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This seminar moves from ancient (briefly) to contemporary texts and contexts via rhetorical theory, sound, listening, and digital audio editing. Considering rhetoric's productive as well as interpretive capacities, we explore spaces between rhetorics and poetics; between normative and descriptive senses of character; and among sound, radio, audio, and listening. Drawing on three central ancient conceptions of character, the seminar will also engage students with digital sound studies in contemporary interdisciplinary rhetorical studies, information studies and posthumanism, close and distant rhetorical listening practices, and digital audio editing. The seminar will introduce students to ""collections as data"" and give students practice analyzing and building databases.
The period between 1929-1945 was an enormously important one for the US and the world, when old verities were challenged and new ones had yet to take hold. During these years, Americans argued over the place of government in their lives and their economy; the extent to which the nation should be considered a collection of states or a united political entity; and the role the US should properly play in the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the nation during these tumultuous years and left his stamp indelibly upon it. But the era is not reducible to FDR. There were numerous other important people who lived, worked, and who argued with, against, and for the president. This is not, therefore, a class on FDR and his rhetoric, although both are central to the course, but on the various controversies and developments from the years of depression and war. We'll be talking about all of these people, and more like them, and we'll be thinking about what it means to do politics in a moment of political, social, and economic rupture.
We understand that most memories of the past take shape through a variety of representational and performative mechanisms (discursive, visual, spatial, and bodily). This seminar will explore the workings of collective memory from several disciplinary vantage points, including history, philosophy, rhetoric, media studies and cultural studies. Students will practice interpreting specific cases of mediation by focusing on artifacts and sites of memory—photographs, films, museums, and monuments, both physical and virtual.
This seminar takes a rhetorical perspective on the ways in which social issues in the contemporary political context filter up into and through the US presidency. We consider the presidency as a node of discourses surrounding the entirety of our shared political life, including government and media. We also consider the presidency as a locus for the development of theory; the various ways to analyze and understand publics and public opinion; how presidential libraries and archives are useful resources for analyzing social movements, issues, and controversies; the role of technology in crafting visual, aural, and textual images of political actors; and of course, the limits and possibilities of political leadership. We will consider the cultural and institutional influences on the presidency and the rhetoric associated with it. The second part of the course will involve analysis of the genres of presidential speech.
Placing rhetorical studies in conversation with the “argumentative turn” in policy scholarship, this seminar contemplates the reciprocity of rhetoric and policy as forces in public life. Analyzing a wide range of international debates over making, maintaining, and assessing public policies, we engage with multidisciplinary perspectives on issues including education, immigration, welfare, housing, surveillance, health care, and policing. We consider the rhetorical dynamics of community activist struggles for city governance, the ways the law and legislative argument (re)inscribe systems of power, and how (neo)liberal logics of neutrality and competition have been imposed on various policy domains. As policy discourses complicate rhetoricians’ traditional conceptions of author, audience, situation, and context, students will develop their ability to draw together fragmentary discourses into cohesive narrative arguments that interrogate the circulation of policy discourses to account for ""invisible contexts"" that re-inscribe power, reproduce inequality, and marginalize bodies.
An introduction to some of the theories and critiques of critical social race theory, this seminar exposes students to many of the late twentieth- and early twenty first-centuries’ most important scholars on the subject. In it, we consider whether and how contemporary movements for social justice, such as Black Lives Matter, intersect with issues of racial identity. Students will gain knowledge about how rhetorical studies currently engages race, ethnicity, and identity.
This seminar includes explorations in the language of revolution and revolt in the modern age, with emphasis on the history, theory, and analysis of social unrest from the 18th-century Atlantic to contemporary uprisings. Students will develop historical literacy in the traditions of revolution, explore theoretical grounds, and enhance their critical and interpretive skills.
The course will introduce students to three central ancient conceptions of character, to sound studies work in contemporary interdisciplinary rhetorical studies in the contexts of information studies and posthumanism, and to rhetorical listening practices and audio editing. Students will produce public as well as academic scholarship.
This seminar will investigate the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière for two primary reasons: first, they represent three of the foremost contemporary figures working at the intersection of political philosophy, rhetorical theory (broadly defined), and ethical thought; second, scholars in Communication as well as English have engaged Agamben, Butler, or Rancière’s ideas in their own research, thereby revealing substantive affinities with current preoccupations in rhetorical inquiry.
This seminar offers a critical introduction to contemporary digital methods and methodologies in interdisciplinary rhetorical studies and allied fields. The seminar historicizes and defamiliarizes contemporary digital media and transmedia theories and practices. At the same time the seminar provides practice with digital methods (may include but is not limited to information architecture, curation, archives, database construction and use, metadata, mapping, video and/or audio editing, rudimentary coding). The seminar will be taught in a multimodal, transmedia seminar room.
In this seminar, we work to understand and evaluate Foucault’s philosophy as a coherent system of thought with continuing value for contemporary questions of language, truth, knowledge, power, and politics. To that end, we will assess how and why self-described scholars of rhetoric have employed elements of Foucault’s philosophy in their own research."