Emerging
I thought it might be time to emerge, if only for a brief while. And since I am emerging, I might as well do so in grand style. So, for the many of you who don’t yet know–and if you don’t yet know please don’t take your not knowing as anything personal–I’ve accepted a tenure-track position at Creighton University. Among the number of reasons I’m excited to be heading to Creighton includes the fact that it was while Director of Creighton’s Freshman English Program that Edward PJ Corbett wrote Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, which includes this passage:
The fourth part of rhetoric was memoria (Greek mnēmē), concerned with the memorizing of speeches. Of all the five parts of rhetoric, memoria was the one that received the least amount of attention in the rhetoric books. The reasons for the neglect of this aspect of rhetoric is probably that not much can be said, in a theoretical way, about the process of memorizing; and after rhetoric came to be concerned mainly with written discourse, there was no further need to deal with memorizing. This process did receive, however, some attention in the schools of rhetoric set up by the sophists. [. . .] The courses that one sometimes sees advertised in the newspapers or magazines—“I Can Give You a Retentive Memory in Thirty Days”—are modern manifestations of this division of rhetoric. There will be no consideration in this book of this aspect of rhetoric. (27-28)
As I’ve said before, while I’ve gotten and will continue to get a lot of mileage out of this passage, I don’t want to come down on Corbett too hard. This was, after all, published a year before Yates’ The Art of Memory. And yet, if the compositional nature of memoria should have resonance anywhere, it should have been at a Jesuit institution where monastic rhetoric, in the form of the Spiritual Exercises, was, and still is, a living tradition.
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Twitter Feed- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
- One class down and one to go.
- The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes http://nblo.gs/7sqXb
congratulations on the new job, J!
on memory, over at side effects, there is some interesting talk of memory in/through the body
Thank you!
I’ll never, ever, ever regret going to a Jesuit school as an undergrad. Congrats on what sounds like a cool job. -Bill
Bill, thank you. My first experience with the Jesuits was when I started the doctoral program at Saint Louis University, but I have to say that I’ve been quite pleased.
Congratulations, belatedly!
Mike,
Thank you!
[...] with situational depression and the end of a 19-year relationship in just a few posts, “Emerging” and “Year in Review, both in 2008. The lack of blogging during 2009 is a direct result [...]