This symposium will be hosted at the University of Notre Dame – McKenna Conference Center, March 15-16, 2019.
The symposium’s gambit is that the “death” of rhetoric did not spell the death of persuasion. Rather, a range of practices and theoretical reflections on persuasion outlived and even counteracted the weakening of rhetoric’s discursive grip. Poetry, philosophy, pedagogy, and politics, for instance, drew (and continue to draw) on models of persuasion that are self-aware and yet deliberately avoid or even resist established systems. Eighteenth-century novelist Lawrence Sterne gestures toward this tendency when, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the narrator remarks wryly of his father that, though the man had never read a major work on rhetoric, “he was born an orator; … Persuasion hung upon his lips.” Persuasion after Rhetoric will explore the flourishing of such persuasive talents alongside highly innovative theories and techniques.
Keynote speaker:
Frances Ferguson (English, University of Chicago)
Philology Turned to Persuasion: The Rise of ConstitutionsSpeakers:
Maeve Adams (English, Manhattan College)
Contestatory Publics: Persuasion as Resistance
Ian Balfour (English, York University)
Extreme Austen, or Hyperbole
Mark Canuel (English, University of Illinois at Chicago)
Hazlitt, Progress, and the Arts
Sean Franzel (German and Russian, University of Missouri)
Persuasion after the Revolution
Brian McGrath (English, Clemson University)
The Tone Police
Jan Mieszkowski (German and Comparative Literature, Reed College)
Plants and Politics
Emma Planinc (Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame)
To ‘Persuade without Convincing’: Rousseau as the Legislator of Nature
Adam Potkay (English, William & Mary)
Rhetoric and Philosophy: Tropes, Dialogue, Self-Division
Yasmin Solomonescu (English, University of Notre Dame)
Reasoning is not Believing
Daniel Stout (English, University of Mississippi)
Assemblage, Persuasion, Conviction
Stefan Uhlig (Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis)
Smith’s and Blair’s Indiscipline
Ross Wilson (English, University of Cambridge)
Every Thing is Faultless: Hazlitt on Judgement and Understanding
Sarah Zimmerman (English, Fordham University)
The Lecturer’s Argument
Please direct queries to Yasmin Solomonescu at solomonescu.1@nd.edu or 574-631-4144.