Date:
Location:
The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations presents:
Dr. Jeannie Miller
Assistant Professor, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
University of Toronto
"Exceptions and Wonders: Rhetoric and al-Jahiz's Natural Science"
Tuesday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.
6 Divinity Avenue, room 201
The ninth-century polymath al-Jahiz has, in his cultural afterlife, acquired two personae: the impish and sophistic author employing the rhetorical genre of “debating the merits” of various objects, and the passionate theologian who pursued natural science as a component of theology. Integrating these elements of al-Jahiz’s output, this talk will examine the argumentative and performative strategies within the rhetorical debates he narrates in Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (Book of Animals). I will ask how he thought rhetoric produced knowledge of natural science, and why exceptional, shocking, and extreme creatures figure so prominently.