Semisensical ramblings by David W. Rick
“The complete and perfect orator is who can speak in public about every subject with richness of arguments and variety of tunes and images.” — Crassus, in Cicero. De Oratore. Key Terms: Disertus, Eloquens, Loci/Topoi, Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, Memoria, Actio Cicero’s De Oratore takes the form of a letter to his brother, describing a dialogue […]
“For all advice to do things or not to do them is concerned with happiness and with the things that make for or against it; whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.” […]
“The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion. […] If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of […]
First of all, I must note that this is not in fact a text about archives. Rather, it is a text concerning the study of video games and how that study might be applied pedagogically, and as my current project involves working with an archive of video games, this seemed like a very appropriate piece […]
Revisiting the second half of Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition (Eds. Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo), two additional pieces cropped up that I found created interesting connections to the two I discussed last week. The first of these was an interview with […]
In the opening of her piece, L’Eplattenier raises the issue of research and archival methodology as lacking sufficient discussion within the discipline of rhetoric, asking, “Why do we as a discipline rarely talk about the methods we use to access our information?” (68) In answering this, L’Eplattenier explores the roles of rhetoric historians and how […]
In Linda Ferreira-Buckley’s piece “Rescuing the Archives from Focault,” she reviews the trend toward regarding the archive with skepticism, citing the progression from a classical understanding of history as a subjective discipline to the 19th Century treatment of history as an “exact science.” She notes that while this problem is valid, the archive—far from reinforcing […]
I recently read A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, a text that aptly fields, as advertised, a theory of the nature of fun as a cognitive phenomenon. Koster may be most notably recognized by those of my age group as the lead designer for Ultima Online and is now, from what […]