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. The course will introduce students to a brief history of composition studies and its emergence as a discipline within English studies, to primary research methodologies in composition studies, to emerging composition pedagogies and their theoretical underpinnings, to leading journals in composition studies and their various theoretical and methodological leanings, as well as to composition’s ongoing responses to important theoretical developments in writing and literacy studies such as globalization, world englishes, digital literacies, and the rhetoric of popular culture.
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. Thus we will conclude the course 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.
Required Texts
Dobrin, Sidney. Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Sheridan, David, Jim Ridolfo and Anthony Michel. The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric. Parlor P, 2012.
Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. 2nd ed. Oxford University P, 2014.
Additional secondary readings provided to students by the instructor via pdf.
Assignments
2 In-depth Reading Responses at 50 points each 100
1 Colloquium presentation on composition pedagogy 200
1 Oral Presentation on Research-in-Progress 100
1 First draft of Seminar Paper —-
1 Final draft of Seminar Paper 600
Total 1000
Learning Goals
* General knowledge of the history of rhetoric, composition, and “comp/rhet” as interrelated fields/disciplines. Includes an awareness of primary connections to and shared concerns with other fields in English studies.
* Introductory awareness of the many areas of research and practice within composition studies and rhetoric as well as the 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 both composition and rhetoric.
* Ability to analyze and produce appropriate scholarly material independently and collaboratively in an academic context, with a sense of shared responsibility and vision.