Course Description & Goals
If you have spent any time in the EWM major, you may already realize that “rhetoric” is defined in several ways. For our purposes, we’ll define it as a way of making knowledge in the world. In fact, the way in which we interpret, respond to, or perceive ourselves to be involved in things like ecology, digital revolutions, globalism, feminism, ethnic profiling, and even war is inherently rhetorical because it requires our understanding of how symbols act on us and on others—what Kenneth Burke has famously called “equipments for living.” Thus, this course will introduce you to some theoretical landmarks in rhetoric and rhetorical criticism that make it a living practice for the 21st century.
In one semester, we cannot cover all schools of thought that have historically contributed to rhetorical theory as we know it (e.g., Classicism, linguistic post-structuralism, Marxism, Dramatism, postmodern feminism, etc.) but we can engage with a set of critical problems or dilemmas that have shaped contemporary understandings of rhetoric, writing, culture, and text. In fact, much of what challenges us as citizens, workers, writers, readers, and students often boils down to four paradoxes that deserve critical attention: agency, anti-signification, textuality, and representation.
Whether or not you consider yourself a rhetorical theorist, much critical work is often done to meet real demands in real contexts. Thus, this semester, we will use films, graphic novels, and assorted web, print, and video texts as “case studies” for these four paradoxes. No prior theoretical background is required to do well in this course, but you must be willing to spend considerable time working through difficult texts and writing about them thoughtfully. By the end of the semester, you will have achieved the following:
- wrestled with difficult ideas in the study of culture, class, other, and self;
- gained a solid overview of some important landmarks in the development of contemporary rhetorical theory;
- expanded your understanding of the analytic possibilities of rhetorical theory;
- learned different methods for reading theoretical texts, some of them multimodal;
- gained a clearer sense of how critical terms can be applied to mundane circumstances and how complex thoughts can be communicated in a variety of media;
- honed your critical writing skills in both essay and blog formats.
