Contribution to Book
I Say “Cat”, you Say “Cradle”: Ecstatic Signification and the Kitchen Songs of Avudai Akkal of Sengottai
Global Rhetorical Traditions
(2022)
Abstract
Eighteenth Century Tamil sage Avudai Akkal artfully combined pedagogical, poetic, and musical elements to create an embodied performance-rhetoric for right-conduct - how to live - and right-view - proper understanding of who you are - for a demographic otherwise often excluded from such instruction. By necessity, these instructions needed to be concise, effective and easily repeated. In short, they needed to be intersectional, sprouting the Perennial Philosophy in diverse contexts. So concise were Akkal’s recipes for not just conceptualizing or analyzing but experiencing transcendental states, that, on our quest for compression in the infolanche, we would put them in the tradition of “pith instructions.”
Keywords
- global rhetorics,
- pith,
- Carnatic
Disciplines
Publication Date
2022
Publisher
Parlor Press
Series
Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Publisher Statement
GLOBAL RHETORICAL TRADITIONS is unique in design and scope. It presents translated primary sources on global rhetorical instruction and practices of Asia, Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, Polynesia, and precolonial Europe. Each chapter represents a different rhetorical region and includes an introduction, critical commentary, translated primary sources, a glossary of rhetorical terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. The general introduction helps contextualize the project, justify its organization and coverage, and draw attention to the various features, characteristics, and/or philosophies of the rhetorics included. The book's significance lies in its contributions to studying and teaching global rhetorical traditions by offering representative research methods and primary sources in a single volume. It can be read as scholarship, as reference, and as textbook.
Citation Information
Trey Conner and Richard Doyle. "I Say “Cat”, you Say “Cradle”: Ecstatic Signification and the Kitchen Songs of Avudai Akkal of Sengottai" Global Rhetorical Traditions (2022) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/trey-conner/11/