Intro to Rhetoric

The UH-Mānoa catalog says
that this course should cover the “history of theory and practices of rhetoric
from Classical to contemporary periods,” and that is precisely what we will do,
via very heavy reading, starting with the Classical period, which started two and a half
millennia ago (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian), moving on to the Middle
Ages (Augustine, Boethius), into the Renaissance (Christine de Pisan, Sidney,
Erasmus, Bacon), through the Enlightenment (Campbell, Blair), and ending with
the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Centuries (Kenneth Burke, Stephen Toulmin,
Foucault, Derrida, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama).

So we will be studying what
are the first three words of the title of the largest of the two course texts:
The Rhetorical Tradition. But, frankly,
that text should really be called
The Western
Rhetorical Tradition
. So part of what we will do in this course is expand
our scope to include non-Western (and non-male!) rhetorics, probably via class
visits by the English Department’s composition and rhetoric specialists,
several of whom have studied non-Western, feminist, and comparative rhetorics.

As it happens, I am also
teaching a “Studies” course (ENG 409) this spring called “Rhetoric and
Literature.” Last spring, Professor Georganne Nordstrom and I taught ENG 300
and ENG 409, respectively; so we wound up sharing students. Those shared
students gained, I think, a capacious, significant, and deep knowledge of
rhetoric. Something to think about doing, then?

Finally, one thing that came
up over and over again in last semester’s ENG 409 class was how excited the
students felt realizing that they were studying something that they’d been
practicing (or hearing or seeing or reading) all their lives. After all, rhetorical practices (people speaking/writing well) certainly predated any theoretical
study of those practices, something that even classical rhetors understood and
acknowledged.


Course Requirements

          Steady attendance and participation

          Frequent postings to the class’s Laulima site on the
readings

          A portfolio at the end of the semester looking back at and
reflecting on your Laulima postings

          A midterm exam

          A long essay

          A final exam

 

Required Texts (available at the UHM Bookstore)

Patricia
Bizzell and Bruce Hertzberg, eds., The
Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical

          Times to the Present, 2nd edition (2001).

James
Herrick, The History and Theory of
Rhetoric: An Introduction,
5th edition (2012).