Fall 2007

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 10: A History of Modern Reason: Descartes to Artifical Intelligence - David Bates
• Rhetoric 20: Rhetorical Interpretation - Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 24: International Law, Genocide, and Individual Responsibility - David Cohen
• Rhetoric 103A: Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetoric - David Cohen
• Rhetoric 105: Human Property 1660-1730 - Jody Greene
• Rhetoric 110: Advanced Argumentation - Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 119, Section 1: The Action Film (Cross Listed with Film 108, Section 3) - Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 119, Section 2: Melodrama! (Cross listed with Film 108, Section 4) - Linda Williams
• Rhetoric 127:Novel and Society: Narrating the Nation: Novels of Decolonizing Nationalism and Postcoloniality - Pheng Cheah
• Rhetoric 140: The Image of Difference - Daniel Coffeen
• Rhetoric 152AC: Race and Order in the New Republic - Nadesan Permaul
• Rhetoric 159A: Great Theorists in the Rhetoric of Political and Legal Theory - Nancy Weston
• Rhetoric 167: Law and Rhetoric: The Human in the Law - Samera Esmeir
• Rhetoric 172: Beyond Classical Social Theory - Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 173: Rhetoric of Historical Discourse - Michael Wintroub
• Rhetoric 178: The Power of the Book - Jody Greene
• Rhetoric 181: "Green Rhetoric" - Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 189, Section 1: Digital Media-Story, Performance and Game - Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 189, Section 2: The Rhetoric of Psychoanalysis - Kaja Silverman
• Rhetoric 189, Section 3: The Politics of Interviews - Trinh T. Minh-ha

This course will cover the discursive History of Europe’s relations with its “Others” from the period of the Middle Ages to present (though its prime area of focus will be the early modern period). We will study saints, sinners, Jews, Protestants, witches, lepers, slaves, Aztecs, and explorers. We will examine religious beliefs and religious wars, the most horrific sorts of torture, the Black Death, the "discovery" of new worlds, the trade in slaves and the making (and breaking) of kings and nations. Though the history of the period spanning the Middle Ages to the present is traditionally viewed as a triumphal march of progress from superstition towards Enlightenment, we will see how this "progress" was made possible by the persecution of peoples and cultures considered marginal and/or different. How “Others” were defined, represented and used as a means of constituting Western identities (e.g., in terms of race, class, citizenship, and nation-state) will form the course’s central theme; we will also be concerned with understanding how oppressed and marginalized groups resisted impositions of dominant groups and articulated their own narratives of “otherness”.

Rhetoric 24: International Law, Genocide, and Individual Responsibility

This course will examine the paradigm of genocide developed in the aftermath of WWII and the ways in which international courts, historians, and political theorists have tried to deal with the issues of individual responsibility that such systematic mass murder raises. We will fist look at various interpretations of the Nazi genocide and at the way in which cases arising from it were prosecuted in international and national tribunals. We will then look at how more recent instances of mass atrocity have raised important issues about the paradigm enshrined in the Genocide Convention of 1948. More specifically, we will take Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia as case studies and analyze the ways in which a new generation of international tribunals has responded to the challenges they pose. Readings will include Hilberg, The Desctruction of the European Jews, Arendy, Eichmann in Jersualem, Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Browning, Ordinary Men, Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death, Kienrnan, The Pol Pot Regime, and Desforges, Leave None to Tell the Story. There will also be a course reader with cases from Nuremberg to Rwanda and Bosnia.

Rhetoric 103A: Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetoric

This course provides an in-depth introduction to the development of rhetoric as the central vehicle for public discourse in the ancient world. We will examine the way in which rhetoric appears as a central focus in philosophy, law, political theory, history, and literature. In particular we will discuss the way in which from the Greek perspective rhetoric was an essential component of democratic political culture. Another major theme of the course will involve the role of rhetoric in political deliberation about war and the tension between justice and expediency in wartime politics. We will read a wide range of texts from legal and political orations to philosophical discussion of rhetoric, law, and politics.

This course offers an introduction to one of the central philosophical, political, and cultural problems of Early Modern England (and beyond, of course): the nature of property, and in particular, property in the self. Do we own our bodies? Do we own our "selves"? If so, do we have a right to sell or otherwise alienate them? Is it ever justifiable to own or to buy another person? If so, under what circumstances? Are children the property of their parents? Wives of their husbands? Colonial subjects of the "Mother" country? Finally, how do you judge the worth, in monetary terms, of another human being or the product of her labor? What value do we place on a human life?

The course will look at two institutions with relation to which these questions gained increasing urgency in the period after the English Civil Wars: Prostitution and Slavery. While we will be interested in texts that feature literal instances of these institutions, we will also be looking at metaphorical appearances. Over the course of the term, we will have the opportunity to read a series of texts that bring together the literal and the metaphorical meanings of prostitution and slavery (Rochester, Behn, Southerne, Mandeville, Defoe, Swift, Lillo, Equiano, Morrison). In the meantime, we will consider and debate questions about property and the nature of the self that have remained lively topics of debate for the past three and a half centuries (Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Gilroy, Patterson, Williams, Rubin).

Rhetoric 110: Advanced Argumentation

This is a course of study and practice in advanced techniques of argumentation. It is intended for students with well-developed writing skills; however, we will be reviewing certain basic principles of analysis, writing, and research. The course is discipline based and genre specific. The discipline upon which the course is based is law and the genre upon which we will focus is the legal memorandum in its various forms. Legal writing is often criticized for its tortuous constructions and obscure terminology; however, a well-written legal memorandum, brief, or opinion is both an elegant and a persuasive text. When you have completed this course you will have a better understanding of law and legal argument as well as the ability to make fairly complex legal arguments that are clear and persuasive. This course, however, is not intended simply, or even primarily, for those interested in law or law school. It is intended for anyone interested in developing the ability to quickly master the techniques of advanced argumentation in any discipline or genre.

Required Textbook(s):

• Richard K. Neumann, Jr. Legal Reasoning and Legal Writing: Structure, Strategy and Style, Fifth Edition.
• Handouts available in class or on class website.

Requirements:

Reading: There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. Much of it will involve concepts and a style of argument that are unfamiliar to many of you. Mastery of these concepts and this style of argument will require a careful and thoughtful reading of the material.    

Writing: There is writing.  Lots of it. There will be short written exercises on a weekly basis interspersed with several longer essays. These essays and exercises must be done in a timely and professional manner.      

In this course, we will examine the action film genre, from its beginnings in the silent era up to the present day.† Drawing primarily from books and articles on the genre by such scholars as Steve Neale, Yvonne Tasker, David Bordwell, Susan Jeffords, and Richard Dyer, we will be discussing the way certain landmark Hollywood action films reflect historical, technological, narrative, and other stylistic characteristics of the genre as a whole.† We will also discuss the influence of other nationsí action film traditions such as Hong Kong, Japan, Italy, and Britain, as well as the often overlapping relationship of action film to melodrama, adventure film, film noir, war film, science fiction, and the Western.

Required:

• Yvonne Tasker. Action and Adventure Cinema.
• Class reader (Additional readings will be handed out in class, in class reader or available only on the website.)

Requirements:

Reading and Screenings: There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. There are also weekly screenings. Attendance at the weekly screenings is required.

Written Assignments: There will be a midterm and a final. Both will have take-home and in-class components. There will also be required short postings to the class website.

Class attendance: Class attendance is required. I will be taking attendance. Arriving late for class will be considered as an absence. Absences can affect your grade significantly.

Instructor: Linda Williams
Area of Concentration: Image & The Narrative

In this class we will develpop a historical and theoretical framework for studying melodrama as a pervasive and global cultural form, looking primarily, though not only, at movies. We will start from the evolution of early film melodram and the development out of popular theaer, opera and painting and trace the generic conventions of the mode as they change throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first century. The class will have three main areas: silent film melodrama; popular Hollywood melodramas, including "women's films;" and contemporary melodramas across several different cultures. Since melodrama appears in many media and forms, our focus will be on developing a set of fundamental theoretical principles that we can then tet historically and in diverse cultural contexts. We will watch and discuss at least one feature-length film each week, along the shorter visual and audio materials and a variety of readings in film and theater criticism.

Required Books:

• Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imaginations: Balzac, Henry James Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (Yale U.P. Paperback 1995)
• Chrisinte Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is (BFI, 1988)
• Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton UP, 2001)
• Coursebook available at Replica Copy

Recommended Books: (also in bookstore)

Gayatri Chatterjee, mother India (BFI, 2002)

Rhetoric 127: Novel and Society: Narrating the Nation: Novels of Decolonizing Nationalism and Postcoloniality

The dominant geographical focus of postcolonial literary and cultural studies has been on the literature of British Africa, India, the Caribbean, and their various diasporas in the North Atlantic. The historical variety of colonial regimes, however, makes it more appropriate to speak of colonialisms in the plural and different experiences of anti-colonial nationalism and postcoloniality. This course examines the relationship between the novel as a literary form and the imagining of national community through a comparative study of narrative fiction from decolonizing and postcolonial Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. We will read novels by Jose Rizal (the Spanish Philippines), Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana), Salman Rushdie (Ukania/South Asia), and Ninotchka Rosca (postcolonial Philippines) and critical writings by theorists such as Gyorgy Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Franco Moretti and Benedict Anderson in order to explore questions such as the following: what are the consequences of the encounter of native populations with the ideas, cultural forms and sociological structures of modernity as a result of colonialism, and how are these phenomena used to subjugate native populations? How can we explain the rise of the radical "educated native" who plays a pioneering role in opposing the colonial regime despite the fact that the educated native derives many benefits under colonialism? What role can radical nationalist literature play in the continuing process of political revolution both before and after formal independence? We will also consider the use of the Bildungsroman, magical realism and the tropes of heterosexual romance and reproduction in the representation of the postcolonial nation.

Required Texts:

• Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere
• Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind
• Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Child of All Nations
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
• Course reader

Rhetoric 140: The Image of Difference

The goal of this class is to learn to see differently to see difference rather than familiarity.  This entails putting aside the technology of vision we have been trained to employ: narrative, identification, representation, and symbols.  We are not suggesting that these things don’t exist or are not important.  We are suggesting, however, that there are other ways to see and that these different ways of seeing inaugurate different ways of living that are beautiful, exquisite, pleasurable and are perhaps, just perhaps, more fulfilling. 

This class will focus on the theory and practice of such non-narrative viewing, a mode of looking that actively seeks the strange and the different.  This will involve a shift in our posture of viewing.  We will no longer slump down in our chairs and let the story take us away (or not).  We will lean forward and notice all sorts of things as we ask different questions: How does this image go?  What networks does it forge?  How does it construct the world? How does it distribute me?  We will no longer be tied to ourselves as a fixed position that knows; we will, on the contrary, join the flux that surrounds us. 

Readings: Henri Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, William Burroughs, Deleuze and Guattari, Wim Wenders

Films will probably include:

• Faces (Cassavettes)
• Happy Together (Wong Kar wai)
• Mulholland Dr
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• The Ring
• Memento
• Blow Up (Antonioni)

Rhetoric 152AC: Race and Order in the New Republic

This course will explore the connection of the issue of race to the cultural character and identity of citizens in the new American republic during the ante-bellum, and has subsequently affected our contemporary social and political discourse. 

Reading will begin with James Fennimore Cooper's The Pioneers. By using the structure of this romance novel as a model, the class will view the founding of the United States as a formal problem, (not unlike the underlying problem posed in novel), in which the three principal racial groups in North America (i.e., the Native Americans, the European-Americans, and the African-Americans) sought to be included into the social and political order of the new republic. All subsequent readings will be viewed in the context of addressing that formal problem, with an emphasis on what the language and symbolism reveal of fiction reveal about the actual historical events of the period. This is a seminar that begins with a short presentation in each class session and often the use of DVD clips from news, films, documentaries, and television programs, but is focused around class discussion of the reading materials.

Reading includes original texts in American literature and letters (e.g. My Bondage, My Freedom by Frederick Douglass, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens, and readings from D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Willliams, the New York Review of Books, etc.), history and criticism. Supplementary reading, in a course reader, will analyze the eras from which the literary works emerged, and the problems that shaped the course of the American founding. Contemporary news articles and film clips (ranging from Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" to Sixty Minutes, to “The American Experience”) will supplement formal reading material. There will be a take-home midterm, a paper/project making use of course materials and theme, and a take-home final exam.

• James Fennimore Cooper, The Pioneers
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Donald Jackson, ed., Autobiography of Blackhawk
• Frederick Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Rhetoric 159A:  Great Theorists in the Rhetoric of Political and Legal Theory

This course explores significant themes and questions in political and legal theory through close readings of major texts of a single thinker — this term, the work of Martin Heidegger.

In the format of a philosophical seminar, we shall explore the nature of law and of polity, and of our contemporary understanding of each, through a sustained encounter with Heidegger’s thought.  That encounter will bring us to inquire into the nature of thinking and of human being as such, and to come to see how these decisively inform the understandings of law and polity and guide their history.  We shall thereby come to reflect as well upon the place of theorists and theorizing in legal and political thought.

Prior coursework in philosophy is not required; openness to its challenges is.

Texts:

• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, 1977; rev. & exp. ed., 1993).  ISBN: 0060637633

• Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. by J. Glenn Gray.  Harper & Row (Perennial), 1976. ISBN: 006090528X19

• Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. III and IV.  Trans. by J. Stambaugh, D.F. Krell and F.A. Capuzzi.  Ed. By D. F. Krell.  Harper & Row, 1987, 1982; HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.  [published as a single paperback volume].  ISBN: 0060637943.

• Supplementary materials, to be made available as the course proceeds.  

Important 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. 

In planning their schedules, students should be aware that wide-ranging collective discussions, often lasting an hour or more, generally occur after the Thursday 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.

Rhetoric 167: Law and Rhetoric: The Human in the Law

In this advanced course we will examine historical experiences, political formations and philosophical investigations that articulate particular relations between the law and the “human.” Our point of departure will be the eighteenth century and we will end with the post-Cold War era and contemporary campaigns of human rights. Though the main focus will be on Western traditions, we will also investigate other traditions that were either displaced by some Western traditions in their colonial and postcolonial careers, or survived them. One objective is to probe the terms of the particular relations between the law and the human and the way these relations can shed light on a range of sensibilities toward pain, suffering and cruelty. Another objective is to investigate how the associations between the law and the human have historically constituted the political and the ethical.

Requirements:

There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. You should be prepared to discuss the readings in our meetings. Class attendance is required and I will be taking attendance. Absences will affect your grade. The writing assignments include several short exercises and two longer papers (up to 10 pages).

Required Books:

• Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History
• Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order
• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
• Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights
• Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
• Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (recommended)

In addition, there will be a course reader that will include a selection of articles, book chapters, and primary materials.

Note: Enrollment is open only to those students in attendance from the outset (including the pre-enrolled and wait-listed).

Rhetoric 172: Beyond Classical Social Theory

We will study Karl Marx's theory of capitalism not so much to assess its empirical soundness and logical coherence but to mark the ways in which capitalism has put into question the relevance of classical social theory. As Marx recognized better than any other nineteenth century social theorist, capitalism is a revolutionary force, a system of creative destruction as Josef Schumpeter would later put it, and we will study three new major and unsettling developments which have required an open, post-Marxist approach: the mediation of consumer experience by logos and brands or the sign values of goods, the tensions between the emergent global market and the nation state which had "contained" capitalism, and the rise of "creative" accounting in efforts to please the global capital market. Students will be asked to write a three to four page report on each of the five books. The goal of this course is to prepare students to recognize the limits of inherited ways of looking at society (for example Marxism, nation-statism, and naive realism) so that they may respond innovatively to emergent opportunities and dangers.

Required books:

• Karl Marx, Capital
• Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industries: The Mediation of Things
• Daniel Altman Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy
• Prem Shankar Jha, The Twilight of the Nation-State: Globalisation, Chaos and War
• Nicholas VÈron, Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism

Rhetoric 173: Rhetoric of Historical Discourse

This class will explore the history of early modern Europe through the lens of gender, focusing specifically on France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but with forays into other national and chronological contexts.  Themes that we will discuss will include, love and deception; dissimulation and “truth,” performativity and constraint; desire and fear; virtue and obsession; devotion and transgression, submission and resistance; knowledge and power.

Required:

• Mandragola by Niccolo Machiavelli†
• Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits by Allan Greer
• Lieutenant Nun by Catalina de Erauso†
• Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
• Persian Letters by Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu
• The Possession at Loudun by Michel de Certeau
• The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis

Rhetoric 178: The Power of the Book

This course offers an introduction to the history of books as cultural and material objects-a field sometimes known as "the sociology of texts." Our particular focus will be on the social, intellectual, cultural, political, and economic power of books-power that may be benevolent or malevolent, and sometimes both at once, but rarely neutral. We will study how texts before and during the era of print were and are produced and circulated, how the book as we know it (also known as the codex) came into being, and what changes are being and might be wrought on the book in this digital age. Our texts will include three novels, one of which concerns the era before print, one print culture, and one the future of the book "after" print. At the same time, we will read historical works concerning books and the cultures of knowledge of which they have been a part, as well as other kinds of cultural artifacts-from scripture to poetry to artists' books-that express and sometimes contest the power of books. No prior knowledge of the history of the book is assumed, beyond that which you have as lifelong users of books.

Rhetoric 189, Section 1: Digital Media-Story, Performance and Game

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.

Required Textbook(s):

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Editor), Pat Harrigan (Editor). †First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
• Jesper Juul.Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional WorldsClass reader†
• (Additional readings will be handed out in class, in class reader or available only on the website.)

Reading and Screenings: There is a substantial amount of reading in this course. Class projects will include online activities such as games and interactive literature.

Assignments: There will be a number of required short responses, a class presentation, a paper and a project.

Class attendance: Class attendance is required. I will be taking attendance. Arriving late for class will be considered as an absence. Absences can affect your grade significantly.

Rhetoric 189, Section 3: The Politics of Interviews

As a common form of interacting, documenting and informing, the interview plays a central role in the process of social and cultural inquiry. The interviewer often engages in dialogues with selected witnesses to seek information for an argument or to carry forward a course of reasoning. In the processes of researching, negotiating, inscribing and showing, interaction with the subjects of inquiry often revolves around postures of objectivity and of neutrality. The interview is here not only studied in its popularized use as a form of oral witnessing and of privileged access to personalities. It is also explored in its critical and potentially creative dimensions as part of a mise en scène or a setting in which interviewer and interviewees function as social actors. Here, information and truth provide the structuring presence through which questions of power and subject, or of testimony, authentication and legitimization are raised. Focusing on the framing process while engaging in critical debates on politics and aesthetics, the seminar will revisit the structures of the documentary interview (with a range of film & video examples) and explore the site where inter-viewing becomes a performative art, playing with the structure of the interview and the very space of betweenness.