Against the Sophists

My podcasting colleague and collaborator, Joel Jonientz, passed away last month. Joel was famous at UND for being a kind of Swiss-Army-Knife scholar. He could write, draw, build, talk, paint, animate, shoot, record, design, and conceptualize any number of projects with any number of people. One reason he was so useful to everyone who met him was that he was unafraid of experimenting, of trying something new, of learning on the fly.

In that spirit of risk, I've been working on turning Isocrates' "Against the Sophists" into a comic book. Joel would have scoffed at the quality of the artwork, but he would have appreciated the creative spirit that calls this artifact into being.

But why a comic book, and why Isocrates? While so much of our pedagogy is urging us to consider the rhetoric of risks (and crises and strategies and on and on), I offer these early pages up as a different rhetoric of risk, a risky rhetoric of production for a complex multimodal rhetorical environment.

I also think Isocrates is useful now because so many of his critiques about Sophistry are applicable to higher education. In the first page, I put the words of E. Gordon Gee, former head of Ohio State, now President of West Virginia University, in the mouth of the clown-sophist. The plan for the comic has numerous instances of invoking education professionals to demonstrate the lasting value of Isocrates' thoughts on pedagogy.

Finally, I like the idea that as I work through my own complicated relationship to the academy, I can provide an artifact of potential value to my rhetoric colleagues who have provided so much value to me. The comic will be available to all as a pdf formatted for tablet devices. The final product should provide an updated version of "against the Sophists" that brings classical rhetorical theory into contact with contemporary issues in higher education (MOOCs and for-profits and the 10k bachelor degree to name a few).

The comic will also allow students of rhetoric to ask questions about the representational and juxtapositional logics of visual communication while it works through a classic rhetorical text. I hope it serves as a reminder that the ancient and the new can exist in the same spaces at the same time, that we can "do" Isocrates and new media together, that classical rhetoric can still be productive of something. I hope (and this is self-serving) it marks the ways rhetorical scholarship can fall in-between disciplinary categories without falling out of view.

So to all the rhetoric folks heading to San Antonio this weekend for RSA (the Rhetoric Society of America conference for more casual readers of this blog...assuming any readers at all exist), enjoy the first three pages of ISOCRATES AGAINST THE SOPHISTS and take some time to discuss digital rhetorical production over a beer.