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Archive for the ‘Rhetoric’ Category

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Screening Legal Education

In Arts & Letters, Creativity, Film, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Teaching, Writing on June 15, 2011 at 10:59 pm

Allen Mendenhall

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.  We do not wish to escape life but to find life, to use our minds in fresh, experimental ways, to flex our emotions, to enjoy, to learn, to add depth to our days.

 —Robert McKee, from Story

Law school is, in a way, about performing.  From the minute you walk into the building as a 1L, you search for and construct a new identity—one that conforms to your assumptions of what a lawyer is and does.

The first time a professor called on me—Mr. Mendenhall, can you tell us how the judge in this case distinguishes restitutionary from reliance damages?—I panicked.  I knew the answer.  More or less.  But I had no chance to rehearse.  Here I was, before a large audience, a packed house, all alone, all eyes on me.

“Um, yes,” I stammered, apparently suffering from stage fright.

I don’t remember how I answered—not precisely—but I remember taking a deep breath, feigning confidence, and pretending to know what the professor expected me to know.  I must’ve sounded silly talking about things I hardly understood; but I must’ve performed satisfactorily because the professor let me alone and interrogated another student.

My first audition.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Outline and Summary of David F. Ericson’s The Debate Over Slavery (New York University Press, 2000)

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, History, Humanities, Laws of Slavery, Liberalism, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Slavery on June 7, 2011 at 10:44 am

Allen Mendenhall

Ericson, David F.  The Debate Over Slavery:  Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America.  New York:  New York University Press, 2000.

 “The slavery issue in the antebellum United States was defined centrally by the failure of a people to bear witness to its own liberal principles” (90).

Chapter One

Rhetoric matters, and this book is about the anti- and pro- slavery rhetoric during the antebellum period.  Ericson argues that rhetoric separated a nation that was not so “divided against itself” as people assume.  Both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric appealed to “liberalism,” according to Ericson, and thus the overall discourse at that time, in this country, under those circumstances, smacked of “liberty” and “equality”: concepts rooted in the mores of Christianity, Republicanism, and discursive pluralism.  Today we might lump these concepts into classical liberalism or neo-liberalism, but Ericson suggests that we should not lump concepts the way “consensus scholars” do; rather, he suggests that we accept that liberalism, in all its manifestations, is a complex and multifarious tradition inherited and adapted in many ways and for many purposes.  He endorses the approach of “multiple-traditions” scholars that reveals how advocates on both sides of the slavery debate attempted to conform their arguments to the tradition of liberalism.

Chapter Two

Ericson spells out liberalism and distinguishes it from “non-liberal” thought:  “I define liberal ideas as a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values.  Conversely, nonliberal ideas appeal to some notion of natural inequality based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or birthright that denies those liberal values to significant numbers of human beings” (14).  The proslavery liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because slavery was the status in which African Americans could enjoy the most practical liberty in light of their present circumstances, which rendered them incapable of prospering as free men alongside European Americans” (14-15).  The antislavery liberal logic went as follows:  “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied that African Americans were men with a birthright to freedom equal to that of European Americans” (14).  The antislavery non-liberal logic went as follows:  “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied African Americans the opportunity to work, worship, and learn at the feet of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15).  The proslavery non-liberal logic went as follows:  “The institution was a just institution because African Americans constituted an inferior race consigned by nature or God to be the slaves of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15).  Read the rest of this entry »

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Interview with Troy Camplin, Interdisciplinary Scholar and Author of Diaphysics

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Communication, Creative Writing, Humanities, Information Design, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Teaching, Theatre, Western Kentucky University, Writing on May 18, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Allen Mendenhall interviews Troy Camplin.

 

Troy Camplin holds a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas.  He has taught English in middle school, high school, and college, and is currently taking care of his children at home. He is the author of Diaphysics, an interdisciplinary work on systems philosophy; other projects include the application of F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order theory to ethics, the arts, and literature. His play “Almost Ithacad” won the PIA Award from the Cyberfest at Dallas Hub Theater.  
 

 

Q:  Your interdisciplinary background seems to lend itself to commentary on this site.  Tell us a bit about that background and a bit about your thoughts on the value of interdisciplinary scholarship.

A:  I have an unusual educational background that I only made more unusual in my independent studies. My undergraduate degree is in Recombinant Gene Technology, with a minor in chemistry, from Western Kentucky University. When I am interested in something, I spend all of my time learning about it. So, as an undergrad, I not only learned about molecular biology through my classes, but also in my independent reading. I read the journals and I read even popular works on molecular biology. This led me to John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Double Helix, in which he talks a great deal about quantum physics. I didn’t know a thing about quantum physics, and I really didn’t understand what he was saying about it in that book, so I decided to read his other books on quantum physics, including In Search of Shroedinger’s Cat. I cannot say I understood quantum physics much after reading that book, either, but I was hooked, and read every popular book on quantum physics I could read. In addition, I ran across several other popular science books that introduced me to what would become much more central to my thinking, including Gleick’s Chaos and Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organization. These provided several of the seeds of my development as an interdisciplinary scholar.

Another element to my interdisciplinary development was a class I pretty much lucked into. Undergraduates have to take several required courses, of course, and one semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with Joseph Trafton (who was highly recommended, and whose class I eventually did take), but it was full. So I took an Intro. To Philosophy class just to get the hours in that section in. By chance I chose a class taught by Ronald Nash—a random choice that ended up changing my life completely.

Nash taught his class using three texts: a collection of Plato’s dialogues and two books Nash himself wrote. One of the books Nash wrote was Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism. It was through Nash that I was introduced to free market economics. I was hooked. I read everything I could find in the university library with the word “capitalism” in the title or as the subject. I read Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Hayek, and a little book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  by Ayn Rand. The latter, of course, led me to Atlas Shrugged, and that led me to the rest of her work. Rand hooked me on the idea of being a fiction writer and made me interested in philosophy. I began reading the fiction writers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why) and the philosophers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why). I read and fell in love with Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, Aristotle and Nietzsche. Particularly Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, whose tragic worldviews were deeply appealing to me. Nietzsche deepened my appreciation for philosophy, and introduced me to tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Andrew Ferguson on “Converting Mamet”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Conservatism, Economics, Humane Economy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Rhetoric, Theatre on May 17, 2011 at 8:06 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following post appeared at Austrian Economics and Literature.

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Although I do not read The Weekly Standard unless James Seaton has contributed an article or review (read Seaton’s review of Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature & The Economics of Liberty at this link), I was pleased and intrigued by this recent article by Andrew Ferguson that addresses the political conversion of America’s most famous living playright, David Mamet.  Ferguson opens the piece with this:

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “ ‘F— you’ —David Mamet.” 

Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.

Ferguson goes on to describe a speech at Stanford in which Mamet expressed his disenchantment with higher education:

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Writing, Workshopping, Emulation

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on May 13, 2011 at 9:49 am

Allen Mendenhall

I remember trying to write a paper for my high school English class and sitting in the library for what seemed like hours, looking at my blank sheet—we didn’t use laptops in those days—and thinking, “How am I going to write six pages about this book.”

The book was Wuthering Heights, and I was, I think, sixteen.  I had written papers before, but never one this long.  I was stuck.  I had writers’ block.  All I could think about was thinking about finishing the paper as soon as possible.

Eventually, I jotted down something that led to something else that led, in turn, to something else, which became the bulk of my paper.  I don’t remember what my paper was about, or the grade I received for my efforts.  All I remember was the panicked moment in the library when that blank-white paper stared back at me and seemed to demand that I fill it with words.

I was angry because I felt helpless.  My high school “not-gonna-do-it” attitude was much like the attitudes I sense in my college students.  Frustrated, I convinced myself that I didn’t need to write about Wuthering Heights because the book was old or for girls or whatever.  The problem was, I liked the book and wanted to write about it.  I just couldn’t.

“If we are going to teach our students to need to write,” remarks James A. Reither, “we will have to know much more than we do about the kinds of contexts that conduce—sometimes even force, certainly enable—the impulse to write.”

Reither is spot on.

Today, I can hardly restrain my impulses to write.  I write all the time.  I feel that I’m always learning how to write—and to write better.

What happened between my junior year of high school and today?  I can’t reduce the explanation to a single cause.

The best answer is probably that many things happened between then and now, each of them influencing me in some way.

As Reither claims, “writing processes and written products are elements of the same social process,” by which he means the social process of immersing ourselves in discourse communities and becoming fluent in the language and cultures of our audience.  Writing is not easy.  It involves repetition, experiment, experience, and mimesis.

Reither submits that “[m]ost of us learned to do what we do on our own—perhaps in spite of the courses we took—and some students continue to do the same.”

In college, I read unassigned essays just to get a feel for how authors conveyed their thoughts and feelings, for how they punctuated their sentences and toyed with syntax.  I underlined vocabulary that I wanted to use in my own papers.  I suppose this method of learning could be called emulation.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Wallace Stevens and Imagination

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Communism, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Imagination, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Western Civilization, Writing on May 4, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post first appeared here at themendenhall.

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It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism.  But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.”  The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were, many of them, social and political conservatives.  This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge alternative and complicating visions of the world in general and of modernism in particular.  In the wake of the radical 1960s, many intellectuals simply ignored the contributions of the conservative imagination to literature, preferring to will away such unpalatable phenomena by pretending they do not exist.  However well-meaning, these intellectuals either assume without much hesitation or qualification that all modernist theories and practices were progressive, or they brush under the rug any conservative tendencies among writers they admire.  American modernism was progressive in its adaptation of forms, but it does not follow that avant-garde aesthetics necessarily entails progressive political programs.  Nevertheless, under Frankfurt School and Marxist auspices, among other things, the literati and others in the academy have rewritten the history and thought of modernist American poetry to purge it of all conservative influence.  George Santayana, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore—these individuals, according to progressive mantras, were intellectually challenging and therefore, the argument goes, politically leftist.  Such revisionism will not do. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hayek v. Keynes: The Rap Anthems

In Austrian Economics, Economics, History, Music, Rhetoric on April 29, 2011 at 1:36 pm

Allen Mendenhall

“Fear the Boom and Bust”

“Fight of the Century: Round Two”

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Law and the Ordinary, by Alexandre Lefebvre

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on April 13, 2011 at 10:32 pm

Allen Mendenhall

One of my favorite journals, Telos, has published an essay that might interest readers of this site.  The essay, by Alexandre Lefebvre, is titled “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence.”  Here is the abstract:

This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.

Telos is one of the few literary-theoretical journals that regularly challenges the critical and political orthodoxy that pits itself, ironically, as the unorthodox, progressive, or transgressive.

Indeed, Telos seriously considers repressed, unpopular, and unapproved thoughts and theories. It complicates “conservative” and “liberal” as meaningful categories of discourse.

Having published such controversial authors as Paul Gottfried, Clyde Wilson, Alain de Benoist and others who situate themselves on the right-wing of the political spectrum, Telos is committed to contemplation and speculation, to profound and difficult ideas and not fashionable or typical recitations of mainstream opinions.

The journal has a long history of interrogating and revising critical theory and critiquing culture and society, and it continues to publish notable scholarship in traditions both left and right, although the signifiers left and right are not useful starting points from which to analyze anything that appears in this journal.

Paul Piconne was the founder and long-term editor of Telos.  Piconne died in 2004.  Today the editor is Russell A. Berman.  The only publication as daring and interesting as Telos is Counterpunch, a political newsletter and not an academic journal.  I urge readers of this site to read both Telos and Counterpunch as often and as closely as possible.

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Outline and Summary of Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999)

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Slavery on April 9, 2011 at 4:01 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Introduction

The focus of this book is on nineteenth-century New Orleans and the slave market that emerged then and there.  More than other workings of slavery, slave markets reduced humans to commodities with prices.  In particular, this book is interested in the story of slave showrooms, which held up to 100 slaves and where appraisals, accountings, back-room dealings, and other activities took place.  The book attributes the slave trade to mercantilism whereby colonial imports serviced and stocked metropolitan centers and generated profits secured for both state-sponsored companies and the monopoly-granting state itself.  Companies with well-connected leaders and government ties could gain state privileges and favors and receive special monopoly licenses to dominate trade, first in goods such as tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton, coffee, and so on, and later in human beings.  The ban of the international slave trade in 1808 did not lead to the reduction or softening of slavery, but rather to new shapes and manifestations of slavery, especially as slave populations moved increasingly from the upper to the lower South.  The ban led, more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the domestic slave trade.  The domestic slave trade intensified during the rise of the cotton kingdom.  The price of slaves changed with the price of cotton until the 1850s.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Law & Literature: A Basic Bibliography

In American History, Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Slavery, The Literary Table, The Supreme Court, Western Civilization on April 2, 2011 at 9:16 pm

Patrick S. O’Donnell compiled this bibliography in 2010.  He teaches philosophy at Santa Barbara City College in California.  This bibliography first appeared over at The Literary Table. 

Amsterdam, Anthony G. and Jerome Bruner. Minding the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Atkinson, Logan and Diana Majury, eds. Law, Mystery, and the Humanities: Collected Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Ball, Milner S. The Word and the Law. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies.  Kansas  City, MO: Andrew McMeels Publ., revised ed., 2006.

Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Binder, Guyora and Robert Weisburg. Literary Criticisms of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Black, David A. Law in Film: Resonance and Representation. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of  Chicago Press, 2001.

Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 ed. Read the rest of this entry »