Spring 2010

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 200: Ramona Naddaff
• Rhetoric 240D: Pheng Cheah
• Rhetoric 240E: David Cohen
• Rhetoric 243: Linda Williams
• Rhetoric 250: Kaja Silverman
  

Instructor: Ramona Naddaff
Office Hours: TBD

Class Time:
W: 3pm - 6pm, 7415 Dwinelle

In the post-world war II period, ancient Greek and Latin rhetorical theory has witnessed an unprecedented rejuvenation, extending its research methods and topics to the center of debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Once the exclusive terrain of philological investigation, ancient rhetorical theory has become a site to explore crucial questions about not only theories of democracy, language, and the arts. Interpreted from an interdisciplinary framework, classical rhetorical theory has also been incorporated into contemporary psychoanalytic, gender, and cultural studies. In the first instance, this seminar proposes to read the seminal texts in classical rhetorical theory—from Homer, Thucydides, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle to Cicero, Tacitus, Longinus and Augustine. Complementing close textual readings with recent scholarship in the classics, this seminar aims to understand the changing contexts and perspectives from which these canonical texts have been read. How, for example, has Plato’s Gorgias, once a revered anti-rhetorical diatribe, become a “sourcebook” for learning about the seductive, violent and mimetic powers of rhetorical language? Finally, drawing in particular on the work of French classicists such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Nicole Loraux, Barbara Cassin, and Florence DuPont, this seminar revisits ancient questions and quarrels about orality and literacy, the relation between soul and the body, myth and philosophy, tragedy and democracy, poetic logic and sexual orientations. All texts are in translation. Students who wish to read in the original source language are encouraged to do so.

Class restricted to first-year Rhetoric Graduate Students.

Provisional Reading List
Primary Texts

• Anon. Dissoi Logoi.
• Homer, selections from Iliad and Odyssey.
• Thucydides, selections from The Peloponnesian War.
• Gorgias, Encomium of Helen.
• Euripides, Helen of Troy.
• Isocrates, selections from Against the Sophists.
• Plato, Gorgias, selections from the Republic, Phaedrus.
• Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric.
• Cicero, De Oratore and selections from Tusculan Disputations.
• Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators.
• Longinus, On the Sublime.
• Augustine, De doctrina christiana and selections from the Confessions.

Secondary Criticism:

Works by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet,Marcel Detienne, Nicole Loraux, Barbara Cassin, Florence DuPont, Francois Hartog, Paul Veyne, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Froma Zeitlin, Simon Goldhill, Charles Segal, Gregory Nagy, Thomas Cole, Peter Brown, among others.

Rhetoric 240D: Theories of the World and World Literature from Goethe to the Present

Instructor: Pheng Cheah
Office Hours: TBA

Class Times:
Tu: 3:30pm - 6:30pm, 7415 Dwinelle

The intensification of globalization in the past decade has led to a renewed interest in reinventing Goethe’s project of world literature. Recent discussions of the topic, however, have taken the normative significance of ‘the world’ for granted. This course explores the vocation of world literature in contemporary globalization. The first part of the course examines various ideas of the world and its link to literature and culture in Goethe, Hegel, Marx and Arendt. In the second part of the course, we will turn to consider novels from and about postcolonial space that attempt to transform the world created by Northern political and economic hegemony. We will study novels from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that explore the consequences of commercial and financial flows such as international tourism, humanitarian aid, foreign investment etc. for humane social development. Issues to be discussed include: the normative status and transformative power of world literature in the wake of Marxist critique; the autonomy of literary and cultural flows in relation to economic flows; non-Eurocentric accounts of world literature; the connections between the formal features of committed literature and its thematic concerns in the crafting of new figurations and stories of belonging of postcolonial peoples and migrants; narrative experimentation, the revival of the story form and the use of 'magic' and its relation to realism; and the political use of the /Bildungsroman/. Readings will also include theoretical work and criticism by David Harvey, Salman Rusdhie, Walter Benjamin, Benedict Anderson, David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and Giovanni Arrighi. Students should submit a 20-page paper on a topic of their choice (to be determined in consultation with the instructor).

Book list:

• Hegel,  G.W.F.: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction ISBN-10: 0521281458, ISBN-13: 978-0521281454
  
• Marx, K., and Engels, F.: Manifesto of the Communist Party ISBN-10: 1406525146, ISBN-13: 978-1406525144
  
• Marx, K., and Engels, F.: The German Ideology ISBN-10: 1573922587, ISBN-13: 978-1573922586
  
• Arendt, H.: The Human Condition ISBN-10: 0226025985, ISBN-13: 978-0226025988
  
• Farah, N.: Gifts ISBN-10: 0140296425, ISBN-13: 978-0140296426
  
• Cliff, M.: No Telephone to Heaven ISBN-10: 0452275695, ISBN-13: 978-0452275690
  
• Cliff, M.: Abeng ISBN-10: 0452274834, ISBN-13: 9780452274839 
• Mo,  T.: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard ISBN-10: 0952419319, ISBN-13: 978-0952419310
  
• Mo,  T.: Renegade or Halo Halo ISBN-10: 0952419335, ISBN-13: 978-0952419334
  
• Ghosh,  A.: The Hungry Tide ISBN-10: 061871166X, ISBN-13: 978-0618711666
  
• Naipaul,  V.S.: A Way in the World ISBN-10: 043339711X, ISBN-13: 978-0679761662
  
• Course Reader

Rhetoric 240E: The State, Violence, and International Law

Instructor: David Cohen
Office Hours: TBA

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

The seminar will explore the development of the international legal framework to regulate war and the violence that states commit against their own citizens (genocide, crimes against humanity, torture, etc.). We will begin with two texts that provide accounts of the development of key international institutions and the sources of their authority and legitimacy (Anghie, and Hurd & Kronin). We will then look at a number of specific contexts for state organized violence and the way in which bureaucratic and administrative resources are mobilized for mass murder. Here we will examine the theories put forward by Raul Hilberg and Zygmunt Baumann in the context of the Nazi program of extermination. This part of the course will also consider the parts of Weber's Economy and Society that develop his theory of bureacratic domination. Consideration of the Rwandan genocide will provide an opportunity to examine how these theories (Weber, Baumann, Himberg) might or might not apply in a context quite different than mid-20th century Europe. The Rwandan genocide, and particularly the Akayesu Case from the ICTR, will introduce another central theme of the course, gender-based violence as a characteristic element of state sponsored mass atrocity. Following this theme further, we will read Human Rights and Gender Violence (Sally Engle Merry) and the key international case dealing with the prosecution of sexual violence (the Kunarac Case from the ICTY). The course will close with a consideration of the transitional justice enterprise as a whole and the challenges it faces in confronting the aftermath of mass murder (Elster).

Readings:

Weber, Economy and Society (bSpace)

Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law) ISBN-10: 0521702720, ISBN-13: 978-0521702720

Hurd and Kronin, eds., The UN Security Council and the Politics of International Authority (Routledge) ISBN-10: 0415775280, ISBN-13: 978-0415775281

Jon Elster, Closing the Books (Cambridge University Press) ISBN-10: 0521548543, ISBN-13: 978-0521548540

Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence (University of Chicago, Chicago Series in Law and Society) ISBN-10: 0226520749, ISBN-13: 978-0226520742

Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press) ISBN-10: 0801487196, ISBN-13: 978-0801487194

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes and Meier, Study Edition) ISBN-10: 0841909105, ISBN-13: 978-0841909106

Pillip Gourevitch, We Regret to Inform You (Picador Press)ISBN-10: 0312243359, ISBN-13: 978-0312243357
Arendt, H.: The Human Condition ISBN-10: 0226025985, ISBN-13: 978-0226025988

Rhetoric 250: The Pencil of Nature (Cross-Listed as Film 240.001)

Instructor: Kaja Silverman
Office Hours: TBA

Class Time:
Tu: 11am - 2pm, 226 Dwinelle

Admission to this seminar is by permission of the intstructor. Interested students must attend the first clas meeting.

We are used to thinking of the camera as a controlling and even aggressive device: a mechanism for “shooting” and “capturing” the world. And since most cameras require an operator, and it is usually a human hand that picks up the apparatus, points it in a particular direction, makes certain technical adjustments, and clicks the camera button, we often extend or transfer this power to our look. Photography consequently seems another chapter in the history of what Heidegger calls “modern metaphysics”--a history that begins with the cogito, that seeks to establish man as the “relational center” of all that is, and whose “fundamental event” is “the conquest of the world as a picture.”

However, photography’s earliest practitioners and viewers had a very different understanding of the medium. They saw it as a new kind of image-making—one whose agent was Nature, whose goal was self-disclosure, and whose intended viewer was man. They also conceptualized this image-making in graphic rather than ocular terms, and stressed the differences between it and their perceptions. Surprisingly, they did not question its veracity, nor did they attempt to resolve the discrepancy between what they saw and what the photograph showed them by doubting their own sensory perceptions. They understood what Descartes was unwilling to grant: both opened onto the same world, the one they inhabited. For a brief time, at least, this world seemed inexhaustible.
Although these ideas disappeared with the industrialization of photography, they continued to reverberate in other domains: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, painting, sculpture and drawing. Artists and writers also began making photographs “by other means,” and the obsolescence of the medium has now freed it to become again what it was in 1939.

We will begin this seminar with a careful reading of some early writings about photography. We will then explore some texts by Freud, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Proust, Agee and Sebald that are informed by photography. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of some contemporary artists who work in, or with, photography.
Admission to this seminar is by permission of the instructor. Since the constituency of my graduate seminars is often quite diverse, I will be posting a short list of background readings on my office door. I will also post a list of the course books. Because our first few classes will be devoted to essays in the course reader, giving participants time to buy their own books, I will not place an order with ASUC.