If we want to understand rhetoric in theory and practice, we need to go back to its historical sources, to the Greeks (who literally invented rhetoric) and to the Romans. This course will focus primarily on the works of the ancients, though we’ll continually cycle back to contemporary practice and theory. 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 exploring the Sophists, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, Lysias, and others. From here we study Plato’s attack on rhetoric and on the Sophists, and we’ll spend a great deal of time with Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric as a true technē (or “art”). We’ll finish the semester examining the Romans Cicero and Quintilian and finish with nineteenth-century Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout this odyssey, we’ll examine these ideas not merely as historical curiosities, but as ideas that help us think about our own arts of discourse, how they work and how we (ought to) teach and study them. Throughout the course, we’ll discover and forge connections between the rhetorical tradition and contemporary writing and speaking. We’ll often explore contemporary and ancient speeches as a way to ground our theory and do some rhetorical inquiry.

You’ll be reading mostly primary texts, with some modern essays about rhetoric and ancient history. While these texts are quite challenging, I’ll do my best to make them accessible to you, for instance, by giving you reading questions every day. In addition, everyone will keep an “exam preparation journal”: early in the semester, I’ll give you a list of essay questions from which the essay exams will be drawn and ask you to devote your journals to each question; in this way, you’ll continuously be working out your answers to the big questions in the course. There will also be periodic reading quizzes just to give you a little motivation to keep up. Finally, each student will make a presentation and complete a semester project (an essay or other major work).

If you have questions about this course, please get in touch with me.