courses
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	Rhetoric 1A/1B
	1A  "Good Hair", Good Wine 1A  Banality 1A  Craft of Writing s1 F13 1A  Craft of Writing s2 F13 1A  Craft of Writing s3 F13 1A  Craft of Writing s4 F13 1A  Difficult Passages 1A  Feminism in a Colonial Context 1A  Hiding in Plain Sight 1A  Language, Experience, and Argument 1A  Listening to America 1A  Listening to America 1A  Listening to America 1A  No Place Like Home 1A  Reading & Composition 1A  Reason, Emotion and the Body 1A  Revealing is Healing 1A  Revolutions and Revisions and Representations 1A  Rhetoric of Reason 1A  The Rhetoric of Identity in Hybrid Texts 1A  The Rhetoric of the Text 1A  Writing the World 1A.001  Reading & Composition F12 1A.002  Reading & Composition F12 1A.004  Reading & Composition F12 1B  Banality 1B  Banality 1B  Collaborative Assemblages 1B  Craft of Writing s1 F13 1B  Craft of Writing s2 F13 1B  Craft of Writing s3 F13 1B  Craft of Writing 1B  dead words / unsettled bodies 1B  dead words / unsettled bodies 1B  Empire, sovereignty, and violence 1B  Human, All Too Human 1B  Nature, the Human, and Mediation 1B  Performing Research 1B  Reading & Composition 1B  Rhetoric of Reason 1B  Rhetorics of Everyday Life 1B  Rhetorics of the Everyday (Part II) 1B  Somewhere, Anywhere, Elsewhere 1B  Telling Fables, Fictions, and Lies 1B  The American Voice 1B  The Filipino Novel in English 1B  The Idea of Asia 1B.001  Reading & Composition F12 1B.003  Reading & Composition F12
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Rhetoric 1A/1B

Rhetoric 1B: Reading & Composition

Scheduled
Spring 2012  Instructor(s)  Paul Nadal

Observing the economic rise of China and India, many commentators muse of an Asian century to come: Asia—not Europe or the U.S.—will be the new driving force of world history. But, exactly, what, where, and even when, is "Asia"? This course explores the question of Asia and its uses and meanings as discourse, sign, and imaginary in the fields of politics, economics, and culture. We will examine the ways in which a geographic category and cartographic image—"Asia"—becomes produced and circulated as a racialized and gendered body of knowledge in order to ask the broader question concerning the relationship between space and knowledge. We will track the influence of "Asia" in the history of nineteenth-century European colonialism and modernity; its contradictory career in twentieth-century Asian nationalist visions of modernization and development; and its curious representational life in the public sphere, popular consumer culture, and literature. Along the way, we will consider the foundational role of Edward Said's Orientalism in the critique of the idea of Asia, and how other scholars have extended and gone beyond it to present an alternative archive and interpretive framework of Asian modernity.

Given the interdisciplinary scope of the course topic, we will be working across genres from philosophy, literature, op-eds, to critical essays, paying special attention to styles of argumentation and the craft of analytical research writing. Among the authors we will read include: G.F.W. Hegel, Roland Barthes, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Wang Hui, Pheng Cheah, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and Neferti Tadiar. We will also work through two literary texts: David Henry Hwang's 1988 play, M. Butterfly, and Mohsin Amid's 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

There will be two writing assignments, one short-essay focusing on honing close-reading skills, and a final research paper on the topic of the idea of Asia, which will be developed in draft and final forms.

No prior knowledge of the subject or of these authors will be assumed.

* Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
* David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
* Mohsin Ahmid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
* Edward Said, Orientalism
* Course Reader

Required Reading

* Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
* David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
* Mohsin Ahmid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
* Edward Said, Orientalism
* Course Reader