Spring 2007

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 10: Reason & Arguement--Daniel Coffeen
• Rhetoric 20: Interpretation--Kaja Silverman
• Rhetoric 24 Section 1: Freshman Seminars: Bad Books and How to Spot Them --Daniel F. Melia
• Rhetoric 24 Section 3: Freshman Seminars - David Cohen
• Rhetoric 30 Section 1: Rhetorical Theory and Oral Argument - Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 103B: Aesthetics and Politics - Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 124: Extreme Language: The Modern Lyric in French- Jennifer Bajorek
• Rhetoric 128: Novel Into Film: Analysis of Adaptations and Principles of Adaptation--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 135: Rhetoric of Narrative Genres in Non-Literate Societies--Daniel F. Melia
• Rhetoric 139: Rhetoric of Autobiography - Ramona Naddaff
• Rhetoric 140: Joy, Complexity, and the Affirmative Life--Daniel Coffeen
• Rhetoric 150: Chrisitanity and Politics: Historical, Rhetorical and Theoretical Engagements--Matthew Scherer
• Rhetoric 157A: Rhetoric of Modern Political Theory - Karen Feldman
• Rhetoric 167, Section 1: Advanced Topics in Law and Rhetoric: Law and Violence--Nancy Weston
• Rhetoric 167, Section 2: Justice and Accountability Times of War, Genocide, and Terrorism - David Cohen & Eric Stover
• Rhetoric 171: The Problems of Mass Culture and the Rhetoric of Social Theory--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 172: Rhetoric of Social Theory--Rakesh Bhandari
• Rhetoric 174: Rhetoric of Science: Stem Cells and Society--Charis Thompson
• Rhetoric 175: Philosophy And Writing: Confilct or Common Destiny? Prospects for the 21st Century--Catherine Malabou
• Rhetoric 181: Theory and Practice of Reading & Interpretation--Felipe Gutterriez
• Rhetoric 189 Section 1: The Voice of Autobiography--Trinh Minh-ha
• Rhetoric 189 Section 2: "Meditated Republic From Broadcast to Peer to Peer" - Dale Carrico
• Rhetoric 189 Section 3: The Practice of Poetry--Barbara Claire Freeman

What is an object? This is a question with a vast range of possible answers. An object can be a commodity, a fetish, a work of art, a message, an extension of the human body, or a religious artifact. Under certain circumstances, even people can be objects. This course will investigate a wide range of the forms which objects assume in our culture, the systems of representation through which we create them, and the discourses through which we conceptualize them.

Rhetoric 24 Section 1: Freshman Seminars - Bad Books and How to Spot Them

The world is full of BAD BOOKS; not just uninteresting or ill-informed, or morally repugnant books, but books that set out to present or defend positions which are unsupportable in logic. I speak here not of books like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but of books such as von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which presents “proof” of visits to earth by extra-terrestrials, or of Barry Fell’s America B.C., which “proves” that ancient Celts reached North America before the time of Christ. Often these BAD BOOKS become quite popular. This seminar will examine the proposition that there is a recognizable rhetoric common to many such BAD BOOKS and investigate possible reasons for the fact that they often gain a wider audience than GOOD BOOKS on the same subject.

Course work will include short in-class reports and a written report on a Bad Book of your choosing.

Required Reading:

M. Baigaint, et al., Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Dell Publ. ISBN 0440136482)
L. Shlain, The Alphabet versus The Goddess, (Arkana Publ. 0140196013)

No prerequisites. Work will include inclass reports and a project. Attendance and active participation are mandatory; 3 unexcused absences will result in a failing grade for the course. Enrollment is limited to 15.

Rhetoric 24 Section 3: Freshman Seminars

The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) and for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has been at work for more than a decade. During this period they have evolutionized the jurisprudence and practice of international criminal law and the process of providing accountability for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. This seminar will examine these developments by studying closely one of the major cases of the ICTY dealing with crimes against humanity (torture, sexual violence, and enslavement). We will read both the trial judgment and the appeals judgments and analyze the role of these courts in the development of contemporary international law.

While offering many opportunities for practice in oral argument, this course will also attempt a rigorous examination of the basic principles of rhetoric and strategies of argumentation.

Regular attendance and class participation are mandatory (only two absences are permitted, and make-up work will be assigned); students will be given quizzes on the assigned readings; you will be assigned specific chapters of which to give oral summaries; and you will be asked to give an impromptu talk, an extemporaneous speech and a short and a long oral argument on controversial topics of your own choosing (though please seek in office hours or through email my approval of the chosen topic and proposed research base for the respective arguments).

Greater weight will be given to later grades if performance has shown improvement.

While the readings are often difficult, the reading load is not heavy (on average less than 100 pages per week). But the training in the logic of arguments will be at times demanding; the successful student will enjoy confidence, quickness and sharpness in future public dialogues.

You should begin thinking soon about the topics of the oral arguments you will be presenting. Note due dates for submission of topics.

Grade breakdown (Karp book report 5%; Shand and Weston quiz 5%; impromptu speech 5%; Billig book report 5%; 3 Fisher quizzes 10%; short oral argument 15%; Garver book report 5%; extemporaneous speech 10%; long oral argument 25%; in class attendance and participation 25%).

Required books: Anne Karpf The Human Voice, John Shand Arguing Well, Anthony Weston A Rulebook for Arguments, Michael Billig Arguing and Thinking; Alec Fisher, The Logic of Real Arguments; Eugene Garver, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief.

Some reading materials on the inherent limits of logic and reason, as well as on the ancient Indian rules of debate, may be brought together in a reader as supplemental reading. 

Just which objects are art and what are art‚s objects and how do arts voice objection?  Over the course of the term we will think through the conversation, antagonism, and co-construction of the aesthetic and the political, especially as these have played out in some characteristic Marxist and post Marxist discourses.

Our texts will be collected in a reader, and will include:

The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde, Selections from the volume Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Jameson, including short exchanges between Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, and Lukacs, Selections from the anthology Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Selections from the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, Selections from the anthology Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, Selections from the anthology Things edited by Bill Brown, Selections from The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere.

The modern lyric continues to be identified, more than any other genre or form of literature, with a certain extremity of language. But what does it mean for language to be extreme? Extreme with respect to what? What ideas and problems are brought into play when we consider a given instance of language to be the outermost, the utmost, or to be excessive in degree, the most advanced, the last? We will pursue the hypothesis of lyric extremity through sustained readings in the corpuses of five major poets: Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Aimé Césaire, Michel Deguy, and Édouard Glissant. Specific questions will include the tensions between autobiographical versus humanist and Universalist tendencies and claims of the lyric; the persistent association of lyric with trauma and disaster and with the fortunes of key rhetorical figures (allegory, irony, metaphor, metonymy, catachresis, paronomasia). How is the notion of extremity connected with certain ideas about hermeticism (monolingualism, chance, bad luck or "le guignon") but also, conversely, with a possible lyric opening (translation, métissage, mnemotechnics, survival)? All texts will be made available in translation; students who are able to read in French will be strongly encouraged to do so.

Writing is a colonizing tool. So difficult is this for us, as literates, to grasp and to live with that fact that we come to endorse Derrida's formulation that writing is prior to speech. Most of the world today, and all of the world in the past was not literate, did not use books. Why don't we study this phenomenon? Virtually all other courses in the humanities and social sciences deal with written, verbally fixed texts. The primary material of this course is taken from multiform, oral/traditional texts, mainly from Europe and Africa, and from texts whose content or shape is strongly influenced by orally transmitted material. Many of the generalizations which you may have internalized about understanding the rhetoric of texts will have to be reexamined because the relationship between author and audience in an oral setting is different in many crucial respects from that in a written setting.

Major aims of the course:

1. Understanding how oral traditional narrative is composed and transmitted.

2. Understanding the differences between the rhetorical techniques common to oral texts and
those characteristic of written texts.

3. Exploring some aspects of ancient, medieval and modern oral traditions.

4. Creating an oral tradition in the class itself.

Required Reading:

A.B. Lord, Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press; (2nd ed. 2000) paperback with CD; ISBN 067400283-0; paper

Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, NY:Knopf, (Everyman ed.1992); ISBN 0679410473; paper

A. Dundes, editor, Cinderella, A Folklore Casebook, Univ. of Wisconsin Press (Backlist), 1982, ISBN 0-299-11864-9; paper

V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1968; ISBN 0-292-78376-0; paper

John William Johnson, The Epic of Son-Jara, Indiana Univ. Press; ISBN 0-253-20713-4; paper

Through close readings of a selection of autobiographies drawn from ancient, modern and contemporary literature, this course will explore the question of how the genre of the autobiography has been intimately connected to the construction of Western notions of the individual and of truth-telling. In particular, we will focus on the following three questions: 1) How the autobiographer constructs him/herself as an intimate and interesting object of knowledge for both him/herself and others; 2) What techniques, strategies, and experiences does the writer describe and devise to allow for the appearance of such self-knowledge and the necessity of self-reflection; 3) Finally, what is the relations of autobiography to literature, on the one hand, and, on the other, to non-fiction prose? Stated otherwise, is the autobiography a fictional or factual document or both? Furthermore, given that much of contemporary literary criticism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis has called into question the very existence of a "self", the autobiography becomes an unusually rich document for exploring the different perspectives from which the self is imagined--or not-- as the source of sovereignty and autonomy. The first part of the course will concentrate on Western canonical autobiographies; the second on contemporary American ones. Students must bring a list of three autobiographies of interest to them for the first seminar.

Provisional Reading List:

Oedipus Rex - Sophocles, The Apology - Plato: Selections from Phaedo, Augustine; Selections from The Confessions, Rousseau: Selections from The Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker, An Autobiographical Study - Freud: Selections from The Interpretation of Dreams, The Bell Jar - Slyvia Plath, The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself - Frederick Douglass, Autobiography of a Face - Lucy Grealy, Truth and Beauty - Anne Patchett, How It Went - Mary McCarthy, Selections from The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

Joy is not happiness.  One is always happy about something; there is a cause to one’s happiness.  But joy is not caused by anything: it is the exuberance of creation itself.  Joy is pure positivity, the affirmation of life; it can be heard in Nietzsche’s great dictum, “amor fati,” love fate, regret nothing, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” 

Joy, then, is neither facile nor reductive.  But joy can be simple as it approaches bliss.  This class, however, will examine the intersection of joy and complexity, the juncture at which the exuberance of creation twists and pleats itself into ever surprising configurations.   We will examine a breadth of these configurations—in the writing of Borges, Burroughs, Deleuze, Guattari, Kant, Lucretius, Lispector, Maturana, and Nietzsche; in the music of Bach, Flaming Lips, Pinback, Cornelius, Thelonious Monk; in the visual art of Sarah Sze, Matthew Ritchie, Miro; in the films of Wes Anderson. And we will ask of them: What is joy?  How does one live joyfully?  And what of pain, of suffering, of fear and trembling?  How do they fit into this joyful life?

Required Reading:

A reader, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

In this course we will examine major theorists of 19th- and 20th-century political theory, focusing on the themes of sovereignty, freedom, universality and democracy. We will focus on the rhetoric of their argumentsˆfor instance, on how figures, tropes and effects of language are not incidental to their claims but constitutive of them. We will begin with short excerpts of Kant, Hegel and Marx and then look at how our central themes have shaped modern debates within political theory. Authors will include Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and their reception by such theorists as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Linda Zerilli, Etienne Balibar, Chantal Mouffe, among others.

This course in advanced topics in law and rhetoric proceeds as a philosophical seminar addressed to selected questions of law, language, and their relation. This term, we shall inquire into the nature of violence, asking how its contemporary prevalence might be understood philosophically, and exploring its relation to law.

Required Texts:

(1)  Hannah Arendt, On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970. 
(2)  Georgio Agamben, State of Exception. Trans. by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. (3)  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (Harper & Row, 1977) (4)  Michel Foucault, Power.  Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3. Ed. by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 2000. [portions]. (5) Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fayles (Penquin Classics, 2000) (6)  Course reader of supplementary materials [supplementary readings from the writings of, inter alios, Benjamin, Fanon, and Derrida].

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.

The 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. The course will use a seminar format (enrollment limit of 24) to ensure full participation in discussions and ample opportunity to engage our guest speakers.  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, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, artists, journalists, jurists, and forensic scientists 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 Asia and Europe to Vietnam, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq. Discussions will focus the ways in which different academic disciplines and professions have tried (1) to explain and analyze the causes and nature of war crimes (including genocide and crimes against humanity); (2) to document and focus the world’s attention upon them through a variety of methodologies and media; and (3) to locate responsibility for their perpetration within the complex interplay of military, political, social, and cultural institutions. 

Course requirements:

One substantial research paper (20-25 pages) and an oral presentation of the paper.

Required Texts

Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier 1985, Paper/Study Edition ISBN 0-8419-0910-5)

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2000)

Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt:  Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Meridian, 1994)

David Cohen, Indifference and Accountability: The United Nations and the Politics of International Justice in East Timor (EWC 2006)

Allison Desforges, Leave None to Tell the Story

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York:  Picador, 2003) 

Eric Stover and Gilles Peress, The Graves:  Srebrenica and Vukovar (Zurich, Switzerland:  Scalo, 1998)

Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil:  The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto:  Random House Canada, 2003) (Paper)

Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor:  Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience  (New York:  Metropolitan Books, 1997)

Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (London:  Penguin Books, 1992)

Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York:  Avon Books, 1978)

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth:  America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York:  New York Review of Books, 2005).

Students will be introduced to social theorizing about the economy as an apparently autonomous sphere of social life.The world of dry, self-interested and voluntary economic transactions will be recast as the source of once unimaginable individual and social powers; creativity and innovation; fetishism and phantasmorgia; global interdependence and an asocial sociality; vertigo and displacement; a treadmill temporality and an ideology of progress; metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties; gambles, speculations, swindles, and periodic catastrophes.We will begin with a study of Adam Smith's and Condorcet's rhetoric in their path-breaking attempts to understand the ascendance of the market (Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment will introduce us to the 'invisible hand' ). We will then read a brief and non-technical introduction to the partisan ideas of Smith and the other great political economists ( as summarized by Duncan Foley in Adam's Curse: A Guide to Economic Theology). Special attention will be paid to Karl Marx's theorizing about the capitalist economy as a mode of production-chaotic yet capable of self-reproduction, destructive yet creative, historically transient yet ineluctable. In the second half of the course we will explore three problems in the social theory of the apparently autonomous economy: the differences between economies organized around commodity exchanges for profit and societies held together by gift-giving (Maurice Godelier's The Enigma of the Gift argues however these two opposed systems surreptitiously share assumptions about the sacred); the meaning of the fetishism of commodities (as analyzed in Michael Taussig's surrealistic My Cocaine Museum in which the fantastic powers of the commodities gold and cocaine in Colombia are investigated); and the unintended de-nationalization effected by the market's relentless spatio-temporal compression (Saskia Sassen's Territory-Authority-Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages will be our main text here while Prem Shankar Jha's Twilight of the Nation State is recommended)By the end of the course we will have explored how in a market economy commodities speak out loud while repressing their function; fantasy has gained primacy over symbols and material facts; state sovereignty has been reduced to a simulacrum; and power relations are dissimulated in the Edenic market realm of the innate rights of man.Four 3-4 page essays will be required; a record of attendance will be kept; and a cumulative final worth twenty percent of the final grade will be given. Students should not enroll if they do not plan to attend regularly and to read each of the six books. 

Required books: Emma Rothschild Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment; Duncan Foley Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology; Karl Marx Capital: A New Abridgement; Maurice Godelier The Enigma of the Gift; Michael Taussig My Cocaine Museum; Saskia Sassen Territory-Authority-Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.

Recommended: Prem Shankar Jha, Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War

Rhetoric 174 - Rhetoric of Science: Stem Cells and Society

This semester the course will focus on stem cells and regenerative
medicine in society. The class fulfills the requirement for a class in
the Ethical, Social, and Legal Implications of Stem Cell Research for CIRM
Scholars, California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Training Grant, UC
Berkeley, but is open to all rhetoric students and other interested
advanced undergraduates. A syllabus will be available 11/28 on the course
website for all interested students to consult.

Required:
1. Squier, Susan, 2004. Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the
Frontiers of Biomedicine. Duke University Press.
2. Waldby, Catherine, and Robert Mitchell, 2006. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
3. Waters, Brent, and Ronald Cole-Turner, eds., 2003. God and the Embryo: Religious Voices on Stem Cells and Cloning. Georgetown University Press.4. Scott, Christopher Thomas, 2005. Stem Cell Now: A Brief Introduction to the Coming Medical Revolution. Plume

Recommended:
1. Petryna, Adriana, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., 2006. Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, and Practices. Duke University Press
2. Thompson, Charis, 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. MIT Press.

Syllabus

This course aims to investigate the relations between philosophy and writing that have structured certain central aspects of twentieth-century thought found in the work of such authors as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Levinas. Here, “relations between philosophy and writing” means two things:  (i) the way that philosophy, in its theory of language, construes the relation of speech to writing in general, and (ii) the relation that philosophy maintains with its own writing as a specific kind of discourse.  In the philosophical tradition, writing has always been consigned to a secondary rank, devalued by comparison to spoken language.  At the same time, since it has always thought of itself as a discourse of truth, philosophy has considered itself to differ profoundly from literature, to be free of style and rhetoric. In the twentieth century, this philosophical contempt for writing is overturned.  For the authors noted, we will see that the study of Nietzsche is decisive on this point: philosophy is inseparable from the writing of a life—every philosophy is, in a sense, autobiographical.  This also implies that the sense of writing changes, that writing ceases to be defined as a mere technique for recording speech. What new sense does writing then take on?  What is a philosophical rhetoric?  What is a philosophical author?  We will address these questions in relation to the concept of the “trace,” and ask whether this concept is still relevant, at the start of a fresh century, for determining the unique work of the philosophy that is to come.

Required Text:1/ Phaedrus by Plato, Alexander Nehamas, and Paul Woodruff (Paperback - Mar 1995). Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company (March 1995)2/Rousseau, JJ, On the Origin of Language, Johann Gottfried Herder, John H. Moran, and Alexander Gode (Paperback - Mar 15, 1986) Paperback: 186 pages. Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (March 15, 1986).3/Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is; Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Tanner, and R. J. Hollingdale (Paperback - Dec 1, 1992). Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (December 1, 1992)

Rhetoric 189, Section 1 - The Voice of Autobiography

In telling one's story, one is told. 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. To picture and relay events of one's life is potentially to produce a new field of knowledge. The course will explore the creative aspect of self-narration while addressing questions of representation and identity, of personal and collective memory or else, 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”).

Readings include: Bell Hooks, A. D. Ortiz, Zora N. Hurston, R. Barthes, Theresa H.K. Cha, Marguerite Duras, Helene Cixous, JL Borges, J. Derrida & M. Foucault.

What is the shape and what might be the significance of a transformation from a mass mediated public sphere into networked public sphere?  We will spend some time studying the broader institutional and practical history of modern media formations and transformations before fixing our attention on the claims being made by political economists, critical theorists, policymakers, and media activists about our own media moment.  We will also cast a retrospective eye on the role of media critique from the

perspective of several different social struggles in the last era of broadcast media, the better to contemplate changes we may discern in the problems, tactics, and hopes available to these struggles in the first era an emerging peer-to-peer public sphere.

All of our texts will be collected in a course reader, which will consist of selections from the following:

• Edward Said, Covering Islam: How Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)

• Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991)
• Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War on Amerca‚s Women (1992)
• Michelangelo Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power (1994)

• David Brin, The Transparent Society (1999)
• Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (2002)
• Robert McChesney and John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs (2002)
• Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Examined As A Grotesque Crippling Disease (2002)

• Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (2004)
• Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People (2004)

• Peter Daou, The Triangle (available online) (2005)
• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)