On Fruit and Dialogues, and Fruitful Dialogues

Abstract

I found my way to rhetoric while completing graduate work in ancient Greek and Roman studies and comparative literature. Like a good classicist, I first adopted an Aristotelian-inspired (and conveniently tripartite) view of rhetoric, which resulted in a strict boundary between my rhetorical and literary worlds. The division remained until I read Plato’s Timaeus. I began to believe that I could tie together my interests in rhetorical theory, philosophy, and literary studies, but I wasn’t sure how. In the process of writing a seminar paper on the Timaeus, I came across Andrea Nightingale’s book Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, which manifested the kind of interdisciplinarity I was after. Nightingale foregrounds the deliberate intertextuality of Plato’s dialogues, proposing that Plato first defined and demarcated “philosophy” by engaging with contemporary rhetorical and poetic genres, thus creating a dialogue among these genres within dialogues of his own. In this way, Nightingale reads Plato’s works as philosophical, rhetorical, and literary texts. Reading Genres in Dialogue motivated me to think more expansively and creatively about my own work in Platonic philosophy and rhetorical theory, and to be more attentive to my writerly inclinations. For years I set aside the Timaeus because, after all, it’s a work of natural philosophy and is rarely read in a rhetorical context. But I had a feeling there was something else there, something that warranted my attention, and I’m on my way to figuring out what that is.In a different genre altogether, Yung In Chae’s essay “Apples and Oranges, Ravens and Writing Desks: How to Compare Stuff,” published in the public-facing classics journal Eidolon, is one I wish I had read much earlier. It’s a common impulse to want to compare the ancient and modern worlds, and this essay was originally aimed at writers who pitched to Eidolon to deter them from falling into comparatist traps, though its directives are much more broadly applicable. Comparing two things can be fun, writes Chae, but to make the comparison productive, you must be able to explain what is at stake with the comparison. I have fallen into all the traps Chae warns of in “Apples and Oranges,” and I fear my past writing contains some of Chae’s “least favorite comparisons,” which “resort to mass generalizations of both cultures, and in the end, make interesting arguments about neither.” Though Eidolon is no longer publishing new material, its archive is available to the public, including Chae’s essay “Like Dionysus: BTS, Classics in K-Pop, and the Narcissism of the West,” which for me exemplifies what comparatist work can do and be. It’s productive to acknowledge shortcomings in my past writing as long as I commit to better and more complex comparisons in the future. Now when I write, I aim to keep Chae’s question in the forefront of my mind: what are the stakes of the comparison I’m making?