• Rhetoric 1A.002
• Rhetoric 1B.002
• Rhetoric 20
• Rhetoric 103B
• Rhetoric 110
• Rhetoric 160

This course is designed to help students become attentive readers and eloquent writers. Students will read literary, political and philosophical texts in order to analyze complex and competing arguments. By responding to these works, students come to develop the skills needed to write clear, precise, and persuasive college-level papers. In-class writing workshops will concentrate on the mechanics of writing, the engaged practice of editing and revision, and the hunt for the ever-elusive evolving thesis. Through collaborative work and textual analysis, students will learn the scholarly arts of close reading, critical thinking, and reflective writing.

Thematically, the course addresses the concept of the state of nature as cast in Western European political thought and in “back-to-nature” novels. We will encounter the works of political thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume and Marx and explore their conceptions of man’s transition from the state of nature to civil society. Complementing these theoretical texts, we will read two novels (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Golding’s Lord of the Flies) to examine this narrative run in reverse, i.e. man’s return from civil society to a state of nature. Discussion will be animated by the following questions: What are the rhetorical, political, and philosophical functions of the state of nature, and notions of human nature, in these texts? How is the state of nature envisioned, and what is man’s place in it? How might postulating a state of nature sustain political dreams of civilization? And, last but not least, who gets cast out of civilization under the guises of the ignoble savage and the noble lie?

Written assignments are fundamental to the course and students will produce approximately thirty pages of writing in addition to completing style and grammar exercises that focus on concision, clarity, punctuation, cohesion and grace.

Required Texts:
• Course reader.
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies
• Joseph M. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (ninth edition)

This course aims to help students strengthen and advance their critical reading and persuasive writing skills. We will work on developing techniques of textual analysis and strategies for formulating arguments that harness textual evidence. We will focus on generating research methods based on what is often considered a mundane activity: reading. At the center of this course will be the critical relation to the texts we read and write.

Our topic this semester will be political criticism, which is an important and thriving form of public commentary. The mass media has popularized political criticism and contributed to its pervasive presence, from the more sober assessment of particular policies to political humor that mocks those who hold power. But political criticism is not merely a popular type of information and entertainment. It has a philosophical lineage that can be traced back to the European Enlightenment. In this course, we will examine the philosophical history of political criticism and ask how it differs from more popular forms. We will ask what it means to be critical and what a philosophical form of criticism or critique implies. We will examine a variety of political critiques through a brief survey of important texts from the canon of modern political thought. Through a careful examination of these texts, we will build an understanding of philosophical critique and in the process sharpen our own critical faculties. Among others, we will study texts by Rousseau, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Just what is the relationship of argument to interpretation? "Interpretation" derives from the Latin interpretatio, a term freighted with the sense not only of explication, but of translation. What are the conventions that govern intelligible acts of interpretation, translation, argumentation? What are the conventions through which we constitute the proper objects of interpretation in the first place? And who are the subjects empowered to offer up interpretations that compel our attention and conviction? What happens when objects object to the interpretations we impose and then demand the standing of subjects themselves? How does the interpretation of literary texts differ from an interpretation of the law? How does it differ from a scientist's interrogation of her environment? Or from any critical engagement with the "given" terms of the social order in which one lives? Or even from the give and take through which we struggle to understand one another in everyday conversation? These are questions with which we will begin our survey of some of the themes, problems, and conventions in the rhetoric of interpretation. Where we will have arrived by the end will of course be very much a matter open to interpretation.

Required Texts (All Available in a Course Reader):

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo (excerpts); Freud, On the
Interpretation of Dreams (excerpts), "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an
Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia;" Marx and Engels, The
German Ideology (excerpts), "On the Fetishism of Commodities," Barthes,
Mythologies; Carpenter, "They Live" (film); Foucault, Discipline and
Punish (excerpts); Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (excerpts);
Arendt, The Human Condition (excerpts), Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
(excerpts), Burroughs, "On Coincidence," "Immortality," Solanas, "The SCUM
Manifesto," Mercer, "The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe," Adams,
"Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity," Brown, "Thing Theory," Latour,
Making Things Public, Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy (excerpts), Haraway,
"The Promises of Monsters," Butler, Undoing Gender (excerpts)

This course is described in the course catalog as a broad consideration of the historical relationship among philosophy, literature, and rhetoric, with special emphasis on selected themes within the early modern and modern period. However, instead of focusing on the early modern and modern period, this course focuses on the latter half of the 20th century. In view of the short span of the summer session, the consideration of the historical relationship among philosophy, literature and rhetoric has been reduced to a fairly narrow one. The theme we will focus on is generally the theme of John Austin's How To Do Things With Words, namely, "the total speech act in the total speech situation." Consideration of this theme will involve reading the works of various thinkers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin, John Searle, Jacque Derrida, and Stanley Cavell.

Required Texts

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, eds., J.O Urmson and Marina Sbisá, Harvard University Press, 1962, 1975.

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber, Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Course reader.

Other required readings may be available on the web or distributed in class.

Rhetoric 110 focuses on good arguments: what they are and how to make them. We will look at essays from a wide array of disciplines, focusing on the techniques and tropes of successful academic writing. As we read these exemplary essays, we will pay attention not only to how we write but also to how we read (and how we can read better). Our readings will also serve as case studies for thinking about such topics as: the characteristics of various academic genres; the values of clarity and difficulty; the notion of performative writing; the mechanics of research; the relationship between evidence, hypotheses, and theses; the complexities of engaging "theory"; and the conventions of academic prose.

By the end of the course, each student will have written an essay that would be suitable for applications for graduate study, professional schools, or employment. (Students are welcome to use the class either to rework an argument that they began in another course or to begin a new essay.) We will also spend some time reading each other's work and understanding how to give genuinely helpful feedback.

This course aims above all to be useful and seeks to make every student a better writer, reader, and thinker—regardless of major or area of interest.

This course will introduce the student to the study of legal discourse. Our orientation will not be historical but will focus on the basic topics and forms of law in action and legal scholarship as found in case-law, statutes and the pages of law reviews.  Our study of legal discourse will include the study of films that address such issues as the relationship between law and justice, the practice of law, the role of police, courts and trials in a political system, legal ethics, legal education, the adversarial system, and the relationship between law and popular culture.

Required Text

Course Reader