This course is a survey of the history of rhetoric. You will be introduced to that history, as we trace a few of the key developments in the field across the last 2000+ years. Please note that this course satisfies the “PRE-1700” historical breadth requirement for the English major.
The course is intended to raise awareness around a few larger ethical and rhetorical frameworks (including their relationships to each other), to teach you how to “read” texts (and their key concepts and issues) through those frameworks, and to offer you opportunities to practice deliberating with your peers and reflecting in your writings on the implications of those readings.
You will first be introduced to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and, through secondary readings, his ethics in the context of rhetoric in the ancient world. Then, we’ll trace a genealogy of the relation between rhetoric and ethics through a few canonical works (in the field of Rhetoric) produced in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. We’ll eventually pause at and dwell on the ethics of Nietzsche, by reading excerpts of Beyond Good and Evil. Finally, we’ll read works from Michel Foucault on the ethics of self-care. Then, we’ll apply these larger frameworks (mainly, those represented in Aristotle’s, Nietzsche’s, and Foucault’s works) to episodes of The Walking Dead, asking key ethical questions of that text. As a post-apocalyptic vision of the world, the series asks important questions of its viewers about what constitutes a “good person” and a [civically] responsible choice in a world where moralities are in flux and in competition.