Debra Hawhee
Publications
- Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, (with Sharon Crowley) (2nd edition 1999)
- Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (2005)
- Moving bodies: Kenneth Burke at the edges of language (2009)
Hawhee on Bodily Arts
Article Name: Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists' Three R's
Debra Hawhee produced this article with the intent to explain that style and rhetoric can be closely compared to physical activity. She illustrates that style come from what we do in our daily lives and activities such as sports (she uses wrestling many times) are just another form of expression that carries with it style and language on its own. She uses a large amount of ancient Greek mythology to explain this idea of sports as a form of rhetoric.
Going into more detail, Hawhee starts out her article explaining the "sophist," which is best defined as a "wise-ist." The brief section is an explanation of how sohpists where greatly present in the "Lyceum," which is an ancient Greek form of a gymnasium. The language of the people who participated in sports as well as academics was at a higher level. The Lyceum seemed to have a language and style of its own. This is precisely what Debra Hawhee was trying to show. "From this spatial intermingling of practices there emerged a curious syncretism between athletics and rhetoric, a particular crossover in pedagogical and learning styles, a crossover that contributed to the development of rhetoric as a bodily art: an art learned, practiced, and performed by and with the body as well as the mind."(144) This is a comparison between the language of the body and language of the mind. Each person is different but will see a close link between how we think and how we move. Sometimes this is taken for granted.
The second chunk of her article is devoted to the "three R's of sophistic pedagogy," rhythm, repetition, and response. She uses many examples with the wrestling language from the first section. The athlete is something of great interest to her and the easiest ancient sport to find was wrestling; hence this usage for examples and excerpts. Training techniques and ways the athletes would prepare are the examples she uses to back up the idea of body movement as a language. Hawhee brings up the subject of music enhancing the training of these athletes and is precisely what she means by rhythm as one of the R's. "In other words, music, with its sonorous, seductive movements, most closely apporoximates human ethos...."(146) She also stresses the idea of doing things over and over to facilitate the learning process. "...by going through micromotions over and over, the wrestler will acquire a bodily rhythm and enables a forgetting of directives." (148-9) She then goes on to explain the last two, repetition and response. This is explained with more detail on the wrestling and athlete's perspective. One specific example of this is Aristotle's ideas of melete, which means practice or exercise. (150) This is the idea that practice makes perfect. "In other words, education is enabled through one's habit of melete, of a belief in the transformative work of practice." (151) What she uses for response is an example of mimicking. Hawhee shows that responding to what you see by doing what you see is precisely what makes you learn. This can be proven in any sport. You do what you see and then perfect it.
The last portion of her article illustrates how not only was bodily movement a large place in rhetoric and style in the ancient times, it can still be present in the contemporary. Hawhee explains that if you use the three R's during training in a sport, why not use it in education? It worked with Aristotle. There are many ideas surrounding how education must be conducted. This is yet another example of how bodily movement can be closely compared to the way people think in a scholarly environment.
References
LibraryofCongress.gov catalog [2]
Penn State directory [3]
