The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing

Predicated on Steven Katz belief that music is all around us. It is in the rhythm and tones of the texts we read, write, and see everyday. How can we be aurally sensitive so we can gain knowledge that the experience of the music we hear conveys? Sophism and orality. Rhetoric focuses particularly on the use of language in specific texts; on the form as much as the content of an utterance. It is not only a method for training effective communicators (rhetors); Katz examines rhetoric as a method for understanding on a theoretical as well as a practical level how humans use language (as in the language of music) to alter or shape our understanding of reality.

Visual, and logocentric? Isn't that a contradiction?
Also we rely on visually-based metaphors to shape our knowledge. So we need a set of metaphors based on aural and temporal experience as championed by the ancients sophists, Isocrates, and Cicero--early sophists as intellectuals in an oral culture as they believed in the ability of language to constitute and communicate knowledge
Plato is seen as a transitional figure to a more literate culture
Gorgias linked language with thought
Isocrates--a sophist; put writing in the service of orality through use of a style attuned to aural effects

Uses a classical rhetorical approach and an aural approach to critique Reader Response Criticism. So it is the philosophy of language, and music theory. Simultaneously, he assesses the scientific empiricism and technological rationalism that control the parameters of reading and writing theory, research, and pedagogy. In doing so, Katz examines the possibility and desirability of teaching reading and writing as "rhetorical music" to supplement the formalistic, logocentric imperatives that underlie current methods of reading and writing instruction. This book will interest not only theorists and teachers in rhetoric, composition, and literature but also scholars and teachers of oral interpretation, literature and science, a
It is said that Isocrates admitted to a lack of the vigor for public performance; how was he able to excel in orality and aural
Cicero capitalized in the Roman conception of the orator and oratory--to him style is epistemic
Eloquence is seen in the uniting of philosophy and rhetoric? form and content together conveys full knowledge -- both rational (via content) and affective (via style). Cicero in his De Oratore excels in the sophistic tradition of equating language with thought and experience while considering sensory perception of the world imprecise.

Chapter 2 documents a parallel development in literary criticism and science
Chapter 3 turns back to classical rhetoric to find precedents and models for dealing with affective response
Chapter 4 shifts to the theory and study of language as a musical experience

The postscript: examines the potential pedagogical take--how to teach epistemological uncertainty, performance, and emotion as a vehicle of meaning

The role of emotions and affectation on texts....contains expectations, etc, making knowledge acquisition more subjective than objective.
Music creates affect without have a referential aspect to it...



Techne: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/science/21wormgrunting.html?ref=science
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/science/21arch.html?ref=science