• Rhetoric 10: Intro to Practical Reasoning & Critical Analysis of Argument
• Rhetoric 20: Rhetorical Interpretation
• Rhetoric 24: Understanding Genocide
• Rhetoric 24: Modern Advertising "Theory" and the Re-Invention of the Wheel
• Rhetoric 41AC:The Rhetoric of American Frontiers
• Rhetoric 103B: History of Rhetorical Theory II
• Rhetoric 105: The Rhetorics of the European Middle Ages
• Rhetoric 121B:Rhetoric of Fiction: Content and Context
• Rhetoric 133: Cinema and the Sex Act
• Rhetoric 138: Rhetoric & Literature Under the Roman Empire
• Rhetoric 139AC: Autobiography & American Individualism
• Rhetoric 152: Rhetoric of Constitutional Discourse
• Rhetoric: 157B: Rhetoric of Contemporary Political Theory
• Rhetoric 159B: Great Themes in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Political & Legal Theory
• Rhetoric 164: Rhetoric of Legal Theory
• Rhetoric 167: Advanced Topics in Law & Rhetoric
• Rhetoric 168: Rhetoric, Law, & Political Theory, 1500-1700
• Rhetoric 175: Philosophical and Literary Theories of the Lie
• Rhetoric 177: Language, Truth, & Dialogue
• Rhetoric 179: Rhetoric of Sexual Exchange
• Rhetoric 196: Undergrad Seminar on the Theory & Practice of Reading & Interpretation
• Rhetoric 196: The Aesthetic in an Anti-Aesthetic Post-Modern Culture

Reader, books and films required include the works of: Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, Helene Cixous, Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Theresa Cha, Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, Zora Neale Hurston, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Italo Calvino, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Raoul Peck, Kidlat Tahimik (all subject to change).

Freshman Seminar: Understanding Genocide

This course will examine the frontier as an important factor in America's self-conception of its history and national character, beginning with Frederick Jackson TurnerÕs "frontier thesis." For Turner the frontier is the constitutive feature of American political and cultural identity. But even in his relatively brief essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the frontier is not a single thing or concept. Rather the "frontier" seems to be a place-holder for a rather disparate, and at times contradictory, assemblage of ideas, values, histories, geographical regions, and character traits.

We will examine various models and explanations of what the frontier represented and, in some cases, continues to represent. While in any literal sense, the frontier has long since been closed, as metaphor and idea it very much lives on in American society. Belief in the redemptive properties of open spaces and solitude, the merits of self-reliance, and the advantages and Americanness of rootlessness and mobility are still prevalent today. We will examine the varying positive and negative legacies of AmericaÕs frontier experience and its reflections upon that experience.

Modernity can be understood as the epoch in which our confidence in the transparency of language and the ability of signs to reflect and express the reality of things becomes irreparably shattered. "From the nineteenth century on, beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche the sign is going to become malevolent," Michel Foucault writes. "There is in the sign an ambiguous quality and a slight suspicion of ill will and 'malice'." This course explores the complex relationship between texts and things and their ethical and political implications. We will begin with Marx's exploration of the mystificatory nature of cultural forms in his theory of ideology. We will then study Saussure's account of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and its influence on Roland Barthes' structuralist critique of myth. We will then explore the even bolder claim that language is not merely a mystifying veil that is cast over things, but has a performative force that constitutes and forms objects. What kind of causality, if any, can texts and discourses exercise on things? Does the alleged formative power of texts lead to nihilism or does it open up new possibilities for critique and resistance? Such questions will be addressed through a study of Derrida's theory of textuality; feminist uses of the psychoanalytical account of the imaginary body; Foucault's analysis of the links between discourse and power; and Edward Said's critique of how Western discourse has constructed the Oriental world. Finally, we will address the impact of techno-mediation on our perception of reality by examining the writings of Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and also Jean Baudrillard's provocative claim that simulation has displaced and replaced the real.

Who did Chaucer think he was, anyway? How can we understand Chaucer (or any other medieval author, for that matter) when the conventions by which we decode texts seem to be so different? The course will investigate the ways in which rhetoric and rhetorical theory survived in medieval Europe as exemplified in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. This approach has two purposes: to illustrate the ways in which rhetorical theory pervades much medieval high art and to construct some historical perspective on the problem by looking at the beginning and (arguably) the end of medieval rhetorical theory and practice. [The fact that Chaucer is a lot of fun will not be overlooked.]

This course is an introduction to the analysis and interpretation of fiction. Ordinarily, the focus of 121B is on thematic issues and authorial intenmtion, but since it has been sometime since 121A was taught, a substantial portion of this class will be devoted the the consideration of narrative theory. We will be dealing with a number of approaches to narrative analysis as well as a number of short stories. We will also watch two movies and read two novels, all of which I take to be "coming of age" narratives, although of very different sorts. There will several papers and a final. There may be several short in-class quizzes. Attendance is required. Students are expected to be active participants both in class and on the course website. On the days the movies are shown, you will need to arrive at class a half hour early. We will read a lot.

This course considers the history of the representation of the sex act in cinema. When, why and how did movies begin to show the "dirty parts" that had once been carefully elided by a cut to a fire burning in a fire place or a train going through a tunnel? What form did the representation of formerly censored sex acts take in movies nationally and internationally? We will look especially at the period of the emergence of cinematically constructed sex acts on screen in the sixties and seventies across a range of cinematic forms: American avant garde films whose formal innovations were often matched by sexual innovations; international art films that brought a new sexual sophistication to the narrative film; American "blaxploitation" films that broke longstanding taboos against the representation of racial, and interracial, sexual relations; the brief era of porno chic when American pornography seemed poised to challenged Hollywood; and New Hollywood's response to the challenge of these more "adult" forms. Finally, we will consider available contemporary works of film and video which have utilized the performance of explicit sex acts in innovative ways. All of these works will be explored against the background of the much-debated "sexual revolution," diverse theories of sexuality, and the "visual pleasures" of moving pictures.

Rhetoric & Literature Under the Roman Empire

Conversions and Confessions: Augustine / Derrida
Take up my books...of Confessions. Pay attention to the person I was there; see what I was, in myself and through myself." (St Augustine to his friend Darius). This course will revolve around a reading of all thirteen books of St AugustineÕs Confessions: a foundational text written under the late Roman Empire (c.397-401 CE). We will analyse various models of rhetoric, and the characterisation of different ÔtypesÕ of rhetoricians, mapped out by Augustine in his Confessions. We will also explore AugustineÕs own complex innovative rhetoric, a rhetoric of conversion and confession which he created specifically to write the text itself. Our exploration of AugustineÕs conversions and confessions will also be framed (each week) by a reading of Jacques DerridaÕs Circumfessions. DerridaÕs writing involves a highly self-conscious (ÔpostmodernÕ) deconstruction of AugustineÕs text, yet Derrida himself can be read here as equally constructive; as ÔautobiographicalÕ and confessional in his own right. How can we begin to think through this paradox ? Should we today think of Augustine as a confessing penitent or as a dazzling philosopher of language and its limitations ?

Themes which will be covered in the course include ancient and modern concepts of rhetorical genre and the evolution of rhetoric as a discipline; the relationship between memory, narratology and a rhetoric of conversion; and of course the concept of confession, seen especially from a series of religious perspectives. Short readings from other relevant ancient and modern texts (including Foucault and Lyotard) will also be assigned.

This course studies the autobiographical form in American literature as a forum both for self-discovery and self-creation. The autobiography, that seemingly most narcissistic and inert form of writing reveals itself, through its constructions and rhetorical strageties to be a site of resistence, subversion, reappropriation of the construction of identity in American society, one that has its own language and strictures. We will be reading early "autobiographical" forms of writing such as captivity narratives, moving on to the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Adams, Black Elk, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Alice B. Toklas and Samuel Delaney, in each case exploring how the selves we read about are always formed in response to and in engagement with other selves, other narratives and other literary forms.

Inquiring into the rhetoric of constitutional discourse, we ask: What is a constitution? And how do we speak of it? The first of these is the question to which we shall be devoted in this course. The second will provide us with a way to enter into engagement with it, for in the way we speak of a constitution ­ and so draft, advocate, or interpret it ­ there lie already implicit understandings of what it is and of how we regard ourselves as living under it. Unearthing these implicit understandings and contemplating their sense and implications will be our principal task.

In taking it up, we shall come to see that the first question ­ What is a constitution? ­ asks as well, What is a polity? and How may it be founded? We shall thus find ourselves inquiring into matters beyond those often taken to exhaust constitutional thought, whether historical or contemporary, such as considerations of optimal administrative structure and arrangements for the distribution of power and for the security of rights and interests. We shall come to see that all such considerations and arrangements are secondary to, and derivative of, a particular (if tacit) answer to the more fundamental question of how a people understands itself to be a polity, and, before that, of what a polity is.

We shall look to the American founding experience to see how such questions and their tacit answers do, in fact, underlie and infuse constitutional discourse and political life and generate their possibilities. Accordingly, we shall examine familiar documents from that discursive tradition: the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution; the Federalist Papers, which argued for the ConstitutionÕs adoption, and their opposition counterparts; and selected political writings from the revolutionary and founding periods, as well as from political thinkers of the prior century (such as Locke and Montesquieu) who are acknowledged to have influenced the founders. Yet as we do so we shall find ourselves drawn ever farther into exploring the foundational questions that, as we shall see, examination of those documents raises. Accordingly, we shall come to devote much of our time and attention to engaging with those questions, and much of our reading will be drawn from the philosophical thought that touches upon and enlarges them, including that of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt.

This course begins where 157A leaves off (although it need not be taken sequentially), with Nietzsche. Conceiving Nietzsche as having set a new task for (or perhaps against) philosophy "a great Nietzschean quest," we look at subsequent thinkers who, in their own reaction to Nietzsche struggle with his complicated legacy. What can political theory (or philosophy for that matter) have to say after Nietzsche? What happens to ethics, law, identity, or even being itself? In this class we will watch how Nietzsche's legacy, itself a notion that is constructed, debated and redefined by the thinkers that we will study, serves to enable a kind of attitude that is both aesthetic and philosophical. "The idea of Nietzsche" occupies a central role in this course; his vision of self-deliverance, of failure and betrayal, serves not as the undoing, but the grounds of further inquiry.

This course is an introduction to the principal themes and arguments of a particular tradition of critical theory that runs from the German idealist tradition of Kant and Hegel through Marx to the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth. This tradition can be seen as a branch of critical theory more generally understood as modernity's ongoing efforts to question its own grounding presuppositions. The authors whose texts we will read include all of the individuals listed above. There may be several short in-class quizzes. Attendance is required. Students are expected to be active participants both in class and on the course website. We will read a lot of fairly difficult stuff.

The first half of the course will examine the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its aftermath. We will study both the genocide itself (including the role of the international community) as well the activities of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the trials conducted by the government of Rwanda. We will consider various kinds of interpretations of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath and discuss how a society that has torn itself apart attempts to achieve justice and stability for the future. Alison Desforges is one of the world's leading experts on Rwanda and we will be using her book, Leave None to Tell the Story, along with judgments from the Rwandan tribunal (ICTR) as our primary texts. In the second half of the course we will look at ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the War in Bosnia. In addition to studying the nature and course of genocide and ethnic conflict in Bosnia, we will particularly focus on major cases decided by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY).

This course explores the complications that arise when statements concerning religious belief and magical practises enter into various different arenas of legal discourse. What kind of conceptual problems arise when dealing with legal cases which necessitate 'definitions' of religious belief or magical practices (in particular the negotiation of boundaries between private/public, irrational/rational) ? How have certain legal systems (past and present) framed and polarised religious believers or practitioners of magical arts? Why (and how) does religion and magic enter into the rhetoric of modern American legal discourse at all ? How can contemporary Ôliberal democraciesÕ walk the tightrope between freedom of religious belief/conscience and necessary public interest ? Our classes will approach these questions, and many more, from three related perspectives:

1. Anthropological/sociological (including case studies from Evans-Pritchard onwards, possibly focusing on Africa and South-East Asia.)

2. Historical (including a brief look at magic cursing spells and religious belief in the courtrooms of Ancient Athens; a reading of some second - sixth century Roman trials against magic and Ôheretical beliefÕ; and an analysis of sections from a medieval ÔinquisitorialÕ handbook. We may also read some short theoretical discussions on whether ÔdeviantÕ religious beliefs (including Ôheresies) should be considered as crimes or not; the provisional list includes Thomas Aquinas (c.1271), Balthasar Hübmaier and Martin Luther (c. 1525), Arminius (1606), Hobbes (1681), Locke (1685) and John Stuart Mill (1859).)

Contemporary jurisprudence / "Looking for Secular Purposes." (American First Amendment law and free exercise clause jurisprudence, including the reading of recent Supreme Court cases. Discussion of recent case material from the European Court of Human Rights.)

The reading for the course will alternate between ÔtheoryÕ and case material.

We will treat the writings of this turbulent and dangerous period as an oppurtunity to examine the construction of the legal and political discourses that have shaped the modern era. Beginning with the renaissance, questions of subjectivity, citizenship, obedience, sovereignty and mutual obligation were in the process of being constituted in tandem with new disciplines and new technologies of power. As much as this period was marked by the attempt to articulate and strengthen the notions of control and sovereignty, it was also marked by tremendous rupture and contingency, other possibilities and counter narratives, which are as much a part of our legacy from this time as those constructions which have been more formally adopted. To examine these grand narratives we will examine a series of philosophical, literary and historical writings from this period as well as modern commnentary on these thinkers and their times.

This course will examine the changing definitions and theories of lies and lying in the history of philosophy. We will concentrate especially on how philosophers distinguish (or not) lies from truth, error, falsehood and deception. Our reading, however, will not be limited to strictly "philosophical" texts. We will also consider how novelists and psychoanalysts use the topic of the "lie" to discuss the very concept of fiction, of self-identity and of socialization. While most writings on lies and lying tend to take seriously only the moral dimensions of lyingÑ"Is it good or bad to lie?" "Under what conditions is a lie morally permissible? --, we will attempt to understand what is at stake for an individual when and if h/she chooses to lie. Who is the liar? What does a person become, in both speech and action, when h/she lies? Does one lie if the truth is not known and/or the lie is unintentionally told? These are but a few of the questions that will organize our discussions. Time permitting, there will also be the opportunity to analyze contemporary "live" cases of lying.

How do dialogues complicate reading? Where does the "truth" of a text with multiple speakers lie? Is the dialogue a particular genre or form of writing or is all meaningful writing - and speaking - a form of dialogue?

These are among the questions we will consider as we read and discuss various dialogues - or texts in dialogic form - concerned with relations between or among language, truth and judgement. The provisional reading list includes:

a) ancient: Plato's Ion, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Symposium

b) enlightenment: Diderot, Rousseau, Hume

c) 20th-century: Heidegger, Murdoch, Foucault

This course will examine various rhetorical constellations associated with the term 'woman', namely with regard to the body, the social category and the metaphors that are associated with this term. We will see how the category of woman, and thus the designations 'sex' and 'gender', are in fact more problematic than may appear to commonsense understanding. We will also consider how the critical examination of the term 'woman' has developed in the theoretical work that has influenced contemporary debates in feminist and lesbian/gay studies as well as race theory. We will also consider the usefulness of classical tropes of rhetoric for understanding particular arguments in these debates. The course is organized roughly into three sections, corresponding to a triple focus on science and metaphor, the destabilization of the term 'woman', and the debates within feminism regarding its own self-constitution around a presumed identity of woman.

This seminar examines some predominant 20th century literary and theoretical works that repesent passion and its vicissitudes. We will examine philosophical, anthropological, autobiographical, and fictional texts and films that evoke diverse kinds of passion -- for language, God, animals, mastery, knowledge, Eros, chance, etc. The goal of this course is to illustrate how to read and interpret difficult texts, and to produce an understanding of the cultural paradigms that not only have shaped and focused our shared beliefs about passion but inform our ways of practicing it

This seminar will analyze the role of philosophical aesthetics within the context of the modern-postmodern debates in contemporary visual culture. We will review critics as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu, the philosophers of the Frankfurt school, the postmodernists and the poststructuralists who have put the category of the aesthetic to question. These critics argue that the aesthetic is not only complicit with oppressive ideology, but is itself an oppressive ideology; in so doing, they question its legitimacy as a political strategy and as a form of knowing (Foster, 1983; Bennett, 1996; Brecht, 1927). We will compare these postmodern claims with competing claims made by aesthetic theorists and philosophers of science.