Fulfills MA core requirement; Group E; or Language and Theory requirement.

This course is an introduction to rhetorical history and theory, focusing on primary rhetorical texts from the Greek Sophists (5 th and 4 th centuries BCE) to Nietzsche (late 19 th century). We’ll begin with selections from Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History, and a contemporary speech or two, which will raise some fundamental questions about the nature of rhetoric. Then we’ll start working backward, beginning with 19 th-century origins of composition studies, Locke, Bacon, and the Enlightenment’s putative rejection of rhetorical knowledge. Then we’ll cycle back to the Greek Sophists, Plato (The Gorgias and The Phaedrus), Aristotle (On Rhetoric), the Romans Cicero and Quintilian, Augustine, and back toward the contemporary. We’ll crisscross timelines because much of the rhetorical tradition can be seen as reacting against the revolutionary ideas of the 5 th- and 4 th-century bce Sophists, and we’ll better understand them—and postmodern thought, which in many ways revives Sophistic rhetoric—if we start with the more familiar. We’ll examine all these ideas not merely as historical curiosities, but as ideas that help us think about our own arts of discourse, how we can use them and how we teach them. Throughout the course, we’ll discover and forge connections between the rhetorical tradition and contemporary writing.

Some key theoretical questions include: Can rhetoric help us induce the truth or only belief? What is the nature and function of rhetoric? What’s the relationship between logic (or dialectic) and rhetoric? What good is rhetorical training: why teach or study rhetoric, writing, or communication; does it make us better communicators, better thinkers, more savvy consumers of rhetoric? Are there other important functions for rhetoric than persuasion, like pleasure and virtue? Is there a universal and teachable art of rhetoric that underlies all writing tasks?

Above all, I hope each of you will discover helpful connections between the vast realm of rhetoric and your specific interests in writing and teaching writing. The course will also prepare you for your master’s and Ph.D. exams (we’ll develop lists of key critical terms, and I’ll quiz you on them periodically; we’ll pause for a week twice during the semester to prepare and take essay exams). You’ll also do some informal writing and do a final seminar paper or project. Each of you will give and write a report on a scholarly work.