Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetorical Theory II

This course surveys some key theoretical texts from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries that shed light on how meaning is both produced and interrogated in modernity. One of the key accomplishments of the modern era is the development of critical stances that question the appearance, objectivity and naturalness of texts and acts. These stances also reveal the power operations of texts and things. We examine the making of these stances: how they came to being, their practices, their attention to power, and their intellectual and political consequences. What are the modes of thinking, reading and interpretation that have been consequently introduced? And what should constitute our objects of inquiry in the search for understanding: where should we look and what should we study? We begin with Marx’s critique of ideology, and end with the approaches of science studies that question the meta-narrative of modernity, and its divisions between the realm of humans and the realm of things and nature. Other theorists (from psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, feminism and deconstruction) will guide us in considering such questions as the relationship between discourse and power, discipline, possibilities of resistance, modes of reading, and subjugation.