Today I've been poring over pages and pages of past preliminary exam questions and devising my own to send to my committee for consideration. Most of the questions are derived from the old exams, slightly tweaked to accommodate my interests. I wrote a few of them myself. Any suggestions? [Edited to add links to the reading lists: rhetorical theory and tech comm theory and research. Gender and CMC list is coming.]

Rhetorical Theory

1. Consider Cicero's De Oratore as a response to Plato's critique in the Gorgias.
2. What does Cicero mean by “eloquence”? Does the concept have implications for the understanding and teaching of rhetoric today?
3. Select two canonical works by classical male theorists, e.g. Gorgias's “Encomium of Helen,” Plato's Gorgias or Phaedrus, Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore, and indicate how you would teach them from a feminist perspective. In each case, indicate why you are doing what you do.
4. Select two canonical works by modern theorists, e.g. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives, Habermas' “What Is Universal Pragmatics?”, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric, Bakhtin's “The Problem of Speech Genres,” and indicate how you would teach them from a feminist perspective. In each case, indicate why you are doing what you do.
5. Burke directly addresses technology as a social commentator, a philosopher, and a rhetorical theorist. Discuss his approach to technology in each of these roles and comment on its importance to rhetoric as practiced by bloggers.
6. What theoretical concepts within the rhetorical tradition are most important to the creation of an adequate rhetorical theory of blogging practices? What, if any, traditional concepts does this new technology render obsolete? (More detailed treatment of fewer concepts is preferred to less detail and more concepts.)
7. Assume that nothing of the Aristotelian corpus survived except the Rhetoric and that we knew nothing of Aristotle's political views. Agree or disagree with this statement: “It is difficult to imagine a theory of rhetoric less congruent with modern feminism(s) than that set forth in the Rhetoric.” Defend your view by making specific reference to Aristotle's text.

Here are some more old photos; I'll keep these up, I promise. :) These are both of old friends from college; the first was taken in Nashville, and the second in Florence, Alabama, at the same abandoned warehouse.

Scott has just posted his thesis, “We Other Christians”: Gays, Lesbians, and Spaces of Protest
in the Episcopal Church. The abstract:

With the Episcopal Church’s recent election of openly-gay bishop Gene Robinson and its
blessing of same-sex unions, the intersection of gays and lesbians and faith-based spaces has
become a flashpoint in the ongoing movement for recognition of the rights of gays and
lesbians. However, the geographic literature has very little to say about gays and lesbians in
faith-based spaces, especially mainstream faith-based spaces. In this paper, I analyze openended
surveys conducted with gay and lesbian members of the Episcopal Church to ascertain
why these "other Christians" choose to remain in these sometimes hostile spaces instead of
the more friendly space of gay and lesbian-oriented churches (like the Metropolitan
Community Church). I analyze to what extent these members are creating thirdspaces of
protest and what their responses tell us about identity and the spaces that both shape and are
shaped by these identities. Also, the paper concerns itself with poststructuralist criticisms of
essentialist models of identity and space and examines those criticisms in the context of the
half-closet, the phenomenon where a queer body is both in and out of the closet at any given
time and at any given place. In the end, this research presents models of identity and space
that challenge our traditional views of these two concepts and questions whether these
understandings can be applied outside the subdiscipline of queer geography to the broader
discipline of human geography itself.

Awesome, Scott! You did it! :) Now to wait anxiously for Krista's.

I must be reading Jeff too much, because now I have been looking through my old photographs for prints to scan. Here are a couple I took of a woman who blew through town for a week or so when I was in college. Disclaimer: She gave me her permission to publish the photos and show them in galleries, which I've done.

Edited to add: It didn't feel right, so I took the photos off. The photos were nudes, strategically posed and very tasteful even by Florence, Alabama standards, and she did give me her permission...but that was years ago. I don't know how to get in touch with her now, so I can't re-ask her.

This is pretty cool. If you have a UThink blog and are logged into the system, you can surf through university library indexes looking for books and articles, and if the index is Find It! enabled, you can blog citations with one click. I discovered this in class tonight, when my students, I, and Julie (an excellent research librarian) were in a library classroom going over research strategies. Julie was walking us through using MEDLINE, and she pointed out the Find It! feature, which is faster than going to the library catalog, typing in the title of the work, and searching. She clicked on it, and I noticed the list of options (my emphasis):

Check for print/other electronic holdings in MNCAT -- U of M Catalog

Request item from Interlibrary Loan

Questions? Ask Us!

Consult the Find It FAQ

Extract the URL for this citation with the Find It URL Generator

Post this citation to your blog on UThink

I of course had to try it out. I'm thinking maybe Dorothea and certainly Liz might be interested in this UThink development.

Last night, I dreamed that I lived in a lakehouse. It floated in the water and undulated constantly, but wasn't a boat. If you sat on the living room couch and looked out the window, the water came up around the windowsill, causing me to wonder about the integrity of the seals around the window. I couldn't find any caulk to reseal them. I was afraid the water would seep into the house, and I was terrified that I'd see a crocodile. Of course, as soon as I thought that, a crocodile swam right up to my window, opened its mouth, and glared at me. Then I saw more and more until there were eight of them. They were banging up against my window and causing the house to undulate harder. That's all I remember.



The reason I bring it up is that crocodiles have been a recurring symbol in my dreams for about ten years now. I've had dreams that I was frantically clawing my way up a muddy riverbank, trying to get out of the water, while crocodiles chased me. I've also had dreams that I was a scientist breeding crocodile-human hybrids. A woman was giving birth to them, and I was in the delivery room. I have no idea how a dream symbol comes to have a standard, textbook interpretation, but this one is very much in keeping with all the entries for "crocodiles" in the dream books I've seen:

Crocodiles in dreams in a positive way represent your potential and powers capable to seize luck when it comes. In a negative sense, crocodiles represent hazards lying beneath the surface of a seemingly harmless situation. Seeing a crocodile in the dream is a warning: you are surrounded by evil-minded people. If you got bitten by a crocodile, be careful: a dangerous situation has developed. Killing a crocodile in the dream is a sign that you will be able to defeat a powerful enemy. Also, see Alligator.

Perhaps it's an anxiety dream? Every now and then, I dream that my teeth fall out, which is supposed to represent anxiety. Sometimes they fall out intact, like a set of dentures, and sometimes they break into smithereens in my mouth, and I have to spit them out.

What do you think? Do dreams mean anything at all? Are they worth trying to interpret?

Austin Lingerfelt, who first encountered blogging as a requirement in a sophomore composition class, has written an insightful essay on the effect blogging has had on his writing and on him as a writer. I'd categorize this as one of the most moving arguments yet for using weblogs in the composition classroom. The teacher he had for that course must be very proud.

Cross-posted to Kairosnews.

Addendum: I know this isn't a case that represents all students who use blogs in the composition classroom. This writer might, in fact, be an outlier, but if other writers taking composition can benefit from blogging the way Lingerfelt has, or almost as much, I'd argue that the weblog is a tool to be taken seriously in composition pedagogy.

I'm slammed! I have to grade papers, do more studying for prelims, and a host of other stuff, including another entry in the Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism, this time on essentialism. I'll post drafts of these entries and solicit feedback as soon as I receive the guidelines on how they are to be written.

Today I found out that NCTE is supporting the Pathways for All Students to Succeed (PASS) Act and the Graduation for All Act. Both acts center on improving literacy among adolescents. I would have quoted some sections of the letters, but NCTE has specified in the Document Properties of Acrobat Reader: "Content copying or extraction: Not allowed." Great. Yeah, I could type out what I want to quote, but it's the principle. The acts seem like a good idea, but I'd have to learn more about exactly how they'd work before endorsing them myself. All I know now is that PASS would provide grants for promoting literacy and would place "literacy counselors" in schools to work with teachers and with students who at risk of dropping out of school. "Academic counselors" would work with students and parents. The Graduation for All Act is basically the same, except it would target the schools with the lowest graduation rates.