EP16: Ryan Leack: Totality & Temporality

Ryan Leack, Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California and author of published poetry, academic journal articles, and music for film scores, is interviewed by Live Theory co-host Ellen Wayland-Smith to discuss his recent poetry book, Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space. Here, he explores what it means to be human through an engagement with memory, time, and space, but also through cosmic imagery, interpretations of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, philosophy, and other modes of inquiry, all of which feel through the precarity of human life in its radical contingency. Each elegy addresses moments, memories, and images of his daughter, the figure around which the poems orbit. Moments contour human experience through personal events—her birth, growth, education, and so forth—each of which speaks to the larger human condition. Thus, his meditation on her life becomes a meditation on his own: on space, place, change, and growth.

As higher education continues to navigate attacks from the Trump administration, it is also negotiating the increased use of AI in theclassroom by teachers and students. On this special episode, we invite our USC Writing Program colleague Dan Dissinger, host of the Writing Remix podcast, to unpack the effects that AI and LLMs have on humanities classrooms, the risks of an exponential increase in reliance on AI by students, why students are using AI, and how teachers are being impacted. They also comment on the USC administration’s decision to give ChatGPT Edu to all students and faculty.Something that Ryan & Daniel present is a pedagogy of slowing down as an act of resistance. This approach includes reducing workloads, designing reflective assignments, and leaning heavily into process- instead of product-oriented writing to open students’ eyes to coercive branding and monetization in their lives. They call on intellects like Michel Foucault, Byung-Chul Han, Guy Debord, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Jean Baudrillard to deepen their conversation.This episode was originally recorded and released for the 2025 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival: “Untethering Surveillance Power Dynamics, Emerging Technologies, Social Control.”

Thomas Nail, a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, Being and Motion, and Matter and Motion, discusses his research on the philosophy of movement from antiquity to the present. Here, we take the topics of “matter and motion” and “being and motion” as orienting points but also cut across Nail’s work in ways that intersect with thinking about writing and the teaching of writing.

Michelle M. Wright, Emory College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, discusses her research on literary, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses on Blackness and Black identity in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Germanophone African Diaspora, from the 18th to 21st centuries. She published her first book, Becoming Black: Creating an Identity in the African Diaspora, with Duke UP in 2004, and her second book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, with UMN Press in 2015. Her current project, Feeling Europe: Black and African Diasporas in the Heart of Empire, looks at how space, place, and affect destabilize yet expand notions of home and racial belonging. She is also co-editor of several books. Here, we discuss “freedom, agency, and refuge” across a broad swath of her past and current work.

Ellen Wayland-Smith, Professor (Teaching) of Writing at USC, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador, 2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020), discusses her latest book, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self (Milkweed Editions, 2024). Here, she discusses two chapters, “Object Permanence” and “Quartz Contentment,” followed by a substantive discussion that ranges across topics of the book and to issues related to writing and rhetoric. These issues touch on personal loss and grief, the experience of time and scale, the use of scientific concepts in humanities work, and turtles.

Our Writing Program colleagues discuss AI, ChatGPT, and emerging Large Language Models, including their potentials and pitfalls for the doing and teaching writing and rhetoric, as well as the relation to writing program administration. This episode, like Episode 8 last year with Jonathan Alexander, is part of the 4th annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” hosted by Charles Wood. This year’s theme is “AI: Applications and Trajectories.” Here, we hope to illuminate through an extensive discussion the uncertain future in regard to powerful technologies that will likely reshape writing practice for writers, teachers, and students alike.

Margherita Long, Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on Japanese feminism, the modern novel, war narratives and peace activism, and eco-semiotics, discusses the introduction to her manuscript Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia. In 2018 she won a five-year grant from the Japan Foundation for a faculty line and a series of international symposia on Japanese Environmental Humanities at UCI. Her interest in the ethics of material indebtedness dates from her first book on psychoanalysis and the maternal-feminine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (Stanford University Press, 2009). Here, she discusses the tension between a politics of resistance and a literature of affirmation in the post-Fukushima work of feminist writer Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016).

Nathan Stormer, Professor of Rhetoric in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of Maine, discusses with us his article “Rhetoric by Accident,” published in Volume 53.4 of the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric. Here, he articulates a view of accidents that shape rhetorical work, but which themselves are not purposive, motive-driven, directed, or ethical. As extra-moral events and material and/or discursive happenings, accidents are indifferent to purpose. Staying with accidents and our material openness and vulnerability to them, Stormer sustains a space in which to think about accidents, and the accidental, apart from their agential and ethical usefulness, thereby disentangling the accidental from core rhetorical formulations that orbit intentionality on the human stage. In doing so, Stormer illuminates the power of accidents beyond our responses to and appropriations of them.

Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, director of the Humanities Core Program, and author, co-author, or co-editor of 22 books, discusses his new book, Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). In this episode we discuss both the introduction to his book and the broader project. As part of the 3rd annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” this episode speaks to the Carnival theme, “Rhetoric: Places and Spaces In and Beyond the Academy.” Challenging both modes of writing and desire, Alexander conceives of writing itself as desire in the form of an ongoing opening out onto possibilities. In this way, writing, especially as figured in rhetoric and composition pedagogy, transcends narrower argumentative and persuasive modes. Furthermore, desire is not conceived of as a lack to be fulfilled, or as an essentialized need to be unleashed, but rather as a fundamental openness, inclusive of critical reflection that makes different conditions and futures possible. Exploring the histories and modalities of writing and desire, we discuss both as unending processes of thinking and being otherwise in and beyond the classroom.

Susan Jarratt, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, shares her rich experience as a writer and scholar, and also as an editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the official journal of the "Rhetoric Society of America," which will be of great value to those of us working in rhetoric, composition, and related fields, whether in returning to unfinished projects or in taking up new ones. Here, she discusses several of her major projects, including Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) and Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019), which inform what she imparts to scholars tackling difficult projects that often involve expansive scholarly terrains and traditions. Her practical advice will help writers navigate the limits of time and space, but also some of the psychological struggles, including the urge toward perfectionism, that can have the effect of stopping writing before it begins, or else before it is finished, thereby giving scholars tools to work through the trouble spots of their craft.