The very first post on my very first blog

The subtitle of my blog, taken from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” says something about the potential of rhetoric and my approach to it. Namely, writing about rhetoric, either theoretically or historically, is always a redemptive process. On the one hand, rhetoric requires redemption from its own proclivity for flattery, from its own ‘mere-ness’. On the other hand, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably…Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History). However, another of Whitman’s poems says perhaps something more about this specific blog:

I believe of all those men and women that fill’d the/ unnamed lands, everyone exists this hour here or/ elsewhere, invisible to us,/ In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life,/ and out of what he or she did, felt, became, loved,/ sinn’d, in life (“Unnamed Lands”).

Which is to say: this blog is a collective endeavor, and in at least two ways. First, my topic of study will come from the collective that is the past (which speaks to the historical orientation I’d like to take in my studies). Second, my attempts to write critically about that past will be influenced by the collective contributions of my colleagues in Dr. Kristan Poirot’s "Rhetoric and Textual Methods" course. In keeping with the pragmatic nature of the latter endeavor, this blog has four goals (subject to change):

1. To provide a platform for my writing and ideas related to rhetoric.
2. To improve my writing skills.
3. To better understand (and get better at) the revision process.
4. To receive feedback from my peers (and whoever else perchance runs into this blog) on both my writing and thoughts.

I also hope this blog can function somewhat beyond Fall Semester 2010 at Texas A&M University. Namely, as I develop and pursue other ideas and writing, this blog will continue to be a place to perform those rhetorical contributions as well as get feedback on them. I might also post things of general interest on occasion.