Well, at least it's not 5AM...this time.

So, how does a discussion of drama relate to my investigation into Plato’s Chora? To understand the direction in which this project will proceed and the subject matter that this project seeks to investigate, I think it is helpful to first think about drama, for several reasons. The first being that this project will be a performance. Using key terms that occur repeatedly within traditional scholarship on the Chora as my script, and the classroom as the space for Chora’s theoretical performance, this project seeks to (en)act the possibilities for a protagonistic application of the Chora in rhetorical scholarship. Moreover, the very format with which my project will take will be as much an explicit argument as it will be an implicit performance of that argument. While other literary forms, too, are open for interpretation, performance of drama requires different terminology, namely that focused on embodiment and (en)actment; a discussion of the choratic classroom, as I will show, requires such terms, since the Chora is always moving. Just as drama is the process of (an always changing) (en)actment of reactions to a set of words—putting forth an argument of who and what a character is—and just as that embodiment is open to various interpretations by the actor, the Chora also allows for that style of engagement in the classroom. This project, then, seeks to rhetorically open up the very physical, designated space of the composition classroom. Thus, the question that this project seeks to answer is not one of meaning-making or productiveness, but rather one of embodiment and enactment: How might we embody and enact the Chora in the writing classroom? Finally, this project will argue that like protagonists in drama, the fields of rhetoric and composition too must give up their will toward mastery—the desire to find the precise ”key” to a/effective writing. We might instead seek to open up the fields to the possibilities that come out of impreciseness, out of failure, out of not knowing. And by seeing our students, too, as protagonists, we might better be able to help them give up their insistence that what they bring to the classroom—a set of values, experiences, ideas of what writing is and is not—need be what they will leave with. If the Chora is a site of transformation, flux, as Plato’s dialogue intimates, then my project argues that the Chora allows us to, like the protagonist of a drama, occupy a space predicated on contingencies, refusals, blockings. And most importantly, we must take away all expectations of what we as instructors will bring to the classroom, and like Hamlet resign ourselves to the idea that in the composition classroom, the readiness really is all.