New Scientist magazine is running a flash fiction contest — and they want YOU to enter.
The rules are simple: set your story 100 years in the future, and tell your story in no more than 350 words. Then send it to New Scientist and await your sure-to-arrive-soon fame and fortune.
And, if you need help generating ideas, David Malki has created an Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000, which is sure to provide you with winning ideas for years and years to come. (Malki is the creator of the Wondermark: An Illustrated Jocularity online comic. If you’re not reading it every week, you should be.)
Given our recent work with Aristotle’s Poetics, I have no doubt you’ll find much of interest in the E-PHG-FG2K.
(Click the image to go to Wondermark and view the E-PHG-FG2K in biggie form.)
There have been several questions now that the first assignment has come up, so here’s the definitive answer: YES! You may e-mail your work to me. The Lorax (who speaks for the trees) loves this idea, and encourages you to e-mail everything you do for this class to me.
So now you know. I’ll always take hard copies, but we all win when you use e-mail.
Here’s another video clip about the health care reform debate, but this one is an example (as the post title indicates) of a skilled rhetor practicing his craft. In this instance, it’s Senator Al Franken (D-MN), talking to people at the Minnesota State Fair.
Watch how Franken takes note of the kairos of the moment and adjusts his speech to it. Also watch how he uses example and dialectic (logos alert!) to make his case. Finally, where do you notice him using appeals to ethos? Interesting, no?
If you’re having trouble getting a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, here are links to two free online versions that use the same translations we’ll be discussing in class.
If you’re going to use the online texts, be sure to take extensive notes during your reading and to bring those notes with you to class.
Of course, mummies, zombies, and vampires are also alleged to do the same, so I’m not entirely sure this is a good thing anymore.
In any case, welcome to the first day of Writing Bodies: Rhetorics of the Flesh!
To kick our discussion off, I thought I’d pair some introductory info on the beginnings of rhetoric in ancient Greece with an issue that is currently being hotly debated today — health care reform. Here’s a video clip of George Lakoff explaining the rhetoric that is driving much of the current debate:
