Response to Hansen Question #2

2. What implications, if any, do Hansen's ideas have for the teaching of writing, rhetoric, and/or literature?

This question is so large that it really can't be answered in a general way. I will comment that I am skeptical that Hansen's work itself will have a definable impact, which is not intended as a slight. Rather, it is a comment on the fact that, enmeshed as we are in the culture that Hansen is examining, our perspective on the ramifications of theory is inherently myopic. I've spent the past few days in archives looking at exactly this phenomena: contemporary things have not played out yet, and our engagement with them is more reactionary than that of posterity. Work such as Hansen's seems to be historically absorbed rather than causing a cultural revolution. Eliot mentions this sort of thing in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

Moreover, it is rare that we are able to trace significant impacts in rhetoric, writing, and literature to one person. Indeed, it seems fallacious to do so, because we are not dealing with the work (or the person herself) but with the discourse surrounding these things. Foucault and Heidegger allude to the impossibility of extricating "thoughts" such as these from the world in which they exist. Even when we can point to a significant figure, say for example Aristotle, we are not really dealing with Aristotle's work but with interpretations and the conversation they have spawned since his time (I'm bracketing off complications of authorship).

All that being said, something specific I picked out of Hansen that I thought was applicable and conservable is his implication of a kind of visual enthymeme. It seems that Hansen's notion of embodiment in image causes the viewer of the image to half-create what results. This to me recalls Bitzer's notion of the enthymeme (well, his discussion of Aristotle's enthymeme) and how the onus is upon the audience to partially construct the meaning the rhetor wishes to communicate.