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. |
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... particular served for me as models of learning and figures of discipline and therefore inspire this study most forcefully. They are my didaskaloi, Jeffrey Walker and Janet Atwill, and my basketball coaches, Pat Summitt and Larry Ricker ...
... particular bodies as they practice and perform various arts. Such circulation operates, as this book's last chapter suggests, on partner registers of visibility and intelligibility—seeing and recognizing. These registers are most ...
... particular rhetorical styles.Janet Atwill's monumental study (1998) of Aristotle and the liberal arts raises critical historical questions about liberal values, curriculum, and pedagogy. Takis Poulakos (1997) reads Isocrates as a ...
... particular situations—in response to time as right time, opportunity, occasion, what the ancients termed kairos. Once again, kairos emerges often in Greek literature and philosophy in the context of athletic and rhetorical encounters—in ...
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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 |