En Memoria -- Joel E. Siegel, Film Critic

R.I.P. -- (1943-2007)

Remembering Antonio Aguilar

R.I.P. -- Antonio Aguilar (1919-2007)

Quote of the Day

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."

~ Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park

Memoria as a "Compositional Art"

In The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, Mary Carruthers credits the work of British historian Frances Yates for her groundbreaking work on memory; however, addresses the limitations in her focus and emphasis on memory as only treating it as an instrument for storing information.

Carruthers expands the scholarship initiated by Yates by stating:

"Memoria is most usefully thought of as a compositional art. The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now reverse as 'imagination' and 'creativity'"

Thus, memory is not simply about being a "warehouse" for storing facts and information, but a heuristic that fosters critical thinking. In reading theories about invention, I wonder to what degree invention has been conflated with memory (historically). I believe that memory is critical in the first phase of writing when students are encouraged to confront a "friction" in their experience, or a "puzzle," which will help them to transition into inquiry, the second stage of writing.

Memoria is considered "too personal" or "intimate" to allow it to stand alonside or prior to invention as a tool for composing.

Just some thoughts....more later.

Isidore of Seville's "Etymologies II"

Isidore of Seville's (c. 560-636) definition of rhetoric in Etymologies II:

"Rhetoric is the science of speaking well on civil questions; eloquence is the flow of words, designed to persuade people to the just and good."

This quote is featured in The Rhetoric Canon, edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen, who says the following about the seventh-century late antique/early medieval author:

"He defined rhetoric as training in citizenship in which practice in eloquence and ethics are joined for the benefit of society. As canonizer and canonized, Isidore contributed to the history of rhetoric and rhetorical practice by restating and so disseminating in brief form what the 'canonical' rhetoricians and rhetorical theorists of antiquity--Gorgias, Aristotle, Hermagoras, Cicero and Quintilian--had earlier argued" (13).

Schildgen adds that Isidore literally created a rhetorical canon by not only defining rhetoric and recording its history, mostly drawn from the Greeks, but also by creating a particular list of rhetors and connected the study of eloquence with law and mapped out tropes, which made Isidore the "authorative source for rhetorical practice" (13).

From what I have read, Isidore was born in and died in Spain. Interesting that he is not part of Bizzell and Herzeberg's The Rhetorical Tradition. Hmmmmm.....????

Hasta la proxima...

Citation: The Rhetoric Canon. Brenda Deen Schildgen, ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1997).

PS

Currently listening to:



Ely Guerra's "Sweet & Sour. Hot Y Spicy"

(Yes, I'll marry you, Ely.)

Quote of the Day

“Do you think that a mere dilettante like me could recite from memory in a manner worthy of him a speech that Lysias, the best of our writers, took such time and trouble to compose?

Far from it—though actually I would rather be able to do that than come into a large fortune!"

~ Phaedrus

Recent Books on Memory, Rhetoric and History

The following are some recent and older sources on memory, rhetoric, and history/historia. Enjoy.

Art in Crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory by Amy Helen Kirschke (Indiana University Press, 2006).

Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series) by Marouf A., Jr. Hasian (Michigan State University Press, 2006).





More Than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music by Michael P. Graves & David Fillingim, eds. (Mercer University Press, 2004).
***
Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction by Michael Lane Bruner (University of South Carolina Press, 2002).
***
Baudelaire and The Art of Memory by James A. Hiddleston. (Oxford University Press, 1999).
***
Writer's Book of Memory: An Interdisciplinary Study for Writing Teachers by Janine Rider (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., September 1995).

Memorial Culture in the Middle Ages

I want to share the following quote from Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture because it made me think about the “History of Rhetoric” as a “text” in Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition—which is, in itself, a mnemonic of sorts used in teaching the history of rhetoric.

“It is my contention that medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary. This distinction certainly involves technologies—mnemotechnique and printing—but it is not confined to them. For the valuing of memoria persisted long after the book technology itself had changed. That is why the fact of books in themselves, which were much more available in the late Middle Ages than ever before, did not profoundly disturb the essential value of memory training until many centuries had passed. Indeed the very purpose of a book is differently understood in a memorial culture like that of the Middle Ages than it is today.

A book is not necessarily the same thing as a text. ‘Texts’ are the material out of which human beings make ‘literature.’ For us, texts only come in books, and so the distinction between the two is blurred and even lost. But, in a memorial culture, a ‘book’ is only one way among several to remember a ‘text,’ to provision and cue one’s memory with “dicta et facta memorabilia.” So a book is itself a mnemonic, among many other functions it can also have.” (8)

Citation:

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Check out what Mike Duncan, Rhet/Comp doctoral student at the University of Memphis in Rhet/Comp, has to say about Carruthers' libro on memoria.

P.S.

Currently listening to:


"The Police" (2 disc compilation) (tickets for Denver show still avail)