Faked Out: The companion novel to the bestselling Faking It by Elisa Lorello

Author:Elisa Lorello [Lorello, Elisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Missouri Breaks Press
Published: 2018-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

For some reason I had expected Andi to show up wearing something sexy, like a cocktail dress. Instead she appeared in jeans, a light blue tank top, and flip-flops. Her naturally wavy hair, growing longer every day, was pulled back in a headband. Then again, I hadn’t dressed up for the occasion either, sporting my usual jeans and a U2 tour shirt, thus I don’t know why I was expecting her to.

We started with the writing tutorial first. Andi had assigned me to read Plato’s Phaedrus—a text so tedious it would’ve made a better form of execution than the hemlock. These were some of the classical texts and some of the earliest forms of argument and rhetoric, Andi explained. Furthermore, she explained Phaedrus to me as Plato’s slam against the sophists and a philosophical foray into provisional vs. absolute truth. She lost me.

“The sophists were the talk show hosts, televangelists, and motivational speakers of their time,” she explained. “The Stephen Colberts. Orators for hire—have quill, will travel. And they were regaled as rock stars with their grandiloquent ability to move the masses and make them swoon.”

“Sounds like a good gig,” I said.

“Plato didn’t think so. He’s saying that sophistry is nothing more than ‘cookery,’ a bunch of bells and whistles, and that rhetoric isn’t so much a pursuit of truth as it is a means of persuasion.”

“So, when you called me ‘a modern-day sophist’ that day, you weren’t paying me a compliment?”

She opened her mouth, as if to say something, then closed it again. I winked. See? I remember things.

“But here’s the cool thing,” she pressed on. “If you really study the text, Plato is teaching, and he uses metaphor and tropes used in rhetoric to do so.”

She was animated, clearly geeked out by this stuff, prompting me to tease her a little. “So?”

“So? Do you realize that this is the stuff that I’m still teaching to this day? Metaphor? Rhetoric as a means of communication and persuasion? Plato paved the way for guys like Aristotle who systematized the whole thing, modes of discourse and all.”

Never let anyone tell you readers aren’t sexy.

“And truth?” I asked.

“What about truth?” she countered.

“Is rhetoric a means to truth or not?”

“Plato didn’t think so. He thought sophistic rhetoric actually got in the way of the search for absolute truth, which sort of contradicts what I teach today. I say language is a way to make meaning, to express truth in many forms. Plato sought to use rhetoric analytically and dialectically. Read the text again and you’ll see it—look at the dialectic between Socrates and Phaedrus.”

Read it again? I’d rather eat the paper on which it was printed.

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“It’s an acquired taste,” she replied, as if she’d heard my mental metaphor.

We moved on to her next lesson: describe the Warhol painting without using any words typically found in an art review—kind of like Taboo for art critics. After that, I had to write an impromptu speech—I even created a metaphor inspired by the Platonic “cookery,” which impressed Andi.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.