Prompt 1

Due by Sunday 1/20

Rhetoric of the Body asks that you take a critical view of the body in society (and consequently the body of society). For your first post, I would like you to look around you and talk about the bodies in your world.

• How do bodies function in your environment?
• What kind of bodies do you encounter everyday?
• What sort of arguments do these bodies make as far as personal or corporate identity?

After you talk about your immediate environment, you can consider more general questions about the body in society.

• You may wish to talk about the student body at the university. Are bodies something we forget about in higher education? If so, why? And where do they remain important in our society?
• Another option is to address the body in modern, digital society. With the advent of virtual reality and the avatar, can we still consider our bodies to be fundamental markers of our identities?

What you want to do with this post is map out your "starting place" for the course - where are you now in terms of the ideas we will discuss?