• Rhetoric 1A
• Rhetoric 1B
• Rhetoric 10
• Rhetoric 103A
• Rhetoric 139AC

This course is designed to help you to develop effective reading and writing skills, with an emphasis on arguments likely to persuade scholarly audiences. You will produce approximately thirty pages of writing in the course of the session, the assignments ranging from textbook exercises to reading diagrams to the composition of brief and then longer argumentative essays. In a series of in-class writing workshops where you study your own and others' work, you will learn the varieties and mechanics of style, the structure of simple and complex arguments, and the importance of multiple drafts and revision.

Required texts
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph M. Williams, 9th edition
Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, Picador, 2004
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi, Touchstone, 1

This course is designed to help students develop the skills necessary to be critical readers and persuasive writers. The course will introduce students to a variety of strategies of textual analysis as well as to a basic rhetorical vocabulary (i.e., tropes, figures of speech, etc.). Students will be given the opportunity to practice analyzing texts and producing sophisticated arguments by engaging with a series of texts that call these very activities into question. To this end, the course readings will be grouped in such a manner that we will read Plato alongside a diverse selection of readings of Plato (by Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and others). In the same manner, we will read Nietzsche alongside a number of readings of Nietzsche (by Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, and Paul de Man). By approaching the material in this manner, students will get a sense of what is at stake in their relationship to reading and writing as they work to become better critical thinkers. Some questions we will explore include: How does the text open to its outside? How does a text act upon a reader and is it possible for a reader to act upon a text? What is our relationship to the language that we have inherited? How are we shaped by that language? How does it empower and/or constrain us? What resources do our languages and traditions leave us for resistance and/or creative response? How are reading and listening related? Can we accomplish different types of things with writing and speaking? Other readings might include works by Rousseau, Bakhtin, Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Kafka, and Poe.

Rhetoric 10 is an introductory course in practical argumentation, textual interpretation, critical thinking, and discourse analysis. The works we will be reading together are exemplary argumentative texts in many different modes: philosophical dialogues and formal theses, polemics, literary readings, a novel, a play, a graphic novel, a film, and many others.

We will survey many of the basic argumentative tools that have accumulated over centuries of rhetorical theory and practice: We will ponder the trivium; we will learn about the three Aristotelian appeals, logos, pathos, ethos; we will contemplate the different ends of argument; we will discover the difference between a scheme and a trope, a formal versus an informal fallacy; we will analyze enthymemes and learn the rules governing the various modes of syllogism; we will analyze the argumentative content of figurative language; we will explore the Toulmin Schema and Rogerian strategies of argumentation; and many other things in a very brief space of time.

The word "argument" comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, the process of argumentation can be one that seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks always to prevail over difference. We argue, surely, to change minds and alter conduct, but we argue as well to inquire what are the best beliefs when we are ignorant or
unsure of ourselves, we argue to interrogate our own assumptions, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to reconcile deep differences, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.

Over the course of the term, we will concentrate out attention on the idea of persuasion as a practice that would repudiate violence. We will discover persuasion is a practice haunted by violence, a practice complicit in violence, a practice responsive to violence, a practice responsible for violence, a practice through which violence is uniquely understood and resisted.

Required books:

Maus: A Survivors's Tale (Complete) Parts 1 & 2 by Art Spiegelman
ISBN: 978-0679406419

Kindred by Octavia E Butler
ISBN: 978-0807083697

Books are available at Amazon.com or at the Cal Student Bookstore

Is there anything about rhetoric that was not discovered by 200 B.C.E.?  Where did Rhetoric come from, anyway? 

Rhetoric 103A provides an introduction to the ancient Greek and Latin sources of Rhetoric and rhetorical theory.  Special attention will be paid to ancient and modern objections to rhetoric as theory and as practice.  Readings will cover the period 500 B.C.E. to 300 C.E. Applications of ancient theory to the present will be investigated.  The course will pay special attention to how to read such ancient texts.

Reading:

• Selections from P. Matsen (ed.) Readings from Classical Rhetoric [Readings will include Herodotus, Gorgias, Alcidamas, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle and others.]
• Plato, *Gorgias, and *Phaedrus
• Aristotle, *Rhetoric and *Poetics
• Aristophanes (ed. Arrowsmith), Three Comedies  [*The Clouds & *The Wasps]
• Cicero, Selected Political Speeches

[*Books marked with * are to be read in their entirety.]

Written Assignments:

• 3 Quizzes in class
• 1 3-hour Final Examination.
• 1 2,500-3,500 word paper (8-10 pp.)

Themes for the Course:

• Objections to Rhetoric (and the answers to objections)
• Rhetoric, orality and writing
• Modern vs. ancient understanding of rhetoric

You should keep the themes in mind as you read.  Make careful note of all references to those themes in lectures and class discussion.

Week 1: Introduction, history; Gorgias and his detractors.  Objections to rhetoric; Plato, Isocrates.

Week 2: Rhetorical handbooks and the beginning of serious theory by Aristotle

Week 3: Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric.

Week 4: Aristotle on style and the art of Greek tragedy. The Poetics. (not-so)comical objections to rhetoric in Aristophanes.

Week 5: Roman school rhetoric. Cicero as theorist and orator.

Week 6: Quintilian, Imperial rhetoric and the Second Sophistic.

This course is designed to fulfill the UC Berkeley campus’s American Cultures Breadth Requirement. Its basic purpose will be to introduce students to American autobiography and American cultures by means of exploring how representations of personal experience by writers of diverse cultural groups respond to or are otherwise informed by the American rhetoric of individualism. We will begin with a general, critical discussion of "individualism" as an ideology and of "autobiography" as a literary genre with a particular rhetorical function for Americans, and then move on to explore the complex relationship between genre and ideology in American cultures through rhetorical analysis of particular autobiographies. We will examine a series of primary works drawn from three distinct American cultures: European Americans, indigenous peoples, and African-Americans, in order to see the ways in which writers have responded to the imperatives of ideology and genre.

REQUIRED BOOKS:

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press).

Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. David W. Blight (Boston: St. Martin’s Press).

Wright, Richard, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. (New York: Harper Collins).

Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Vintage Books).

Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts (New York: Vintage Books).