Fall 2009

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 205: Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 230: Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 240G.001: Trinh, Minh-Ha
• Rhetoric 240G.002: Pheng Cheah
• Rhetoric 240G.003: Judith Butler

Rhetoric 205: Contemporary Rhetorical Theory and Practice: How To Do Things with Rhetoric

Instructor: Marianne Constable
Office Hours:
First week: 8/24 - 2pm - 3pm, 8/27 - 4pm - 5pm, 7409 Dwinelle
Semester: M: 4pm - 5pm, Th:5pm - 6pm, 7409 Dwinelle

Class Times:
Th: 2pm - 5pm, 7415 Dwinelle

CATALOG: Contemporary Rhetorical Theory and Practice. (4) Three hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: Graduate status. An introduction to the questions around which contemporary rhetorical theory and practice are organized. Through an analysis of materials drawn principally from the 18th century to the present, the course will examine rhetorical inquiry in relation to critique as well as the disciplinary construction of knowledge-domains. The course will attend to rhetoric in relation to a range of fields, including but not limited to philosophy, history, literature, politics, religion, law, science, and the arts. (F,SP) Staff

How To Do Things with Rhetoric

The required seminar for first-year rhetoric graduate students will center this semester around seven books based on dissertations by former Rhetoric PhD students. The books will be supplemented by materials from contemporary and other periods that will help students see “the questions around which contemporary rhetorical theory and practice are organized”! Students will be asked to lead some discussions, to prepare discussion memos, and to write two 10-page papers. Non-first-year and non-rhetoric students may take the course; auditors must commit to attending, reading and participating all semester.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotions: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (U. of Chicago Press, 2006)

Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Cornell 2007)

David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota 2003)

Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford U. Press, 2005)

Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford University Press, 1997)

Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton U Press 2005)

Jennifer Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment (Stanford U Press 2008)

Rhetoric 230: Incommensurability: Contacts, Translations and Mediations

Instructor: Michael Wintroub
Office Hours: TBA

Class Times:
Tu: 10am - 1pm, 7415 Dwinelle

How does (or can) communication take place between rival theories, paradigms, forms of life, or cultures? What possibilities are there for finding common ground, understanding or even tolerance between divergent life-worlds and conceptual schemes? Can the divide between the rational and the irrational, truth and error, the modern and the primitive be spanned? What are the mechanisms of translation? Of mediation? Or, conversely, is there a divide at all? Or are there perhaps many "little divides"? And what happens in the zones of contact? Are relations with others entirely contingent and asymmetrical? If so, how might we understand—make sense of—these histories of misunderstanding, and/or projection and resistance. These are some of the questions we will be asking in this seminar. We will begin with incommensurability, reading works by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Michel Foucault, David Bloor, Robin Horton and Ian Hacking; we will then look at works on translation, extending our gaze to Ernest Gellner, Edward Said, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Simon Schaffer, William Pietz, Donald Mackenzie and Theodore Porter; and finally, we will pursue a series of in-depth case studies that examine “contact” between distinct cultures/lifeworlds as found in the works of Marshall Sahlins, Gananath Obeyesekere, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Carlo Ginzburg and Richard White.

Required Books:

• Obeyesekere, G. 1997. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton University Press.
• Sahlins, M. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example. University of Chicago Press.
• Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Ginzburg, C., 1983 Night Battles. Routledge
• Latour, B., Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press
• Niranjana, T., Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context, University of California Press.
• Clendinnen, I., Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge Latin American Studies).
• Schaffer, S., and Shapin, S., Leviathan and the Air-pump. Princeton University Press.
• Schwartz, S., Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico, St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Rhetoric 240G.001: Postcoloniality And Its Critical Tools

Instructor: Trinh, Minh-Ha
Office Hours: TBA

Class Times:
M: 2pm - 5pm, 7415 Dwinelle

The course explores postcoloniality in its potential breadth as a praxis (not necessarily bound to the confines of postcolonialism as an occupied terrain). In investigating the cultural legacy of Western imperial domination and colonial expansion, the question is not only to unravel the great narrative of isolation, exclusion and exploitation, but to offer ways to rethink given traditions while working through and recreating the critical theories at hand. The focus will be on devising tools workable across struggles, in a wide range of contexts. These tools, whose function is to give form, to de-form, and to trans-form, do not merely serve to challenge binaries such as First and Third, the West and the Rest, modernism and tradition, center and margin. They also contribute to a new collaborative cultural dimension in which the art and politics of thriving in between worlds constitute a marker of the limit to the power of knowledge.

List of readings will tentatively include the writings of Eqbal Ahmad, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Baudrillard, Homi Bhabha, Aime Cesaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Ezekiel Mphalele, Edward Said Gayatri Chakravorty Sprivak (all subject to change).

Rhetoric 240G.003 (Cross-Listed as Critical Theory 200)

Instructor: Judith Butler
Office Hours: TBA

Class Times:
Tu: 2pm - 5pm, 121 Latimer

This course will consider a notion of critique, immanent and dialectical, that emerges from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and bears significantly on 20th century conceptions of critical theory We will begin with an introduction to Kant’s notion of critical philosophy and then turn to Hegel, focusing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the sections “Lordship and Bondage”, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” and “The Ethical Order.” We will turn briefly to Marx’s critique of Hegel in the second part of the course.
Students should be prepared to conduct close readings of the text with some reference to the German in class. A list of secondary readings will also be provided.
The course is open to all students in the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis and graduate students in the Department of Rhetoric (who are not required to apply). Please note: graduate students who are in neither program may be accepted through instructor approval only. To apply, please attend the first session (September 1) to receive course syllabus and be prepared to write a 1-2 page statement on your reasons for wishing to take the course. Course requirements: one seminar presentation, a short paper (week 3), and a longer paper (last class) will be required. No auditors.

Texts:

• Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0198245971
• Marx-Engels Reader, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Robert C. Tucker, W.W. Norton, ISBN 978-0393090406
• Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521654081
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 978-0230013384