Elmira College

« Back to Recent News

Spring 'Trouble Begins' Lecture Series Concludes May 30

Elmira, NY (05/25/2018) — The spring portion of the 2017-2018 "The Trouble Begins" Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies, concludes Wednesday, May 30 in Cowles Hall, Elmira College. The lecture begins at 7:00 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

The fourth and final lecture, "My penchant for silence': Mark Twain's Rhetorical Art of the Unspoken," will be presented by Ben Click of St. Mary's College of Maryland. There is no shortage of commentary on Twain's penchant for talk, how he transliterated and employed it. He perfected the mock oral narrative, precisely rendered of frontier and river vernacular, created the stunning narrative method of Huck Finn's voice, and crafted countless, repeatable maxims (Ironically, one being: "I talk until I have my audience cowed"). Yet, silence permeates the writings of Mark Twain - for example, there are over 150 references to silence in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone! Examining its functions is an overlooked, yet integral, aspect of his writing for silence mediates and influences the discourses of his fictive and personal worlds. Rhetorical theorist Cheryl Glenn argues, "silence - the unspoken - is a rhetorical art that can be as powerful as the spoken or written word." Twain too understood that power: "The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it." Indeed, Twain crafted the full measure of that art on the page throughout his writing life. This talk examines representative (and powerful) rhetorical uses of silence in the arc of Twain's fictive writing.

Click is a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland, director of the Writing & Speaking Center, director of the Twain Lecture Series on American Humor Culture, and the associate editor of The Mark Twain Annual. With Larry Howe and Jim Caron, he published Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts. He has given numerous lectures and scholarly papers on Mark Twain, published articles and book chapters on the teaching of writing and writing assessment. He is also working on a book that examines humor as a rhetorical strategy in environmental writing, a genre that is sometimes seen as taking itself too seriously.

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series
In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain's October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College's campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.

About Elmira College
Elmira College is a private, coeducational, Phi Beta Kappa college founded in 1855, located in Elmira, New York. The College has an undergraduate enrollment of approximately 1,200 full-time mostly-residential students, and is the guardian of Quarry Farm where Mark Twain wrote many of his most iconic novels and is today a research center for visiting Twain scholars. The College has been ranked as a Best College in the Northeast by The Princeton Review and a Top Tier national liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report, which also ranked Elmira College as a leading college, nationally, for student internships. The Philadelphia Inquirer cited the Elmira College campus as 'picture postcard perfect.'

Media Attachments

The spring portion of the 2017-2018 The Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies, concludes Wednesday, May 30 in Cowles Hall, Elmira College. The fourth and final lecture, “My penchant for silence’: Mark Twain’s Rhetorical Art of the Unspoken,” will be presented by Ben Click of St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Copyright © 2024 Merit Pages, Inc. • All Rights Reserved. • Terms of Service • Privacy Policy • Opt Out