• 1A, Sec. 1:Rhetoric of Life - Scott Ferguson / Norman Gendelman
• 1A, Sec. 2: From Kantian Asethetics to Art After Philosophy - Meredith Hoy / Jennifer Lum
• 1A, Sec. 4: The Reality of Fiction / The Fiction of Reality: Between Word and Image - Julie Napolin / John Garcia
• 1A, Sec. 5: The Analytical habit of Mind" An Introduction to Argumentative Writing with Case Studies in Modern Poetry and Prose - Colin Dingler

• 1B, Sec. 1 - Brad Rogers / Fernando Gonzaga
• 1B, Sec. 2 - Arranging Words and Images - Brook Belisle / Claudia Salamanca
• 1B, Sec. 4 - Otherness - Ryan McDermott / Vlasta Vranjes

Instructors: Scott Ferguson & Norman Gendelman

This course is designed to train students in the skills of college-level academic reading, critical thinking, argumentation and written composition. Through close analyses, as well as extensive peer commentary and rewriting, students will learn to make sophisticated arguments about a variety of philosophical, scientific, literary, and visual text. In an effort to particularize this aim, our course will consider life as a philosophical question, one that, as many argue, defines the modern worldview. We will ask: What is life? What gives life its specific definition? For instance, is life simply the metabolism and reproduction of certain carbon-based compunds? Or is it, perhaps, at a more profound level, a certain kind of information? Maybe life concerns an impulse or purpose that cannont be reduced to modern scientific conceptions as all. How, moreover, is life to be distinguished from what it is supposedly not? How does life differ from mere matter, for instance, which is supposedly inert? How is life different from death or the dead? Furthermore, how do questions of life relate to other concerns of living, such as psychology, aesthetics, technology, politics, ethics, and even space and time? Rather than settling on one single answer to these complex and vexing inquiries, however, our primary interest will be to think about how texts - others and our own - figure such questions; that is, how various rhetorics give shape and meaning to life.

Instructors: Meredith Hoy & Jennifer Lum

The 1A/1B requirement exists to ensure that students graduate from Berkeley with the skills they need to be persuasive, elegant, and grammatically correct writers. Rhetoric is an interdisciplinary department in which students and professors study the various ways in which cultural artifacts such as literary texts, philosophy, political documents, images, and musical compositions, are all communicative acts that construct and reshape the way we describe and define self, world, history, and culture. The 1A/1B sequence in this department helps students to approach texts (visual, literary, philosophical) with a critical and nuanced eye, and to begin to make clear, flowing and logical arguments. Learning to read closely and to write persuasively is a skill that requires continual practice. Just as any published paper in an academic field comes into its final form after an extensive process of research, revision, and discussion, so too will this class emphasize the importance of a continuous re-examination of our own ways of thinking, seeing, and speaking. The written assignments will consist of four papers, each of which will be submitted once, and then revised and resubmitted after you receive feedback from peers and instructors.

Specifically, this course is arranged around the topic of “aesthetics”. What are aesthetics, and how do aesthetics shape our world view? How and why have the definitions and standards for “the aesthetic” changed over time? What cultural conditions changed the parameters for what we consider beautiful and meaningful? What is the relationship between art and aesthetics, and how has this relationship been challenged and reconfigured at various historical moments? Although the concept of the aesthetic has existed since the classical age, it appeared in art historical discourse in the mid eighteenth century. The course begins with a brief look at 18th century aesthetics, which will provide students with a frame of reference for subsequent analysis of the many interventions into traditional aesthetics by modern and contemporary artists and theorists. The disruptions of traditional aesthetics set into motion by avant-garde art movements from abstract expressionism, to dada and fluxus, to conceptual art, to performance, video and now to digital art, have altered how we conceive of art at the levels of production, reception, and criticism. But we cannot assume that the domain of art is separate from everyday life. Instead, we must assess the cultural conditions and social, political, and technological context in which aesthetic models have been shaped and reshaped in order to see how works of art and the discipline of art history actively construct and reflect upon the culture in which they are produced. The course is divided into four subtopics that address four aesthetic categories—traditional aesthetics, conceptualism, embodiment and performativity, and the technology and science of art. As we progress through these four categories, we will continue to rethink our own assumptions about what counts as art, about the limits of what can be called art, and about what will become of art as we move forward into a continually receding future.

Instructors: Julie Napolin & John Garcia

This course is designed to help you develop analytic writing and critical reading skills. You will be asked to produce approximately thirty pages of writing in the course of the semester; the assignments ranging from 2 page close readings of assigned texts to longer essays engaging multiple texts. In a series of reading and writing workshops, you will learn to read a text closely, effectively, and critically, to develop analytic questions from your reading, to form a claim out of a question, to organize an argument, and to present evidence eloquently and concretely. The majority of our class time will be spent in collaborative close readings of the assigned texts. Bi-weekly access of b-space will be necessary.

The topic of this semester’s course is the reality of fiction and the fiction of reality. Beginning with the most basic question, “what is fiction,” we will ground our discussion in some classical theories of narrative fiction as they outline both its dangers and its creative possibilities. In the first half of the course, “the reality of fiction,” we will attempt to understand how “fiction” is defined against “reality” and how this distinction, in the very act of definition, becomes difficult to maintain. While Plato is often credited with the creation of the “two-world model”—the real and the un-real—we will use the tools provided by Longinus to read Plato against himself. In both authors, we will locate a crucial aesthetic relationship between the word and the image in which fictional narrative is lent an “incantational” power to create an alternative or “third” reality. Is there an “aesthetic reality” or a “narrative time and space?” Is it purely for pleasure or does fiction both critique and fortify what we take to be reality? In pursuit of these questions, we will turn to Nietzsche who posed one of the first critiques of the Platonic model. In the second half of the course, “the fiction of reality,” we will note how Nietzsche’s break inflects modern(ist) realism, looking to Conrad and James as authors who have asked—by means of fiction—how we can investigate the truth or “what really happened.” Can the “truth” be accessed outside of fictional narrative? How is it that “seeing is believing” and how do narratives marshal belief in the stories they tell and the images they present? Additional texts might include those by Iser, Brooks, and Barthes, as well as cinema and some short works of television.

Instructors: Colin Dingler

Rhetoric R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. This course is an introduction to the craft of argumentative writing. Clear, concise, and compelling prose is an essential skill for success in the university and beyond. Because
learning to write persuasively is grounded in learning to read analytically, we will look at a variety of forms that written arguments can take. In the first half of the semester we will closely read a philosophical dialogue on rhetoric by Plato as well as essays by Roland Barthes about the "mythologies" of 20th-century popular culture. Close attention will be paid to arguments made in these texts and rhetorical strategies used to make them. Alongside these readings, weekly lessons from a textbook on analytical writing will introduce you to the fundamentals of crafting a strong argument: developing a thesis statement, finding and using supporting evidence, thinking about form and style, and revising your work.

In the second part of the course you will use these skills to write short essays about modern literary texts. We will look at Gertrude Stein's *Three Lives*: an experimental work of fiction that challenges conventions of the novel by adapting elements of Cubist painting. Finally our discussion will turn to a handful of poems by modern and
contemporary American writers. These readings will explore the different ways a poem can use form (line, rhythm, syntax, meter, to name a few) in order to present individual or collective experience and respond to a historical moment. In other words, we will consider how poetry can also be understood as an analytical activity. Students who have little experience reading and writing about poetry should not be dissuaded; poems will provide an opportunity to practice the elements of analytical reading and argumentation outlined above.

Although a major focus will be modern literature, this course is primarily about your own writing. The objective is for you to acquire skills that will be useful regardless of your major. Course requirements will include regular reading and rereading of texts, participation in class discussion, a brief in-class presentation, four short essays, and weekly writing exercises that will focus on style and mechanics (for a total of 32 pages of writing including exercises, essays, and revisions).

Description forthcoming

Instructors: Brooke Belisle & Claudia Salamanca

In this course we will explore intersections of words and images, and correlated assumptions about literature and visual art. We will consider a series of examples from poetry to digital media, focusing on formal ideas such as syntax, composition, montage, and the database. We will ask how theory, practice, and material conditions interact to construct not only formal possibilities for art but also structures for thinking and meaning. As the second half of the required R1A and R1B series, this course will extend its interest in composition to a technical focus on students' own writing. Over the semester we will practice and expand skills emphasized in R1A, working through a handbook on effective essay-writing and through a primer on prose style. Students will complete reading assignments and writing exercises every week, write and revise a midterm paper, and write a final paper based on independent research.

Required books:

Course Reader (available at ZeeZee Copy first week of class)

Writing Analytically. ed. Rosenwasser and Stephen. Heinle: 4th edition, 2005.

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. Joseph Williams. Longman: 2nd edition, 2005/6.

Instructors: Ryan McDermott & Vlasta Vranges

In this course, we will focus on the ways in which writers use language to establish both a voice and a position in relation to an audience—that is to say, in relation to other people. As a concept, “otherness” is involved not only in writing (by way of the audience of readers just mentioned), but also in the very means by which people construct their identities in society (that is, we are always defining ourselves in relation to other people, who are in that sense always different from us). From a larger perspective, otherness can also be applied to the literal and symbolic conditions of marginalization experienced by those who are regarded as “different” from the ruling majority of a given society—for example, on account of such complex issues as race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. We will explore the “problem” of otherness across a wide range of writing (including both non-fictional and fictional texts) by analyzing the ways in which the language and concepts of our chosen texts work to represent and construct marginalized concepts and experiences. This course ultimately aims to expand the borders we draw between such enduring entities as the private and the public, the individual and society, the writer and the reader, and—most importantly—the self and the other.

In a nutshell, this is a three-pronged composition course: reading, analyzing (thinking critically), and writing will be our sustained focus. In class, we will devote the majority of our time to developing both critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. More specifically, we will practice close readings of our chosen texts, which will in turn enable us to work towards the type of analytical thinking that is required to write solid analytical prose. As a way of getting there, we will journey through the world of “exposition and argumentation” (the backbones of composition) and make stops at the following destinations: grammar; sentence and paragraph construction; essay structure; thesis development; using evidence; and style. The majority of class time will revolve around class discussions, group work, and writing workshops.

Over the course of the semester, each student will be assigned four papers and a number of short take-home assignments (many of which come from Style, a composition guidebook we will use throughout the course). Class time will be frequently spent on group work and in-class writing.

The writing portion of this course will be geared towards the production of a final and longer research paper that will make use of multiple critical sources. Each paper will involve a primary draft, a peer editing phase, and then the revision and resubmission of a final draft to the instructor for a grade. Students can expect to receive a substantial amount of commentary on all four essays.

Readings include the following:

* Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
* Sigmund Freud, Dora
* Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment
* Toni Morrison, Sula
* Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
* Lars Von Trier, "The Idiots" (film)
* Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
* Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own