A Number of Words

On the mulish bus
going to the conference,
a mathematics professor
said to a scholar of rhetoric,
"One day you'll
realize that everything
is about numbers."
The rhetorician replied,
"Thank you for telling
me that using words."


hans ostrom 2019

Wittgenstein's Progress

After trying to reduce
philosophy to mathematics,
Wittgenstein went on
to explore a forest
of rhetoric and psychology,
of banter and brain.


hans ostrom 2018

How To Fix the Humanities in Higher Education

It’s a true fact that in the U.S., the humanities division of higher education is in trouble.  Students are voting with their feet and staying away from history and English and other humanistic venues.

I’d like to take a moment to address the problem in a way that most humanities professors and administrators do not seem to emphasize and, in some cases, reject.  It’s called practicality.

In one practical move, the humanities need to go back to classical basics, except I’m not talking about teaching Greek and Latin and rehashing what used to be the grand narrative of Western Civilization.  Many Greek and Roman thinkers and teachers (the categories are not necessarily exclusive) were empiricists and nascent social scientists.  Aristotle’s writings on rhetoric reveal a mind keenly aware of how public discourse functions, how political arguments get put together, and so on.  Whereas many English Departments and colleges farm out the teaching of rhetoric to graduate students and adjuncts, Aristotle embraced it as essential.  I doubt if he’d have much time for most of what the Modern Language Association represents. 

At my own university, the English Department decided to manipulate the notion of “writing across the curriculum,” which was never meant as a replacement for first-year composition, and have the faculty at-large teach in the form of “first-year seminars.”  One problem, of course, is that writing really isn’t getting taught the way it should be, in most cases.  I don’t blame the faculty who have taken on the seminars.  I blame English for jettisoning their responsibility—not just English at my school, but English across the profession.  A second problem is that those students who once became interested in the humanities by means of a first-year composition course now never have the opportunity. A third problem is that enrollments in English courses have plummeted. Of course. 

So my first suggestion is to re-embrace rhetoric, not just at the first-year composition level, but also with new courses in public and political discourse.  In an age when these two areas of communication are undergoing revolutions, English departments are sitting on their hands.  It’s ludicrous.

My second suggestion is to find out, in detail, why students are walking and wheeling away from humanities.  Hire social scientists, if necessary, or even if it’s not necessary, for we know how humanities types love their confirmation bias. I know I do. 

I’d be delighted to be proved wrong by data, but my moderately informed guess is that students will take ethnic studies classes in history and literature even if most of them may not choose to major in such disciplines.  African American and Latino Studies classes at my university continue to attract a lot of students, even as enrollments in English plummet. It makes sense, at least on first glance, for just as public/political discourse is undergoing a revolution, conflict and cooperation between and within ethnic groups is another area undergoing revolution.  Why wouldn’t students—of all ethnicities—energized by Black Lives Matter and related events and conditions be interested in ethnic studies courses that dovetail with these phenomena?

Think of students as citizens.  That is how Aristotle and Quintillian thought of them—if you feel the need to seek classical approval.  The original seven liberal arts were rooted in civil practicality.  That’s why they included arithmetic, rhetoric, and music.  How beneficial it would be for students to learn how the blues, for example, massively influenced later genres of popular music but also the American culture at large. Ethnic studies courses—in a variety of humanities departments—think of students as citizens, too, he wrote, climbing on his hobby horse one last time.

Yes, that’s right, I’m invoking the call for relevant courses that arose in the 1960s.  No, I’m not suggesting that colleges base their humanities curricula on whatever students deem relevant.  I am suggesting that colleges look at what’s happening in society, how young people are responding to some of what’s happening, and adjust accordingly.  Besides, ethnic studies have come of age.  Texts are more widely available than ever.  The scholarship and pedagogy are seasoned. 

If, in English, it’s creative writing students want to take, then offer it—in the forms of poetry, fiction, and screenwriting, among others.  Offer playwriting.  Teach journalism. Teach blogging. Teach magazine-writing, including online magazines (obviously).  These are all opportunities to refine critical thinking and sharpen writing in general.  If you, personally, recoil from such courses, then hire someone else to teach them.  Keep teaching what you teach, but get out of the way. Please.

I don’t want to drift too far from the main point of my second suggestion, however.  Get empirical. Find out what students are interested in academically and why.  Make some adjustments based on the data. You don’t need to burn your dissertation (although you should stop trying to teach it) or give up on your pet critical and cultural-studies theories.  Just suspend your beliefs and find out what’s really going on. If necessary, respect your youngers, a radical concept, I know. 

Finally, I’d suggest reaching out across disciplines and campuses to find unlikely partners.  When I served briefly as the director of the writing center at U.C. Davis (about a hundred years ago), we were interested in pairing upper-level writing courses with courses across the curriculum.  I  made cold-calls to many departments and asked if they’d be interested in a partnership.  I vividly remember picking up the desk phone and calling someone in in wildlife science.  Pretty soon a writing course taught to students in that field materialized.

I’m not suggesting that anyone ought to turn the cold call into the primary mode of reviving the humanities, although it couldn’t hurt.  It’s probably more practical and workable for people in the humanities to reach out across their own campuses, to walk or wheel or drive to other departments and start with a tabula rasa, asking how you might collaborate with business departments & schools, education departments, engineering, sciences, and social sciences.  Teach all kinds of professionally applicable writing and socially vibrant literature courses. 

Be peripatetic. Get over yourselves.  Get out there and mix with students and colleagues.  Attend conferences outside your specialty and outside humanities.  Go on the road, see what’s what.  Ask questions (not rhetorical ones).  Shut up and listen. Revive the humanities brick by empirical, grounded, socially alert, sometimes old fashioned (rhetoric), innovative brick.  

Phrasing Today

How shall we phrase this day?
It has its own rhetoric.
Our arguments are largely choral
and decorative. Vowels

of sunlight stream between
consonantal trees and bathe
guttural buildings. Sky is a blue
theme; air, a forum.



hans ostrom 2015

It's Going To Be All Right?

People, including parents and friends,
like to say, "It's going to be all right,"
as if they knew. It's not a bad rhetorical
move--pretending you know when you don't.
Where would we be without such
rituals of speech?

"What goes around, comes around," people like
to say. Something about Karma, which
in the U.S. has become a girl's name. Something
about a belief in a force or entity
that controls the game--a pit-boss, say,
in Vegas: no, that's not quite right.

Or maybe it's the deep order of fractal chaos?
It has to be more than wishful thinking.
Doesn't it? It's going to be all right?


I said to a woman once, concerning a mutual
friend who'd been shafted by greasy academic
pigs in tweed, "What goes around, comes around."
(What I really meant was: they'll get theirs.)
She said, "No, it doesn't. Even if it comes around,
it's too goddamn late. These fuckers hurt her,
and they will get away with it."

True enough. Meaning: true. It's in fact the
lesson I took away from Hitler's reign, slavery,
Jim Crow, lynching, assassinations of MLK
and JFK, Black justice v. White justice,
the rise of worms in organization, U.S.-
sponsored coups, and on; and on and on:
they will get away with it.

Even if a dictator's hung,
the damage is already done.

I have said to people in trouble,
"It's going to be all right." It isn't
exactly a lie. It isn't the truth.
It's something we say. It's something
those without knowledge or power
feel as though they ought to say
just to keep the illusion of
an ongoing game alive.

These things we say to each other
that aren't exactly accurate
are nonetheless important
evidently. Tell me. Tell me,
stranger, tell me, friend; tell
me it's going to be all right.




hans ostrom 2013

Reaganomics and Its Metaphors

A link to an older post about the rhetoric and images of "Reaganomics," from  my other blog, which concerns politics and language:

http://politicsandlanguage.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/reaganomics-in-the-portmanteau/

The post's title is "Reaganomics in the Portmanteau"

Audible Is Laudable

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Audible Is Laudable

A crisper whisper would have been
audible to you. You wouldn't have
said, "What?" The whisperer wouldn't
have then withdrawn, mortified. You
wouldn't have made all those bad
guesses: Did she say, "Wild swans
used to be white, of course" or
"Michael wants you to rewrite
the reports"? or something else
entirely? Why had she desired
to whisper? You can't ask her. She
has moved away from you to another
part of the room, is conversing
garrulously. Others look at you.
Again you say, "What?" but for
another purpose. You say it clearly.
They hear you. They say nothing.


Copyright 2009

Aristotle's Topical Ointment

(image: likeness of Aristotle)



Aristotle, who seems to have been able to understand everything about everything, helped to establish the field of rhetoric, as well as the fields of science, philosophy, politics, literary criticism, and what we might call "college teaching." (All in a day's work.) Indeed, the volume we refer to now as On Rhetoric, by Aristotle, is composed in large measure of students' notes of Ari's lectures. It's a fabulous book, if you like that sort of thing.

With regard to rhetoric, Aristotle came up with, or at least formally defined, "topics of invention." The idea was that a rhetor (writer, speaker), when approaching a new topic, could approach it equipped with categories and get going more quickly on the task of discovering ("inventing") what he or she would have to say, ultimately, on the subject.

Nowadays, the term "stock issues" is one variation on "topics of invention." In this case, "stock" doesn't mean stereotypical; it means something closer to "well known issues" related to a subject.

For example, if you're getting ready to argue, civilly, with someone about abortion, you can be sure that the issue of when life begins will come up, as will the issue of whether a fetus is a separate life or part of a woman's body (or both). I often tell my composition-students that arguments about abortion effectively end before they begin because neither side is ever going to agree on fundamental points (or stock issues). If you can't agree on "when life begins," it is unlikely that you are going to agree about abortion. In some cases, it's better simply to agree to disagree, as opposed to wasting time staking out familiar territory, getting angry, and so on. At the same time, if you want to persist in writing an argument about abortion, you can use the "stock issues" to acknowledge the "opponent's" point of view and summarize them fairly, unless of course you are a pundit on TV, in which case you will want to be unfair and loud.

A distinct option is to try to find common ground elsewhere in the topic. For example, could people who disagree about abortion agree on sex-education? Maybe such agreement is not likely, but it's not impossible; it's not impossible because the argument hasn't stalled on something like "when life begins."

Another venerable example of "topics of invention" are the journalist's questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Go into a story with these questions in mind, get answers to them, and you're on your way to writing a good news story.

During National Poetry Month, when we're supposed to be writing a poem a day (I usually do so anyway--more's the pity), I thought I'd reach back to some of the oldest prompts in the figurative book and steal something from rhetoric to use on poetry (Aristotle would approve, I'm convinced; he was comfortable with both arts).


Topical Poem

Who is the one you are. Good luck discovering
What makes up your Who. In the meantime, interact with
When, which is any moment you're alive, and with
Where, a space full of stuff!
How you interact is only partly up to you.
Why any of this is, is the Mystery.


I invite you to write a poem based on these venerable topics of invention, and I think the odds are quite high that your poem will surpass the one above (ya think?). Use Dr. Aristotle's Topical Ointment!

And by the way, isn't "ointment" just a fabulous word?

Natural Rhetoric

Natural Rhetoric

After the cat goes outside, two
perched crows open black beaks
wide to release loud sounds
suggesting outrage, warning,
threat--crow-rhetoric, mechanical,
never ornate. The cat looks up,
sees birds in feline-vision, and makes
cat-noises, nothing as loud or dire
as a warning, more of a refined
complaint, really--aristocratic.

After the cat runs and hides
in shrubbery, we make human
sounds, calling her "name," making
nonsense-noises, expressing
pretend-anger, muttering real
frustration. We're convincing
ourselves of something, not sure
what. The crows leave, the cat
reappears, we pick up the cat
and carry it into the house and talk
to each other about what just happened.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom