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| Fall 2009 1A & 1B (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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Rhetoric 1A.002: The Craft of Writing, Good Old-Fashioned Futures (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Alenda Chang & Ryan Roberts Class times: Writing is a craft that seems to have fallen out of favor in our ultramodern age. And yet, writing has not so much languished as it has taken on a startling array of new forms, from the blogosphere to haiku-like tweets to writing on Facebook Walls. As a class, we will ponder and practice what it means to be a “good” writer in this day and age; moreover, since writing is inextricably linked with reading, our work will extend to becoming more skillful readers, from identifying and vetting sources to critical analysis of “texts,” broadly conceived. Throughout the semester, we will also consider the historical, political, and sociocultural impact of new and imagined technologies on our daily lives: their influence on how we consume and produce writing in the modern day (e.g. hypertext, eBooks, word processing software); the role of games, play, and tactical media; theories of the posthuman; and what qualifies as new media, including the relationship, often obscured, between “new” and “old” media. The texts that we will study will include a generous sampling of new media theory and history as well as cyberpunk and science fiction literature, films, web sites, and video games. Our theoretical stance will encompass cultural studies concerns with race, class, gender and sexuality, and globalization, as well as rhetorical analysis of how various media (written, visual, oral/aural, digital) enact persuasive arguments. Students will be encouraged to weigh utopian and dystopian visions of new media and to consider diverse new media objects, for example, the World Wide Web, code structures, nanotechnology, license agreements, and networks. While our focus will always return to writing and its many pleasures and pitfalls, students can and should pursue their individual interests within new media for their papers, exploring areas ranging from textuality and inscription to interface studies, legal debates over open source and intellectual property, gaming, and social networks. Required Texts: A course reader will also be available for purchase at a local copy center, which will include excerpts from the work of N. Katherine Hayles, Ian Bogost, Cory Doctorow, Lisa Nakamura, Henry Jenkins, Justine Cassell, Hans Moravec, Sherry Turkle, and Matthew Fuller, among others. Recommended Texts:
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Rhetoric 1A.003: The Craft of Writing, “Style, Writing, & War”(Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Eric Morales-Franceschini & Amirah Silmi Class Time: Let’s not be mistaken: this is a course on the rudiments of grammar, logic, and style as they pertain to the craft of writing efficacious and elegant essays. There will be several short assignments designed to develop your skills with punctuation, transition, emphasis, concision, shape, argumentation, analysis, etc.… Yet, aside from (or parallel to) the “grace” of our style and the “soundness” of our arguments, what is there to be said about responsibility? silence? grief? curiosity? gratification? entitlement? in our writing? Let’s be a bit more exact: what if it were the case that writing only ever takes place within always, already ongoing series of hostilities and injustices? such that coming to terms with our own writing is no less—inescapably, repeatedly—coming to terms with power, its rewards and lures as well as its penalties and filth? If we grant this much—which, in this class, we shall—then how is it that “we” can write our grievances as well as our desires and wisdom when we’re compelled to speak in a tongue never quite our own, a language never quite our own? How is it that we can write other than how we were always, already expected to have written, which is to say, within the narrow parameters of disciplinary protocols? What in fact keeps us, so many of us, from devoting ourselves to what Martin Luther King Jr. calls a “vocation of agony,” that of breaking the silence of our own betrayals? And what if this admittedly dangerous vocation not only presupposes agony, but may just as readily call forth immense joy in our lives, our writing? These are the types of questions we are likely to consider in this course, and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michelle Cliff, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixious, Trinh Minh-ha, and Judith Butler will likely be our stimulants. We’ll move through these works as a way to prepare ourselves to write more fully, more thought-fully, on the question of war. In this regard, towards the close of the semester, we’ll analyze a film (Apocalypse Now or Heaven & Earth) and a documentary (The Fog of War) on the subject of war. Required Text: Course Reader (location TBA)
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Rhetoric 1A.004: The Craft of Writing Natura, naturata, naturans: Rhetorics of the Natural (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Emily Carpenter & Simon Porzak Class Times: This course prepares students for effective and elegant writing at the university level. We will focus on developing close reading techniques, strategies for formulating arguments and mobilizing textual evidence, and research methods that incorporate both primary and secondary materials. In doing so, we will cultivate a critical relationship not only with the texts that we read, but also with those that we produce: the analytical work of the essay-writing process will be shared and extended through peer commentary and rewriting. Critical essays will be supplemented by a group presentation. In particular, this course will ask what it means to talk about "Nature" or to refer to attitudes or phenomena as "natural." Students will read the texts from which some contemporary definitions of nature evolve, as well as contemporary writing on nature that uses different vocabularies and approaches drawn from the environmental movement, the sciences, and critical theory. We will also address visual art, video works, and film texts, including at least one feature film. Required text:
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Rhetoric 1A.002: The Craft of Writing - Image, Space, Text(Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Fernando Gonzaga & Hyaesin Yoon Class Times: Our aim for this course is to explore the entanglements of inscription and perception in the spatial, the textual, and the visual. We start with the tentative notion that spaces, texts, and images are machines of experience, which can combine to form a multiplicity of constellations with force in the world. Working with critical theory, narrative film, short fiction, and performance art, we will attempt to interrogate default norms of understanding by pursuing the many doorways and pathways opened by questions. How does the configuration of space and time structure imagination and behavior? How does the production of visibility or legibility shape the experience of space and time? How is the experience of space and time influenced by the narratives and meanings affixed to it? How can the excess that results from its construction contest the coherence of a work? Among those whose works we will likely discuss are Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Foucault, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, Required Texts:
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Rhetoric 1B.001:Bookworms, Computer Nerds and Drama Queens: Rhetorics of Academic Love and Labor from the Greeks to the Geeks (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Todd Barnes & Matt Bonal Class Times: This course will both facilitate and interrogate passionate engagements with academic modes of inquiry. In other words, the course will allow you to “geek out” while studying the history of bookworms, drama queens, and computer nerds. We will follow the figure of the “geek” from ancient Greece to Silicone Valley, but instead of searching for the transhistorical, transcultural essence of the geek, we will analyze and practice research methodologies that look at the many different ways historical discourses and practices have invented, shaped, and transformed the figure of the geek. The course will be structured around the following questions: How has the figure of the geek shaped what has been imagined as the “proper” relationship between love and labor, the human and the nonhuman, the masculine and the feminine, the physical and the metaphysical? What kinds of knowledges and behaviors are produced by the geek, and how do these knowledges and behaviors change alongside various technological innovations? How does the figure of the geek get refigured as it becomes historically associated with various technologies of learning? How do Shakespeare’s early-modern “bookworms” and “drama queens” differ from the computer nerds of the 1980s? How do Socrates’ dialogic technologies differ from those practiced by software engineers or theatre directors? How do different figures of the geek balance (or fail to balance) passions for learning with social or erotic passions? What is the relationship between the academic modes of inquiry and those of the so-called “real world”? How do today’s research methods change in relation to technologies of literacy, performance and digital archivization? How does the geek, as a category of difference and exclusion, operate in relation to forms of difference defined by race, class, gender and/or body type? Like the bookworms we study, we will be reading and composing intensely throughout the semester. We will also spend time developing an intimate relationship with the landscape of the university library (along with its virtual holdings). Like the computer nerds we study, a significant portion of the course will happen on bSpace. Like the drama queens we study, we will spend time at the campus theater. As a class, we will attend Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Required Texts:
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Rhetoric 1B.003: The Craft of Writing (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Brad Rogers & Chiara Ricciardone Class Times: Rhetoric 1B 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. Required Book: Graff & Birkenstein, They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Argumentative Writing (WWNorton) ISBN-13: 978-0-393-92409-1
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Rhetoric 1B.004: The Craft of Writing - The Ambulant Sciences: Between Laboratories, Fields, and Theories (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Katherine Chandler & Osita (IK) Udekwu Class Times: How is knowledge created, or discovered? Laboratories and fields are typically seen as sites for the emergence of facts and evidence. These, subsequently, serve as the ground for the creation of theories: new knowledge about how our world works. This course, will put forward a slightly different take, looking at laboratories and fields as places stranger than we think, ideas to be investigated in their own right. In the course, we will ask students to examine the movement between laboratories, fields, and theories, and challenge them to analyze how arguments drawing on these realms are constructed. Parallel to this, we will frame the writing process as a form of experimentation. Students will engage in a series of “laboratories” and field experiments, with the aim of developing the skills necessary for effective critical and research essays (Note: the formal definition of essay is ‘an attempt or try’). This will culminate in the development of a research project that draws both upon the student’s interests and the themes of the class. The laboratory and the field are concepts seen as central to the “natural” sciences, of course, but also extend their influence to the humanities and social sciences. So, broadly speaking, we propose to use their tactics to suggest possible methods of interdisciplinary research. We ask: What kind of connection exists between the practices found in scientific laboratories, and those employed by photography, creative writing exercises, or artistic activities? How can fieldwork refer to agricultural practices, biological research, and ethnographic studies? What kind of overlap exists between these areas of investigation? What does it mean to test something and what documents are taken as representations of experiences and/or experiments? Readings will include selections from the disciplines such as philosophy and sociology of science, as well as creative and nonfiction accounts of laboratories and fieldwork. Authors may include Francis Bacon, Michel De Certeau, Bruno Latour, Mary Shelly, Rebecca Solnit, Susan Sontag, and Agnes Varda.
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