Seminar leaders:
Debra Hawhee, Penn State University
Vanessa Beasley, Vanderbilt University
It took a few millennia, but rhetoric is finally coming to its—or to the—senses. Or has it been in touch with sensation all along, just beneath its hyper-rational surface? In this seminar, participants will re-examine rhetorical theory in relation to sensation, defined preliminarily (and broadly) as feelings emanating from perceptual contact. One of the seminar’s lead concepts will be the “sensorium,” derived from Marshall McLuhan’s mid-twentieth-century writing but also stretching back to Darwin, More, and others. The concept simultaneously evokes sensation and sensory ecologies, mediating technologies and bodies. Much as the concept of the sensorium refuses to isolate the senses from each other, the seminar will focus specifically on interanimating methods used so far in sense-based areas of visual, sonic, haptic, and even olfactory rhetoric. We will necessarily explore the political dimensions of sense-based rhetoric and venture into cultural studies to think about “public feelings” as a potentially useful approach to rhetorical studies.
This seminar, then, will blend historical, theoretical, and explicitly methodological approaches to the subject at hand. Participants can expect to do the following:
Questions should be directed to Debra Hawhee, hawhee@psu.edu