courses / Graduate Courses / Classical Rhetorical Theory and Practice

Graduate Courses

Rhetoric 200: Classical Rhetorical Theory and Practice



Scheduled
Spring 2013  Instructor(s)  Ramona Naddaff

In recent decades, ancient Greek and Latin rhetorical theory has witnessed an unprecedented rejuvenation, extending its research methods and topics to the center of debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Once the exclusive terrain of philological investigation, ancient rhetorical theory has become a site to explore crucial questions about not only theories of democracy, language, and the arts. Interpreted from an interdisciplinary framework, classical rhetorical theory has also been incorporated into contemporary psychoanalytic, gender, cultural, and post-colonial studies. This seminar proposes to read the seminal texts in classical rhetorical theory. Complementing close textual readings with recent scholarship from classicists, historians, philosophers, political theorists and literary critics alike, it also aims to understand the changing perspectives from which these canonical texts have been re-interpreted and revivified. All readings will be in translation.

 

Required Reading

  1. Anon. Dissoi Logoi
  2. Antiphon, First Tetralogy
  3. Demosthenes, Against Medias
  4. Thucydides, selections from The Peloponnesian War
  5. Gorgias, Encomium of Helen
  6. Isocrates, selections from Against the Sophists
  7. Sophocles, Ajax and Philoctetes
  8. Plato, Gorgias and Phaedrus
  9. Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric
  10. Cicero, On Oratory and Orators
  11. Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators
  12. Longinus, On the Sublime
  13. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine and selections from the Confessions