About ENG 5028

This is not a course in the history of rhetoric, but rather a course that focuses (somewhat historically) on rhetorical theory. It is not a survey or a guided tour, but rather a pan-historical look at some critical moments in the development of what we know as 20th- and 21st-century rhetorical theory and practice. Primarily, we will trace configurations of rhetoric and rhetorical theory, looking backwards and forwards from each configuration to better identify its contours and plot their development. Secondarily, we will study the influences of particular rhetoricians and theorists on their own noetic fields (what James Berlin has called “closed system(s) defining what can, and cannot be known” as well as the nature of the relationship between knower, known, and audience), on the disciplines of language and philosophy, and on each other. Concurrently, our emphasis will be on disrupting the notion of a closed noetic field at all.

This means that we will read in strands across wide swaths of theoretical activity—for example, taking up Locke’s problem of signification in order to better consider the influences of Barthes, Bakhtin, and Burke on more contemporary problems of linguistic, discursive, and cultural identification that are translated in the writings of Anzaldúa, Minh-ha, and Mao. Reading in strands ensures that we read carefully while being critically aware of our own exclusions, since it is impossible to do a close study of the whole of rhetorical theory in 15 weeks. We will also try not to limit ourselves to Western traditions, although we will only have time to sample a much richer body of non-Western scholarship that awaits you. By the end of the course, you should have a comprehensive sense of some key linguistic, philosophical, and critical movements in rhetorical theory, and of how vexing a task it is to chart out a (singular) rhetorical theoretical tradition. By the end of the semester, we hope to:

• learn various ways that rhetoric, composition, and communication studies have utilized, resisted, or negotiated ideas of rhetoric from classical, modern, and postmodern theory;
• develop a critical vocabulary for theoretical work, including key terms that signal noesis between classical, modern, and postmodern rhetorical traditions;
• understand rhetorical theory as ontological (invoking questions of being), axiological (invoking questions of nature or value), and epistemic (invoking questions of knowing);
• explore different reading and research methods for tracing germane developments in language, communication, history, and philosophy throughout our course texts;
• as a result of the above, become better equipped to pursue an individual topic for further study.