Seventh Reading Group: Speak, Citizens!
VENUE CHANGE: UCL Institute for the Americas, 51 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PN
DATE CHANGE: 16 June 2017, 1-5 pm
For our summer 2017 reading group BrANCA will take up the themes of speech, citizenship and civic education. Our primary reading will be Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, an anthology of speeches and recitations first published in 1797. During the next 50 years it was to become one of the early republic’s most influential educational texts and instruments of social philosophy, shaping the minds of generations of Americans, most famously the young Frederick Douglass, who claimed
the book "gave tongue" to his "own soul."
In recent years, debates about the best ways to shape an active democratic citizenry and a public sphere based on rational deliberation have acquired new urgency. At the same time, the fragmenting effects of digital culture present fresh challenges to prevailing theories of civic education, social capital and the transmission of values.
The Columbian Orator provides an intriguing historical reference point for these debates, offering a model of how post-Revolutionary republicanism sought to forge a virtuous citizenry through recitation, rhetoric and performance. What was the value of its efforts? What are the drawbacks to a public sphere centred on performance, embodiment and what modern educationalists call ‘oracy’? What values do our own efforts at civic education seek to transmit, and do they succeed?
A selection of secondary readings will contextualise cultures of early American recitation, and also open up a second set of questions about speech and rhetoric. How useful is the concept of ‘orality’? How has the oral/print divide structured both literary history and Americanist scholarship? How can we make sense of the modern disciplinary divide between rhetoric/communication and literary studies?
Please register your attendance with the convenor, Tom F. Wright by emailing [email protected]
**There are some limited funds to help support current postgraduate students and early career researchers towards travel costs, awarded on a first come first served basis. To apply please email [email protected]**
Readings
All readings are available at this link: https://goo.gl/I3Tm6T
Directions
Nearest tubes to UCL Institute for the Americas are: Euston, Warren Street, Russell Square, Euston Square or Kings Cross/St Pancras.
There will be signs on the door of 51 Gordon Square on the day.
VENUE CHANGE: UCL Institute for the Americas, 51 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PN
DATE CHANGE: 16 June 2017, 1-5 pm
For our summer 2017 reading group BrANCA will take up the themes of speech, citizenship and civic education. Our primary reading will be Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, an anthology of speeches and recitations first published in 1797. During the next 50 years it was to become one of the early republic’s most influential educational texts and instruments of social philosophy, shaping the minds of generations of Americans, most famously the young Frederick Douglass, who claimed
the book "gave tongue" to his "own soul."
In recent years, debates about the best ways to shape an active democratic citizenry and a public sphere based on rational deliberation have acquired new urgency. At the same time, the fragmenting effects of digital culture present fresh challenges to prevailing theories of civic education, social capital and the transmission of values.
The Columbian Orator provides an intriguing historical reference point for these debates, offering a model of how post-Revolutionary republicanism sought to forge a virtuous citizenry through recitation, rhetoric and performance. What was the value of its efforts? What are the drawbacks to a public sphere centred on performance, embodiment and what modern educationalists call ‘oracy’? What values do our own efforts at civic education seek to transmit, and do they succeed?
A selection of secondary readings will contextualise cultures of early American recitation, and also open up a second set of questions about speech and rhetoric. How useful is the concept of ‘orality’? How has the oral/print divide structured both literary history and Americanist scholarship? How can we make sense of the modern disciplinary divide between rhetoric/communication and literary studies?
Please register your attendance with the convenor, Tom F. Wright by emailing [email protected]
**There are some limited funds to help support current postgraduate students and early career researchers towards travel costs, awarded on a first come first served basis. To apply please email [email protected]**
Readings
- Caleb Bingham, ed. The Columbian Orator (1817 edition)
- Carolyn Eastman, ‘Ch. 2: Vindicating Female Eloquence’ from A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago, 2009), pp.53-83.
- Steven Mailloux, ‘Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 35, Number 2, 2002, pp. 96-119.
- Dana Nelson, 'Introduction' from Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (Fordham 2016), pp. 1-23
- Johnathan Sterne, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 36 (2011) 207-225
All readings are available at this link: https://goo.gl/I3Tm6T
Directions
Nearest tubes to UCL Institute for the Americas are: Euston, Warren Street, Russell Square, Euston Square or Kings Cross/St Pancras.
There will be signs on the door of 51 Gordon Square on the day.
