You are invited to join our reading group!
The Chelona RSA reading group was created to help us stay up-to-date with recent publications in our field. We are starting with Rhetoric Society Quarterly’s first issue of 2016 (46:1). We will meet once a month on Tuesdays: September 20th (Skinner 2127), October 11th, and November 15th (Skinner 3117) from 4:00-5:30 pm.
RSQ’s new editor, Susan Jarratt, comments that “rhetoricians have developed increasingly refined strands of scholarship. These refinements certainly produce ever more interesting pockets of research, but these gains also simultaneously open up distance between scholarly subfields. Where do we meet across those differences?” Her proposal is that we read each issue of RSQ not as four disparate articles, but as “islands… linked into an archipelago” (2). To that end, each issue of RSQ includes a short response that attempts to map common threads and synthesize the articles.
To capitalize on this new format, we will discuss one issue of RSQ at each reading group meeting. But don’t worry; you need only choose one article to read (sign up here), then read Christa Olson’s Response. UMD already has electronic copies of all articles, so they should be easy to access.
Come to the reading group prepared to discuss the article you signed up for. Think particularly about:
- how the article fits into the field of rhetorical scholarship
- what it adds to our knowledge of rhetoric
- points that were especially compelling to you
- Jarratt’s proposal that we look for intersections in even disparate scholarship and Olson’s response to that (What do we gain by taking this approach? What might we lose?)
See you on September 20th!
Annie Laurie
Annie Laurie Nichols
Chelona RSA Reading Group Chair
alnich@umd.edu
Don’t forget to check out our organization’s calendar and add it to your own Google Calendar to see all of the events, meetings, and deadline reminders in one convenient place!