| Titel: | Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence |
|---|---|
| Autor: | Kalamaras, G |
| Mediengruppe: | --- |
| Herausgeber: | --- |
| Zeitschrift: | --- |
| Jahr: | 1990 |
| Band: | --- |
| Heft: | --- |
| Seiten: | 269 |
| Sprache: | englisch |
| Abstract: | Western philosophical and rhetorical theory usually cast silence as a lack, an annihilation of voice that hinders the construction of knowledge and the development of 'self.' In such theories, silence holds the status of death, and the speaking subject must overcome it by filling this void with discourse. Particular readings of Western discourse theory, then, privilege language, holding silence to the margins. However, this view of silence representing a void that the 'self' needs to overcome is actually on interpretative act, and as such the status of silence should be renegotiated. My dissertation seeks to authenticate silence as a mode of knowing. In so doing, I examine silence as symbolic form, recasting it from nihilism to a generative practice that both is meaningful in itself and informs discourse in the construction of knowledge. Thus, language and silence act in a reciprocal fashion, shaping discourse as well as the speaking subject herself. In an attempt to authenticate silence as a mode of knowing, I examine the ways classical rhetoric, objectivist philosophy, and Western mysticism have contributed to the misinterpretation of philosophies of silence, particularly those of the East. Beginning from a position of bifurcation, these Western perspectives cannot adequately account for the complexity of Oriental mysticism whose reciprocal paradigm precludes dichotomy. By examining modern and contemporary Western poetics as an analogue to the practices and nonconceptual awarenesses of silence, I describe silence as a meaningful act grounded in Western aesthetics. At the core of both is paradox. In demonstrating the generative quality of paradox, I extend my analysis from poetics and Eastern mysticism into the domain of quantum physics and Western theories of symbolic form, arguing that the 'sacred' awareness found in silence is not an understanding transcendent to rhetoric, but is itself a psychic identification with the process of symbolic transformation. Thus, I claim silence as a rhetoric. Finally, I further authenticate silence as a mode of knowing by offering an application of the understandings of silence in writing-across-the-curriculum practices and curriculum development, demonstrating the compatibility of a rhetoric of silence with the philosophies of dialogics. |