Sawyer Seminar, “Disputation: Arguing In and Out of the University”
Theoretical Perspectives of the Seminar
Comparative insights about disputation will develop along several axes in the Seminar: between and among historical periods (medieval, Renaissance, contemporary); languages and literatures (Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian); religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity); cultures and ethnicities (Western European, Near Eastern, Native American); and gender and class. Because disputation evolved in the West over the course of more than two millennia as the forms of pre-modern culture constantly changed, multi-dimensional terms of comparison are indispensable for understanding the problem of disputation – leading naturally to a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary responses. The many voices contributing to the discussion will be focused throughout the Seminar by questions asked from three selected theoretical perspectives: literary, sociological and philosophical.
Literary and linguistic questions that the Seminar will consider are:
How do the settings of fictional disputations (animal debates, private settings, social settings, elite classes, mixed classes, etc.) affect their procedures and impact?
How do fictional settings – or fictional debaters like birds and beasts – serve as safe(r) arenas for potentially dangerous topics in disputation?
How do gender, class, and ethnicity shape or affect literary disputes?
How do we encounter unequal participants in debate, for instance lord and clerk, or (in medieval Christendom) Christian and Jew?
Do literary disputes set up implicit or explicit limits of access, by such means as specialized language, or such gateways as class or education?
Can the traditional structure of dispute itself serve as a social or psychological censor?
How does disputation, external or interior, shape the development of literary character?
Reason vs. emotion in disputation. What are the competing uses of dialectic and rhetoric in literary disputation?
Sociological questions will include:
What social structures and norms of conduct operate in disputation?
What is the locus of disputation: public, private or in-between?
What access is there to disputation and what participation?
What methods disseminate the process and product of disputation?
How can the audience of disputation respond to it?
How can the audience remember, record, reproduce, quote and become persuaded by disputation?
Where do its contents and outcomes place disputation in typologies of power?
Where does professionalization situate disputation in a mediated public sphere?
And philosophical issues will include:
What theories of argument best illuminate disputation?
What does speech-act theory tell us about disputation?
Is disputation a form of performative utterance?
Is disputation governed by a logic of questioning?
How does disputation navigate the boundary between semantics and pragmatics?
Do game theory and games of partial cooperation apply to disputation?
Comparative insights about disputation will develop along several axes in the Seminar: between and among historical periods (medieval, Renaissance, contemporary); languages and literatures (Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian); religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity); cultures and ethnicities (Western European, Near Eastern, Native American); and gender and class. Because disputation evolved in the West over the course of more than two millennia as the forms of pre-modern culture constantly changed, multi-dimensional terms of comparison are indispensable for understanding the problem of disputation – leading naturally to a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary responses. The many voices contributing to the discussion will be focused throughout the Seminar by questions asked from three selected theoretical perspectives: literary, sociological and philosophical.