Spring 2009

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 10: Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 20: Ramona Naddaff
• Rhetoric 24.001: Thomas Sloane
• Rhetoric 24.002: Daniel Melia
• Rhetoric 24.003: Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 24.004: David Cohen
• Rhetoric 103B: Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 119: Dan Melia
• Rhetoric 124: Barbara Freeman
• Rhetoric 128: Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 133: Kaja Silverman
• Rhetoric 139: Trinh, Minh-Ha
• Rhetoric 150: Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 153: Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 159A: Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 162AC: Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 167: David Cohen
• Rhetoric 175: Nancy Weston
• Rhetoric 181: Eileen Jones
• Rhetoric 189.001: Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 189.002: Jacqueline Asher

Instructor: Ramona Naddaff

TuTh: 2:00pm - 3:30pm, 180 Tan (Lecture)
W: 2:00pm - 3:00pm, 2305 Tolman (Discussion 101)
W: 5:00pm - 6:00pm, 235 Dwinelle (Discussion 102)
Th: 11:00am - 12:00pm, 206 Dwinelle (Discusson 103)
Th: 5:00pm - 6:00pm, 104 Dwinelle (Discussion 104)

This course will examine changing historical and rhetorical   interpretations of the lie.  Rather than concentrating on the central problem of truth telling in the Western critical tradition, we will aim to study how the definition of the lie has shaped both modern theories of interpretation and the very art of rhetoric.  We will ask such questions as:  Who is the liar?  What does a person become when they lie?  Is lying always intentional?   Extensive and focused readings in the history of Western philosophy will provide the foundation for investigating specific case studies in lying selected from works of psychoanalysis, fiction, journalism, political theory and film.  In each moment of real or imagined lying be it story-telling, conning, voluntarily and involuntarily omission of   information, acts of self-deception our discussions will underscore the particular, individual and social perspective at stake. Working with and against our theoretical readings, we will consider how moral judgments are formed about whether it is right or wrong to lie to family, friends, lovers, official and unofficial authorities, and to the general public at large. 

Selected Texts (Provisional):  Plato: Hippias Minor; Selections Republic; Augustine:  Lying; Machiavelli:  The Prince; Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew; Jean-Jacques Rousseau:  Selections The Confessions: Kant:  On a Supposed Right to Lie; Nietzsche: On Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense; Freud:  Negation and Two Lies told to Children; A. Koyré:  The Political Function of the Modern Lie; Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying; Natalie Zemon Davis:  The Return of Martin Guerre.  Selections from essays by David Samuels, Rudolph Bell, Earl Shorris, Frank Rich, Mark Danner and others.

Requirements: Two 5-7 page essays; one exam.  Lecture and section attendance mandatory. Reader: purchase required.

Only students attending the first three classes will be admitted to the course.  No exceptions granted.

Instructor: Thomas Sloane

Tu: 9:00am - 11:00am, 7415 Dwinelle

This seminar will meet the first eight weeks of the semester: January 22, January 29, February 5, February 12, February 19, February 26, March 4 and March 11, 2008.

This seminar is an introduction to the elements of rhetorical analysis: how to analyze anything from politics to poetry and beyond. Most reading materials will be available online. Credit will depend upon regular class participation, short oral reports, and a final two-paragraph written summary. This course was designed for students with varied interests-politics, English literature, history, music, architecture, ad inf. (almost).

Emeritus Professor Thomas O. Sloane has been at Berkeley since 1968.  He has published extensively on rhetoric and humanism, and served as the editor-in-chief of the recent Encyclopedia of Rhetoric for Oxford University Press

Rhetoric 24, Section 2: Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular "Logic" on TV Judge Shows (1 unit)

Instructor: Daniel Melia

F: 11:00am - 12:00pm, 204 Dwinelle

TV "Judge" shows have become extremely popular in the last 3-5 years.  A fascinating aspect of these shows from a rhetorical point of view  is the number of arguments made by the litigants that are utterly  illogical, or perversions of standard logic, and yet are used over  and over again. For example, when asked "Did you hit the plaintiff?"  respondents often say, "If I woulda hit him, he'd be dead!" This  reply avoids answering "yes" or "no" by presenting a perverted form of the logical strategy called "a fortiori" argument ["from the stronger"] in Latin. The seminar will be concerned with identifying such apparently popular logical fallacies on "Judge Judy" and "The People's Court" and discussing why such strategies are so widespread.  It is NOT a course about law or "legal reasoning." Students who are  interested in logic, argument, TV, and American popular culture will  probably be interested in this course. I emphasize that it is NOT  about the application of law or the operations of the court system in  general.

Required Reading:

Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer

Instructor: Marianne Constable

W: 4:00pm - 6:00pm, 7415 Dwinelle
Meeting dates: first half of semester (till spring break minus 2/25/09)

This seminar will meet for eight weeks, beginning January 21, 2009 and ending March 18, 2009. This seminar will not meet on February 25.

Read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for fun! Learn something about the history of the English language. Learn what it means to read rhetorically. And learn a little about law and legal discourse. At the first seminar meeting, there will be a handout and we will go over lines 1-42 and 309-330 of the Prologue. We will then begin with the Man of Law's Tale and see how far we get into the other Tales. The seminar will be as much like a reading group as possible, following the group's interests and pace in discussion and reading. Regular attendance and participation will be required. Students taking the course for a grade will have a short paper due after the class ends. I would like students interested in doing close reading. No previous exposure to Chaucer (or to formal law or legal studies) is required. Enrollment priority will be given to students who attend on the first day.

Marianne Constable is a Professor of Rhetoric. She specializes in legal rhetoric and philosophy and thinks it might be fun to teach something different. She regularly works with undergraduate research apprentices and won an undergraduate research mentoring award in the humanities.

Instructor: David Cohen

Th 10:00am - 12:00pm, 7415 Dwinelle
This seminar will meet the whole semester but have various weeks off to prepare for longer assignments.

Our seminar will examine the development of the new war crimes tribunal established by the UN and the Cambodian government to provide justice for victims of the Khmer Rouge Genocide (1975-79). We will examine the genocide itself, the years of negotiation that led to the creation of the court, and the challenges facing this "hybrid" national/international institution as it prepares for it first trial, which is scheduled to begin in March 2009. We will also read materials about other international tribunals for comparative analysis.

David Cohen is the Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center. The Center engages in research programs on war crimes and human rights trials from World War II to today. The Center also monitors trials and conducts judicial training programs for war crimes and human rights tribunals in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, East Timor, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Instructor: Marianne Constable

TuTh: 11:00am - 12:30pm, 101 Barker (Lecture)
Th: 4:00pm - 5:00pm, 201 Giannini (Discussion 101)
Th: 5:00pm - 6:00pm, 279 Dwinelle (Discussion 102)
W: 10:00am - 11:00am, 2305 Tolman (Discussion 103)
W: 12:00pm - 1:00pm, 2311 Tolman (Discussion 104)
W: 4:00pm - 5:00pm, 203 Wheeler (Discussion 105)

Course Format: Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week.

Prerequisites: 10 or consent of instructor. Formerly 101

A broad consideration of the historical relationship between philosophy, literature, and rhetoric, with special emphasis on selected themes within the early modern and modern periods.

Using the theme of "declarations" as its example, the spring 2009 course will draw on the works of Nietzsche, Austin, Foucault and others to consider the implications of these approaches for the analysis and interpretation of various texts. A fuller description and required readings will be announced soon!

Instructor: Daniel Melia
Area of Concentration: Image and the Narrative

MWF: 10:00am - 11:00am, 209 Dwinelle (Lecture)
W: 12:00pm - 2:00pm, 283 Dwinelle (Screening)

King Arthur is one of those historical/literary figures who manages to keep being reinvented in a variety of cultural settings and a variety of genres. There are, in fact so many films involving Arthur and his Knights that there is a web site devoted to them. There is a veritable industry of academic studies of Arthur and the arthurian legends as well as a host of modern novels dealing with the same material. Is this just a mess? What do Excalibur, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail have in common? This course will examine the shape and shaping of the Arthurian legend in modern film and literature and compare the modern gestalt to the origins of the stories in the Middle Ages.

Required written work: Mid-term Exam (10%), 2 papers (7-10 pages, 30% each), final exam (30%)
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Films: The Sword in the Stone; Knights of the Round Table; The Sword of Lancelot; First Knight; Excalibur; Lancelot du Lac; Camelot; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Sword of the Valiant; Knightriders; The Fisher King; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; Unidentified Flying Oddball; Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Required reading:

• James Wilhelm ed., The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation 3rd Expanded Edition (NY: Taylor & Francis, Garland Medieval Series, 1994) ISBN: 978-081-5315112 [Paperback]
• T.H. White, The Once and Future King (NY: Ace Books, 1987) ISBN: 978-0441627400 [Paperback]
• Norris Lacy and G. Ashe, eds. The Arthurian Handbook 2nd Edition (NY: Routledge 1997) ISBN: 978-0-8153-2081-4 [Paperback]
• James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media, 30th anniversary edition (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008)
  ISBN13: 9780195321050 [Paperback]

Instructor: Barbara Claire Freeman
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric; Public Discourse; Image & the Narrative

TuTh: 3:30pm - 5:00pm, 187 Dwinelle

"The Rhetoric of Poetry" is open to no more than 15 students who want to explore the art, craft, and rhetoric of poetry by learning to write it. To this end, Students will write and "workshop" their poems; read contemporary poetry; read poems aloud; create a class poetry-reading; and attend local poetry readings. No poetry-writing experience is required, but students should welcome the opportunity to explore the craft of writing, revising, (and revising!), and poetry. There will be frequent in-class poetry writing exercises and opportunities to receive feedback. Attendance at all classes is important and required.

Required Texts:

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide; Mark Strand & Eavan Boland ed., The Making of a Poem: A Nortong Anthology of Poetic Forms; R. Behn and C. Twichell, eds., The Practice of Poetry

• What narrative impulses and interests do film and literature share?
• How does a work of literature become a film?
• How does the medium affect the message?
• Can a film tell the same story a novel, a short story, or a play does?
• What debt does fictional film owe to literature and vice versa?
• What sort of license might a director take when translating a character-driven work of fiction to the screen?
• What artistic sensibilities might a film/director bring to a story that go beyond the original "artistic intent" of the written work/author?
• How and when may we consider these film adaptations to be "new" narratives, independent of the original written work, and what problems arise from this notion?

Our focus will be on reading texts and viewing films. The concern is less with developing complicated models of analysis than with developing deep and rich analyses of film adaptations. Through a series of written exercises, we will consider both the process of producing an adaptation as well as analyzing a completed adaptation. There will be regular fairly short written assignments as well as a longer final paper. You will be required to attend screenings, participate in class discussions, and post to the class website on a regular basis.

Requirements:

There will be regular fairly short written assignments as well as a longer final paper. You will be required to attend screenings, participate in class discussions, and post to the class website on a regular basis

Required Textbook(s):

• Jane Austin, Emma.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
• Nick Hornby, High Fidelity.
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.
• Steven King, The Shining.
• Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession.
• Ben Brady, Principles of Adaptation for Film and Television.

(Additional assigned readings will be provided as part of a course reader or as class handouts.)

Instructor: Kaja Silverman
Area of Concentration: Image & the Narrative

W: 9:00am - 12:00pm, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)
Tu: 6:00pm - 8:00pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)

This course will be devoted to the work of Jean-Luc Godard.  Godard is not only a great filmmaker, but also one of the most important representatives of the twentieth century.  He has reinvented cinema many times over, both in his early criticism, and in each new chapter of his filmmaking career. He has shown that cinema can be as aesthetically and intellectually complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Martin Heidegger’s On the Way to Language, and we will attempt to do justice to this complexity. We will screen and discuss representative works from each period in Godard’s oeuvre, beginning with Breathless, and ending with In Praise of Love. This course is not for the faint-hearted; both the screenings and the discussions will be extremely challenging.

Rhetoric 139: The Autobiographical Voice

Instructor: Trinh, Minh-Ha
Area of Concentration: Image & The Narrative

Tu: 2:00pm - 5:00pm, 109 Dwinelle

In telling one’s story, one is told. To picture and relay events of one’s life is potentially to produce a new field of knowledge. The art and practices of the self is here studied not as a mere matter of retrieving one’s past, but as an investigation of self and other that also involves an inquiry into the tools of investigation. The course will focus on the “voice” as an activity by which the text’s social, ethic and esthetic positioning is conveyed to the reader. It will explore the creative aspect of self narration while dealing with questions of representation and identity, of personal and collective memory, and of audience and receptivity as these contribute to the emergence of new modes of subjectivity. In the transformative process of self discovery and self invention, attention will be given to works
whose challenge of the conventions of autobiography has placed them in the passage of pre-established categories (giving rise, for example, to such terms as “autoethnography,” “bio-mythography” or “autobiophotography”).

Books required in addition to the Reader:

• Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977
• Cha, Theresa H. K., Dictee. Berkeley: Third World Press, 1994.
• Cixous, Hélène, Rootprints. London: Routledge, 1997
• Duras, Marguerite, The Lover. Trans. B. Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1985; 1997
• Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1989 (Recommended).

Instructor: Rakesh Bhandari
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

MWF: 9:00am - 10:00am, 109 Dwinelle Hall

The cultural theorist Kojin Karatani has described the modern world as
Borromean rings of capital, nation, and the state. But the modern world
now finds each social form in crisis: global capitalism has undermined the
apparently weak powers of markets for self-regulation and returned us to
depression economics; economic crisis also threatens to delay
environmental measures and thus make even weak economic growth a grave danger to the biosphere; the nation as a limit form is now no longer so unquestioned as to be interchangeable with society itself; the sovereign
power of the state been put in question by the mobility of global capital,
and the state has never even achieved the legitimate monopoly over
violence in places such as the Congo and Afghanistan where armed groups whose connections to states are often opaque have gained strength. The economy has thrown into crisis humanity's on-going metabolic relationship with nature; the nation is not necessarily an imagined community with which people identify; and the authority of the state over the economy and in relation to violence has been put to serious test. Today’s intertwined crises are crises of the modern world itself, and this course will explore the relation between the crises of the modern world and politics. Attendance is mandatory. Students will also be assigned current articles and reviews, and quizzes will be given to check on whether students are keeping up with readings. A midterm and a final will be given, and one long paper will be assigned.

Required books:

• Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
• Steven Greenhouse The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker
• James Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the
  Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
• Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State: Language, Politics and Belonging
• Ahmed Rashid Descent into Chaos: The United States and the
  Future of Nation-Building in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia

Instructor: Michael Wintroub
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

W 1-4P, 7415 Dwinelle

The valorization of the down-to-earth simplicity of the everyman is a mainstay of American politics; even Ivy League educated public servants affect the pose of being “just like us” as a means to discredit their critics and win political support for their ideas.  To label someone as “elite” (“a latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, egg-headed, French loving, sushi-eater”) whether a politician, a reporter or an expert is to discredit the authenticity of his or her ideas.  Elites are not to be trusted, and expertise is dangerous; intellectuals twist the facts and “hold average people in contempt.”  In this class we will explore the roots of anti-intellectualism in contemporary American politics, culture, class and religion.  Our readings, in addition to articles from the “elite” and popular press, will include selections from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Dane S. Claussen’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Media, Joe Bageant’s Deer hunting with Jesus, Susan Jacob’s The age of American unreason, Thomas Frank’s What's the matter with Kansas? And Michael Rogin’s Ronald Reagan: The Movie.

Instructor: Marianne Constable
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

Th: 3:00pm - 6:00pm, 109 Morgan

Course Format: Three hours of lecture per week.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

This course explores the development of one or two theorists or an important theme or issue, with close readings of major texts as well as attention to important commentators.
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Hannah Arendt is all the rage! In this seminar, we will read and discuss the work of one who is arguably the greatest political theorist of the 20th century. What does she offer in terms of history, politics, philosophy? In what ways can she be considered a theorist of the "rhetoric" of political theory? We will begin with _The Human Condition_ and students will be asked to turn to various of Arendt's essays as well as to the works of others to consider the ways in which these supplement, qualify, support, undermine (or something else) Arendt's arguments about the public sphere and political speech and action. This will take about 10 weeks, depending on the pace and interest of the class. The final 5 weeks will then be devoted to a similar exercise around _The Life of the Mind_.

Attendance and participation are required. Students will be asked to be prepared for presentations on the reading almost every week. Two 10-page papers will be required.

REQUIRED: (by Arendt)

Human Condition
Life of the Mind
On Violence
On Revolution

RECOMMENDED: (by Arendt)
Men in Dark Times
Rahel Varnhagen
Origins of Totalitarianism
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Between Past and Future

Various bibliographies, editions of letters, and secondary works to be announced.

Instructor: Rakesh Bhandari
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse, and History & Theory

MWF: 11:00am - 12:00pm, 215 Dwinelle

We will study American understandings of group differences as hard and heritable. Not only will we try to establish why such understandings are best characterized as mythic, we will also study the historical origins and social consequences of these myths. While we will focus on the American system of racial classification, we will also explore our understandings of other types of group difference--the clash between Western and Eastern Civilization, class antagonisms, and the differences between citizens and aliens. This course is focused on two classic problems: how myths come to be believed as true and how myths become real in their consequences.

Attendance is mandatory, and a final examination will be given.

Required books:

• Bruce Lincoln Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship
• Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo- Saxonism
• Audrey Smedley Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview
• Jonathan Marks What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee? Apes, People and Their Genes
• Mark Nathan Cohen Culture of Intolerance
• Aviva Chomsky "They Take Our Jobs" and Twenty Other Myths about Immigration
• John Hobson Eastern Origins of Western Civilization

Instructor: David Cohen & Eric Stover
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

TuTh: 2:00pm - 3:30pm, 160 Dwinelle

In the aftermath of World War II, an era of post-colonial conflicts, civil wars and “Cold War,” transformed our understanding of war as an armed contest between nations states, carried on principally through conventional military campaigns waged by national armies. At the same time, as international lawyers struggled to adapt the norms of the laws of war to the horrors of the Second World War (in the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1949 Geneva Conventions) and to new forms of mass violence directed largely against civilian populations.  By the 1990s, the international community had turned to mechanisms of international criminal justice to restore peace and order for the first time since the Tokyo and Nuremberg tribunals.  Yet, at the dawn of the 21st Century many of these international norms, especially the Geneva Conventions, are now under threat as the United States and other nations embark on a “war against terrorism.”

This upper division undergraduate course will use an interdisciplinary lens to examine these transformations and our understanding of the violence of modern conflicts and its affects on survivors and communities. Drawing upon a variety of texts, as well as the visual media of film, art, and photography, we will study the ways in which writers, historians, social psychologists, anthropologists, journalists, and jurists have contributed to our understanding of wartime atrocities and their affects on society.  We will examine war crimes committed in modern conflicts, ranging from WWII in Europe to Vietnam, Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States.  We will discuss the ways in which different academic disciplines and professions have tried to explain and analyze the causes and nature of war crimes (including genocide and crimes against humanity); to document and focus the world’s attention upon them through a variety of methodologies and media; and to locate responsibility for their perpetration within the complex interplay of military, political, and cultural institutions.

Instructor: Nancy Weston
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric

TuTh: 12:30pm - 2:00pm, 109 Dwinelle

Inquiry into the rhetoric of philosophical discourse, by way of an exploration of the history of philosophical engagement with the question of truth. 

What is truth?   How do we speak of it?   What is in question, in the question of truth?

These seem odd questions to us now, when we speak of truth as such--if we do at all-- with irony or scare quotes, when speech instead takes recourse to issues of power or instances of shifting truths, as truth’s intelligibility and very possibility are said to be in doubt.  Yet for over two millennia philosophy was centrally occupied with the question of the nature and ground of truth.  How has philosophy come to take the course that it has?  Where has that course brought us, such that we now find the question of truth obscure, even dispensable?  How might both the question of truth and our contemporary estrangement from it be illuminated by tracing that course and finding our place along it?

Course readings will be drawn from significant classic and contemporary works in Western thought on truth’s nature, ground, and possibility, including those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.  With their aid we shall enter into a sustained inquiry into the history of truth and its pursuit in philosophy, to the end of contemplating the course and ground of our understanding of thinking, of truth, of language, of history, and of who we are and have become that we think on truth as we do.  Affording students the opportunity of immersion in the history and practice of Western philosophy in its enduring concern with the question of truth, this intensive seminar offers a course in (not simply "on") the rhetoric of philosophical discourse.

Prior exposure to philosophy is not required; openness to its challenges is.

Please note:  Enrollment is open only to those students in attendance from the outset.  Accordingly, all students interested in taking this class--whether pre-enrolled, wait-listed, or neither--are to attend the first class meeting, 12:30-2 on Tuesday, January 20 in Room 109 Dwinelle. 

In planning their schedules, students should be aware that wide-ranging collective discussions, often lasting an hour or more, will generally occur after the Tuesday class meetings.  In past classes, students have found these informal but intense discussions to be of substantial help in coming to terms with difficult material encountered in the course.  If your schedule prevents you from joining them, you may wish to reconsider taking this class.

Required Books:

• José Medina and David Wood, eds., Truth:  Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions (Blackwell, 2005).  
• David Cooper, ed.,  Epistemology: The Classic Readings  (Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. By Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer.  (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)

A course reader of supplementary materials, to be made available for purchase at Copy Central on Bancroft Avenue.

Instructor: Eileen Jones
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric, Narrative & Image

TuTh: 9:30am - 11:00am, 109 Dwinelle

This is a course on the problems and possibilities of interpretive criticism. Our focus will be on the interpretive criticism of film and the detailed analysis of film style. Our working definition of interpretive criticism is found in John Gibbs and Douglas Pyle’s introduction to Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film:

Interpretive criticism is, or has the possibility to be, a kind of conversation about what we find in and what we make of films, and it should be governed by a process that can be evoked by using the much disparaged words of F.R. Leavis: ‘This is so, isn’t it?’/ ‘Yes. But…’. The ‘Yes, but…’, often left out of critical accounts of Leavis’ work, is crucial. In itself the question (‘This is so, isn’t it?’) can seem too peremptory, demanding assent from a speaker/writer who assumes his own authority. Even ‘Yes, but…’ may be too limiting: the implicit question, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ should also be able to elicit the response, ‘No, because…’.

This is to suggest that processes of argument and persuasion are involved, rather than merely the demonstration of a position: that what I have found in the film is not simply my view but represents an understanding capable of being shared or challenged and, in the process, enhanced, re-worked or replaced. Interpretation developed through reasoned argument is therefore not simply ‘subjective’ or rooted in the tastes of an individual or group but, in establishing shared understanding, becomes a form of knowledge. It implies that a basis for dialogue and mutual understanding exists….
Style and Meaning, 3-4.

Among the questions to be considered are: 1) To what extent interpretive criticism is possible given the diversity of cultural codes, forces and perspectives? 2) What can/should be the relationship between interpretive criticism and theory? 3) To what degree can rooting interpretation in the details of film help to address the preceding questions? We will read in this course writers who have adopted a variety of positions regarding interpretive criticism. Among them will be Susan Sontag, David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, Stanley Kaufmann, Stanley Cavell, V.F. Perkins, Adrian Martin, Andrew Klevan, and Stephen Mulhall.

Required Text(s):
Course Reader

Rhetoric 189.001: Special Topics: Digital media - Story, Performance and Game

Instructor: Felipe Gutterriez
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric, Public Discourse, & Image and The Narrative

W: 3:00pm - 6:00pm, 109 Dwinelle

Prerequisites: Consent of instructor

In this course we will examine a wide range of digital media practices including hypertext, interactive drama, videogames, literary interactive fiction, socially constructed narratives in multi-user spaces, and artificial intelligence-based story generation. Through a mixture of readings, discussion, and project work, we will explore the theoretical positions, debates, and design issues arising from these different practices. Topics will include the rhetorical, ludic, theatrical, and narrative dimensions of digital media as well as their political and legal ramifications.

Requirements:

            There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. Class projects will include online activities such as the exploration of games, interactive literature, social networking sites, and other “Web 2.0” applications. There will be mid-term and final exam. Your exploration of the issues in this course will be demonstrated in class discussion, exam essays, a research paper, and short bspace postings reporting the results of your study of particular instances of online digital media.

Required Textbook(s):

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Editor), Pat Harrigan (Editor). First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
• Ian Bogost. Persuasive Games

(Additional assigned readings will be provided as part of a course reader or as class handouts.)