Polysemy
KH:
It sounds as though your current professional work on kairos carries the concept into contemporary discourse and thought; some of the essays in your recent edited collection, even, expand our notions of kairos as a rhetorical concept with discussions of kairos in multiple disciplines. We are interested in knowing more about how you define kairos. You mentioned its "richness and multiplicity of meanings." Similarly, in the forward to your edited collection Rhetoric and Kairos, Carolyn Miller refers to the "depth, complexity and untranslatability of the Greek concept of kairos." Even though its meaning is not easily explained, would you tell us some of the ways you define the concept of kairos? How are you using the concept of kairos in your work?

PS:
The term kairos is so complex that I can only mention but some of the synonyms that reflect historical usage (primarily texts in Greek Antiquity and the New Testament), which only hint at some of its meanings. Kairos in the sense of temporal usage includes "timing," "right timing," opportunistic timing "eukairos" (good timing), "kakakairos" (bad timing), and time without opportunity, "akairos." Other meanings include: "symmetry," "propriety," "occasion," "due measure," "fitness," "tact," "decorum," "convenience," "proportion," "fruit," "profit," and "wise moderation." And these synonyms are but some of the translations of kairos in Greek literature, philosophy, and rhetoric. Because kairos has so many meanings it has no meaning outside of a specific linguistic context. Indeed, the same term has been translated in quite different ways within the same sentence. In the New Testament, for example, there are references to kairos as "eschatological time," as well as to "God's time" (a kairic dative of time uninfluenced by the rhythms and cycles of chronological, earthly time). Carolyn Miller is quite accurate in saying that kairos is an untranslatable concept (because of its polysemy). It is a redoubtable task, I believe, to attempt to explain kairos with comprehensiveness. I have always felt that the best I can provide are exploratory illustrations of various forms of kairos.

PS:
In my work on kairos, I have not consciously attempted to define the word in a manner that would suggest its stability or limitations, either as a term or as a concept. In this sense, I believe that kairos is particularly strategic as a rhetorical term, especially in the sense of rhetoric as figuration. Indeed, kairos is a trope, a master trope, that assumes a shape made possible (and necessary) by the exigencies of a rhetorical situation. The richness and diversity of historical usage gives testimony to the chameleon properties of the term/concept. (As an aside, I might add that Aristotle appositizes rhetoric with dunamis, and I believe that Aristotle's attention to the power and potential of rhetoric reflects a kairic perspective.) I am particularly interested in the ways in which kairos functions as a trope in literary discourse across the centuries. There are numerous treatments of kairos in classical and Renaissance literature, but the concept has not been so richly examined in the literature of the past two centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which kairos functions in Modernist literature, especially the American Modernist writers. There have been several studies of time (as chronos) in Modernism, but I believe that there is an opportunity for more work in time as kairos (and the other meanings mentioned above). Kairos is an inexhaustible mine.

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