English
540 Spring 2009: Rhetoric in
Meetings: Tuesdays 2-3:15 in HUM 226; Thursdays on line.
Instructor: Susan Romano
Email: sromano@unm.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 10 12; 1-2 HUM 365
Blog: http://19crhetoric.blogspot.com/
PDF website: www.unm.edu/~sromano/english540
Positive Learning Environment Statement
The English Department affirms its commitment to the joint responsibility of instructors and students to foster and maintain a positive learning environment.
Course Objectives
Practical
-Assemble a bibliography of primary materials for future use in research and
teaching
-Practice conjoint reasoning orally in class and in writing on line
-Use a particular text and rhetor to measure generalized cultural phenomena
-Develop a research question, plan its pursuit, and begin its execution
Conceptual
-Examine
the cultural, philosophical, practical, technological, and social imperatives
that shaped the “classical tradition” in the nineteenth century
-Study nineteenth-century theoretical principles (e.g., perspicuity, taste) and
their dissemination via educational publications
-Study nineteenth-century topoi for rhetorical action
(e.g., abolition, gender, race, temperance, voting rights, women’s rights) as
sites of invention, agency, and conflict
-Track nineteenth-century speaking, writing, and teaching traditions via contemporary scholarship that challenges dominant narratives and expands the database.
Course Requirements
20 points: oral presentations on adopted rhetors and textbooks or conduct books.
20 points: take-home exam
20 points: research proposal (includes well-developed question & annotated bibliography)
20 points: writing project
20 points: collaborative assignment-making
Attendance: mandatory, including weekly online participation
Books Required
Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth:
Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition.
Jessica Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911. SIUP, 2008.
David Gold, Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947. SIUP, 2008.
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her Vol. I .Greenwood Press, 1989.
Shirley Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. SIUP, 1995.
Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a
Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women.
Books
Recommended
Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century
Rhetoric in
Reading Schedule
Note: We’ll take up
Johnson’s work on the New Rhetoric legacy (Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in
Week 1: Introduction
Legacy of Republican Motherhood and True Womanhood
Contemporary
populist rhetoric by Palin,
Weeks 2 – 6: Antebellum topoi and podium rhetoric
Bacon; Logan; Kohrs Campbell; Johnson Nineteenth-Century selections; Royster, selections.
Weeks 7 – 11: Post-war scenes of education and the oral-to-literacy shift
Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space; Enoch; Gold; Johnson Nineteenth-Century selections; Royster, selections.
Production Schedule
Across the semester: Collectively assembling lists of key terms and topoi; textbooks and conduct books; rhetors. This assembly and its process will constitute material for the exam and for your oral presentations on your adopted rhetors and books.
Across the semester: collaboratively constructed writing assignments grounded in principles of nineteenth-century rhetorical theory.
Weeks 12 – 15: Research Proposals; Writing Projects; Exam; Oral Presentations