Beyond Argument. The goals for this course are to introduce you to the ways in which rhetoric’s emphasis on persuasion, as well as first-year writing’s emphasis on argument, have advanced, indemnified, and limited Rhetoric and Composition’s value to the larger institution and to writing students, as well as how those emphases have shaped disciplinary practices that define the field, itself. Then, the course will introduce you to scholarship that challenges the standard conceptions of rhetoric-as-persuasion and persuasion-as-argument; it will offer other ways of engaging that don’t lapse into straight argument and that don’t simply seek to change the minds of readers. These “other ways of engaging” are enacted by writers who write in order to shape and change their own ways of thinking/being. In short, these texts are exercises in self-transformation, as much as they are written for other readers. Said texts include works by Nietzsche, Foucault, and bell hooks, as well as a number of “game-changing” Rhetoric and Composition scholars. I hope that for your final projects in the course, you, too, will try writing for self-transformation.
Guiding topics include (this list traces the movement of the course): how discourse functions; how negative dialectics perform in “persuasive” discourse; how we can practice different modes of engagement that would enable different disciplinary identities and ethics. The two guiding questions for the course would be the following: 1. How, exactly, is the study of rhetoric more (complex and sophisticated) than simply the study of negotiation within polarized discourse or of texts that perform as arguments; 2. How can you explore and engage with these more complex and sophisticated conceptions of the study of rhetoric?
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
Analyze required texts according to the historical and political contexts particular to the field
Identify and evaluate scholarship relevant to the issue/topic taken up in the final paper
Enter the scholarly conversation by articulating one’s own position in it, through the processes of inventing (e.g., brainstorming, researching), drafting, and revising research-based writings
READINGS
Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 9780140449235.
hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press. ISBN: 08960883527.
Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh UP. ISBN: 9780822962403.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP. ISBN: 9780822362241.
Readings available on Laulima. A few representative texts include the following: Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Foucault’s “The Order of Discourse,” Olivia Frey’s “Beyond Literary Darwinism,” Foss and Griffin’s “Beyond Persuasion,” and Bone, Griffin, and Scholz’s “Beyond Traditional Conceptualizations of Rhetoric.”
ASSIGNMENTS
Students will share reading responses with me throughout much of the semester so that I can help them navigate the denser readings and help them explore and identify a topic for their final projects. They will be required to share an annotated bibliography and proposal with me in the last half of the semester and to share a draft of their final projects with me and with their peers toward the end of the semester. The final project will be a scholarly paper that could be revised for publication.