Contemporary U.S. Political Rhetoric

Catalog description

In this course students will learn how to analyze selected discourses and movements in recent U.S. political history and to compose and deliver their own discourses--written, spoken, and mediated by digital information technologies. The discourses students will learn to analyze include speeches, debates, news stories, commentaries and other written arguments; audio, visual, and video messages; and persuasive campaigns. This course provides students the opportunity to study contemporary U.S. political rhetoric in order to contribute to improving its quality. Using rhetoric's analytic and productive capacities, students will read, listen to, and view examples of public discourse on vital issues of the day. Informed by the diverse, millennia-long history of rhetorical theory in general and argumentation and public memory studies in particular, this course offers variously mediated texts as points of departure to enable students to learn and deliberate together about the causes and consequences of and the possible remedies for the state of U.S. political rhetoric in the past, present, and future. This course thus serves as one kind of culmination of undergraduate rhetorical study, equipping students with the skills, habits, and practices they need to be informed and capable citizens of a democratic republic. Further, the course enables students to synthesize what they have studied in various disciplines across their undergraduate education because the course focuses on public problems and public memory. While different sections of the course will focus on different public problems and political issues, the rhetorical theory and criticism core of the course will remain consistent across sections. Over the course of the semester students will learn through practice how to compose and deliver factually correct and rhetorically credible discourses for different audiences. Students will learn through practice how to analyze and produce rhetorically sound arguments. Students will learn the histories of social and political movements in the United States as those histories pertain to contemporary political discourses and controversies.