Overview:
For decades, the concern that spaces that enable the public debate necessary for the functioning of a democracy are on the decline, if not altogether disappearing, has been voiced by scholars in rhetoric, media studies, and political science. In the era of Trump, this anxiety, characterized by contemporary scholarship that critiques and interrogates the ideal of the public sphere (as articulated by Jurgen Habermas), has taken on a new urgency. As terms such as fake news, echo chambers, and political silos become part of our daily discourse and social media feeds, a renewed interest in public sphere theory is timely, understandable, and necessary. This course aims to introduce students to how and why public sphere theory and contemporary rhetorical theory intersect, recognizing, analyzing, and occasionally celebrating the complex rhetorical productions found in emerging publics and counterpublics.
Students will have the opportunity to analyze sites of contemporary public rhetorical action, such as work produced by slam poetry organizations; the multimodal products of grassroots community resistance (e.g. the Trump Resistance Movement); the technological interventions of digital hacktivists advocating, paradoxically, for both on-line privacy and freedom of information; and the oppositional discourses of fourth wave-feminists, exemplified by campaigns such as the Everyday Sexism Project. Drawing from pivotal scholarship by Warner, Brower and Asen, and Pough, students will produce scholarly investigations of how the rhetorical work of publics and counterpublics serves to expand and complicate our notions of community resistance, political action, and rhetorical intervention.
Student Learning Outcomes:
As a graduate seminar in rhetorical practice and theory, the course is designed to broaden students’ foundational understandings of rhetoric as a form of praxis and as part of the intellectual work of the humanities. This course will thereby enrich students’ disciplinary knowledge in C/R specifically and English studies more generally. The course should additionally enable students to make connections with other courses in our graduate curriculum that emphasize public engagement and social activism as both the means and ends of much literate activity. Finally, those graduate students who are aspiring or practicing teachers will also come to see increased possibilities for curriculum development in both college and high school language arts programs; this latter goal is made manifest in the various readings that explicitly address rhetorical pedagogy.
Assignments:
Graded assignments will likely include:
1) Students will have common readings to write about through a series of posts to an interactive class website.
2) Students will be asked to attend one event that in their estimation signifies an intervention within a definable public or counterpublic, and they will be asked to analyze and report on its rhetorical effectiveness.
3) In the second half of the course, each student will work on a scholarly, thesis-driven seminar paper that aims to rhetorically analyze a particular site of public and/or counterpublic rhetorical action.
Likely Texts:
Brouwer, Daniel and Robert Asen, Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life. U of Alabama P, 2010.
Habermas, Jurgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989.
Pough, Gwendolyn. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere, Northeastern UP, 2004.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.
Possible book chapters:
Selections from: Craig Calhoun’s Habermas and the Public Sphere, John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems, Jeffrey Bannet’s Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance, Elenore Long’s Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics, and Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres.
Possible articles:
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public’: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Rosa Eberly, “Publics and their Discourses,” Gerald Hauser, “Features of the Public Sphere,” Lauren Belant, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” Anna Poletti, “Coaxing an Intimate Public: Life Narrative in Digital Storytelling.”