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9/21: Rhetoric as Meaning-Making, or How Our Bodies Become/Create/Make Argument
“Bodies matter to knowing, meaning-making and interaction. So rhetoric must be about bodies as much as minds, and about the material as much as the conceptual.” Doug Downs, from “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making,” p. 463 Downs’s quotation above connects bodies to meaning to our interactions with others. This might be a new way for us to understand how we communicate in the world. To help us think through this complex set of connections, we’re going to use Corder’s and Downs’s texts to think about how our counterstory drafts are making arguments and, more generally, how public arguments are made. You’ll get into groups to think about…
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9/19: Narrative as Argument
Today we’ll start with a round-robin reading of our Counterstory Assignment. Each of us will choose a couple sentences to read aloud to the group and we’ll go around, reading and listening, reserving any feedback until the end. We share patterns and reflections after each member of our community reads. We’ll then access “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” by Jim Corder, available on our course Blackboard site. Corder’s purpose in this article is define argument, but his intent is to offer a different definition than that proposed by other scholars. Rather than stating a position, acknowledging a counterargument, and proposing a solution, Corder proposes that “argument is emergence toward…
