Pat Bizzell Says Hi!
Today I got to meet Pat Bizzell, which was really exciting. She's quite a fascinating and complex lady: all at once serious yet witty, brilliant and yet down-to-earth. Like me, she's a big fan of Quintilian ("Doesn't he seem like someone you would have loved to have met?" she said), and apparently, she and David Bartholomae are brother and sister. Ha! She said that, and completely fooled me! "Naw," she said. "We've just known each other so long that it feels that way." Apparently, DB made fun of Pat Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg when they published the first edition of _The Rhetorical Tradition_. "No one will want to read that!" He said. Who knew? DB was wrong.
I learned a lot about Pat Bizzell today: for instance, did you know that she is a practicing Jew? She's also a Master's student (no, really!), getting her MA in Judaic Studies. I assume that she's the best student in the class. :)
Some memorable quotes from her time at UNH:
- "If I have any hope for the world to come, it's because of all my hours spent reading student papers."
- (Referring to Gerald Graff) "He's a madman!"
- (Referring to Stanley Fish) "If he were here right now, I'd say, 'Stanley, you are the Descartes of our time!'" and "Stanley brings out the worst in me."
Her presentation posed some interesting questions that I'd like to throw out here, just for fun (although, because it's not a part of our assigned readings, you obviously aren't obligated to respond):
- (In response to the idea that emotion/pathos is the most underresearched element in rhetorical study) "How can we use emotions to futher political/pedagogical goals?" "How can we best understand the emotions and needs of our students?"
- (In response to Peter Elbow's "Believing and Doubting Game") "When is believing no longer a game?"
- "Why do we, as teachers of writing, expect to produce 'magic teaching' (i.e., we teach it; they learn it) in every class session?"
posted by Sarah Eileen @ 6:43 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Hey, Sarah!
I'm so jealous! Sounds like you're having or had a great time.
Wow, did it sound like Pat meant David Bartholomae was serious when he said he thought no one would want to read The Rhetorical Tradition? It's hard to imagine loving rhetoric and writing and not wanting to dig into the multi-millennial tradition (ooh, cool phrase, if I do say so myself).
That's so cool that Pat Bizzell is working on an MA in Judaic Studies. Well, some of us do the religion/theology thing before our comp/rhet degrees and some after.
Hmmm, the question about how we could better use/study pathos... how we could best understand the emotions of our students... That's a tough one, but it's definitely a question we need to keep asking. I don't know. It might start with ways of getting students to get in touch with their own emotions and trying to pinpoint how they affect their perceptions of issues/ideas and of their own writing processes.
Ooh, I like the question, When does the believing game stop being a game? It brings up interesting issues of how/whether we give sincere peer response and of the power of belief (in the peer-reader and in the writer) to effect better writing.
Thanks for the post, Sarah. I hope you had a safe trip back (are you back yet?). See you on Tuesday.
"How can we use emotions to further political/pedagogical goals?"
Hmm, maybe Pat Bizzell/you just provided me with the more focused (and necessary) approach to my thesis that I've been looking for...
Laura, you bring up a good point about DB. One thing that Pat Bizzell mentioned was that Bartholomae (to her knowledge, at least) has no prior training in classical rhetoric (he is, after all, a literary scholar in 19th and 20th century British literature). And yet so much of what he writes alludes to classical training (so much so that I have a section on my thesis on DB-Quintilian similarities!). I guess that shows how much of our writing is steeped in tradition (a "multi-millenial tradition," as you so nicely put), either with or without our notice. Amazing!
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