Mimesis, Duality, and Rhetorical Education

Abstract

The pedagogical strategy of imitatio cultivates particular attitudes and habits that are useful resources for democratic citizens. Specifically, a mimetic pedagogy cultivates duality, as manifest in a faculty of perspective taking and enabled through the close analysis of rhetorical texts. Reviving imitatio as the central component of a rhetorical education entails a productive critique of norms of sincerity that prevail in contemporary culture, and as such constitutes one of the more significant contributions that rhetorical education can make toward enhancing and sustaining democratic culture.

Notes

¹Fleming himself provides one effort to forge a link between particular pedagogical strategies and citizenship education (“Becoming Rhetorical”).

²The attributes of sincerity that I am emphasizing here, and their utility within a democratic culture, resemble those associated with parrhesia, or “frank speech” (Foucault; Balot). One important difference between the two concepts is that parrhesia does not carry with it the connotation of Romantic self-expression that has accrued to our contemporary usage of sincerity (Melzer).

³Trilling 12; Skeat 555; Jeske 145. The second syllable comes from the Indo-European root ker, meaning “to grow,” so that the roots of “sincerity” suggest “one growth” or having a single origin, and thus unadulterated purity. Jeske relates the folk etymology of “sincere” as meaning “without wax,” allegedly referring to the practice of Roman sculptors to use wax to fill in mistakes. Skeat states that this etymology is “unlikely,” while the Oxford English Dictionary declares flatly that “there is no probability” in it.

⁴Compare Guignon, describing authenticity: “The basic assumption built into the idea of authenticity is that, lying within each individual, there is a deep, ‘true self'—the ‘Real Me'—in distinction from all that is not really me” (6).

⁵The bifurcated citizen that I am suggesting as the outcome of a rhetorical education bears some resemblance to the de-centered self of some contemporary critical theory. See, for example, Rosenau, 42–61; Seigel, 603–650.

⁶Other forms of mimetic practice might include “poetic mimesis,” which concerns the production of art, and most specifically the extent to which art might reproduce nature, and “cultural mimesis,” which concerns the practices through which human cultures define themselves as more like, or less like, one another. However, any attempt to thoroughly differentiate these mimetic practices from one another is doomed to fail. Key texts in these complementary mimetic traditions would include Auerbach and Taussig. Melberg provides a thorough and concise overview of various theories of mimesis.

⁷It might be said that a rhetorical education cultivates an understanding of rhetorical agency as “promiscuous and protean” (Campbell).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Terrill

Robert Terrill is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, 800 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA