• R1A Section1--Andrew Weiner & Jennifer Lum
• R1A Section 2--Benjamin Young & Keerthi Potluri
• R1A Section 4--Annika Thiem & Diana Anders

• R1B Section 1--Zhivka Valiavicharska & Katie Horowitz
• R1B Section 2-- Julie Napolin & Hyaesin Yoon
• R1B Section 3--Mark Pedretti & Alenda Chang
• R1B Section 5--Benjamin Morgan

This course will aim to provide students with an introduction to critical interpretation, formal analysis, and argumentative writing by questioning the ways in which one might understand the rhetoric of the image. By considering some of the many ways that images function –– as metaphors, technical reproductions, artifacts of public discourse, and components of thought and memory –– students will gain experience in evaluating a wide range of texts and media. The course will begin by engaging the problem of persuasion, and by considering some of the various roles that figurative language plays in everyday speech, political communication, and literature. We will then turn to the technically reproduced image, working to develop a critical and formal vocabulary that will allow us to assess the sorts of appeals that can be made with photography, film, video, and new media. Through close readings of specific images and sequences of images, we will consider how such arguments might alter the definition of the artwork, and what the implications of this shift might be. The next unit will focus on the function of images in the mass media, questioning how they shape our sense of public figures and current events. We will pay attention to recent debates over journalistic and spectatorial ethics, and to the ways in which public opinion has figured as a contested site in recent and ongoing armed conflicts. The course will end by considering the increasingly central role images have come to play in the representation of history and memory.

Course readings will include Aristotle, G. Lakoff, W. Benjamin, S. Sontag, A. Sekula, M. Rosler, W.G. Sebald.

(Description Coming Soon)

In this course students will develop their skills to write successful university-level essays. We will practice close reading, critical thinking, and argumentative writing by examining texts in which ethics and ethical action arise as questions when situations that require evaluation and action do not permit simple answers.

To train ourselves as thoughtful critical readers and writers, we will study in conjunction with these texts principles of argument and composition. To read critically, one must understand the logic of a text, the manner of its presentation, and the  modes of how it persuades its readers. To write well, one must thus attend to the topic at hand, understand one’s audience, and vary one’s style to fit the situation.

Examining literary as well as philosophical texts, we will ask in which ways these texts make ethical deliberation and action available and productive as questions. Instead of understanding ethics as a matter of providing unambiguous answers, we will consider the ethical value of beginning with questions and of not knowing right away what to do. We will explore how ambiguity becomes a precondition for ethics and how then ethics is not primarily concerned with applying principles, but with how to “read” and interpret situations as ethical problems. We will ask also how the texts allow us to distinguish “ethical” from “political” questions. What makes a situation an ethical problematic as opposed to a political or non-moral choice of preference? How do these texts address us as their readers, and is there a particular ethics of reading that becomes a question for us in response to these texts? What are the particular style and content of these texts so that they open up questions of moral ambiguity? How does the language of these texts enable and provoke these questions?

While we will spend most of our time working directly with the primary texts, we will also frequently set time apart to discuss the mechanics of writing and editing. The main objective for this class is to master this particular set of problems and primary texts through becoming better at analyzing and utilizing the techniques of thoughtful and engaged reading and concise and compelling writing.

Authors might include Simone de Beauvoir, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, Max Frisch, Franz Kafka, Michel de Montaigne, and Elie Wiesel.

Required texts:

David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically (4th edition)

Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (8th Edition)

This reading- and writing-intensive class will give you a solid introduction to critical analysis of texts and argumentative writing, while focusing on major philosophical works from the field of modern political and social thought.              

Building upon Rhetoric 1A, we will assume a basic foundation in writing and composition and will focus on refining our ability to develop well-formulated, convincing, well-composed, and elegant written arguments about the texts we read. In contrast to Rhetoric 1A, 1B will be more reading-intensive: we will practice close readings of dense critical and philosophical writings, uncover underlying premises of the arguments advanced in them, and learn how to develop rigorous critical analyses of the assigned texts. 

Our discussions will be organized around two fundamental questions in modern political and social thought: the concern with freedom and power. We will look at the different meanings and conceptions of freedom throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will consider various ways in which political thinkers have understood connections between freedom and the individual, the collective, culture, and the law. In addition, we will read various critiques of the practices and discourses of liberalism by authors concerned with the locations, workings, and agents of power in modern western societies. Authors will include Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Fanon, Arendt, and Foucault.

Required texts:

A reader, details to be announced

This course is designed to help you to develop analytic writing skills and to teach you research methods in the humanities. You will be asked to produce approximately thirty pages of writing in the course of the semester, the assignments ranging from short close readings of assigned texts and longer essays incorporating secondary sources located in your own library excursions outside of class. In a series of writing workshops, you will learn how to develop a research question, how to construct an argument around it, how to read secondary sources alongside of a primary text, how to organize an analytic research paper, and most importantly, how to read closely and critically. The majority of our class time will be spent in collaborative close readings of the assigned texts.

The topic of the course is the essay, or “changing the mind.” “I’ve changed my mind” is an expression most of us use on a daily basis.  While the active construction of this phrase suggests the subject as the agent of change, one often cannot fully identify when and how the “change of mind” took place. We will begin with the self-reflective subject of Descartes who sat himself down in order to re-build the “edifice” of his own thought. We will read him alongside of his contemporary, Montaigne, an author who offers an alternative portrait of what it means to be “a thing that thinks.” Montaigne is often understood as beginning the “essay” form, which literally means, “to try.” We will ask how his Essays include in their structure an impermanence and uncertainty, yet also how they refuse to offer a fully defined system. In particular, we will focus on his essays dealing with solitude, asking how they offer an alternative to the Cartesian subject who, like Montaigne, enters into a self-conversation. We will then turn to later thinkers who have adopted his essay form, thinkers who attempt to document, and undergo in the process, a changing of mind. How does the essay form open itself up to objects and experiences usually thought to be outside of the realm of what Descartes deemed “first philosophy,” such as reveries, passing fancies, personal history, material objects, and affects? How have authors dealt with the question of revision and retraction, and what does it means for an author to offer a position only to revise it later, at times in the scope of a single work? How does writing create a position rather than simply record one that was already formed? Texts and authors might include Plato’s Phaedrus, Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, W. James, Baker’s “Changing of Mind,” Adorno “The Essay as Form,” as well as excerpts from Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Lispector’s The Stream of Life.

This course fulfills the second half of the University’s Reading and Composition requirement.  Concise, conceptually sophisticated prose is the cornerstone to success in almost every academic discipline, and our primary aim will be to build upon the skills of critical reading and argumentative writing developed in Rhetoric R1A or equivalent.  Learning these skills will be integrated with a study of encounters between the “West” and the “East” in various discursive media: fiction, film, and politics, among others.  We will be asking about how the “East” has been constructed as an object of speculation, suspicion, utopianism, and misprision at various historical moments.  How does the Western encounter with the Near and Far East understand its “Other,” and what are the stakes of that engagement?  What political or ideological functions do particular representations of the “East” serve, and what rhetorical strategies are used to accomplish those effects?  Our inquiry will also raise questions about interpretation and representation that implicate our study of writing, so the content of the course will be very much the same as its form.  Exercises in writing and reading will be integrated into our daily class sessions, and the course will culminate in the students’ production of a research paper related to the course material.

In this course you will develop skills necessary for successful college-level papers: careful reading, critical thinking, and effective writing. You will leave the course with the ability to write persuasively to an academic audience. Students will write several short essays and will complete exercises to build skills such as paraphrasing, close reading, and using evidence effectively. A longer final essay will provide an opportunity to research one of the topics we cover during the course. Our reading will focus on arguments about whether or not, and why or why not, fiction matters. Are novels good for anything besides the enjoyment they provide? Can fiction make a difference in the real world—politically, socially, individually? Might its influence be dangerous rather than beneficial? Or, if fiction is useless and doesn’t matter, does that mean we needn’t bother with it? We will take a range of answers to these questions seriously, reading essays and stories by authors such as Barthes, Borges, Calvino, Eco, Pater, Rushdie, Sartre, and Wilde.