• Rhetoric 200: Classical Origins of the Rhetorical Tradition--Daniel Boyarin
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 1: Rhetorical Theory: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in a Global Era--Pheng Cheah
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 2: Rhetorical Theory: Paranoia and Popular Culture:--Carol Clover
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 3: Rhetorical Theory: Political Philosophy and the Aesthetic Dimension--Frederick Dolan
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 5: Rhetorical Theory: Marxian Theory--Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 6: Rhetorical Theory: Lacan and His Commentators--Kaja Silverman
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 7: Rhetorical Theory: Research Methods in Political Performance "post" 9/11--Shannon Jackson
• Rhetoric 240G, Sec 8: Rhetorical Theory: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition: Theories and Practices--Ernst van Alphen
• Rhetoric 243: Special Topics in Film: Heterosexuality and Godard/Mieville--Kaja Silverman

Rhetoric 200
Instructor: Daniel Boyarin

This course will be a survey of many of the most important texts through which rhetoric and philosophy came to be understood as other to each other in Athenian antiquity. Inter alia the course will constitute a first introduction to the oeuvre of Plato as he is arguably the major figure in the invention of this opposition, an opposition that has much to teach us even now about the way we think about language, truth, and discourse. The course will be run as a seminar. I will lead the first session, in which I will also lay out the background and designs of the course. Following that week a student (or students) will take responsibility for leading the discussion further. There will be no examination but a final paper will be required. Grading will be on the basis of participation in discussion, preparation of one’s leading of discussion, and presentation of one’s seminar paper, and the paper itself.

Tentative Schedule:

1 Parmenides, Poetry, and the Invention of Philosophy: Parmenides’ Poem; Gorgias: Defense of Helen, On What is Not; Protagoras (Fragments); The Ion

2 Socratic Parody; The Clouds; Thucydides; Pericles’s Funeral Oration, The Menexenus

3 Plato and Thucydides: The Mytilenian Debate, Melian Dialogue; The Protagoras

4 Inventing Rhetoric: The Gorgias; The Republic

5 Plato Pushes the Point: The Thaetetus; The Sophist

6 A Different Socrates: Xenophon: The Symposium; The Apology

7 The Erotics of Philosophy and Politics: The Symposium

8 Plato’s ‘Noble Lie’ Anent Rhetoric: The Euthydemus; The Phaedrus; Isocrates: Panathenaicus

9 The Rhetors Write Back: The Apology (Plato); Gorgias, Defense of Palamedes; Isocrates: The Antidosis; Against the Sophists

10 An Extraordinary Synthesis: Aristotle: The Rhetoric

Required Texts:

Plato, Plato on Rhetoric and Language: Four Key Dialogues; Plato,
Euthydemus; Plato, Symposium; Isocrates; Aristotle; Plato, The Theaetetus of Plato; Plato, Sophist; Plato, The Republic; West, West, Plato., et al.; Plato, Euthydemus; Plato and
Xenophon

Rhetoric 240G, Sec. 1
Instructor: Pheng Cheah

We live in an era where nationalism is out of favor. The catchwords of the moment are globalization, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, even postnationalism. This course examines canonical philosophical ideas about nationalism and cosmopolitanism and more recent theories about these two forms of solidarity in the era of globalization. The first part of the course explores the rise of competing arguments in late 18th and early 19th century German philosophy that normative culture and universal freedom are necessarily connected to the territorially bounded community of the nation or a world community. The second part of the course considers contemporary accounts of the rise and spread of nationalism (with special attention to the genesis of decolonizing nationalism in the Third World), recent studies of the effects of globalization on national culture, and recent theories of cosmopolitanism. Topics to be explored include postcoloniality and nationalism, the phenomenon of diasporic communities, the implications of globalization for nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and postnationalism and human rights.

Required Texts:

Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet; J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party; Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments; Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World; Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder; Jurgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation; Jurgen Habermans, The Inclusion of the Other; John Rawls, The Law of Peoples; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents; Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society

[There will be additional essays by authors such as Tom Nairn, Ernest Gellner, Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, and James Clifford].

Rhetorical Theory: Paranoia and Popular Culture

Although the term "paranoid/paranoia" has come to refer to responses ranging from vague nervousness or the expectation of any unpleasantness ("I'm paranoid that I'm going to forget the phone number,"), we'll be returning it, in this course, to its more technical uses especially in political theory and psychoanalysis. We'll be paying particular attention to the claim that paranoia (that is, conspiratorial thinking, the "reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible" ) is characteristically American (indeed, "as American as apple pie," as one political historian has put it). Following M. Rogin's conviction that film has come to be the chief popular repository of "the paranoid intuition" in American culture, we will explore a number of films that not only play out paranoid themes, but, as formal constructions, work to engender a paranoid response in the spectator. Our readings will include works by, e.g., S. Freud, D. Shapiro, R. Hofstadter, D .B. Davis, L. Bersani, and F. Jameson, and our film list will probably include such titles as The Manchurian Candidate, D.O.A., Double Indemnity, JFK, Wild Things, The Truman Show, The Trial (Welles), The Game, and Deliverance.

Required Texts:

Rhetorical Theory: Political Philosophy and the Aesthetic Dimension

The field of "politics and aesthetics" is a huge one, stretching from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond and embracing philosophy, literature, and art as well as political theory. In this seminar we will limit ourselves to some works that have assumed the status of modern classics, along with recent commentary on them or on themes they treat or inspire. The aim of the seminar will be both to read these texts with care and to formulate their implications with respect to current problems in political philosophy and aesthetic theory. Works to be discussed include Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and The Aesthetic Dimension, and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy.

Required Texts:

Heidegger, Basic Writings; Arendt, The Human Condition; Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension; Benjamin, Illuminations; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. II and III; Benjamin, Reflections

Rhetorical Theory

Rhetoric 240G, Sec 5
Instructor: Rakesh Bhandari

A reading intensive seminar on select interpretations, criticisms and elaborations of the critiques of philosophy, political economy and the state developed by Karl Marx in his mature work, in particular the three volumes of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. The following topics will be among those discussed: the relationship between German Idealism and critical theory; science and scientism; the theory of capital accumulation and crisis; the relationship between capital and the nation state; homology between the commodity form and the juridical subject.

Required Texts:

Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital; Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx; Duménil and Lévy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neo Liberal Revolution; Foley, Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory; Grossmann, Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System; Karatani, Transcritique on Kant and Marx; Lukács, History and Class Consciousness; Lukacs, A Defense of HCC; Pashukanis, General Theory of Law and Marxism; Poulantzas, State, Power and Socialism; Ranciére, The Philosopher and His Poor.

We will also read essays by Max Adler, Jairus Banaji, Paresh Chattopadyay, Lucio Colletti, Gideon Freudenthal, Maurice Godelier, Manu Goswamy, Irfan Habib, Rohini Hensman, Lawrence Krader, Paul Mattick, and Anwar Shaikh.

Rhetorical Theory: Lacan and his Commentators

This course will be devoted to a close reading of Lacan’s first,
second, and seventh seminars, and selected essays from his Ecrits. We will be concerned not only with the psychic, but also the social, political and visual dimensions of these texts, and will therefore pay close attention to what Lacan has to say about the formation of the bodily ego; the entry into language; the institution of sexual difference; the operations of the paternal law; the organization of the unconscious; aggressivity; the field
of vision; and identification.

In our discussions of these issues, we will also be thinking “toward”
phenomenology, with which Lacan’s work is in rich dialogue. Next year, I plan to teach a “follow-up” seminar to this one, which will bring together Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. In addition to the above-mentioned texts by Lacan, we will read essays by a number of his commentators, and spend a week or two with the book form
of Mary Kelly’s extraordinary installation, Post-Partum Document, a work which is profoundly indebted to Lacan, and even recounts the same story,but does so from the position of the mother, rather than the father.

Required Texts:

Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis In Contemporary Culture; Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan; Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document; Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. John Forrester; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter; Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan

In addition, there is a reading packet, available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Ave.

Rhetorical Theory: Research Methods in Political Performance "post" 9/11

This course will compare ways of researching and analyzing the role of performance in art, activism, and everyday life, with particular focus on post-9/11 formations. Exploring key texts in modern and contemporary theorizing of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, we will consider various ways of responding methodologically to the challenge of these models. How do verbal, imagistic, and/or embodied cultural forms differently cultivate political consciousness? And where are those cultural forms documented? In what kinds of texts can a researcher find evidence of dialogic reception? To what degree and in what way must contemporary scholarship on political performance build upon a longer set of disciplinary precedents? If political performance is often unintelligible or fleetingly resistant, where is its archive? Throughout, we will discuss the search for and integration of relevant analytic models and relevant "objects" of analysis. As a course in research methods, students will compare the how-tos and wherefores of archival research and e-search as well as narrative, discursive, and historicist methods of scholarly representation. Students will be asked to do writing exercises that develop a "meta-consciousness" in the creation of a research project and that articulate a project's relationship to adjacent fields and sub-fields.

Readings will draw from the work of, amongst others, Adorno, Arac, Benjamin, Brown, Butler, Davidson, Foucault, Graff, Kracauer, Jay, Phelan, Marx, and Said in conjunction with selected plays, exhibits, protests, installations, memorials, and "ephemera" of everyday life.

Required Texts:

Rhetorical Theory: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition: Theories and Practices
Also listed as Dutch 250

From the Classical period on, people have reflected on the differences between word and image, often leading to a privileging of one medium (usually the word) above the other. Leonardo da Vinci has called this "contest" between media "paragone". Through the ages the outcome of this contest differs. Today, e.g. culture pessimists discuss regularly the decline of the culture of writing and the dominancy of visual culture. In this course the most important historical conceptions of the differences and similarities between word and image, and between literature and visual art, will be discussed. (e.g., Plato's Allegory of the Cave, da Vinci, Lessing's Laocoon, Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, W.J.T. Mitchell's Iconology,Mieke Bal's Reading Rembrandt, Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes.) But next to these theoretical reflections, artistic practices that foreground the characteristics of word and image will be studied (futurism, surrealism, concrete poetry, Text art, Art & Language).

Required Texts:

Special Topics in Film: Everything You've Always Wanted to Know about Heterosexuality But Were Afraid to Ask (a.k.a. "Het")

This seminar will be devoted to the exploration of   a category which fell out favor early in the Women's Movement, and has also served as the whipping-boy for a number of subsequent social movements: heterosexuality. This exploration is long overdue, not only because of the resurgence within our present culture of a triumphant masculinity, and a compliant femininity, but also because   heterosexuality is the only erotic possibility for a vast number of people who are passionately committed to the transformation of gender roles.

We will conduct our exploration of heterosexuality primarily through   the films of Jean-Luc Godard,   who has focused obsessively upon it for over four decades.   But   we will   also attend closely to the work of the two women with whom he   has had the most sustained and productive relationships: Anna Karina, and Anne-Marie Miéville.   Karina, Godard's first wife, starred in a number of his films during the l960's. As anyone who has ever seen  these films knows, they are unthinkable without her. Miéville, who is a feminist, has been with Godard for over three decades now,   and has collaborated with him in a variety of ways. She has also made a number of fascinating films of her own,   which offer a considerably darker view of the heterosexual couple. Miéville's relationship with Godard has dramatically   changed the kinds of films he makes, but since she is neither his "muse" nor his "mentor" we will have to develop some new theoretical coordinates for talking about the kind of "influence" she exercises over him.

The film list is not final, since it is not yet clear which works will be available, but it will hopefully consist of the following titles

Vivre da vie (Godard and Karina, 1962)
Alphaville (Godard and Karina, 1965)
Pierrot le fou (Godard and Karina, 1965)
Ici et Ailleurs (Miéville and Godard)    
Numéro deux (Miéville and Godard)
Passion (Godard, 1981)
Soft and Hard   (Miéville and Godard, 1985)
My Dear Subject (Miéville, 1988)
Nouvelle Vague (Godard, 1990)
Lou Didn't Say "No" (Miéville, 1994)
We're All Still Here (Miéville, 1997)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, 1998-2001)
In Praise of Love (Godard, 2001)
After the Reconciliation (Miéville and Godard, 2002)

Students interested in taking this seminar should   look ahead of time at some of the other films Godard made during the l960's, particularly Breathless, Contempt, Weekend, and One or Two Things That I Know About Her, since they are likely to figure in our discussions.

Required Texts:

Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard; Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy; Jean-Luc Godard, Interviews, ed. David Sterritt; The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000, ed.; Michael Temple and James B. Williams; Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard; Jean-Luc Godard, The Future of Film: Three Interviews, 2000-2001, trans. John O’Toole; Jean-Luc Godard, Godard On Godard: Critical Writings on Film; The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible, ed. David Sterritt and Ray Carney