Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece by Debra Hawhee

Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece Reviews

• 
  Joey

  This is a text book. If it isn't a text book it is one of the worst books I have ever read. The book while straightforwardly written is boring, as any text book would be if you sought to read it for pleasure. The subject matter is a narrow one with a narrow audience so I would guess that the author would not try to jazz up her subject to meet the demands of an idiot like me. Still, the inclusion of hundreds of Ancient Greek words makes reading a slog and the book already has just an insular interest anyway. Read this book if you REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY love Classics.
• 
  Ian

  This is a hugely important and exciting work in shifting rhetoric from a rationalist towards a materialist framework, but the connections Hawhee elaborates seemed, to me, to get progressively more opaque as the chapters progressed. Not saying I don't buy what she's selling, but my capacity to clearly follow how she was making her points was inversely proportional to the height of the number of the chapter I was in beyond chapter 4. But maybe that's on me. Maybe I'll be able to follow along farther on a second read. I'm sure I'll read this many times.
• 
  Eric

  Hawhee’s primary purposes in this book are to argue that and explore the ways in which rhetorical and athletic training were deeply interrelated in ancient Greek culture. She argues that both sorts of training were seen as “bodily arts.” In other words, rhetorical training was not a purely intellectual pursuit based on the acquisition of knowledge, but an embodied practice requiring habituation and bodily intuition. Rhetorical ability, for instance, required facility with metis and kairos, neither of which could be learned in any systematic manner. Rhetorical altercations were, like Olympic wrestling, agonistic encounters aimed not at one competitor decisively or finely defeating another, but “insistent questioning, intense engagement with the issue under consideration” (193), an interminable performative pursuit of virtuosity rather than the achievement of stagnant victory. Developing rhetorical skill requires submission to phusiopoiesis, a willingness to have one’s nature (re)created. Hawhee’s later chapters examine the ways in which the physical space of Greek gymnasia and the physical/rhetorical events surrounding Greek festivals informed, encouraged, and eventually disrupted the close link between athletics and rhetoric. She also works, in her final chapter, to complicate any simple division of vision and the visible as embodied and physical and speech as disembodied and intellectual, drawing on Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen and Derrida to argue that speech itself has a “stealthy body” (184)--one capable of forcibly effecting visible bodies.