Rhetoric's Making Strange
10 Pages Posted: 16 May 2009 Last revised: 26 Apr 2010
Date Written: January 6, 2009
Abstract
Please note that this talk has now been incorporated in a published article entitled, Legal Writing Scholarship, Making Strange, and The Aesthetics of Legal Rhetoric, also available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1591123.
This is a talk presented at the Law & Rhetoric: Legal Writing Through a Rhetorical Lens Workshop in San Diego, CA, on January 6, 2009, sponsored by Mercer University School of Law and produced by Prof. Linda Berger of Mercer. The purpose of the talk was to demonstrate how improvisational teaching in a small advanced legal writing course could generate interesting topics for research. This is so because rhetoric has the ability to unsettle our ordinary perceptions. In fact, in this particular setting rhetoric's ability (an ability I think I am willing to defend as unique) to make everything seem strange is strong enough to turn upon rhetoric itself and to reveal anew those rhetorical insights that are now hidden from us because they have been implicit in Western culture for centuries. The talk is presented as an internal monologue: a stream of conscious exploration rather than an exposition. There is no single theme to this monologue. It is more of an honest search for a theme, for such is the way that interesting topics are generated, or so I believe.
Keywords: rhetoric, legal writing, teaching, persuasion, person, Vining, poets, literary, game, argument
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