Brown Bag Biography with Sarah Allen

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The Center for Biographical Research presents: /“Beyond Anthropocentrism(?): Logos and the Aesthetic Relation” / Sarah Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and the Director of Writing Programs, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa / There is an ongoing and contentious debate about the origins of the field of rhetoric—in particular, about whether the discipline begins at the recorded birth of the term “rhētorikē” (in Plato’s work) or if it begins in Presocratic treatments of the concept of “logos,” which historians of rhetoric have mistakenly assumed (due to a repeated error in translation) was synonymous with “rhetoric.” While rooting the field not in a version of rhetoric that predates itself, but in the Presocratics’ 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 “natural” 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‘i at Mānoa. 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 Hawaiʻinuiākea 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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