Rhetorical Histories in Motu: On Teaching the Octalogs

Abstract This article argues for teaching the history of rhetoric using a historiographic approach—one informed by reading the Octalogs—to move students to inquire into how and why histories are written. It theorizes the pedagogical significance of the Octalogs in three ways: how they show students glimpses of images from rhetoric’s contested history, how they create a kind of productive confusion for students necessary for future learning and movement, and how they serve as a “disciplinary heuristic,” inspiring the invention of new research trajectories for students in the discipline. Drawing from retrospective interviews conducted with former graduate students who read the Octalogs, the article concludes by outlining eight benefits of an Octalogic pedagogy or a pedagogy that invites students to see histories of rhetoric as always in motu.