Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient GreeceThe role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production. Bodily Arts examines this intriguing intersection, offering an important context for understanding the attitudes of ancient Greeks toward themselves and their environment. In classical society, rhetoric was an activity, one that was in essence "performed." Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of learning and performance, Bodily Arts draws on diverse orators and philosophers such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato, as well as medical treatises and a wealth of artifacts from the time, including statues and vases. Debra Hawhee's insightful study spotlights the notion of a classical gymnasium as the location for a habitual "mingling" of athletic and rhetorical performances, and the use of ancient athletic instruction to create rhetorical training based on rhythm, repetition, and response. Presenting her data against the backdrop of a broad cultural perspective rather than a narrow disciplinary one, Hawhee presents a pioneering interpretation of Greek civilization from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE by observing its citizens in action. |
From inside the book
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... connection between philia and sophia. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Evan Watkins,John Muckelbauer, Susan Searls, Dan Smith, Jeremiah Dye- house, Brad Vivian, and the rhetoricians from the House of Corax, Kakie Urch and J. Blake Scott, all embraced ...
... connections between the arts of rhetoric and athletics, not unlike the shipwrecked statue, have been more or less submerged since ancient times. To account for this submersion, though, would require a long meditation on disciplinary ...
... connections between rhetoricand athletics neitherbegan norended with training, but rather emerged from long-time cultural ... connection between athletics and rhetoric, then, is an appreciation for the immediate relation between training ...
... connections to the arts around them. As indicated above in the discussion of learning and performing, where rhetoric is linked by discipline with composition and writing studies (usually in English departments), historians of rhetoric ...
... connections to athletics enables a view of rhetoric as a bodily art rather than strictly a cerebral endeavor, and traces the way in which rhetoric and athletics mutually shaped and struggled with each other—conceptually, practically ...
Contents
Agonism and the Production of Aretē | 15 |
An Intelligence of the Body | 44 |
Kairotic Bodies | 65 |
The Arts of Training | 86 |
The Space of Training | 109 |
The Bodily Rhythms of Habit | 133 |
Rhetoric Athletics and the Circulation | 162 |