This was a slideshow I had to do for another writing class. We had to go through the texts and pick out twenty quotes to put together that made a point. I chose the idea that we all have the ability to participate as intellectuals in the community and in the classroom.

1. Intellectual ParticipationOctober 29, 2009Sara Ponticelli

2. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory “The goal of rhetorical study was to clothe one’s ideas in the most elegant dress possible, and rhetoric thus came to be seen as the finishing refinement of an upper-class education.”

3. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory “Studying writing in context means more than assessing the immediate audience. To study this rich network, we need to look at not only at the individual writer, but at the collaborative situation of his or her classroom, personal and institutional histories, and writers’ and teachers’ political hopes.”

4. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory “With more understanding of the complexities of students’ literacies and identities, composition continues to respond to issues of diversity in our classrooms, institutions and communities.”

5. The Prison Notebooks: The Intellectuals “School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated.”

6. The Prison Notebooks: The Intellectuals “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator.”

7. Phaedrus Phaedrus: “I have just heard that one who is to be an orator does not need to know what is really just, and not what is really good or noble, but what will seem to be; for they say that persuasion comes from what seems to be true; not from the truth.”

8. The Rhetorical Situation “Every audience at any moment is capable of being changed in some way by speech; persuasive situation is altogether general.”

9. The Rhetorical Situation “It is clear that situations are not always accompanied by discourse; Nor should we assume that a rhetorical address gives existence to the situation; on the contrary, it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence.

10. The Rhetorical Situation “In our real world, however, rhetorical exigencies abound; the world really invites change – change conceived and effected by human agents who quite properly address a mediating audience…the world presents objects to be known, puzzles to be resolved and complexities to be understood…”

11. Check It While I Wreck It “Habermas’s model is relevant and useful because it sets up as a model a time when individuals came together, discussed issues of a collective good, worked toward change and challenged state power.”

12. Check It While I Wreck It “Bringing wreck, for Black participants in the public sphere historically, has meant reshaping the public gaze in such a way as to be recognized as human beings – as functioning and worthwhile members of society – and not to be shut out of or pushed away from the public sphere.”

13. Rethinking the Public Sphere “I propose to call these subaltern counterpublicsin order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.”

14. A Rhetoric of Motives “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division.

15. Rethinking the Public Sphere In general, the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics means a widening of discursive contestation, and that is a good thing in stratified societies.”

16. Flight West (Chapter 1) “Much of the daily interaction for all of us is instantiated through language; thus, language is a key analytic category for anyone proposing social change.”

17. The Roots of a Deep-Democratic Project (Chapter 2) “The defining features of this method (prophetic pragmatism) are a universal consciousness that promotes an all-embracing democratic and libertarian moral vision, a historical consciousness that acknowledges human finitude and conditionedness, and a critical consciousness which encourages relentless critique and self-criticism for the aims of social change and personal humility.”

18. Socractic Commitment and Critical Literacy (Chapter 3) “As a discursive strategy, strong rivaling really is (as are the ideas of West that helped to give it shape) Socratic commitment plus – disputation, frank questioning of power and a quest for action agendas.”

19. Tracking Prophetic Witness (Chapter 4) “Contrasting himself (West) to Foucault, whom he feel severely under-theorized agency, he argues, “Human agency remains central – all we have in human societies and histories are structured and unstructured human social practices over time and space.”

20. Tragicomic Hope in Democracy (Chapter 5) “It may be about female-male interaction writ large but also, as Matt Dobkin asserts, “For listeners who felt the racial implications of the song more forcefully than its feminist-sexual undercurrents, ‘Respect’ was the sound of revolution.”

21. Tracking Prophetic Witness (Chapter 4) “In some ways, the most interesting developments around class in composition studies are the efforts to follow critical pedagogy to its logical extension and organize beyond the classroom.”