Spring 2010

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 20: Dan Melia
• Rhetoric 24.001: Dan Melia
• Rhetoric 24.002: David Cohen
• Rhetoric 103B: David Bates
• Rhetoric 105: Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 119.001: Linda Williams
• Rhetoric 119.002: Eileen Jones
• Rhetoric 123: Shannon Jackson
• Rhetoric 124: Barbara C. Freeman
• Rhetoric 132: Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 133: Eileen Jones
• Rhetoric 139: Scott Ferguson
• Rhetoric 140: Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 158: Sara Kendall
• Rhetoric 160: Sara Kendall
• Rhetoric 165: Nancy Weston
• Rhetoric 171: Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 173: Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 174: Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 177: Marianne Constable
  
  

Rhetoric 24.001: Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular "Logic" on TV Judge Shows

Instructor: Dan Melia
Office Hours: W: 2pm - 4pm & by appointment (6404 Dwinelle)

Class Time:
M: 2pm -3pm, 283 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 ISBN-10: 0060904984, ISBN-13: 978-0061315459

Coursework: Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussion and quality of in-class reports. Missing more than 3 class meetings for any reason will result in a failing grade.

Rhetoric 24.002: Freshman Seminars: The State, Violence, and International Law

Instructor: David Cohen
Office Hours: TBA (7309 Dwinelle)

Class Time:
Th: 10am - 12pm, 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.

Rhetoric 103B: "Language and the Politics of Cognition in the Age of Rousseau"

Instructor: David Bates
Office Hours: M: 2pm - 3pm (340 Moffitt), Th: 2:30pm - 4pm (7315 Dwinelle)

Class Times:
TuTh: 11am - 12:30pm, 106 Stanley (Lecture)
Tu: 1pm - 2pm, 61 Evans (Discussion 101)
Tu: 4pm - 5pm, 78 Barrows (Discussion 102)
W: 2pm - 3pm, 78 Barrows (Discussion 103)
W: 4pm - 5pm, 106 Barrows (Discussion 104)
W: 9am - 10am, 203 Wheeler (Discussion 105)
W: 11am - 12pm, 2311 Tolman (Discussion 106)

The transition from Classical Rhetoric to Modern Rhetoric might be characterized as the move away from the idea that language and reason can be deployed for certain ends, toward the realization that language itself has a determining influence on the way we think. This course will focus on the origin of such a modern idea in the European Enlightenment. We will read some difficult and challenging texts, ones that reshaped the way cognition, social orders, and political institutions were understood. Our main goal will be to locate the origin of language in the embodied cognitive subject, to see what kind of thinking and action were made possible by that linguistic subject. We will be alert to the political stakes involved in this modern project, as we discuss representations and conceptualizations of economic life, gender, colonial encounters, and modern technology, for example. The class will be based on close readings of major canonical texts, with a special emphasis on the influential writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Authors will include: Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot. We may supplement our readings with some selected critical interpretations.

Assignments: some short writing exercises, in class mid-term, term paper, final exam (questions distributed in advance).

Required Books:

• Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge) ISBN-10: 0521567971, ISBN-13: 978-0521567978
• Locke, Essay concerning Human understanding (Oxford) ISBN-10: 0199296626, ISBN-13: 978-0199296620
• Condillac, Essay on the origin of human knowledge (Cambridge) ISBN-10: 0521585767, ISBN-13: 978-0521585767
• Rousseau, The Discourses and other early writings (Cambridge) ISBN-10: 0521424453, ISBN-13: 978-0521424455
• Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later writings (Cambridge) ISBN-10: 0521424461, ISBN-13: 978-0521424462

Rhetoric 105: Homo Economicus: Setting the Stage of Enterprising Modernities

Instructor: Dale Carrico
Office Hours: TBA (7404 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric

Class Time:
TuTh: 3:30pm - 5pm, 223 Dwinelle

We will treat the mannered comedies book-ending the early modern Augustan period and the late modern twentieth century as both documents of and negotiations of the ramifying terrains of enterprising North Atlantic modernities. In these insistently witty plays we will discern not only the shifting urban and institutional landscape of globalizations, mass mediations, technoscientific disruptions, market disciplines, social administrations, raced and gendered relations alive across these London scenes, but also the no less shifting agencies available from the mutable, calculating, contractarian, indebted, disreputable, stylish, desiring and desired rationalities making their play there. A simplifying assumption of our course will be that in the always already artificial historical figures cut by the Earl of Rochester, Oscar Wilde, and David Bowie, respectively, we discover if not exemplary then at least indicatively provocative figures that capture an emerging enterprising lifeway while at once bringing that lifeway into a highly edifying crisis from which it never will recover even when it comes to prevail. It is no accident that these figures obsessively recur in the mannered comedies we will survey together.

George Etherege: The Man of Mode,
William Wycherley: The Country Wife
Laurence Dunmore: The Libertine (film)
William Congreve: The Way of the World
Richard Sheridan: The School for Scandal
John Gay: The Beggar's Opera / Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Noel Coward: Design for Living
Noel Coward: Hands Across the Sea
Joe Orton: Entertaining Mr. Sloane
Joe Orton: The Good and Faithful Servant
Todd Haynes: Velvet Goldmine (film)
Jennifer Saunders: Absolutely Fabulous (Television Series): Episodes: "Iso
Tank," "Death," "Doorhandle"

Together with these mannered comedies we will be reading selections from Hobbes On Wit and Laughter, Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Willians', The Country and the City, Holland's The First Modern Comedies, Canfield's Tricksters and Estates, Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests, Brockway's The End of Economic Man, Bristol's Effeminate England, Sinfield's The Wilde Century, Harvey's The Limits to Capital, Goux's Symbolic Economies, Adorno's The Culture Industry, Lahr's Coward and his Prick Up Your Ears, Buckley's Strange Fascination: David Bowie the Definitive Story, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and who knows what else... All of the plays and readings will be available either online or in a reader available for purchase at the beginning of term.

Required Reading:

Course Reader

Rhetoric 119.001: Serial Television: The Wire (Cross-Listed with Film 108.004)

Instructor: Linda Williams
Office Hours: Tu: 2pm - 3pm, Th: 12pm - 1pm & by appointment (7329 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Image and the Narrative

Class Time:
Tu: 10am - 11am, 142 Dwinelle (Introductory Lecture - Followed by Screening)
Tu: 11am - 1pm, 142 Dwinelle (Screening)
Th: 10am - 12pm, 142 Dwinelle (Lecture)

Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon’s The Wire was “the best TV show ever broadcast in America”--not the most popular but the best. But what exactly is this portrait of Baltimore as seen through six distinct but interrelated institutions: police, drugs, the docks, city government, public schools and newspaper--the media that reports, or fails to report, on all the others? The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. Such comparisons attempt to get at the social complexity of the series, its depth, its bleak tapestry of a decaying American city, its diverse social and racial stratifications and its sense of “fate.” Though valuable, none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling “show” on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will attempt to understand what is special about this series that grapples with the institutional totality of what ails contemporary America, most importantly a failure of justice that transcends a “law and order” or “CSI” context. Looking especially at the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons, and at their journalistic, novelistic, dramatic and televisual roots, this class will dig deep into the question: What’s so great about The Wire?
Please come to the first class familiar with at least a few episodes of the series. We will screen most of season one, almost none of season two, most of season three and four and selected episodes of season 5. You are strongly encouraged to obtain a copy of the whole five seasons and watch it--perhaps with friends. Though we will skip season two, I urge you to watch it on your own. A copy of the series is available for viewing (but not for taking out) at the MRC and another copy will be on reserve in the Film-Rhetoric library for preparing sequence analyses.
Format and policies: Class Meets Tuesdays 10-1pm, Thursdays 10-12. I will introduce the week’s material on Tuesdays and then we will screen two episodes. Thursdays
No food or drink (besides water) in the class room.

Required Reading:

• Tiffany Potter, C.W. Marshall, eds. The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television (New York: Continuum, 2009), ISBN-10: 0826438040, ISBN-13: 978-0826438041
• David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (New York: Holt, 1991, 2006), ISBN-10: 0805080759, ISBN-13: 978-0805080759
• David Simon and Ed Burns, The Corner: A Year in the LIfe of an Inner-City Neighborhood (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), ISBN-10: 0767900316, ISBN-13: 978-0767900317

All books are on reserve in Moffit Library.

Rhetoric 119.002: Physical Comedy (Cross-Listed with Film 108.003)

Instructor: Eileen Jones
Office Hours: Tu: 3pm - 5pm, W: 2pm - 3pm & by appointment (7416 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Image and the Narrative

Class Time:
MW: 9:30am - 11am, 188 Dwinelle (Lecture)
Tu: 5:30pm - 7:30pm, 188 Dwinelle (Discussion/Screening)

In her essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess, Linda Williams argues that “Physical clown comedy is another ‘body’ genre concerned with all manner of gross activities and body functions—eating shoes, slipping on banana peels. Nonetheless, it has not been deemed gratuitously excessive, probably because the reaction of the audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the central clown. Indeed, it is almost a rule that the audience’s physical reaction of laughter does not coincide with the often dead-pan reaction of the clown.”

While physical comedy is perhaps not deemed as excessive as the “body genres” that are her chief concern (pornography, horror, melodrama), physical comedy is frequently identified as a “low” genre, reliant on “gags” that disrupt classical narrative filmmaking structures, and designed to produce a mysterious physical response—laughter—which is generally considered to be a release from emotional tension. In part because of its visceral impact, physical comedy has been culturally underappreciated, with individual artists frequently receiving grudging or belated critical study. In this course we will draw on the scholarship of Henri Bergson, Simon Critchley, Tom Gunning, Henry Jenkins, Kristine Brunovska Karnick, Noell Carroll, and Andrew Klevan in order to examine the work of a variety of film directors and performers specializing in physical comedy, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, The Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati, Frank Tashlin, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Cary Grant, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, Blake Edwards, Steve Martin, Monty Python, Ben Stiller, Jackie Chan, and Stephen Chow.

Required Textbook(s):
Course Reader

Rhetoric 123: Rhetoric of Performance

Instructor: Shannon Jackson
Office Hours: TBA (215 Dwinelle Annex)
Areas of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric; Public Discourse; Image & the Narrative

Class Time:
TuTh: 12:30pm - 2pm, 223 Dwinelle

This course explores the concept of performance as term to analyze everyday life, collective gathering, and cross-disciplinary art experiment. We will consider paradigms drawn from speech act theory, sociology and anthropology to consider the numerous ways that the terms of performance and performativity help us to understand speech acts, bodily comportment, social interaction, community ritual, public protests, and more. Additionally we will consider popular and experimental modes of artistic performance, thinking about the category of "aesthetics" in which they work as well as cross-media explorations in performance art, site-specific installation, and new media theatre. In addition to serving as an introduction to a cross-disciplinary conversation, we will particularly focus on two themes. 1) How does performance help us to imagine and re-imagine "public-ness" in past and contemporary society? and 2) How have new technologies given rise to "new media" performance forms that help us to re-think public connection.

Scholars and artists will likely include: Philip Auslander, Bertolt Brecht, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, The Builders Association, Chapple and Kattenbelt, Critical Art Ensemble, Steve Dixon, Forced Entertainment, Michael Fried, Greg Giesekam, Henry Jenkins, Amelia Jones, Moises Kaufman, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Jon McKenzie, Adrian Piper, Rimini Protokoll, Joseph Roach, Richard Schechner, Richard Sennett, Anna Deveare Smith, Victor Turner.

Required Text:
Course Reader

Rhetoric 124: Practice of Poetry

Instructor: Barbara Claire Freeman
Office Hours: TuTh: 5pm - 7pm & by appointment (7325 Dwinelle)
Areas of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric; Public Discourse; Image & the Narrative

Class Time:
TuTh: 3:30pm - 5:00pm, 175 Dwinelle

Any student who misses a class without written permission from the instructor during the first two weeks of the semester will be dropped from the class.

"The Practice of Poetry" is open to 15 upper-division students who wants to participate as a community in the myriad activities that accompany "being a poet." Students will write poetry, andead modern poetry and poetry reviews; "workshop" their poems and read them aloud; create a class poetry-reading; and attend guest-lectures and poetry readings by local poets and small press and journal publishers. No poetry-writing experience is required, but all students should welcome the opportunity to explore the craft of writing, revising and reading poetry. There will be lots of informal writing exercises and opportunities to receive feed-back. Regular attendance is required

Required Texts:

• The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms ed. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, ISBN-10: 0393321789, ISBN-13: 978-0393321784
  
• The Sounds of Poetry, R. Pinsky, ISBN-10: 0374526176, ISBN-13: 978-0374526177
  
• The Practice of Poetry, Behn and Twichell,eds, ISBN-10: 006273024X, ISBN-13: 978-0062730244

Rhetoric 132: Rhetoric, Culture and Society: The Gilded Age

Instructor: Felipe Gutterriez
Office Hours: TuTh: 9am - 10am, 1pm - 1:30pm & by appointment (7326 Dwinelle)
Areas of Concentration: Public Discourse; Narrative & Image

Class Time:
TuTh: 11am - 12:30pm, 182 Dwinelle


Rhetoric 132 is concerned with the analysis of rhetorical practice in the context of social and cultural change with particular reference to the historical transition from pre- industrial to industrial society in the west. The focus of this particular course is American society during the Gilded Age. Historians differ over the precise span of this period, but for our purposes the Gilded Age runs roughly from 1865-1901. In this period the United States changed from a rural, agricultural, and traditional society to an urban, industrial, and capitalist nation. Changes in business organization, the rise of the metropolis, southern reconstruction, western expansion, new systems of transportation and communication, bureaucratization, and professionalization created a variety of problems at all levels of society. Adjusting to these changes, and coping with the problems of national and personal identity that accompanied them, involved a variety of discursive forms and symbolic representations that we will examine.

Requirements:

There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. You must come to class having read the required readings. Postings on the readings for each week will be required. There will be two exams in this class. Exams will include both an in-class short answer quiz and a take-home essay. Attendance is required.

Required texts:

• Fink, Leon. Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era: Documents and Essays. Major problems in American history series. Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1993. ISBN-10: 0669216801, ISBN-13: 978-0669216806
  
• Nagel, James, and Tom Quirk. The Portable American Realism Reader. The Viking portable library. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. ISBN-10: 0140268308, ISBN-13: 978-0140268300
  
• Trachtenberg, Alan, and Eric Foner. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. American century series. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. ISBN-10: 0809058286, ISBN-13: 978-0809058280
  
• Course Reader or articles available online through UC Berkeley Library electronic databases.

Rhetoric 133: Auteur Theory: The Films of the Coen Brothers
(Cross-listed with Film 151.001)

Instructor: Eileen Jones
Office Hours: Tu: 3pm - 5pm, W: 2pm - 3pm & by appointment (7416 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Image & the Narrative

Class Times:
MW: 12:30pm - 2pm, 188 Dwinelle (Lecture)
M: 5pm - 7pm, 142, Dwinelle (Screening)

In this course we will examine the films of writer-director-producer team Joel and Ethan Coen in terms of the ways in which these films confirm, challenge, and provide insight into existing theories of film authorship. The Coens are useful “trouble cases” when it comes to both auteur and genre theories, having positioned themselves and their work in an ambiguous relationship to the often-opposed categories that typically inform these theories: Hollywood studio and independent film practices, classic and postmodern filmmaking techniques, art film and mass entertainment aesthetics, and American and European critical sensibilities. We will screen and analyze most of the Coens’ films including Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, O Brother Where Art Thou? and No Country For Old Men.

Required Texts:

• R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen, ISBN-10: 0252071859, ISBN-13: 978-0252071850
• The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, edited by Mark T. Conrad, ISBN-10: 081312526X, ISBN-13: 978-0813125268
• Course Reader

Rhetoric 139: Trials of the Self: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of the Essay

Instructor: Scott Ferguson
Office Hours: Tu: 11am - 1pm & by appointment (7404 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Image & the Narrative

Class Times:
TuTh: 9:30am - 11am, 209 Dwinelle (Lecture)
M: 6pm - 8pm, 229 Dwinelle (Discussion)

Michel Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Franz Fanon, Orson Welles, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, D.A. Miller

Required Textbook(s):

• Course Reader (available at Metro Publishing)
• Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (May 30, 2006), ISBN-10: 067402222X, ISBN-13: 978-0674022225
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Harvest Books (August 1, 2005)
  ISBN-10: 0156030411, ISBN-13: 978-0156030410
• Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 1, 1977) ISBN-10: 0374521549, ISBN-13: 978-0374521547
• D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, Harvard University Press (September 1, 2000) ISBN-10: 0674003888, ISBN-13: 978-0674003880

Rhetoric 140: The Discourse of Qualities

Instructor: Felipe Gutterriez
Office Hours: TuTh: 9am - 10am, 1pm - 1:30pm & by appointment (7326 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric & Public Discourse

Class Time:
TuTh: 2pm - 3:30pm, 209 Dwinelle

What is mediated through thought are qualities, what is managed in process are qualities, and what terminates at the end is a qualitative whole; an art form that expresses something by virtue of the way in which these qualities have been created and organized.

E.W. Eisner, Educating Artistic Vision

In this course we are concerned with discourses that address the relationship between the structures, processes, and affects of experience (its “qualities”) and experience’s meanings (its “contents”). In addressing this concern we will explore some of the discourses by which aesthetic qualities are understood, expressed and valued. Aesthetic qualities are frequently understood and valued as they are expressed in works of arts.
While we will examine the question of aesthetic quality in works of art, we will ultimately be concerned with the presence of aesthetic qualities in all aspects of our lives. Accordingly we will discuss not only such aesthetic qualities as “beautiful” and “sublime” but also such aesthetic qualities as “neat” and “tidy.” Our consideration of aesthetic qualities will attempt to relate these qualities to other types of qualities: moral, personal and ethical.

My current expectation is that the course will consist of readings, some looking and listening assignments, class discussion and presentations, and regular writing assignments, both graded and ungraded. Graded assignments will probably include two short essays in criticism and the preparation of a term project designed in consultation with the instructor. Ungraded assignments may include performance reports, reading responses paper, and various other short writing exercises.

Attendance is required

Required texts:

• Kant, Immanuel, and Werner S. Pluhar. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Pub. Co, 1987. (paperback). ISBN-10: 0872200256, ISBN-13: 978-0872200258
• Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics, Print publication date: 2007 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008. Print ISBN-10: 0199278350, ISBN-13: 978-0199278350, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278350.001.0001 (available online through the UC Berkeley Library’s subscription to Oxford Scholarship Online)
• Course Reader or articles available online through UC Berkeley Library electronic databases.

Rhetoric 158: Advanced Problems in the Rhetoric of Political Theory

Instructor: Sara Kendall
Office Hours: TBA (7404 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

Class Time:
W: 4pm - 7pm, Room 255 Dwinelle

This seminar will take Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism as its core text with related readings that elaborate upon some of its main themes. We will begin by investigating Arendt’s conception of “the political” and the particular threats that are posed to it in modernity. We will explore her accounts of the development of anti-Semitism, race thinking, colonialism and imperialism, bureaucratic thinking, and the challenge of grounding human rights in modern secular thought. Along the way we will read selected texts that address these themes in greater detail, and we will use these as a basis for both supplementing and critiquing Arendt’s arguments.

Rhetoric 160: Introduction to the Rhetoric of Legal Discourse

Instructor: Sara Kendall
Office Hours: TBA (7404 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric and Public Discourse

Class Times:
TuTh: 12:30pm - 2pm, Room215 Dwinelle

Rhetoric 160 is intended to address “the application of rhetorical methodology to all categories of legal texts.” We will begin by exploring what is meant by “rhetorical methodology” and why legal texts are particularly rich sites for rhetorical readings. The course then focuses primarily on international law, and in particular on international humanitarian law and human rights. As a horizontal legal system built on largely on state consent and lacking a clear sovereign
authority, international law is explicitly concerned with the problem of defining itself and with asserting its authority through language, which are matters of particular interest to aspiring rhetoricians. This course encourages critical approaches to legal claims, and we will be reading legal texts and legal scholarship as rhetorical documents. Please note that Rhetoric 160 is not designed as a preparation for law school.

Required Books: All Listed on BSpace.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin).
ISBN-10: 0140187650 / ISBN-13: 978-0140187656

Shklar, Judith. Legalism: Law, Morals and Political Trials (Harvard UP).
ISBN-10: 0674523512 / ISBN-13: 978-0674523517

Rhetoric 165: The Rhetoric of Legal Philosophy

Instructor: Nancy Weston
Office Hours: Th 3:30-5pm, (7412 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric and Public Discourse

Class Time:
TuTh 2-3:30pm, Room 229 Dwinelle

The central question for the philosophy of law is, What is law? To inquire into the rhetoric of the philosophy of law is, then, to ask, How do we speak about law, and about what law is? How do we pursue philosophical inquiry into law and what can this pursuit reveal about what it is we are seeking? What must we think law is, such that we seek it in the ways we do?

With the help of insights drawn from Heidegger and Nietzsche into the nature and history of moral and legal thought, we will examine both the development of Western legal philosophy and the tacit premises on which it can be seen to be conducted. In looking to classic and modern statements of the political and moral foundations of law, our principal focus will be the question of the source, nature and implications of the search for such foundations, and its bearing upon the understanding of law. Accordingly, engaging with the question of the rhetoric of the philosophy of law will bring us to engage in the philosophy of law as well.

Course readings will be drawn from the below books, as well as from a reader composed of selections from Aristotle, Aquinas, Marx, Kelsen, Dworkin, Finnis, Rawls, Derrida, and other representative modern and contemporary legal scholars.

Students’ obligations include class participation, preparation, and attendance; engagement with extensive and difficult readings; a midterm examination; several short papers; and a final examination.

Please note: The course is intensive. Students are advised to plan their schedules accordingly. All students interested in taking this class — whether pre-enrolled, wait-listed, or neither — are to attend the first class meeting, 2-3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19. Enrollment is limited to students in attendance from the outset.

Required Books:

• H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford University Press, 1961; 2nd ed, 1997). ISBN: 0198761236
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (Harper & Row, 1964). ISBN: 0061311596
• John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Essay on Bentham, together with selected writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, ed. Mary Warnock (New American Library, 1962 or Blackwell Publishers, 2nd ed., 2003). ISBN: 0631233520.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (Random House, 1969; Vintage, 1989). ISBN: 067972462. (Also available in the one-volume Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (The Modern Library, 1968, 2000). ISBN: 0679783393. (This is an ALTERNATIVE , hence NOT required, merely recommended.)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Random House, 1966; Vintage, 1989). ISBN: 0679724656. (Also available in the one-volume Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (The Modern Library, 1968, 2000). ISBN: 0679783393. (This is an ALTERNATIVE, hence NOT required, merely recommended.)
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, ed. (The Viking Press, 1954; Penguin, 1977). ISBN: 0140150625.
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, 1977; rev. & exp. ed., 1993). ISBN: 0060637633
• Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (Perennial, 1959; Harper & Row, 1966, 1969). ISBN: 0061314595.
  

Recommended, NOT required:

• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. (Harper Perennial, 1982). ISBN: 0061319694.

Rhetoric 171: Altars and Alters to the Market: Rhetoric in the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Epoch

Instructor: Dale Carrico
Office Hours: TBA (7404 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: Public Discourse

Class Time:
TuTh: 5:30pm - 7pm, 79 Dwinelle

We will track some of the key popular and polemical exchanges that have for a time, or even still, captured the imaginations, mobilized the movements, and organized the subcultures through which an ongoing clash has played out in the reception of the New Deal and its aftermaths reverberating right up into the present day. This is a discursive clash of Altars offered up to and Alternatives offered up against what have variously been construed as exemplary "market orders." Our texts form key moments in contrary canons, whatever their relative merits, and we will be reading them as time capsules, as symptoms, as crystallizations more often than as particularly sound arguments (which too few of them manage to be). And we will be striving whatever our initial sympathies may be to inhabit all these texts in a way that connects us to whatever it is that has been so compelling in each of them to so many, whatever the outcomes to which their assumptions and aspirations likely contributed in the way of mischief or emancipation. We will be reading:

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, The End of Laissez Faire, Open Letter to FDR, Proposal for an International Clearing Union (all online) Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos (online) Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (online) The Grapes of Wrath (film), The Fountainhead (film)
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (online) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged Leonard Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose Peter Shwartz, The Long Boom John Perkins, Confession of an Economic Hit Man Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

Along with these texts we will also be reading contemporary speeches drawn
-- well, mostly -- from Presidential campaigns and definitive public
addresses by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan,
Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama,

While not required, good background reading for the course might include
looking over Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands, Rick Perlstein's
Nixonland, Norman Soloman's Made Love Got War, and David Harvey's A Brief
History of Neoliberalism.

Required books:

• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon, ISBN-10: 080705643X ISBN-13: 978-0807056431
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Plume, ISBN-10: 0452011876 ISBN-13: 978-0452011878
• Leonard Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain, Free Press, ISBN-10: 143912311X ISBN-13: 978-1439123119
• John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Mariner, ISBN-10: 0395925002 ISBN-13: 978-0395925003
• Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, Harvest, ISBN-10: 0156334607 ISBN-13: 978-0156334600
• Joel Hyatt, Peter Leyden, Peter Schwartz, The Long Boom A Vision For The Coming Age Of Prosperity, Basic Books, Oct 18, 2000 ISBN: 9780738203645, ISBN-10: 0738203645
• John Perkins, Confession of an Economic Hit Man, Plume, ISBN-10:0452287081 ISBN-13: 978-0452287082
• Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, Basic Books, ISBN-10: 0465016154 ISBN-13: 978-0465016150
• Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, ISBN-10: 1844671607 ISBN-13:978-1844671601
• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Picador; ISBN-10: 0312427999 ISBN-13:978-0312427993
• Bill McKibben, Deep Economy, Holt, ISBN-10: 0805087222 ISBN-13:978-0805087222

Rhetoric 173: The Rhetoric of the Mask

Instructor: Michael Wintroub
Office Hours: Tu: 2pm - 3:30pm or by appointment (7323 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric

Class Time:
TuTh: 2pm - 3:30pm, 223 Dwinelle

In a world where visibility—being seen and seeing—constituted the ground upon which identities were constructed and fashioned, performance (dress, manners and speech) came to play a preeminent role in arbitrating power and authority. The questions that will concern us in this class grow out of early modern attempts to articulate, maintain and transgress distinctions between publicly performed persona and private persons, between “exterior masks” and “interior selves.” Where did one leave off and the other begin? What was a mask, and what was really true? Where did art stop and nature begin? And what happened to virtue—to authenticity—in a world where “appearances” seemed to mean everything and where “reality” remained hidden behind closed doors and affected masks? And what was the price of such outward conformity—frustration? cynicism? madness? Not only will we pay attention to the ways people tried to put on appearances as a means of achieving social success, but to the psychological consequences of “playing a part.” Similarly, we will also examine the ways in which role-playing; dissimulation and disguise were all potent means of inflecting, challenging and rebelling against accepted social norms of behavior. Some of the texts that we will be reading are: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Mandragola; William Shakespeare, The Tweflth Night; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre; Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World; Choderlos De Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons; and Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Required Books:

• Niccolo Machiavelli, The Mandragola
• William Shakespeare, The Tweflth Night
• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
• Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World
• Choderlos De Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
• Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Rhetoric 174: The Rhetoric of Anti-Rhetoric: the Scientific Revolution

Instructor: Michael Wintroub
Office Hours: Tu: 2pm - 3:30pm or by appointment (7323 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory of Rhetoric

Class Time:
TuTh: 11am - 12:30pm, 116 Haviland

The great divide separating we “moderns” from the so-called “primitives”—whether our own ancestors or indigenous groups from other cultures—is based on science. Science appears to us as a way of discovering Truth that is wholly divorced from culture, politics, religion, etc., thus radically distinguishing “us” —its practitioners/possessors— from the ways that pre-modern cultures went about making decisions and understanding the natural world. In this course, we will explore the rhetorical foundations of what we call science—that is, we will explore the social, political and cultural roots of an activity that defines itself by its opposition to rhetorical practice, politics and culture. Readings will include primary texts by Paracelsus, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Spratt, Glanville, Newton, Franklin and Shelly.

Required Books:

• Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations
• Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier
• Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump
• Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

Rhetoric 177: Language, Truth and Dialogue

Instructor: Marianne Constable
Office Hours: M: 2pm - 5pm (7409 Dwinelle)
Area of Concentration: History & Theory

Class Time:
W: 3pm - 6pm, 251 Dwinelle

In this 3-hour seminar, we will read and discuss dialogical works by great philosophers and others concerned with language and truth. Through close readings of quite difficult texts and hokey in-class exercises and exchanges, we will consider what makes a dialogue something other than a monologue or a monograph, what sorts of interactions and participations occur in dialogue, and how these sorts of interactions and participations relate to speaking, knowing, reading, writing, and thinking. Finally, we will talk about why dialogues seem so well-suited for dealing with such topics as rhetoric, religion, and love. Weekly written assignments and several longer papers will be required.

REQUIRED TEXTS will include the following, as well as some supplementary readings:

• Plato, Phaedrus, either Penguin ISBN-10: 0140449744, ISBN-13: 978-0140449747 or Loeb edition
• Plato, Symposium, either Penguin ISBN-10: 0140449272, ISBN-13: 978-0140449273 or Loeb edition
• Cicero, Laws (selections; on B-space)
• Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (Hackett) ISBN-10: 0872201880, ISBN-13: 978-0872201880
  
• (Anonymous) The Celestina, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (U of Calif Press) ISBN-10: 0520250117, ISBN-13: 978-0520250116
  
• Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Dodo Press, paperback) ISBN-10: 1409969126, ISBN-13: 978-1409969129
  
• Heidegger, “Conversation along a Country Path” (in Discourse on Thinking, Harper Collins ISBN-10: 0061314595, ISBN-13: 978-0061314599)
• “Dialogue with a Japanese Visitor” (in On the Way to Language, Harper Collins ISBN-10: 0060638591, ISBN-13: 978-0060638597)
• Murdoch, Acastos (Penguin, 1988), ISBN-10: 014008696X, ISBN-13: 978-0140086966 Available online at Amazon.com or Biblio.com
• Yehoshua, The Lover, trans. Phillip Simpson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) ISBN-10: 0156539128, ISBN-13: 978-0156539128
  
• OR Yehoshua, Mr. Mani, trans. Hillel Halkin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) ISBN-10: 0156627698,ISBN-13: 978-0156627696
  
• Interviews: Cavell, Foucault, Nehamas (on B-space)