For Tuesday, February 24

Note: pages 18 and 19 appear to be missing from the Bitzer intro. I’ve looked for online versions to no avail and the book is buried in my home office—so we’ll have to read it later. So sorry.

This week we move back to Johnson’s history: Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. We’ll read chapter 2 on the New Rhetoric, featuring George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately—the most influential rhetoric theorists of the century—the equivalent, perhaps, to the 20^th century Burke, Foucault, Derrida.  Johnson will provide an overview.  Then we’ll read from  Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric. We’re using the Landmarks edition, published in 1963, which claims to be the only complete edition published in the 20^th c.  Lloyd Bitzer provides the introductory essay (Bitzer is most famous for his work on the “rhetorical situation”—we can look at his definition briefly too).  I have copied the pages from Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric  cited by Bitzer in the introduction, and the idea is that you can turn to the source of each citation to further contextualize Bitzer’s cites. I’m not sure this is a good idea; we’ll see. So the pages from Campbell will be discontinuous, and I suspect I’ve not copied everything I should have.

There are three files to download:

Johnson, New Rhetoric

http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/english540/Johnson%20New%20Rhetoric.pdf

George Campbell part 1

http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/english540/George%20Campbell%20Part%201.pdf

George Campbell part 2

http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/english540/George%20Campbell%20Part%20II.pdf

I’ll send an email to the distribution list later in the week after giving some thought to the idea of creating writing assignments. What I’m after is a way to emerge ourselves in nineteenth-century perceptions of language and thought, as if we were charged with disseminating hot theory to undergraduates. Remember that Johnson has argued that nineteenth-century folks believed very strongly in education as a means for social good.  My second intention is to have us to consider whether and how abolitionist and/or temperance and women’s rights advocates or opponents responded to and implemented what educated culture propagated.

NOTE: