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| Spring 2010 1A & 1B (All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.) |
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Rhetoric 1A.001: “Revealing is Healing:” Rhetoric, Narrative, Emancipation (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Diana Anders & Amanda Armstrong Class Time: It is often taken for granted that telling one’s story can have a liberating effect. One sees this phenomenon in a wide range of contexts over the course of the last century: from truth commissions, to feminist anti-rape campaigns, to the civil rights movement, to talk shows like “Oprah,” to international human rights tribunals. Symptomatic of this is the “revealing is healing” motto of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established to enable victims and perpetrators of Apartheid to come together, tell their respective sides of the story, and foster reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing. Linguistic representation in the named model is thought to set free—from internal, psychic pain, but also from histories of oppression and conflict. But what assumptions do these practices make about language, power, and subjectivity? This course sets out to teach analytic thinking and writing by critically examining this problem, paying close attention to the mechanics of persuasive argument. We will work to develop a critical and formal vocabulary that will allow us to assess the accounts of narrative in question. In particular, we will consider the conditions of these ostensibly emancipatory narratives, the sort of “healing” they are meant to engender, the rhetorical devises upon which they rely, and their political, social, and psychological effects. In-class workshops will focus on thesis statements, close reading tactics, paper organization, and style. The course will end with students’ presentations of their final projects.
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Rhetoric 1A.003:The Craft of Writing (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Fernando (Elmo) Gonzaga & Alexandra Kleeman Class Time: Course description forthcoming. Required Texts:
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Rhetoric 1B.001: Collaborative Assemblages (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Emily Carpenter & Katherine Chandler Class Time: This course aims to prepare students to read and write at the college level by establishing strategies for close reading, critical thinking, argument-building, and the use of textual evidence. We will move systematically through the writing process, from active reading to thesis development, paragraph structure, draft preparation, peer-editing, and revision. We will reinforce these new habits by extending our skills beyond the essay to other academic practices: group work, research, a conference, and collaborative writing assignments. Indeed, collaborations will be the theme of our course. We will consider the relationship between writer, text, and reader; the analysis of participatory politics; the cooperative methods of scientific and social-scientific research and experimentation; plurivocal artistic practices and the production of popular cultures. We will use a range of textual materials as lenses through which to view the challenge of intellectual cooperation. These will include scholarship from the humanities, social and physical sciences, as well as novels, popular music, and film. Readings may include texts by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Orhan Pamuk, and Todd Haynes. We propose to examine the process of collaboration-as-assemblage by challenging the notion that a single author or concept stands behind a text. Instead, the class will suggest that the texts, images, and events through which we experience the world gather together a multiplicity of human and non-human actors. In keeping with the notion that the practices of reading and writing are never solitary, the course structure will ask students to cultivate critical but generous relations with texts and with one another through cooperative activities and assignments. Required Books: My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk, (Vintage 2002) - ISBN-10: 0375706852, ISBN-13: 978-0375706851
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Rhetoric 1B.002: Craft of Writing (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Zhivka Valiavicharska & Amirah Silmi Class Time: Description forthcoming REQUIRED BOOKS: David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically ISBN-10: 1413033105, ISBN-13: 978-1413033106 (Available at iChapters.com, Cal Student Bookstore, or Amazon.com)
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Rhetoric 1B.003 Representing Nature: Ecocritical Approaches (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Alenda Chang & TBA Class Time: For some, nature is a kind of place outside of society in which we may turn our thoughts inward. For others, it is a nuisance, a resource to be exploited, a dire threat, or even a chimera. Why do we build such varied relations with nature? What does this say about our own needs and predispositions, both on individual and aggregate levels? Why the continuing tenacity of the nature/culture divide—and is there a good reason to define ourselves both in our relation to and our distinctness from human society? We will draw on science and technology studies, ecology, animal studies, philosophy, literature, and visual studies to explore this so-called nature/culture divide, as well as the persistence of boundaries between the human and nonhuman, biological and inorganic, and scientific and humanistic thinking. Our objects will include landscapes, species, habitats, climates, and even food, in the form of stories, photographs, essays, nature documentaries, scientific reports, video games, and even taxidermic animals. We will at the same time develop an interest in genres of self-expression and introspection, in particular the forms of creative non-fiction, to ask: how have nature writing, scientific popularization, autobiography, memoir, and essay given us the natural world as mirror, canvas, window, and virtual reality? And how do our perceptions of what counts as nature or the natural ramify through multiple modes of experience and representation—among them literature, film, television, art, and the popular press? Required Books:
Students must also purchase a course reader that will include pieces by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, John Muir, Bruce Bagemihl, Aldo Leopold, Robert Bullard, Ramachandra Guha, Carolyn Merchant, Gregg Mitman, and others.
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Rhetoric 1B.005: The Rhetoric of Nature (Satisfies reading and composition requirement) Instructors: Nima Bassiri & Ryan Roberts Class Time: This course will examine the notion of “nature” as it appears in a number of different discursive and disciplinary contexts. The concept of nature plays a significant, but often varied role, in the history of modern Western thought. It can possess a number of different and sometimes incompatible definitions depending on whether it is being employed as a philosophical or, say, scientific, political, legal, or literary notion. While we may imagine “nature” as having a singular definition, it becomes easy to see how the term actually accommodates many divergent and even contradictory meanings. In more ways that one, the meaning of nature depends on the manner and specificity of its textual deployment. In this course, we will examine this contingent and malleable concept of nature by looking at the numerous ways the notion plays out in a number of different kinds of texts. As we do so, we will keep the following questions in mind: What is ultimately meant when a particular author refers to something as “natural”? On what basis does a particular author discriminate nature from something which is taken to be non-natural, and what sorts of categories can this latter term encompass? What problems arise when certain objects (most notably the human being) are thought of as being simultaneously natural and yet more-than-natural? Authors we may read include, but are not limited to, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Mary Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and Donna Haraway. The second major objective of this course will be to develop reading and writing skills, in order to meet the University’s Reading and Composition requirements. Our major focus will be divided into textual analysis and argumentative-analytical essay writing, with an emphasis on developing research skills. |
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