Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is like jumping in a pool fin the first days of the summer: there’s nothing particularly new to the feeling, yet it still feels… fresh. There’s a feeling of unfamiliarity, of peculiarity, of curiosity. There’s something keeping the viewer from being fully comfortable. Perhaps it’s knowing … Continue reading Stories We Tell: Race, Hermeneutics, and Public Memory Formation in ‘Get Out’
Below is a conference proposal I'm submitting to The Popular Culture and Pedagogy: Twitter Conference taking place this upcoming November entirely on the social media site Twitter. It should be a wonderful, and unique, way to learn with and from others in a trans-disciplinary forum! Submission Proposal: #HashtagHorror: Black Mirror, Shaming Culture, and Ethics … Continue reading #HashtagHorror: Conference Proposal
Contact with the Outside: Alienation, Masks and the Exteriority of Rhetoric A definition of the word rhetoric suggested by Walter Ong’s book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, though never explicitly named, could be argued to read contact with the outside. Indeed, for Ong and … Continue reading Some Thoughts on Ong and Havelock
Today I talked to some Clemson graduate students about the arts of beginning well and ending well in academic writing genres (WAC). I'm incredibly happy to have been a part of such an amazing event put on by Clemson's GRAD360 program, and to have had the chance to talk with such brilliant folks. Writing across … Continue reading Hooks & Sinkers: Writing Effective Introductions and Conclusions in Academic Writing
Simulacrum and Power: Perception, Imagination, Reality It seems we are always witnesses. Forbidden Planet tells us many things. It tells us that there are worlds behind us that we can never access, that we can only grasp at. It tells us there are worlds beyond us, that we again, are only capable of grasping at. … Continue reading Forbidden Planet and Film Rhetoric
One could certainly be forgiven for asking the customary question in response to the title of this book review: what does a French sociologist and anthropologist, with no training in composition and seemingly no knowledge of rhetoric studies’ existence as a discipline, have to contribute to the field of academic and … Continue reading Book Review: Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition
Words Are Not Wind: Sandbox Writing (Channeling Michel Foucault) This will not be an academic response. There is no argument here. Rather, it’s an “artistic playing-around-with” some of the thinkers we’ve been reading. Think of it like a sandbox. Someone painted some letters in the sand last night, and I’ve sat … Continue reading Words Are Not Wind: Sandbox Writing
Teaching with Mirrors Fall 2018 Clemson University This semester has been dominated by an at-times overwhelming need for balance: balance between coursework and teaching, between video-making and lesson-planning, between writing and grading. Ultimately, the choice (a false one, as I’ll detail in a moment) seemed to be between success in my own … Continue reading Into 2019: Teaching with Mirrors (A Pedagogy Reflection)
The following was originally written as a weekly course post on Roman Rhetorics for RCID 8010 at Clemson University. --- How does language think? The question is too large. A different question would read how does Latin think?, and then would perhaps add on, additionally, at the end so … Continue reading How Does Language Think?
Attic Hellebores: Aristotle, Excess and the Reticent Sedation of Kairos Aristotle has been expounded time and time again as a forebear of western thinking. Indeed, western rhetoric and philosophy owe an unpayable debt to the primordial systematizer, the inventor of disciplinarity, the constructor of the most developed epistemologies of ancient Hellenic … Continue reading Attic Hellebores: Aristotle, Excess and the Reticent Sedation of Kairos
