Table of Contents by Steven B. Katz
This TOC, showing all Sections and Titles of published work herein contained on this site. Much o... more This TOC, showing all Sections and Titles of published work herein contained on this site. Much of this published work has been buried or unavailable until now.
The TOC reveals (in reverse chronology in each Section), the order of poems and other creative work, scholarly articles, links to full-length books, book reviews of the author's work, book reviews the author has written, comments and responses, etc. The work is copied and/or linked if available, and some more recent work is augmented or in audio as well as print.
The beginning of the TOC also features the author's most recent published work.
You may scroll through the work, or you may use the menu above to access a particular section. Enjoy.
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Newly Published by Steven B. Katz
Survive and Thrive: A Journal of Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine (Special Issue on Diversity and Community in Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities), 2020
Excerpt from: {being about to ASCEND}
This poem constitutes a different take on the theme of t... more Excerpt from: {being about to ASCEND}
This poem constitutes a different take on the theme of this special issue of Survive and Thrive—“Diversity and Community in Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities.” An excerpt from a longer poem under development, the poem here is a story of human frailty and limitation at the end of Anthropocene, the end of the age of humans on Earth—perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant future. This poem is thus a “speculative” or “science fiction” story about what happens to a species indigenous and totally adapted to and dependent on the Earth, and which cannot survive anywhere else, must. Facing extinction, the human community finds that despite their extreme individual, social, cultural, and political differences they must re-emerge by further diversifying in order to survive. This “posthuman” community (in the poem) must leave Earth for interstellar space, and so physiologically as well as psychologically must transform to adapt to the harsh and fatal environments they will encounter, as the late physicist Stephen Hawking predicts. This poem, a lyrical sequence (1), therefore tells a set of related stories about beings undergoing traumatic physical and emotional metamorphosis that will change them and their history of shared experiences forever.
And they have help. In the poem, the alien who has been watching the human community accidentally exposes the aliens, who now they must intercede. These aliens are not just your ordinary intervening earth-saving aliens as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. These aliens are Being, and they want to take the posthumans with them. Thus, this lyrical sequence of poems is not “only” about the end of the human community as we know it, and the need to ”diversify” in extremis to remain a community; it is also a philosophical allegory—about the Posthuman Community and its relationship to Alien Being. It is a hybrid genre, a light dramatic tragedy-comedy of how Posthuman Community, confronted by Alien Being, is finally forced in the future to leave the Earth for Antares, a double star cluster 610 light years (10,675,000 Earth years) from Earth (2). Each poem in this lyrical sequence focuses on some imagined (and often humorous) emotional, psychological, cultural, and/or physical dimensions of issues that might be entailed in becoming non-human, unrecognizable, “Other,” and so modified as individuals and as an extant community, have a chance to survive and thrive.
Recommended Citation
Katz, Steven B. (2020) "Excerpt from: {being about to ASCEND}," Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 9.
Available at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol5/iss2/9
NOTES: 1) A lyrical sequence is a group of shorter lyrical poems that are assembled thematically, narratively, and/or imagistically, to implicitly or explicitly through their juxtaposition or other relations (such as form) indirectly convey meaning, to tell a story, or discuss a set of issues created by metaphor, for example). For those interested, the particular forms of the poems in this lyrical sequence are a blank verse monologue, a free verse chorus, a modified Petrarchan sonnet, a villanelle, a modified Shakespearian sonnet, and a three-part free verse double parody. 2) For the convenience of the reader, the Dramatis Personae (Alien Secret Agent, Posthuman Community, Alien Being, Alien Poet), and the three scenes in which the poem occurs (Earth at the end of the Anthropocene, Interstellar Space, and a planet somewhere deep in the Antares binary star system) are indicated. À la Coleridge-style the ongoing overall plot is tagged to the right of the first stanza in each section.
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Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, 2020
This project is a DIY rhetorical video poem on sbk’s “retirement,” made with iPhone, and Adobe Pr... more This project is a DIY rhetorical video poem on sbk’s “retirement,” made with iPhone, and Adobe Premiere Pro by sbk and Addy Enlow. The project, in movie form, consists of poetry, which is read and shown (each labeled under a rhetorical theory/topic, with rhetorical 'analyses' "indicated" as the poem unfolds/unrolls). Music and photography are also employed, the later predominately interacting with and reinterpreting the rhetoric of the poems. Using Roland Barthes, the power of photographs and their totally present, chimeric, unreal qualities, are briefly explored in a Preface consisting of five short meditations. The result is the combined use of art of create ambiguity.
Ironically, this project started out life many years ago as several different versions of poems in response to sbk’s early and tragic, almost fatal, divorce. Eventually, over the years, these poems were assembled into this lyrical sequence. All retirements are a kind of divorce--amicable and/or difficult. In pursuing the present comparison of my joyful retirement in 2019 to my miserable divorce in the past, this lyrical sequence turns William Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality” on its side: This “Intimations of Mortality” offers its own reflections on mortality, “recollected” not in “tranquility” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”), but analogically but “in agita,” as a divorce, with all the attendant self-pity and violent emotions people experience during that trauma, and long after.
https://sites.google.com/murraystate.edu/intraspection/home/all-issues/issue-3-2020/intimations-of-mortality
Total Video Time 25.34. Video Poem --> (Detailed poetic photo credits begin at *24:26*)
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Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine, 2020
This Editors' Note reflects the thoughts and feelings of the Editors of _Survive and Thrive_ on V... more This Editors' Note reflects the thoughts and feelings of the Editors of _Survive and Thrive_ on Vol 5: Issue 1 on Covid-19 and publishing a journal of medical humanities and narrative medicine during a global pandemic, summarizes its contents, and concludes with a statement about the human condition. While the issue is not a direct response to the pandemic, the Editors humbly offer it as what writer, rhetorician, and literary critic Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living."
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The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics: Studies in the History, Application, and Teaching of Rhetoric Beyond Traditional Greco-Roman Contexts, 2021
This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section reviews attempts in the last decade... more This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section reviews attempts in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first--at conferences, workshops, and in publications--to define “Jewish rhetoric,” especially in relation to the Greco-Roman tradition, at the same time touching on the work of some primary scholars in contemporary fields of rhetorics and Jewish studies. The second section cautiously overviews the author’s own attempt to define “Jewish rhetoric,” touching on a 25-year examination of the philosophy of the Hebrew alphabet, which figures prominently in esoteric and mystical theories of creation–not only in the Hebrew Bible but also in Midrash and Kabbalah–and a tentative proposal that the rhetoric of the alefbet can be understood as an alternate, Jewish sophistic in which language is “Reality” and letters its “divine atoms,” so to speak; so deconstructed, G/d becomes the unknowable master rhetorician, and the ultimate sophist. The third section delineates various issues, questions, and problems that arise in the author’s analysis of Jewish rhetoric overviewed in the second section. The fourth section tries to redress at least some of the questions raised by locating Jewish rhetoric in the Torah–the Five Books of Moses–which is central to Judaism, especially since the destruction of the Second Temple, and that is found in every Jewish denomination and community. The fifth section concludes with a short list of basic issues seen in the analysis above of Jewish rhetoric that may be of value in attempts to develop the field of comparative global rhetorics.
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Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse_3e (2010) Open Access Version, 2020
_Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse_ is an advanced science w... more _Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse_ is an advanced science writing textbook, grounded in the rhetoric of science, the sociology and history of science, and linguistics. The book treats the major genres of writing in science and research: scientific research reports, grant proposals, conference papers and other professional presentations, and public communication, as well as the social, rhetorical, and ethical bases of these as scientific arguments. Focusing not only on the distinctive features of these genres but also on how and why such texts are created by scientists, the book thus highlights the multiple genres of science writing as distinguished from technical writing and other professional writing domains.
In keeping with the goal of treating genres as they are used in various disciplines, the authors approach the task of teaching students in the sciences how to write in their chosen field in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive way. That is, rather than listing a generic set of prescriptive rules, the authors present general rhetorical concepts and heuristics that students can use to recognize and analyze the conventions actually used by scientists in their own fields, and to use these conventions effectively in their own writing. Examples are drawn from a range of scientific disciplines, enabling students to recognize and place their own field's practices in the context of those of other disciplines. Such comparisons also provide the opportunity for instructors and students to identify common conventions in science, investigate variation across fields, and recognize relationships between the structure of a discipline's inquiry and the logic of its spoken, written, graphic, and digital texts.
--
The third edition of _Writing in the Sciences_ was published by Pearson Education in 2010. The text of this version, with copyrighted material excised and minimal updates,
was prepared for Open Access as a PDF ebook hosted by Parlor Press in 2020. With special thanks to David Blakesley, this book is FREE and available for personal and educational purposes under a Creative Commons License, and the Fair Use Act.
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Humanities, 2020
Sonic rhetorics has become a major area of study in the field of rhetoric, as well as composition... more Sonic rhetorics has become a major area of study in the field of rhetoric, as well as composition and literature. Many of the underlying theories of sonic rhetorics are based on post-Heideggerian philosophy, new materialism, and/or posthumanism, among others. What is perhaps similar across these theories of sonic rhetoric is their "turn" from language and the human in general. This short essay explores sonic rhetorics by examining three temporal dimensions found in language. Specifically, the essay focuses on the more obvious sonic dimensions of time in prosody, and then at deeper levels temporal dimensions in a couple of brief but revealing examples from ancient languages (classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew). Further, this essay suggests some ways in which time is related to ethics in practice and action. For example, just as time is involved in the continuous creation of our increasingly vast, expanding, infinite but bounded universe, Levinas might say that time is necessary to create the ethical space, or perhaps "hypostasis," one needs for the possibility to encounter "l'autre"-the Other. Beyond prosody, propriety, even kairos, are hidden temporal dimensions of language that may render sonic rhetorics forms of ethical practice.
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_Humanities_ (Special Issue on Ethics and Literary Practice), 2019
Contains a one page Abstract, two poems ("II. The Ghosts of Objects [A Villanelle for the End of ... more Contains a one page Abstract, two poems ("II. The Ghosts of Objects [A Villanelle for the End of the Anthropocene"] and "III. Time, Proust, Being, You"), and a selected Bibliography. This "treatise" on ethics and literary practice is a self-reflective piece that argues and enacts ethical criticism through poetic form as well as content. That is, I deliberately employ poetry not only as a literary genre but also as rhetorical arguments-investigative, demonstrative, and evidentiary-and as forms of ethical action. The two previously unpublished poems here are drawn from a larger, lyrical discourse sequence tentatively entitled "Heidegger, Ethics, and Time: After the Anthropocene." The "poetic arguments," then, concern the possible interrelations and effects of time and ethics within the philosophical context of post-human "being" collectively, and also of personal death as a shared event.
There are a couple of famous theories of time and ethics that ebb and flow within the different formal abridgments of time in these two poems. One set of theories is expounded in Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, as well as many of his other treatises on language, poetry, and ethics. Another set of theories is founded in Emmanuel Levinas' work on time and alterity. But unlike these philosophies, the two poems here deal in detail with (1) the potential particularities of lived sensation and feeling (2) as they might be experienced by sentient and non-sentient 'being' (3) that survive death-of our species (poem II) and/or individual death (poem III). However, rather than simply rehearsing philosophy or recasting it into poetic form, these two poems argue for and against the notion that time is a physical and thus materially moral absolute, necessary for any (conscious) life to exist at all; and these two poems also argue physically, through their structure and style. They argue that physical dimension of time is not only a material force that is "unkind to material things" (aging, decay), as articulated in the content of one poem for example, but also a moral force that is revealed and played against in the constricted temporal motion and music of the poems (i.e., their forms, and variations within).
In addition to philosophical arguments that poetry by its nature deliberately leaves ambiguous (indeterminate, but also will-free), the aural, temporal forms of the poems themselves flow in or move through but also reshape time. A simple instance of this is the way meter and rhyme are activated by time, yet also transform time, pushing back against its otherwise unmarked inexorable ineffable. .. The temporal properties of poetic forms in conjunction with content therefore constitute "lyrical ethics" in literary practice. Thinking (and putting aside as well) Heidegger and Levinas, these poems as temporal forms may physically shift, even if only momentarily, the relation of the listener or reader to Being/Death, or Alterity/Other.
For example, the enhanced villanelle and modified Spenserian stanza offered here each shapes time differently, and thus differently shapes the intuitive, affective, cognitive responses of readers. With its cyclical repetition of lines, usually over five tercets and a quatrain, the villanelle with every advancing stanza physically 'throws' time (the concept and the line) back on itself (or perhaps is "thrown forward" [Geworfen]). In contrast, the pattern of the Spenserian nine-line stanza allows time to hover around a still but outward-expanding point (like a partial mini-[uni]verse) before drifting to the next stanza (especially here, where the final rhyme at the end of each stanza is much delayed.). Within and without the context of Heidegger and Levinas, I assert that these structural features are ethical statements in literary practice. The choice of these traditional forms of poetry in itself is an ethical statement. Stylistically as well as thematically, these two poems argue "all sides" of ethical positions in relation to the end of being human.
Perhaps more importantly, these two poems explore the inevitably human experience of philosophically different ethical positions on death "post anthropocentrically"-what might come in the rhetorical after we can never know except poetically.
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_More Truly, More Strange: An Anthology of Poetry in Augmented Reality_, 2019
For almost my entire adult writing life, I have been seeking and pursuing the connections between... more For almost my entire adult writing life, I have been seeking and pursuing the connections between science/technology and poetry, in verse as well as prose, both as a way of advancing poetry in the 21st century, as well as critiquing the language and ethics of science/technology. From the first time I met him years ago on a mountain top in NH, poet and scholar Ger Killeen completely understood what I was about and has encouraged and supported my work, as he has so many others, in ways tangible and intangible.
I now have the honor of being among a group of poets published in a new augmented reality anthology of poetry, _More Truly, More Strange: An Anthology of Poetry in Augmented Realty_ edited by Ger Killeen! Both tangible and intangible, this anthology moves the exploration of science/technology and poetry to a new level of reality!
Check it out (instructions for viewing the poems anywhere are contained in the link). If you are curious, I will include a couple of snaps below of my poem floating around my house.
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enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, 2019
http://enculturation.net/Rhetoric_Ethics_Poetics_Katz_Interview
Editorial Statement: "With Issue... more http://enculturation.net/Rhetoric_Ethics_Poetics_Katz_Interview
Editorial Statement: "With Issue 28, we are delighted to present the first two publications in our new sonic projects section. The first of those two, “Rhetoric, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Steven B. Katz,” is an apt starting point for the section. While the interview revolves around Katz’s 1992 article “The Ethic of Expediency,” his 1996 book The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing was a key forerunner to the recent reemergence of sound as a major area of interest in rhetoric and writing studies. The interview is richly supplemented with music, poetic performances, and other sonic features that amplify the possibilities of this new section." --Laurie Gries, Eric Detweiler, and the Editorial Team of _enculturation_ 28 April 2019. Quoted with permission.
Email from Irish Poet, Augmentation Innovator, and Language Scholar Ger Killeen: "Steve, this is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. The notion that “[p]sychagogy, as an indirect attempt to affectively access the soul, may be one of the few scholarly approaches that can adequately address with any genuine emotional depth questions about the Holocaust with authenticity or integrity…” is a revelation for which I feel I’ve been waiting my whole life. The dialectic of the more usual scholarly interview questions and your poetic answers with their inherent music amplifying and being amplified by the sacred guitar music creates for me an experience that is well-nigh overwhelming. It is as if you allow us to become aware that deep inside Celan’s silences and hesitancies there is an infrasound which promises understanding and perhaps even peace. I am on my third listen and I am overawed, my friend. Ger." --June 17, 2019. Quoted with permission.
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Poems for Refugees/Immigrants/Race/Antiwar by Steven B. Katz
_Elohi Gadugi_, 2015
"When We Left the Earth" appeared in _Elohi Gadugi_ (Winter 2015). I here dedicate it to the thou... more "When We Left the Earth" appeared in _Elohi Gadugi_ (Winter 2015). I here dedicate it to the thousands of refugees fleeing their homes and streaming into Europe.
Link to journal provided. Access/reprint rights granted by the publisher.
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"We are used to distinguishing between refugees and state-less people.... From the beginning, man... more "We are used to distinguishing between refugees and state-less people.... From the beginning, many refugees who were not technically stateless preferred to become such rather than return to their country.” —Giorgio Agamben, _Means with¬out End_ p. 16.
These two poems were both published in the _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_ (Spring 2015). "Undusting Time" is dedicated to Anna Weaver and her daughters, one of whom asked why we don't say "we're undusting" instead of "we're dusting," which makes sense, since our purpose is not to add, dust, but to take it away. Here I use "Undusting" in a larger sense, and so in that larger sense I here also dedicate this poem to all the women of the world.
Click on the Permalink below to go to the poem: http://egjournal.org/article/8919/
or go to the journal at http://egjournal.org/
Copyright/Link/Access rights granted by the publisher back to the author. Please let me know if you have any problems with the link (skatz@clemson.edu).
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Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, 2005
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Poets Against the War Website, 2003
This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War Website_, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and... more This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War Website_, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and Editor of Copper Canyon Press) in February, 2003. The war being protested was the war in Iraq. This particular poem explores the cynicism and irony of the tragedy of this fake war on terror, which the poem "mocks."
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Poets Against the War Website, 2003
This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War_ website, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and... more This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War_ website, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and Editor of Copper Canyon Press) in August 2003. The war being protested was the war in Iraq. This particular poem explores the weariness experienced in the eternal war on terrorism.
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Poets Against the War Website, 2003
This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War Website_, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and... more This poem appeared on the _Poets Against the War Website_, published by Sam Hamhill (Founder and Editor of Copper Canyon Press) in November 2003. The war being protested was the war in Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003 with the invasion of that country by the US and allied forces in what was known as the "shock and awe" campaign. This particular poem was first drafted when, at a rhetoric and composition conference (CCCC) in New York City, the author, emerging from a production by the Metropolitan Opera of Verdi's _Otello_ at Lincoln Center on the night of March 20, learned that the war had begun.
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_Raleigh News and Observer: Sunday Journal_ ("Beyond Words"), 2001, 2001
Finished and published the week after 9/11, but just as relevant today: we don't know who our rea... more Finished and published the week after 9/11, but just as relevant today: we don't know who our real enemies are anymore, and our missteps are global and personal.
Based on a reminiscence of an Iranian studying in the _United States who shared it with me in 1977, this poem was begun before the Iranian-US hostage crisis, the
Gulf War, the Iraq War, the successful international nuclear negotiations with Iran, and the US withdrawal from that agreement. The time was a period in the poem was when the United States and Iran were close allies, although this was in some, disputed measure due to the "installation" of the Shah of Iran. At the time of writing this abstract, I will simply and sadly note that the Iranian friends I knew then, who were studying in the U.S.... were in constant fear of being spied upon, even by their own friends, both in Iran and abroad, and the fear and consequences of anything they say. This poem comes out of that fear, as well as longing and sadness that unfortunately in one guise or other appear to be timeless and universal.
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Pembroke Magazine, 2001
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Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, 2000
This villanelle was composed on the occasion of the retirement of poet, colleague, and dear frien... more This villanelle was composed on the occasion of the retirement of poet, colleague, and dear friend, Gerald Barrax at North Carolina State University. (See my note on my use of the villanelle for such poems of parting/retirement in my villanelle for Michael Halloran, contained on this site.) Several titles of Gerry's poetry collections are worked into some of the lines of my poem; I did not use quotation marks to flag them. This poem was published in Obsidian III: Black Literature in Review, formerly brought to NC State in 1985 and edited by Gerry, and at the time of publication of my poem by Afaa (Michael) Harper, who graciously republished the poem in the next issue because of extreme formatting issues with the villanelle in the issue dedicated to Gerry. Obsidian III also changed its subtitle from "Review of Black Literature" to "Literature in the African Diaspora." (For a history of this historically ground-breaking journal, see http://obsidian.chass.ncsu.edu/.
I delivered this poem at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh, NC, at the Obsidian III Festival, February 20, 2000, in honor of Gerry's career at NC State, as well as his retirement.
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Poems of Science/Technology by Steven B. Katz
1) “Posthumanistic”
2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”
These two poems were published in _... more 1) “Posthumanistic”
2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”
These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.
Both of these poems present a far-distant future.
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Table of Contents by Steven B. Katz
The TOC reveals (in reverse chronology in each Section), the order of poems and other creative work, scholarly articles, links to full-length books, book reviews of the author's work, book reviews the author has written, comments and responses, etc. The work is copied and/or linked if available, and some more recent work is augmented or in audio as well as print.
The beginning of the TOC also features the author's most recent published work.
You may scroll through the work, or you may use the menu above to access a particular section. Enjoy.
Newly Published by Steven B. Katz
This poem constitutes a different take on the theme of this special issue of Survive and Thrive—“Diversity and Community in Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities.” An excerpt from a longer poem under development, the poem here is a story of human frailty and limitation at the end of Anthropocene, the end of the age of humans on Earth—perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant future. This poem is thus a “speculative” or “science fiction” story about what happens to a species indigenous and totally adapted to and dependent on the Earth, and which cannot survive anywhere else, must. Facing extinction, the human community finds that despite their extreme individual, social, cultural, and political differences they must re-emerge by further diversifying in order to survive. This “posthuman” community (in the poem) must leave Earth for interstellar space, and so physiologically as well as psychologically must transform to adapt to the harsh and fatal environments they will encounter, as the late physicist Stephen Hawking predicts. This poem, a lyrical sequence (1), therefore tells a set of related stories about beings undergoing traumatic physical and emotional metamorphosis that will change them and their history of shared experiences forever.
And they have help. In the poem, the alien who has been watching the human community accidentally exposes the aliens, who now they must intercede. These aliens are not just your ordinary intervening earth-saving aliens as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. These aliens are Being, and they want to take the posthumans with them. Thus, this lyrical sequence of poems is not “only” about the end of the human community as we know it, and the need to ”diversify” in extremis to remain a community; it is also a philosophical allegory—about the Posthuman Community and its relationship to Alien Being. It is a hybrid genre, a light dramatic tragedy-comedy of how Posthuman Community, confronted by Alien Being, is finally forced in the future to leave the Earth for Antares, a double star cluster 610 light years (10,675,000 Earth years) from Earth (2). Each poem in this lyrical sequence focuses on some imagined (and often humorous) emotional, psychological, cultural, and/or physical dimensions of issues that might be entailed in becoming non-human, unrecognizable, “Other,” and so modified as individuals and as an extant community, have a chance to survive and thrive.
Recommended Citation
Katz, Steven B. (2020) "Excerpt from: {being about to ASCEND}," Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 9.
Available at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol5/iss2/9
NOTES: 1) A lyrical sequence is a group of shorter lyrical poems that are assembled thematically, narratively, and/or imagistically, to implicitly or explicitly through their juxtaposition or other relations (such as form) indirectly convey meaning, to tell a story, or discuss a set of issues created by metaphor, for example). For those interested, the particular forms of the poems in this lyrical sequence are a blank verse monologue, a free verse chorus, a modified Petrarchan sonnet, a villanelle, a modified Shakespearian sonnet, and a three-part free verse double parody. 2) For the convenience of the reader, the Dramatis Personae (Alien Secret Agent, Posthuman Community, Alien Being, Alien Poet), and the three scenes in which the poem occurs (Earth at the end of the Anthropocene, Interstellar Space, and a planet somewhere deep in the Antares binary star system) are indicated. À la Coleridge-style the ongoing overall plot is tagged to the right of the first stanza in each section.
Ironically, this project started out life many years ago as several different versions of poems in response to sbk’s early and tragic, almost fatal, divorce. Eventually, over the years, these poems were assembled into this lyrical sequence. All retirements are a kind of divorce--amicable and/or difficult. In pursuing the present comparison of my joyful retirement in 2019 to my miserable divorce in the past, this lyrical sequence turns William Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality” on its side: This “Intimations of Mortality” offers its own reflections on mortality, “recollected” not in “tranquility” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”), but analogically but “in agita,” as a divorce, with all the attendant self-pity and violent emotions people experience during that trauma, and long after.
https://sites.google.com/murraystate.edu/intraspection/home/all-issues/issue-3-2020/intimations-of-mortality
Total Video Time 25.34. Video Poem --> (Detailed poetic photo credits begin at *24:26*)
In keeping with the goal of treating genres as they are used in various disciplines, the authors approach the task of teaching students in the sciences how to write in their chosen field in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive way. That is, rather than listing a generic set of prescriptive rules, the authors present general rhetorical concepts and heuristics that students can use to recognize and analyze the conventions actually used by scientists in their own fields, and to use these conventions effectively in their own writing. Examples are drawn from a range of scientific disciplines, enabling students to recognize and place their own field's practices in the context of those of other disciplines. Such comparisons also provide the opportunity for instructors and students to identify common conventions in science, investigate variation across fields, and recognize relationships between the structure of a discipline's inquiry and the logic of its spoken, written, graphic, and digital texts.
--
The third edition of _Writing in the Sciences_ was published by Pearson Education in 2010. The text of this version, with copyrighted material excised and minimal updates,
was prepared for Open Access as a PDF ebook hosted by Parlor Press in 2020. With special thanks to David Blakesley, this book is FREE and available for personal and educational purposes under a Creative Commons License, and the Fair Use Act.
There are a couple of famous theories of time and ethics that ebb and flow within the different formal abridgments of time in these two poems. One set of theories is expounded in Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, as well as many of his other treatises on language, poetry, and ethics. Another set of theories is founded in Emmanuel Levinas' work on time and alterity. But unlike these philosophies, the two poems here deal in detail with (1) the potential particularities of lived sensation and feeling (2) as they might be experienced by sentient and non-sentient 'being' (3) that survive death-of our species (poem II) and/or individual death (poem III). However, rather than simply rehearsing philosophy or recasting it into poetic form, these two poems argue for and against the notion that time is a physical and thus materially moral absolute, necessary for any (conscious) life to exist at all; and these two poems also argue physically, through their structure and style. They argue that physical dimension of time is not only a material force that is "unkind to material things" (aging, decay), as articulated in the content of one poem for example, but also a moral force that is revealed and played against in the constricted temporal motion and music of the poems (i.e., their forms, and variations within).
In addition to philosophical arguments that poetry by its nature deliberately leaves ambiguous (indeterminate, but also will-free), the aural, temporal forms of the poems themselves flow in or move through but also reshape time. A simple instance of this is the way meter and rhyme are activated by time, yet also transform time, pushing back against its otherwise unmarked inexorable ineffable. .. The temporal properties of poetic forms in conjunction with content therefore constitute "lyrical ethics" in literary practice. Thinking (and putting aside as well) Heidegger and Levinas, these poems as temporal forms may physically shift, even if only momentarily, the relation of the listener or reader to Being/Death, or Alterity/Other.
For example, the enhanced villanelle and modified Spenserian stanza offered here each shapes time differently, and thus differently shapes the intuitive, affective, cognitive responses of readers. With its cyclical repetition of lines, usually over five tercets and a quatrain, the villanelle with every advancing stanza physically 'throws' time (the concept and the line) back on itself (or perhaps is "thrown forward" [Geworfen]). In contrast, the pattern of the Spenserian nine-line stanza allows time to hover around a still but outward-expanding point (like a partial mini-[uni]verse) before drifting to the next stanza (especially here, where the final rhyme at the end of each stanza is much delayed.). Within and without the context of Heidegger and Levinas, I assert that these structural features are ethical statements in literary practice. The choice of these traditional forms of poetry in itself is an ethical statement. Stylistically as well as thematically, these two poems argue "all sides" of ethical positions in relation to the end of being human.
Perhaps more importantly, these two poems explore the inevitably human experience of philosophically different ethical positions on death "post anthropocentrically"-what might come in the rhetorical after we can never know except poetically.
I now have the honor of being among a group of poets published in a new augmented reality anthology of poetry, _More Truly, More Strange: An Anthology of Poetry in Augmented Realty_ edited by Ger Killeen! Both tangible and intangible, this anthology moves the exploration of science/technology and poetry to a new level of reality!
Check it out (instructions for viewing the poems anywhere are contained in the link). If you are curious, I will include a couple of snaps below of my poem floating around my house.
Editorial Statement: "With Issue 28, we are delighted to present the first two publications in our new sonic projects section. The first of those two, “Rhetoric, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Steven B. Katz,” is an apt starting point for the section. While the interview revolves around Katz’s 1992 article “The Ethic of Expediency,” his 1996 book The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing was a key forerunner to the recent reemergence of sound as a major area of interest in rhetoric and writing studies. The interview is richly supplemented with music, poetic performances, and other sonic features that amplify the possibilities of this new section." --Laurie Gries, Eric Detweiler, and the Editorial Team of _enculturation_ 28 April 2019. Quoted with permission.
Email from Irish Poet, Augmentation Innovator, and Language Scholar Ger Killeen: "Steve, this is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. The notion that “[p]sychagogy, as an indirect attempt to affectively access the soul, may be one of the few scholarly approaches that can adequately address with any genuine emotional depth questions about the Holocaust with authenticity or integrity…” is a revelation for which I feel I’ve been waiting my whole life. The dialectic of the more usual scholarly interview questions and your poetic answers with their inherent music amplifying and being amplified by the sacred guitar music creates for me an experience that is well-nigh overwhelming. It is as if you allow us to become aware that deep inside Celan’s silences and hesitancies there is an infrasound which promises understanding and perhaps even peace. I am on my third listen and I am overawed, my friend. Ger." --June 17, 2019. Quoted with permission.
Poems for Refugees/Immigrants/Race/Antiwar by Steven B. Katz
Link to journal provided. Access/reprint rights granted by the publisher.
These two poems were both published in the _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_ (Spring 2015). "Undusting Time" is dedicated to Anna Weaver and her daughters, one of whom asked why we don't say "we're undusting" instead of "we're dusting," which makes sense, since our purpose is not to add, dust, but to take it away. Here I use "Undusting" in a larger sense, and so in that larger sense I here also dedicate this poem to all the women of the world.
Click on the Permalink below to go to the poem: http://egjournal.org/article/8919/
or go to the journal at http://egjournal.org/
Copyright/Link/Access rights granted by the publisher back to the author. Please let me know if you have any problems with the link (skatz@clemson.edu).
Based on a reminiscence of an Iranian studying in the _United States who shared it with me in 1977, this poem was begun before the Iranian-US hostage crisis, the
Gulf War, the Iraq War, the successful international nuclear negotiations with Iran, and the US withdrawal from that agreement. The time was a period in the poem was when the United States and Iran were close allies, although this was in some, disputed measure due to the "installation" of the Shah of Iran. At the time of writing this abstract, I will simply and sadly note that the Iranian friends I knew then, who were studying in the U.S.... were in constant fear of being spied upon, even by their own friends, both in Iran and abroad, and the fear and consequences of anything they say. This poem comes out of that fear, as well as longing and sadness that unfortunately in one guise or other appear to be timeless and universal.
I delivered this poem at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh, NC, at the Obsidian III Festival, February 20, 2000, in honor of Gerry's career at NC State, as well as his retirement.
Poems of Science/Technology by Steven B. Katz
2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”
These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.
Both of these poems present a far-distant future.
The TOC reveals (in reverse chronology in each Section), the order of poems and other creative work, scholarly articles, links to full-length books, book reviews of the author's work, book reviews the author has written, comments and responses, etc. The work is copied and/or linked if available, and some more recent work is augmented or in audio as well as print.
The beginning of the TOC also features the author's most recent published work.
You may scroll through the work, or you may use the menu above to access a particular section. Enjoy.
This poem constitutes a different take on the theme of this special issue of Survive and Thrive—“Diversity and Community in Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities.” An excerpt from a longer poem under development, the poem here is a story of human frailty and limitation at the end of Anthropocene, the end of the age of humans on Earth—perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant future. This poem is thus a “speculative” or “science fiction” story about what happens to a species indigenous and totally adapted to and dependent on the Earth, and which cannot survive anywhere else, must. Facing extinction, the human community finds that despite their extreme individual, social, cultural, and political differences they must re-emerge by further diversifying in order to survive. This “posthuman” community (in the poem) must leave Earth for interstellar space, and so physiologically as well as psychologically must transform to adapt to the harsh and fatal environments they will encounter, as the late physicist Stephen Hawking predicts. This poem, a lyrical sequence (1), therefore tells a set of related stories about beings undergoing traumatic physical and emotional metamorphosis that will change them and their history of shared experiences forever.
And they have help. In the poem, the alien who has been watching the human community accidentally exposes the aliens, who now they must intercede. These aliens are not just your ordinary intervening earth-saving aliens as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. These aliens are Being, and they want to take the posthumans with them. Thus, this lyrical sequence of poems is not “only” about the end of the human community as we know it, and the need to ”diversify” in extremis to remain a community; it is also a philosophical allegory—about the Posthuman Community and its relationship to Alien Being. It is a hybrid genre, a light dramatic tragedy-comedy of how Posthuman Community, confronted by Alien Being, is finally forced in the future to leave the Earth for Antares, a double star cluster 610 light years (10,675,000 Earth years) from Earth (2). Each poem in this lyrical sequence focuses on some imagined (and often humorous) emotional, psychological, cultural, and/or physical dimensions of issues that might be entailed in becoming non-human, unrecognizable, “Other,” and so modified as individuals and as an extant community, have a chance to survive and thrive.
Recommended Citation
Katz, Steven B. (2020) "Excerpt from: {being about to ASCEND}," Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 9.
Available at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol5/iss2/9
NOTES: 1) A lyrical sequence is a group of shorter lyrical poems that are assembled thematically, narratively, and/or imagistically, to implicitly or explicitly through their juxtaposition or other relations (such as form) indirectly convey meaning, to tell a story, or discuss a set of issues created by metaphor, for example). For those interested, the particular forms of the poems in this lyrical sequence are a blank verse monologue, a free verse chorus, a modified Petrarchan sonnet, a villanelle, a modified Shakespearian sonnet, and a three-part free verse double parody. 2) For the convenience of the reader, the Dramatis Personae (Alien Secret Agent, Posthuman Community, Alien Being, Alien Poet), and the three scenes in which the poem occurs (Earth at the end of the Anthropocene, Interstellar Space, and a planet somewhere deep in the Antares binary star system) are indicated. À la Coleridge-style the ongoing overall plot is tagged to the right of the first stanza in each section.
Ironically, this project started out life many years ago as several different versions of poems in response to sbk’s early and tragic, almost fatal, divorce. Eventually, over the years, these poems were assembled into this lyrical sequence. All retirements are a kind of divorce--amicable and/or difficult. In pursuing the present comparison of my joyful retirement in 2019 to my miserable divorce in the past, this lyrical sequence turns William Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality” on its side: This “Intimations of Mortality” offers its own reflections on mortality, “recollected” not in “tranquility” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”), but analogically but “in agita,” as a divorce, with all the attendant self-pity and violent emotions people experience during that trauma, and long after.
https://sites.google.com/murraystate.edu/intraspection/home/all-issues/issue-3-2020/intimations-of-mortality
Total Video Time 25.34. Video Poem --> (Detailed poetic photo credits begin at *24:26*)
In keeping with the goal of treating genres as they are used in various disciplines, the authors approach the task of teaching students in the sciences how to write in their chosen field in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive way. That is, rather than listing a generic set of prescriptive rules, the authors present general rhetorical concepts and heuristics that students can use to recognize and analyze the conventions actually used by scientists in their own fields, and to use these conventions effectively in their own writing. Examples are drawn from a range of scientific disciplines, enabling students to recognize and place their own field's practices in the context of those of other disciplines. Such comparisons also provide the opportunity for instructors and students to identify common conventions in science, investigate variation across fields, and recognize relationships between the structure of a discipline's inquiry and the logic of its spoken, written, graphic, and digital texts.
--
The third edition of _Writing in the Sciences_ was published by Pearson Education in 2010. The text of this version, with copyrighted material excised and minimal updates,
was prepared for Open Access as a PDF ebook hosted by Parlor Press in 2020. With special thanks to David Blakesley, this book is FREE and available for personal and educational purposes under a Creative Commons License, and the Fair Use Act.
There are a couple of famous theories of time and ethics that ebb and flow within the different formal abridgments of time in these two poems. One set of theories is expounded in Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, as well as many of his other treatises on language, poetry, and ethics. Another set of theories is founded in Emmanuel Levinas' work on time and alterity. But unlike these philosophies, the two poems here deal in detail with (1) the potential particularities of lived sensation and feeling (2) as they might be experienced by sentient and non-sentient 'being' (3) that survive death-of our species (poem II) and/or individual death (poem III). However, rather than simply rehearsing philosophy or recasting it into poetic form, these two poems argue for and against the notion that time is a physical and thus materially moral absolute, necessary for any (conscious) life to exist at all; and these two poems also argue physically, through their structure and style. They argue that physical dimension of time is not only a material force that is "unkind to material things" (aging, decay), as articulated in the content of one poem for example, but also a moral force that is revealed and played against in the constricted temporal motion and music of the poems (i.e., their forms, and variations within).
In addition to philosophical arguments that poetry by its nature deliberately leaves ambiguous (indeterminate, but also will-free), the aural, temporal forms of the poems themselves flow in or move through but also reshape time. A simple instance of this is the way meter and rhyme are activated by time, yet also transform time, pushing back against its otherwise unmarked inexorable ineffable. .. The temporal properties of poetic forms in conjunction with content therefore constitute "lyrical ethics" in literary practice. Thinking (and putting aside as well) Heidegger and Levinas, these poems as temporal forms may physically shift, even if only momentarily, the relation of the listener or reader to Being/Death, or Alterity/Other.
For example, the enhanced villanelle and modified Spenserian stanza offered here each shapes time differently, and thus differently shapes the intuitive, affective, cognitive responses of readers. With its cyclical repetition of lines, usually over five tercets and a quatrain, the villanelle with every advancing stanza physically 'throws' time (the concept and the line) back on itself (or perhaps is "thrown forward" [Geworfen]). In contrast, the pattern of the Spenserian nine-line stanza allows time to hover around a still but outward-expanding point (like a partial mini-[uni]verse) before drifting to the next stanza (especially here, where the final rhyme at the end of each stanza is much delayed.). Within and without the context of Heidegger and Levinas, I assert that these structural features are ethical statements in literary practice. The choice of these traditional forms of poetry in itself is an ethical statement. Stylistically as well as thematically, these two poems argue "all sides" of ethical positions in relation to the end of being human.
Perhaps more importantly, these two poems explore the inevitably human experience of philosophically different ethical positions on death "post anthropocentrically"-what might come in the rhetorical after we can never know except poetically.
I now have the honor of being among a group of poets published in a new augmented reality anthology of poetry, _More Truly, More Strange: An Anthology of Poetry in Augmented Realty_ edited by Ger Killeen! Both tangible and intangible, this anthology moves the exploration of science/technology and poetry to a new level of reality!
Check it out (instructions for viewing the poems anywhere are contained in the link). If you are curious, I will include a couple of snaps below of my poem floating around my house.
Editorial Statement: "With Issue 28, we are delighted to present the first two publications in our new sonic projects section. The first of those two, “Rhetoric, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Steven B. Katz,” is an apt starting point for the section. While the interview revolves around Katz’s 1992 article “The Ethic of Expediency,” his 1996 book The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing was a key forerunner to the recent reemergence of sound as a major area of interest in rhetoric and writing studies. The interview is richly supplemented with music, poetic performances, and other sonic features that amplify the possibilities of this new section." --Laurie Gries, Eric Detweiler, and the Editorial Team of _enculturation_ 28 April 2019. Quoted with permission.
Email from Irish Poet, Augmentation Innovator, and Language Scholar Ger Killeen: "Steve, this is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. The notion that “[p]sychagogy, as an indirect attempt to affectively access the soul, may be one of the few scholarly approaches that can adequately address with any genuine emotional depth questions about the Holocaust with authenticity or integrity…” is a revelation for which I feel I’ve been waiting my whole life. The dialectic of the more usual scholarly interview questions and your poetic answers with their inherent music amplifying and being amplified by the sacred guitar music creates for me an experience that is well-nigh overwhelming. It is as if you allow us to become aware that deep inside Celan’s silences and hesitancies there is an infrasound which promises understanding and perhaps even peace. I am on my third listen and I am overawed, my friend. Ger." --June 17, 2019. Quoted with permission.
Link to journal provided. Access/reprint rights granted by the publisher.
These two poems were both published in the _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_ (Spring 2015). "Undusting Time" is dedicated to Anna Weaver and her daughters, one of whom asked why we don't say "we're undusting" instead of "we're dusting," which makes sense, since our purpose is not to add, dust, but to take it away. Here I use "Undusting" in a larger sense, and so in that larger sense I here also dedicate this poem to all the women of the world.
Click on the Permalink below to go to the poem: http://egjournal.org/article/8919/
or go to the journal at http://egjournal.org/
Copyright/Link/Access rights granted by the publisher back to the author. Please let me know if you have any problems with the link (skatz@clemson.edu).
Based on a reminiscence of an Iranian studying in the _United States who shared it with me in 1977, this poem was begun before the Iranian-US hostage crisis, the
Gulf War, the Iraq War, the successful international nuclear negotiations with Iran, and the US withdrawal from that agreement. The time was a period in the poem was when the United States and Iran were close allies, although this was in some, disputed measure due to the "installation" of the Shah of Iran. At the time of writing this abstract, I will simply and sadly note that the Iranian friends I knew then, who were studying in the U.S.... were in constant fear of being spied upon, even by their own friends, both in Iran and abroad, and the fear and consequences of anything they say. This poem comes out of that fear, as well as longing and sadness that unfortunately in one guise or other appear to be timeless and universal.
I delivered this poem at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh, NC, at the Obsidian III Festival, February 20, 2000, in honor of Gerry's career at NC State, as well as his retirement.
2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”
These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.
Both of these poems present a far-distant future.
_Survive and Thrive: A Journal of Medical Humanities and Narratives of Medicine_
Note: This is a PDF of the original publication; if it's blurry, expand the file on your screen to 'full view' and the attachment should become clear; or you may download the file. Please let me know if the link does not work (skatz@clemson.edu).
All three poems were begun (and as you will see to some extent situated) in the early to late 1980s, when I was a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
“Ghosts of Technology” selected for use in the reading comprehension portion of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's statewide English I Test for 9th grade, 1999-2002; 1998-2000; 1994-96
“Pentadic Leaves” is a ‘Burkean poem’ in five parts based on Kenneth Burke's “pentad,” of course, but the poem also employs in its imagery and very structure concepts and terminology from Burke’s other, earlier, and/or less well-known work.
This lyrical sequence was written for and delivered at the Kenneth Burke Society Conference at Saint Louis University on July 19, 2014, and subsequently published in a special issue of the _KB Journal_ 12: 2 (Spring 2017), which contains both a link to the video, as well as the printed poem published here for the first time.
Both links to the video and printed publication are within. *The video also contains the live introduction and overview of the poem not found in the printed text.*
"Article content is published under a Creative Commons license attached to each article."
"Digging Out the Stairs" is dedicated to the late Seamus Heaney, who, in addition to being a major twenty-twentieth century poet, also held the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.
"Four Meditative Sonnets: Sound, Voice, Paper, Breath" is dedicated to Peter Elbow, a major force in the fields of teaching writing, composition, and rhetoric, and a dear friend to all who know him.
Reprinted in accordance with the Journal's access rights.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again, at the kind and generous request of Professor Jack Selzer at Penn State, I composed and delivered another Ode--this time a lyrical sequence--to and for the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in 2008. This "Ode 2 RSA" was presented at the President’s Luncheon, RSA, Seattle, Washington, May 25, 2008. I here wish to thank Jack for his generosity, and the enormous influence he has had on my life and career.
"Ode 2 RSA" was subsequently published in its entirety in Pre/Text. 20.1-4 (2010): 247-260, which is also the version reproduced here, with permission. Thanks, Victor Vitanza.
Note: I don't exactly know why I write villanelle's for colleagues who retire (see the villanelles I wrote for Gerald Barrax, and Art Young). However, I'm sure it has something to do with its lyrical quality, which can be rendered both celebratory and elegiac. The villanelle is one of my favorite poetic forms, and I have written many, including several that are unpublished as of yet and so will not appear on academia.edu.
I offer the JSTOR link here for those who have institutional access to the journal. For those who don't, I have attached a manuscript copy, with permission from NCTE.
Fainlight. Until her retirement, Ruth was my editor for poems in EJ for over 10 years.
Each stanza clearly represents a "terministic screen" (Kenneth Burke, _Language as Symbolic Action, pp.44-62); the connections between each exhibit the blur of realities.
Links to the poem and the journal are provided. Access and reprint rights granted by the publisher. Please let me know if you have trouble with the links: skatz@clemson.edu
Click on the Link below to go to the poem: http://egjournal.org/article/the-temple-of-asclepius/ Please let me know if you have problems with the link (skatz@clemson.edu).
The collection of poems that made up a thesis was meant as manifesto on "the two cultures," and the necessity of poets humanizing science, and science educating poets (see the required and different "Abstract" written in 1980 as part of thesis). Because all of the poems in this collection were later revised and published, this posting is private, and only specific requests to view it will be considered. Thank you.
**NOTICE: A free, open access version of the 2010 third edition of _Writing in the Sciences_, with copyrighted material excised, is now hosted as an ebook on the Parlor Press website at: https://parlorpress.com/products/writing-in-the-sciences-exploring-conventions-of-scientific-discourse.
©2020 by Ann M. Penrose and Steven B. Katz ISBN 978-1-64317-186-9.
(PDF, 326 pages. Free purchase.)
While the book may seem anachronistic in the necessary focus on literary reader-response criticism, composition, and classical rhetoric, the issues and problems of the study of rhetoric, sound, music, and time based on a new (transcendental) naïve empiricism, or even four-dimensional space-time continuums, have not abated or been solved by newer theories and approaches--not even those based on of Heidegger's philosophical masterpiece, _Sein und Zeit_ (_Being and Time_), which underlies some of the newest and most productive philosophies of rhetoric and music. Thus, the extended discussions of time and rhetorical/affective response to sound as temporal phenomena are given free range, especially in the multiple endnotes and appendices of _The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric_, and may form a new, posthumanistic, physical foundation for understanding.
Formed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1992, the ORI defines research misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" (FFP). However, a host of other authorship issues in addition to plagiarism are important in science (e.g., authorship credit, author order, etc.) and are regularly encountered and often violated by scientists. However, our research also reveals that there are many sources of ethics in scientific communication-some in conflict with each other, just as the ethics are often in tension (e.g., the drive for originality and credit vs. the need to collaborate and share)-and that scientific organizations and journals, combined with social, personal, and other systems of morality and values, create "ethical lines and fields of force." It is within these shifting ethical fields of force, rather than the power of the ORI, that scientists work every day. (In this, we recognize of both Actor-Network Theory, and posthumanistic understandings of the limitations of human agency in continuously emergent and mostly unpredictable ecologies, here applied specifically scientific/authorship ethics.)
The ORI's decision to exclude authorship ethics other than plagiarism provides a unique opportunity to interrogate the supposed and real power of the ORI; to begin to map the ethical lines and fields of force that impinge on scientists; and to explore the role and implications of ethics in authorship as a fundamental concern in scientific research as well as communication.
Winner of the 2007 National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication in the category of Best Collection of Essays in 2006.
Cited by Michael Agger in _Slate Magazine_ (THE BROWSER: CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY. The E-Mail Addict STOP USING, START LIVING, Posted Wednesday, May 2, 2007).
NOTE: The interactive and full color version published by AgBioForum should be available for free at http://www.agbioforum.org/v4n2/v4n2a03-katz.htm.
Published articles and books which I will not be able to reproduce on academia.edu will be listed in chronological order:
[under construction]
Keywords: Rhetoric and religion, Hebrew rhetoric, Hebrew letters, alefbet, Jewish hermeneutics, mystical alphabets, grammatology, ancient Semitic scripts
NOTE: This article appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion (23: 2 2003): 126-162. Because of the copyright allowances of JCR, I am able to present it here on Academia.edu. This article represents one dimension of my research into rhetoric, technology, and ethics; this dimension focuses on the somewhat unique philosophy of Jewish rhetoric generally, and particularity on the Hebrew alphabet in kabbalah, midrash, and Torah (and hence in reverse chronological order). Increasingly, I am seeing and studying new materialisms like Object Oriented Philosophy in relation to this ancient and alternative ontology--the relation of objects and letters, for instance, and the ethical implications of the similarities and differences. Other articles related to this topic that I will not be able to reproduce here include (in chronological order):
--“The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust.” College English 54 (March 1992): 255-75
--“Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Hitler’s Program, and the Ideological Problem of Praxis, Power, and Professional Discourse as a Social Construction of Knowledge.” Special issue on Power and Professional Discourse, Journal of Business and Technical Communication. (Jan. 1993): 37-62
--“The Kabbalah as a Theory of Rhetoric: Another Suppressed Epistemology.” Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy: Selected Papers from the 1994 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America (peer reviewed), John Frederick Reynolds, Editor. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers,
1995: 109-117
--“The Epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995): 107-122
--“The Alphabet as Ethics: A Rhetorical Basis for Moral Reality in Hebrew Letters.” Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement. Selected Papers from the 2002 RSA Conference. peer reviewed). Gerald Hauser and Amy Grimm, Editors. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2004): 195-204
--“Composing Identity in Cyberspace: A ‘Rhetorical Ethnography’ of Writing on Jewish Discussion Lists in Germany and the United States” (with Michal Anne Moskow). Judaic Perspectives on Composition. Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah H. Holdstein, Eds. Creskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 2008: 85-108
--“The Hebrew Bible as Another, Jewish Sophistic: A Genesis of Absence and Desire in Ancient Rhetoric.” Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics. Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley, Eds. Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Patricia Sullivan and Catherine Hobbs. Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2009: 125-150
--“Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations: Digital Being in the Workplace World” (with Vicki W. Rhodes). In Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice, Rachel Spilka, ed. London: Routledge, 2010: 230-256
--“The ‘Place’ of Rhetoric in Aggadic Midrash” (with David Metzger). College English 72: 6 (July 2010): 638-653. Special issue on Composing Jewish Rhetorics. Janice Fernheimer, Guest Editor; John Schilb, Editor
--“Afterword: The Reality of Words and their Aftermath.” In Deadly Documents: Technical Communication, Organizational Discourse, and the Holocaust—Lessons from the Rhetorical Work of Everyday Texts. Mark Ward. Baywood Publishing. 2014. 203-220
--“Socrates as Rabbi: The Story of the Alpha and the Aleph in an Age of Information.” In Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice. Eds. Janice Fernheimer and Michael Bernard-Donals. Brandeis UP, 2014. 93-111
--“Burke’s New Body? The Problem of Virtual Material, and Motive, in Object Oriented Philosophy.” Kenneth Burke Journal. Special Editors Kris Rutten, Vrijders Dries, and Ronald Soetaert, University of Ghent, Belgium. Forthcoming Spring 2015
--“Ethics and Letters: Understanding, Teaching, and Learning Writing as a Moral Act.” Special issue on Jewish rhetoric and pedagogy, The Writing Instructor, David Metzger, Guest Editor. In progress
Note: I am making this paper available here because since its publication in RSQ 1995, it has been missing the diagram, "The Diaspora of Western Philosophy," discussed in some detail within its pages. One could attribute its disappearance to mystical processes... but I prefer to make that (more recently designed) diagram available here. With apologies to the Rhetoric Society of America.
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.
This essay finds Kenneth Burke seemingly moving toward a more posthumanistic rather than modernist perspective in his late book, _The Rhetoric of Religion_. Here, Katz and Rivers focus on how Burke's concept of "entelechy" (a teleology that is nevertheless motivated and largely determined by human agency), is rhetorically shadowed and overtaken by Burke's growing conception of "predestination" (an entelechy based not on telos OR human agency only, but also on the emergence of unpredictable objects and forces in a posthumanistic ecology in which the effect and destiny of human motives and actions are uncertain at best). This Burkean 'shift', albeit temporary, is applied to the indie film "Fixed," where issues of ableism, transhumanism, and genetic selection are explored visually via performance and interviews.
The linked essay, "The Rhetoric of Confessional Poetry (Revisited): Ethos, Myth, Therapy, and the Narrative Configuration of Self," is based on the penultimate version of the article published in My Father Was Shiva: A Family Tragedy in Poetry and Prose with Psychological Interpretations by Jim Flosdorf (Edward Tick, editor. New York: Ablex, 1994: 109-36. Print.) This essay has only been slightly revised for republication in Survive and Thrive (but see the "Poetry Editor's Note: A Missive to Our Selves" [Article 1], which updates and sets up the reappearance of the article for this journal). Here, as in the original article, the author at least tentatively suggests that confessional poetry is not necessarily therapeutic, and in some cases rhetorically may make psychological problems worse. This tentative conclusion is arrived at after considering the rhetorical and psychological role that narrative plays in constructing not only our identities, but our life story, stories which we repeat to ourselves over and over again. Rhetorical analysis is not often applied to the analysis of poetry much anymore. But in this article, it is not being used to interpret the literary meaning of poetry, but the social, psychological, and affective truthfulness of poetry. Narratives have their own fidelity created by the structure of the genre, and thus also have to do with the construction of ethoi. The essay concludes with a personal confession.
Distinguishing between Object Oriented Philosophy and Actor-Network Theory this essay applies Burkean theory to question whether in the former Objects as actants can have agency if not motive. Burkean concepts of pentadic ratios, entelechy, Spinoza's method, intrinsic/extrinsic, symbolic of the body, and catharsis are used to rhetorically analyze claims of Object Oriented Philosophy.
Published in the _KB Journal_, the Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, and Parlor Press. “This work is licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.”
Each writer of this Encomium was given a specific part of the Encomium (as described by Quintilian), as well as two different figures of speech to be used to develop their respective sections. (This is clearly delineated in this document.)
This Encomium was delivered at Lotus of Siam, ARST dinner, National Communication Association, Nov 18, Las Vegas, NV, 2015.
composed and delivered by many of his many of his former graduate students and colleagues: Drs. Greg Clark, Cheryl Geisler, Lura Gurak, Cynthia Haller, Russel Hirst, Karen LeFevre, Steven B. Katz, Susan Katz (no relation :), Jean Lutz, Carolyn Miller, Maureen Murphy, Elizabeth Shea, Shaun Slattery, Dale Sullivan, Jason Swarts, Ashley Williams and Victoria Moore, Liz Wright, Jim Zappen.
Each person above was assigned a section of the traditional rhetorical structure of the Encomium, as well as two different figures of speech each to develop in their respective sections. This is all documented in the text here.
The Encomium was performed at the Russian Tea Time restaurant in Chicago, Thursday 21 March 2002.
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