I've been thinking about exploring memory for the first paper, but maybe someone can help me out. I'm having trouble narrowing it down to a figure or does memoria count as a rhetorical concept in classical rhetoric.
This has some connections (that are pretty obvious at this point) to the work we've been reading in Modern Rhetoric as well about archives and historiography.
What I'm seeing so far (meaning I don't really have a thesis yet) are the connections in Phaedrus between memory, the soul, and goodness. For example, on page 526 as Plato's describing the souls flying up to see Reality he writes that if "it does not see anything true because it could not keep up , and by some accident takes on a burden of forgetfulness and wrongdoing, then it is weighed down, sheds it wings and falls to earth."
Likewise on the next page, Plato writes that "A man who uses reminders of these things correctly is always at the highest, most perfect level of initiation, and he is the only one who is perfect as perfect can be" (527).
I was also thinking about connecting this to notions of orality versus text somehow because it seems like orality is closely tied to memory, but it's also much more mutable. On the other hand, written text guarantees memory to an extent, but it also seems more immutable. Once it's recorded in textual memory it's dead, right, because in Socrates's terms it's no longer dialectic. You can't chat with a text.
A lot of this is layed out in the short introduction to the piece so maybe this is redundant, but it's something I've been thinking about and trying to find new angles or wrinkles for analysis.