Rhetoric and Reality

Catalog description

Practices of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking evolve not only historically but culturally. In this course, we’ll use Charles Bazerman’s characterization of rhetoric as “the study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities” to consider the politics and poetics of our time. We’ll consider the workings of rhetoric in the language of gender, immigration, the internet, and the environment. Students will develop writing projects that emerge from their own interests in the subject matter. Readings will include passages by Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes, bell hooks, James Berlin, Deborah Brandt, Patricia Roberts-Miller, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Nicholas Carr.