Sounding Out theProgymnasmata

Abstract

This article positions the progymnasmata, an ancient sequence of rhetorical exercises, as a rich resource for contemporary scholarship on rhetoric and sound. Drawing on work at the intersection of rhetoric and sound studies as well as scholarship that repurposes ancient rhetorical concepts to study digital media, I argue that refiguring the progymnasmata can significantly expand rhetorical studies of digital sound. I ground my argument in podcasts, a popular sonic medium that has garnered attention in rhetoric and writing scholarship, ending with a series of six exercises designed to help students learn to make podcasts. Few aspects of rhetorical education have survived longer than the progymnasmata, a "series of set exercises of increasing difficulty" meant to prepare students for the writing and speaking they would do in their public and professional lives (Kennedy ix). 1 The sequence took shape as early as the fourth century BCE and, despite periods of relative obscurity, remained a pedagogical staple well into the English Renaissance (Kennedy xi; Woods, "Boys"; Enterline 20). In this article, I argue that the exercises are particularly resonant with emerging sonic media as well as recent scholarship on sound. I propose a reworked progymnasmata designed to help students and scholars conceptualize and create with sound. This project is part of an ongoing progymnasmatic revival. While the exercises' popularity waned in recent centuries, David Fleming points to a recent resurgence of interest that began in the late twentieth century and has continued into the twenty-first ("Quintilian" 132). Fleming advocates for "the very idea behind this cycle of exercises, the attempt to make rhetoric. .. a complete and developmentally attuned curriculum in written and spoken discourse" ("The Very Idea" 114), arguing that the progymnasmata should be tied to a broad "civic humanist" mission as part of a "comprehensive language-arts curriculum" à la Quintilian ("Quintilian" 125). Fleming notes some challenges involved in resituating the progymnasmata within contemporary curricula: "The very stability of the progymnasmatic tradition. .. suggests that it was a highly conservative pedagogy in a culture given to educational inertia" ("Quintilian" 132-33). His concerns and hopes resonate with those of Kathleen E. Welch, who claims that we "need the tremendous knowledge base of the Greek and Roman classics. .. [b]ut we do not need the racism and sexism" with which that rhetorical tradition is entangled (196). However, in addition to Fleming's "Quintilianistic" framework, the progymnasmata have recently been reimagined as exercises in "translingual style," incorporated into the textbook Ancient Rhetorics for

Amplifying Soundwriting Pedagogies: Integrating Sound into Rhetoric and Writing

“…Sound studies has become a strong interdisciplinary field in which scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied sound production and reception from a variety of critical perspectives (Gunn et al, 2013;Lingold et al, 2018;. And in rhetoric and writing studies, scholars have now argued persuasively that sound deserves our attention for rhetorical analysis and theory (Comstock & Hocks, 2016;Eckstein, 2017;Goodale, 2011;Hawk, 2018aHawk, , 2018bKjeldsen, 2018;Lambke, 2019;Rickert, 1999;Stone & Ceraso, 2013;, scholarly research methods and production (Ball, 2004;Carson, 2017;Detweiler, 2018;Wargo, 2020;Wargo et al, 2021), and, importantly, for this book here, pedagogy (Ahern, , 2018Alexander, 2015;Ball & Hawk, 2006;Bowie, 2012aCeraso, , 2018Ceraso, , 2019Ceraso & Ahern, 2015;Comstock & Hocks, 2006;Davis, 2011;Detweiler, 2019;Faris et al, 2020;Folk, 2015;Greene, 2018;Hawkins, 2018;Klein, 2020;Sady, 2018;Stedman et al, 2021).…”

Digitizing Student Work: Access and Engagement in a Tech Comm Digital Archive

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Chapter 2. Experimentation, Integration, Play: Developing Digital Voice Through Audio Storytelling

“…Ceraso's (2018) book Sounding Composition provided interchapters with assignment prompts and classroom practices on exploring the multimodal and embodied dimensions of composing with and in sound. Eric Detweiler (2019) provided scaffolding activities toward teaching with sound in his article "Sounding Out the Progymnasmata. " Jeremy Cushman and Shannon Kelly (2018) shared their podcast assignment and scaffolding used in the first-year writing program at Western Washington University, as well as a wonderful podcast that explains how the assignment was received by both teachers and students.…”