Dialogue
'Do you think me a well-read man?'
'Certainly,' replied Zi-gong. 'Aren't you?'
'Not at all,' said Confucius. 'I have simply grasped one thread which links
up all the rest.'
The
Immediacy of Rhetoric
Finally, and most significantly for my purposes here in defining immediacy,
just as Foucault's insistence that "discourse" must be examined
not as a continuous activity but must be explored at its points of rupture,
as and when it occurs, rhetorical situations should not be examined as contained
and completed "wholes" but as tenuous, fluid, and potentially explosive
events.
Teaching
Interuptions
"The enemy for both Socrates and the younger Plato, was the authoritarianism
of one-way discourse, whether poetic or rhetorical. The philosophical reaction
to such one-way spellbinding could only be to try to destroy the spell by
interrupting, disrupting, subverting it with questions"
Join Steven D. Krause, Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University, in a synchronus electronic exchange. We will be chatting to Steve online about computers as tools and contexts of rhetorical practice.