Returning...

I'm returning to blogging after switching to blogger from blogsome. Avery (the fiction anthology I co-edit and often blog for) uses blogger and I've found that I blog way more often on blogger simply because it works way better. So here I am. With a short update.

I've drafted my dissertation proposal. It is, of course, in its early, early, early stages. In terms of logical-administrative-like things, I've sent it out to my advisor and one other person on my committee. Then, I imagine, I'll get the "this looks good, this doesn't look so good, and have you thought of this" routine - which I really am looking forward to. I like the writing process, but I get nervous (as most of us do) when I stick my neck out there and say "so this is how I'd like to define myself professionally." I’m hoping to defend it in March.

In terms of what I'll be studying in the dissertation...well, that may evolve. I can, however, tell you what my proposal is about. Much like my "about me" blurb suggests, it explores the intersection of music and rhetoric. Generally, I'm interested historically in how that relationship has been situated (by folks like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Nietzsche) and how the intellectual tradition has imagined the ways music and language inform the rhetorical situation. Particularly, though, I'm looking at the ways a lot of the great contemporary work on affect and rhetoric can help us better imagine a productive way of looking at rhetoric and how this musical framing of rhetoric can help us re-imagine the scope of rhetorical knowledge. Moreover, this re-framing of rhetorical economies, it seems to me, might also help us re-imagine some of the ways cultural theory and concerns regarding agency, identity, and affect come to bear on what we do in Comp/Rhet. Some of these repercussions I have yet to trace.

I'm anxious to see the sort of reactions the proposal gets. This morning I read a few selections from Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (which was reviewed in Encultration a couple of years ago) and have since been reeling in the sort of concerns at stake when we imagine the way not only music has been used as a rhetorical device, but also as a means through which to imagine the possibilities for identity and invention. How could this not have some sort of bearing on the ways we imagine rhetoric?