments being … Continue reading Re-Framing RetroActive Composition
Despite a frustrating lack of any palpable challenge to Socrates' naive, limited essentialism, Plato's Gorgias is of undeniable interest to any rhetorician even beyond the explicit discussion of oratory and sophistry contained in its opening discussion. The dialogue is well known in composition and rhetoric for its inaugural debate in which Socrates utilizes his famed method … Continue reading Probing Democracy: Gorgias, Public Rhetoric and the Electrate Polus
Should first-year writing students choose their own essay topics? I’d like to take some time this morning to venture an interesting take on this question that has been turning around in my head for a few months now. Long a topic of boisterous debate within composition and rhetoric, the role of student … Continue reading Should Students Choose Their Own Writing Topics?: A Mindful Approach
This is lifted from a creative piece I wrote a while back. It fits the mood of this Fourth of July well, when my mind drifts into fantasies of deserts, golden hayfields and cacti caked in the red glow of sunset--essentially anything recent political developments haven't infringed as of yet (as hard as Scott Pruitt … Continue reading A Prose Poem for the Fourth of July…
Writing and Mindfulness I first encountered meditation during the spring semester of my senior year of college. A group of twenty or so of us sat in a two-tiered circle, red and blue light shimmering inside from the interfaith center’s stained glass windows, as a philosophy professor/smiling mystic led us in breathing exercises. These exercises … Continue reading Writing and Mindfulness
Ambedo JD Richter To be successful in Millennial America without sacrificing soul and artistry—that was the goal, the tightrope to be walked in a concrete land of parking garages and traffic lights, where everything is bought and sold, where a person’s selfhood is bartered for attention and defined to the outside world as a collection … Continue reading Ambedo (A Chapter from A Novel Written Long Ago…)
Lately I’ve been re-reading an old favorite I first read midway through college, right when I was just beginning to locate myself as a writer: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book raises a number of issues I won’t even begin to detail in this post, but I wanted to pay … Continue reading Writing, Composition and Deliberate Living
The following is an edited and re-worked excerpt of a seminar paper I wrote for a 21st-Century Fiction class at the University at Buffalo in the spring of 2016. The suburbanization of the post-war United States proved a bounty for corporations just beginning to realize the means to tighten their grasp on the key to … Continue reading DeLillo, Brand Names and Post-Postmodernism
Peter Handke's memoir "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" details the life and eventual suicide of his mother, which he attempts to portray in the narrative as having been an "exemplary case" of voluntary death. This is my response to the dense, sparse narrative in which Handke refuses sentimentality and resists analysis; the text ventures into places rarely … Continue reading Peter Handke’s “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”
Jacob Richter 