Brown Bag Biography with Sarah Allen

October 26, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 410

The Center for Biographical Research presents: /鈥淏eyond Anthropocentrism(?): Logos and the Aesthetic Relation鈥 / Sarah Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and the Director of Writing Programs, University of Hawai驶i at 惭腻苍辞补 / There is an ongoing and contentious debate about the origins of the field of rhetoric鈥攊n particular, about whether the discipline begins at the recorded birth of the term 鈥渞h膿torik膿鈥 (in Plato鈥檚 work) or if it begins in Presocratic treatments of the concept of 鈥渓ogos,鈥 which historians of rhetoric have mistakenly assumed (due to a repeated error in translation) was synonymous with 鈥渞hetoric.鈥 While rooting the field not in a version of rhetoric that predates itself, but in the Presocratics鈥 very different conceptions of logos, my project reroots rhetoric so that it might become a more-than-human discipline in order to help transform the ways in which humans engage with the 鈥渘atural鈥 world. In this presentation, I will share one way of defining logos that I am currently exploring: that it structures the cosmos through an aesthetic relation that is first explained by Nietzsche and that is articulated at length by Object-Oriented Ontologists. / Sarah Allen is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and the Director of Writing Programs at the University of Hawai鈥榠 at 惭腻苍辞补. She is currently working on a project that re-roots rhetoric in the Pre-Socratics' conceptions of logos (with special emphasis on that of Heraclitus) in order to "rewild" the field. She is also the author of Kairotic Inspiration: Imagining the Future in the Sixth Extinction (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and Beyond Argument: Essaying as a Practice of (Ex)Change (WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2015). / Cosponsored by Hamilton Library, the Hawai驶inui膩kea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, the Matsunaga Institute, Conflict and Peace Specialist, the School of Communication & Information, and the Departments of American Studies, English, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology / Thursday, October 26 / KUY 410 / 3PM to 4:30PM HST


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Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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