Intensity

Summer intensives have begun at Berkeley. As I told my students yesterday, each class covers a week of the material I'd teach in the regular term, each week we cover about three weeks of material. Intensives are, in a word, intense. Good thing I'm not a tense person (guffaws all around). Today it's Euripides' Hecuba, also we're workshopping audiences/intentions, at once deploying and pressuring these notions, and the pragmatic "aims of argument", interrogation, conviction, persuasion, reconciliation. Tomorrow, it's Kant's "Sketch of History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose" and an overview of Aristotelian rhetoric, his propositional account of emotion (precursor to CBT and reductive AI discourse?), his fear of the disruptive force of refiguration (hence, metaphors as shortened similes), his rhetorical accounting of political time (forensic/past, deliberative/future, epideictic/present), the registers of the logical, the tropological, and the topical and the ways they correspond to the Aristotelian biggies: logos, pathos, ethos... Feeling tired already.