The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the disciplinary histories, developments, and ongoing controversies that have become foundational to the field of Composition and Rhetoric. We will begin by studying rhetoric as a singular discipline with its own two-thousand-year history, replete with methodologies for analyzing, teaching, and performing rhetorical action in the public sphere. Beginning with the revival of sophistic rhetoric, we will turn to the new rhetoric of the early twentieth century and then to the postmodern rhetorical theories. Throughout our study of rhetoric, we will consider what impact these theories have had and might continue to have on discursive political action, negotiations of difference, constructions of self vis-à-vis disparate discourse communities, and the complex interactions between persuasion and identification.
The history of rhetoric is in part a history of education in discursive action; thus knowledge of rhetoric’s history provides a useful gloss to the theoretical concerns of composition studies, such as analyzing student literate practices and investigating the social, political, and economic functions of teaching writing. We will consider the history of composition studies and its emergence as a discipline within English studies, research methodologies in composition studies, leading composition pedagogies and their theoretical underpinnings, primary journals in composition studies and their various theoretical and methodological leanings, as well as composition’s ongoing responses to important theoretical developments in writing and literacy studies such as queer pedagogies, antiracist writing pedagogies and assessment, and feminist rhetorical theories and pedagogies.
Possible Assignments
Reading responses; a short paper in conjunction with an oral presentation (perhaps a colloquium presentation if in Fall 2024 colloquia presentations are still taking place); a group writing pedagogy exercise, and a research project associated with the oral presentation.
Likely Readings
Composition Studies (TBD/some selections from)
- Stacey Waite’s Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing (2017)
- Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (2015)
- Stephanie Kerschbaum’s Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference (2014)
- Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication (2016)
- Shari Stenberg’s Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens (2013)
- Mara Lee Grayson’s Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric (2023)
Rhetoric (TBD/some selections from)
- Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics
- Sappho: selected poems
- Cicero: selected speeches
- Arendt, The Human Condition
- Machiavelli, selections from Discourses; Hamilton et al., selections from The Federalist Papers
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and Habermas, selections from Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
- Frederick Douglass, various speeches, and selections from Stephen Marshall’s City on a Hill from Below and Nicholas Buccola’s Political Thought of Frederick Douglas
- Selections from The Third Reich Sourcebook; Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust; Mark Ward, Deadly Documents
Student Learning Outcomes
- General knowledge of rhetoric, composition, and “CR” as interrelated fields/disciplines.
- An awareness of primary connections to and shared concerns with related fields of English studies.
- Introductory awareness of subareas of research and practice in CR. Ability to see relations among and between those areas and to locate one’s work accordingly.
- Conceptual understanding and practice in graduate-level scholarly writing and oral presentation in CR.
- Ability to process and produce appropriate scholarly material independently and collaboratively in an academic context, with a sense of shared responsibility and obligation.