G. Thomas Goodnight
Spring 2010
Annenberg #206 D
CONTEMPORARY RHETORICAL THEORY
The purpose of the course is to acquaint students with issues in contemporary rhetorical theory. It is divided into two parts: first, students will be introduced to rhetorical theory as grounded in the field of communication. The Lucaites, Condit, Caudill reader assembles key thinkers, issues, and perspectives regarding speaker, language, audience, and social change. While reviewing these paradigm pieces, the class will gradually work through Vico’s, The Art of Rhetoric. Vico’s work is a classic. It explains rhetoric in a sophisticated yet basic and precise way within the tradition. Students should be able to know the basics of the field and classical grounds of contemporary theory. The second half of the field draws form contemporary literary theory in a reader from Rivkin and Ryan. The goal here is to create a bases for doing work in rhetorical theory, since much of the work is being undertaken in a dialogue with the compositional and literary fields. Included in this section are key contemporary pieces from rhetorical theory as well.
The structure of each seminar session includes: 1. a lecture on the particular topic under discussion for the evening’s class, 2. a student report that identifies the key ideas of a reading with biographical/critical information about an author under review, and 3. group discussion identifying key terms, concepts, and ideas. Class participation counts for 30% of the grade. Students will be given a choice of reports and a schedule formed early in the semester. The remaining 70% will be a term project, adapted to the interests and talents of students, aimed at producing a manuscript appropriate for convention presentation. A three page description of the project (argument, text, dialogue, justification) is due at the end of Spring break. The reading pace is designed at about 75 pages a week. The meetings are sketched. Adjustments to pace and content will be discussed as we go along.
Please order digitally the two books. They are not at the book store, since sometimes used copies are more economical. John Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit & Sally Caudill, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory; A Reader, New York: Guildford Press, 1999; Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan: Literary Theory: An Anthology, Oxford 2009; Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (not in print, but we can share selections, handouts). Please review the web site Sylva Rhetoricae before the first class (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Silva.htm). If you are unfamiliar with rhetoric as a subject, work through the terms in the home page’s left column.
Office Hours: My office hours are 2-4 on Tuesday afternoons and by appointment. 213-821-5384.
TENTATIVE SPRING SCHEDULE
1. Jan 11 WHAT CAN A ‘RHETORIC’ BE? (These are available on the
USC data base of Communication and Media Complete, or Google Scholar)
John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” CRT.
Michael Leff, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” CRT.
Thomas Farrell, “Practicing the Arts of Rhetoric: Tradition and Invention,” CRT
Robert Harriman, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” CRT.
Jane Sutton, Rhetoric as an Achievement Without Woman,” CRT.
Edward P. J. Corbett, “Classical Rhetoric,” LT.
2. Jan 18 (NO CLASS, but readings) RHETORIC & EPISTEMOLOGY
Robert Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” CRT.
Thomas Farrell, Knowledge, “Consensus and Rhetorical Theory,” CRT.
John Lyne, Project on Rhetoric and the Human Sciences, Handout
3. Jan 25 THE CHARACTER OF THE RHETORICAL SITUATION: SPHERES, STORIES, AND MORALS
Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” CRT.
Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” CRT.
Barbara Beisecker, “Rhethinking the Rhetorical Situation within the Thematic of Difference,” CRT.
G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Sphere of Argumentation,”
Walter Fisher, “Narrative as Human Communciation Paradigm,” CRT.
Celeste Michelle Condit, “The Rhetorical Construction of Public Morality,” CRT.
4. Feb 1 THE NATURE OF THE AUDIENCE
Edwin Black, The Second Persona,” CRT.
Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” CRT.
Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” CRT
Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,”
CRT.
5. Feb 8 DISCOURSE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Lee Griffin, “Rhetoric of Social Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
Herbert W. Simon, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” CRT.
Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” CRT.
Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” CRT.
Maurice Charland, “Rehabilitating Rhetoric: Confronting Blindspots in Discourse and Social Theory,” CRT.
6. Feb 15 (NO CLASS, but readings) RHETORIC IN THE MASS MEDIA
Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” CRT
7. Feb 22 STRUCTURALISM, LINGUISTICS, NARRATOLOGY
Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,” LT.
Vladimir Propp, “Morphology of the Folk-tale,” LT.
Roland Barthes, “Mythologies,” LT.
Michel Foucault, “The Archeology of Knowledge,” LT.
Seymour Chatman, “The Structure of Narrative Transmission,” LT.
8. Mrc 1 RHETORIC, PHENOMENOLOGY AND READER RESPONSE
Edmund Husserl, “Ideas,” LT.
Natanson, Thomas Wolfe and "the Epiphemic Moment," QJS
J. Robert Cox, "The Irreparable"
J. L. Austin, “How to Do Things with Words,” LT
Stanley Fish, “Not so much a Teaching as an Entangling,” LT
Stanley Fish, ‘Interpretive Communities,» LT.
Pierre Bourdieu, «Distinction, «LT.
Celeste Michelle Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” CRT.
9. Mrc 8 POST-STRUCTURALISM, DECONSTRUCTION, POST-MODERNISM
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense,” LT.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power,” LT.
Georges Bataille, “Heterology,” LT
Jacques Derrida, Difference, LT.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, LT.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, LT
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, LT
l0. Mrc 15 (Spring Break) NO CLASS: PROPOSAL FOR FINAL PROJECT
11.Mrc 22 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, LT
Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism, LT
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, LT
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” LT.
Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” LT.
Bessel A. van der Kok and Alexander C. McFarlane, “The Black Hole of Trauma,”
LT.
12.Mrc 29 POLITICAL CRITICISM: FROM MARXISM TO CULTURAL MATERIALISM
G.W.F Hegel, “Dialectics,” LT.
Karl Marx, “Grundrissse,” “The German Ideology,” “Wage Labor and Capital,” “Capital” LT.
Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony,” LT.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Rabelais and his World,” LT.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” LT.
Slavoj Zizek, “The Sublime Object of Ideology,” LT.
Antonio Negri, “Difference and the Future,” LT.
James Arnt Aune, “Cultures of Discourse: Marxism and Rhetorical Theory,” CRT.
13. Apr 5 FEMINISM
Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of Women,” LT
Luce Irgaray, “Women on the Market,” LT
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperalism,” LT.
Bonnie Dow, "Ellen, Television and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility," Critical Studies in Mass Communication.
Catherine Palczewski, "The male Madonna and the feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Arguments, Icons and Ideographs," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2005.
Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” CRT.
14. Apr 12 GENDER STUDIES
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, LT
Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," LT.
(Collective Memory 3 readings).
15. Apr 19 CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Ian F. Haney Lopez, "The Social Construction of Race," LT.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness," LT.
Henry Louis Gates, "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of Sign and the Signifying Monkey," LT.
Toni Morrison, “Playing in the Dark,” LT.
Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian Differences,” LT.
Molefi Kete Asante, “An Afrocentric Theory of Communication,” LT.
16. Apr 26 COLONIAL, POST-COLONIAL, AND TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES
C.C. Eldridge, "The Revival of the Imperial Spirit," LT
Ania Loomba, "Situation Colonial and Postcolonial Studies," LT.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, "Decolonising the Mind," LT.
Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," LT.
Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Intervention in the Rhetorical Canon,” LT.