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Rhetoric

Courses

Graduate courses the LCS faculty have taught recently include:

• Literary Theory
• Feminisms
• Marxisms
• Varieties of Literary Criticism: The Case of Shakespeare
• Reformation and Its Discontents
• Late Epicurianism
• Enlightenment Political Theory and the Novel
• Enlightenment Sexualities
• 1800/2000: Romantic and Postmodern Historicisms
• Modernist Poetry, Poetics, and Politics
• The Feminist 1950s: Theory/Culture/History
• What was Postmodernism?
• Theories of Commodity Culture: The Frankfurt School and Others
• Field Work: Sociology of Culture from Burke to Bourdieu
• Foucault
• History of Representation
• Gay and Lesbian Theory
• Theories of the Subject
• Postcolonial Theory
• Advanced Seminar in Media Studies: Modernism and Film
• Rhetoric of Science

Literary Theory is one of the eight graduate mini courses aimed at introducing the key terms and debates involved in literary and cultural study. In this course we will consider some influential statements in the recent debates over criticism and theory and some objections and critiques they have elicited. After a brief survey of some familiar critical positions from the past, we will discuss essays on formalism, modal criticism, hermeneutics, reception aesthetics, deconstruction, cultural materialism, and new historicism. We will consider both the positions themselves and the critical practices each of them has enabled. Students will be required to demonstrate understanding of theory and its relation to practice in a class presentation and a ten-page paper, and to have something to say about each of the debates we consider. [Return]

This course will serve as a primer on the discursive forms that feminism has taken in academic theories and studies of culture. We will follow two trajectories in our investigation of academic feminist theory: 1) how have feminisms defined/refined object of knowledge in academic studies, and 2) how have feminisms critiqued and refined methods of academic knowledge production. The course will stress the politics of academic feminism as an "impure" body of theoretical work that tends to refuse a totalizing or exclusive identity. Hence, we will need to pay attention to the ways that feminist theory articulates with theoretical systems such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxisms. Since this is a primer course, coverage of the field will obviously not be the goal. Instead we combine texts that address the two questions stated above with "originary" readings; that is, texts that were historically instrumental in the academic institutionalization of feminisms. [Return]

This part of the Literary and Cultural Studies core is meant to introduce students to problems in Marxist theory, among them value and labor, mode of production, base and superstructure, and historical materialism. However, because our particular disciplinary interests, the course will focus on problems of ideology, including hegemony, culture, and the subject. Readings begin with works of Marx and Engels, including selections from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Capital, Vol. 1, and The German Ideology, and move on to other contributors including Lukàcs, Gramsci, and Althusser. We look at Raymond Williams as an example of Marxism in the specific context of cultural studies. The last readings represent some different positions in the current debates about ideology. [Return]

This seminar is designed for students who have studied Shakespeare at the college level and wish to broaden and their understanding by considering the various ways the plays have been interpreted. In recent years deconstructive, historical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist positions have served as vantage points from which to see the plays in new light. We will read six plays: As You Like It, I Henry IV, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Winter's Tale, each accompanied by least two critical commentaries.

Students are required to attend and participate regularly, present a position statement in class, and submit two prepared papers. Graduate students will meet for an extra hour to discuss additional readings. [Return]

The Protestant Reformation contributed to an explosion of literary, political and (by definition) religious activity in the early modern period, one whose shock-waves were felt throughout urban and rural England and in the American colonies. While regional differences suggest that there may have been many "Reformations," we are going to examine a number of conflicted reactions to the reforming impulse in English and American culture during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The class will briefly survey the theological and political roots of the movement, moving on to examine the following topics: radical religious expression during the English civil war; American and English witchcraft trials; early American and English poetry and "Reformation culture"; religious epic and Milton's Paradise Lost; hidden voices of dissent in English drama; and the political legacy of the Puritan left. [Return]

This class is designed to offer students a long view of a certain strand of materialism which is concerned with the material basis of thought, memory and experience. We will be using a set of landmark texts, beginning with the classical atomists Epicurus and Lucretius, continuing through the seventeenth century with works by Spinoza and the French atomists, then onto Karl Marx (who wrote his dissertation on Greek atomism), Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze. A course reader will include texts by Patricia Parker, Judith Butler, and other contemporary theorists. Reading will be almost entirely philosophical, but our own treatment of these texts will open up onto questions of rhetoric, subjectivity, and agency which are relevant to literary and cultural studies today. [Return]

Late eighteenth-century English novels, produced in the political and ideological wake of the French Revolution, engage directly or sometimes only implicitly in responses to the new republicanism of postrevolutionary France, that "great experiment" that shaped the course of European politics and cultures for years to come. English Jacobinism cast this republicanism as the triumph of reason and enlightenment; Anti-Jacobinism shaped images of horror to express political and social anxiety at lost or eroding traditions of governance and "the social." To gain an understanding of the political contexts for the English novel in this period, we will read some of the major texts of political philosophy from the English Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin debates of the 1790s, along with modern histories of this period in English literature and culture. The novels we will read fall (very roughly) into two categories. On one hand, we will read "novels of education" that helped to shape the ideal of the rational individual so important to the success of republicanism. On the other, we will read "gothic fiction" that stresses the pull of the irrational, even the supernatural, over the rational individual. Some of the fiction falls interestingly somewhere between these two poles, stressing the development of rational individualism while simultaneously presenting readers with compellingly "gothic" scenes of irrational horror. Possible authors are Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney, Matthew Gregory ("The Monk") Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin. [Return]

We will read two kinds of narratives about sexuality: 1) modern histories of sexuality, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and 2) eighteenth-century British narratives of sexual misconduct or transgression. We will begin by looking at how the histories of Michael Foucault, Thomas Laqueur and Nancy Armstrong, for example, tell the story of modern sexual identities.

The main business of the class will be reading novels and autobiographies written by authors such as Samuel Richardson, the notorious cross-dresser, Charlotte Chake, John Cleland, Henry Fielding, and Eliza Haywood. What stories about sexuality are told in these texts? How are these stories related to gendered identities and/or identities of sexual orientation? What role do these stories play in defining the limits for sexual behavior and in formulating identities based on that behavior?

The goal of our study will be both to learn more about sexuality and gender in eighteenth-century British popular texts and to learn more about how we construct the field of sexual possibility from our own historical perspective. [Return]

Methods of grasping the past—from social history and the new-historicism in literary studies to feminist history, cultural history, media history, and others. This course introduces a range of such methods to study selected writings of the Romantic age (roughly 1789-1832) which often themselves were highly self-conscious about historical change, the instability of the present order, and the explosively transformative forces of modernity-such as Anna Barbauld's end-of-history poem "Eighteen Hundred Eleven," Walter Scott's Waverley, William Blake's America, Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Keats's sonnets on art and history, and others. We will ask how recent critics and scholars of Romanticism have historicized a literature that long seemed to resist historical interpretation. We will also see how literary history (poems, novels, plays) and media history (newspapers, periodicals, public shows) began to enter tense and complex new relations in the Romantic age.

Today, across a range of late-twentieth disciplines and discourses, "history" has become a complex process of representing "pasts" in relation to struggles over the shape of the present. Using recent theoretical readings in historicism from various perspectives (Marxist, feminist, Foucauldian, anthropological, sociological), we will ask how the historical self-consciousness of the Romantic period contrasts and compares with our own historicism. Of special interest is our fascination with alternative histories, the excavation of forgotten or suppressed genealogies at a time of extraordinary cultural crisis and social change. Students will be asked to write one shorter and one longer paper as well as oral presentations in the seminar. We will also begin using new resources on the World Wide Web to see how historical "chronologies" are today being changed by the new electronic forms of media. [Return]

In this course we will read the poetry and prose of the controversial but much lauded modernist poets in what Hugh Kenner famously dubbed the Pound Era, after the most influential and problematic figure in modernist poetry. Ezra Pound, editor of Eliot's The Waste Land and keen advisor to many other writers, wrote both highly difficult poetry and bizarre political tracts about usury, money, and banks. Charged with treason against the United States for his fascist propaganda radio broadcasts during WW II, Pound escaped a possible death sentence by copping to an insanity plea. Pound's career raises issues that are relevant to other modernists as well: what is the relationship between an artist's political and social beliefs and his or her aesthetic practice? Why were so many canonical modernists revolutionary in their attitudes toward artistic tradition, but reactionary and anit-democratic in their social attitudes? If "great art" is enlightened and humane, is modernist poetry "great"? [Return]

What are you stereotypes of women in the 1950s? June Cleaver? Betty Crocker? Donna Reed? Were the fifties a passive decade, in which women were trapped in the suburbs, cooking, cleaning, and caring for children? Was the feminist movement of the 1960s a radical break from the cult of domesticity? In this course we look at the emergence of "feminism" in the 1950s. We will examine novels, autobiographies, historical essays, mass-market magazines and films which reveal a more radical underside to the placid surface of the domestic decade.

We will read about Marilyn Monroe and her working class background. We will examine the relationship between sex and feminism in the steamy novel "Peyton Place." We will look at race and feminism in Lorraine Hansberry's autobiography, To be Young, Gifted and Black, as well as a first-person account of the Montgomery bus boycott, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. We will think about the effect of Japanese internment on feminism for Japanese women in the stirring novel, Obasan. We will also re-examine Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and look at her radical labor past.

In the graduate portion of this course we will read feminist theory in light of what made it so hard to "see" feminism in the 1950s, including The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by Donna J. Haraway, and Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott. [Return]

For some, postmodernism was a movement or discourse in the arts and philosophy; for others, postmodernity was a period, beginning in the 1960s and coinciding with the rise of "consumer society." Still others believed the postmodern to be an illusion, a mistake, or a mirage. This course will examine the late-twentieth-century postmodernism controversy and what it produced. We'll read postmodern theory (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Rorty, Deleuze), postmodern literary fiction (Pynchon, Delillo, Doctorow, Gibson) and cultural histories that try to explain the condition of postmodernity (Harvey, Hobsbawm, and others).

We will also ask and try to answer some key questions: why did such writers believe postmodernism both came after and remained entangled within "modernity"? What crisis of historical awareness did postmodernism register, and how did it end up demanding more history, not less? How did the "posts" proliferate—post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism? Why did certain arts, such as architecture, become a bellwether mode of representation for postmodernism, and what did real estate and old houses have to do with new theories and modes of art? Who benefited and who lost in the high tide of postmodern-discourse? Is it over with now, and if so, what then? [Return]

Since Lukàcs, Western Marxist theory has been centered on notions of the commodity as the defining feature of culture under capitalism. We will explore some of these theories, including those of Frankfurt School theorists Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. We will also look a few more recent contributions, and at some critiques of these theories. Readings will include excerpts from Marx's Capital and Grundrisse, and from Lukàcs's History and Class Consciousness in addition to Benjamin, Baudelaire, Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. Required written work will include weekly "agendas" and a research paper. [Return]

This course compares different models and situations of a "sociology of writing" (that is, a sociology of literature, rhetoric, and cultural discourses) with special attention to the work of Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, and Pierre Bourdieu. For Bakhtin in the 1920s and '30s, Burke in the '30s and '40s, Williams in the '60s and '70s, and Bourdieu in the '80s and '90s, the sociology of culture must reply in various ways to the illusions of formalism or structuralism, the claims of modernism, and the wider problems of modernity. However different their methods or national situations (Russian, British, American, or French), these cultural sociologists have been acutely focused on acts and situations of writing, the symbolic power of language, the dramatic situations of communicating meanings. And long before most of us, they have worked across disciplines and grasped the potentials and perils of interdisciplinary writing. Both contemporary literary-cultural studies and rhetorical study owe debts to their work.

We will read major texts by these figures (Bakhtin: The Dialogical Imagination, Burke: The Grammar of Motives, Williams: The Sociology of Culture, Bourdieu: Language as Symbolic Power and The Field of Cultural Production) along with essays by others that help focus their projects. For historical "case studies," we will use selected British and American writers dating from the Romantic age to early-twentieth-century Modernism; these will help illustrate and ground our study of writing as social strategy and response. Bourdieu's model of "fields" will be central to our investigations of both the theory and practical uses of the sociology of writing.

Students will write one paper on a theoretical issue in the sociology of writing, and one longer, more practical study of a particular writer, medium, and situation. [Return]

We will read Foucault's major works including Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. While we will cover Foucault's theories on a range of issues, we will focus on theories of power, politics, and governmentality. Course requirements will include weekly agendas and a research paper on a theoretical issue. [Return]

What is the difference between historical writing and literary criticism? If both "tell stories," how do these stories differ? How is our practice of cultural studies informed by historical problematics? How have current controversies in literary theory changed the terrain of historical discourse? This seminar is designed to encourage reflection on the assumptions that underlie our own scholarship by investigating modern and post-modern conceptions of writing history, and their use value for both literary and cultural studies.

Beginning with Marx, and Hegel's influence on Marx, we will examine the origins of our current theoretical debates over the meanings of history and historical representation. Next we will consider the Marxist-influenced theories of Hayden White and Michel De Certeau. Then we will look at debates over History with a capital "H" versus history with a lower-case "h" in the writings of Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Himmelfarb among others. Finally we will examine some of the ways in which debates over gender have reshaped the debate over writing history.

Discussion in the second half of the semester will largely be determined by the interests of class members who will propose texts and lead discussion on them. These discussions should take the earlier readings as a point of departure for exploring what is at stake in the way that a given text (or a set of cultural artifacts) represents another historical (or cultural) moment. It is anticipated that these discussions would form the basis for the final seminar paper. [Return]

Lesbian and Gay Studies and, more recently, Queer Studies, have grown in importance to the fields of literary, cultural, and historical study. The amount of materials dealing with "deviant" sexualities in these fields has become huge; we will cut out way through this exciting and diverse interdisciplinary territory by focusing on methodology. How is sexuality read? What theories of meaning, identity, and culture inform lesbian, gay, and queer studies? Instead of focusing on lesbians, gay men, transsexuals or transvestites as objects of study, this course will investigate how lesbian, gay, and queer readings—and meanings—are produced, negotiated, and suppressed in both heteronormative and gay-identified cultural contexts.

We will begin with Freud and Foucault, two of the theorists whose ideas about sexuality circulate the most relentlessly through lesbian/gay and queer theory in the 1980s and '90s. Our investigation of method will not be confined, however to theory. We will engage a broad selection of "canonical" texts in lesbian and gay studies that pose a variety of texts and cultural practices—literature, electronic media, and community-organizing and political practices—as objects of study. Moving from the "canon" to more recent texts in queer and media studies, we will try to think through the methodological issues that arise from both the cultural practices and theories that define sexual "deviance." [Return]

This course is an introduction to psychoanalytic theory, with a special emphasis on the problem of the "subject." The course will deal mainly with Freud and Lacan, but will also include Julia Kristeva, Jessica Benjamin, Paul Smith, and others, like Foucault, who have contributed to the debate about the subject from nonpsychoanalytic perspectives. [Return]

Since the 1978 publication of Edward Said's groundbreaking work Orientalism, postcolonial theory has gained currency as a critical discourse examining global experiences of colonization and decolonization. At the center of these discussions have been questions of identity—ethnic, linguistic, and cultural—at the crossroads of competing histories, agents and cultures. Since the term "postcolonial" was first invoked to describe the cultural effects of colonization, the field of study has expanded considerably. Today postcolonial studies looks backwards at earlier works on nationalism and cultural identity; gazes forwards towards the future of globalization; and scrutinizes regularly its own interpretive legitimacy. In this course, we will follow several threads of postcolonial theory. Readings will include Edward Said and Anne McClintock on the discursive operations of empire; Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Aijaz Ahmad on the politics of representation; Franz Fanon, Partha Chatterjee and Chandra Mohanty on nationalism and its discontents; Homi Bhabha, K. Anthony Appiah and Stuart Hall on ethnicity and hybridity; Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha on gender and postcolonial subjectivity; and finally, Arjun Appadurai and Arif Dirlik on the cultural implications of an increasingly globalized economy. [Return]

This course will explore the broad relationship between the cinema (a medium created in the late 19th century) and the Modernist cultural movement—one that reached its apex precisely as the art of film came of age. The course will begin by attempting to give a theoretical and historical overview of the term "Modernism" and by confronting controversy of whether or not the cinema is "inherently" Modernist (either because of its ontological nature or its chronological positioning). The course will then move on to consider major issues foregrounded in discussions of Modernism (and that surface in a primitive, mechanization, politics and propaganda, nationalism, language, commodification, labor, etc. Under each topic, the class will consider an important film that relates to the subject as well as works from other arts and media (literature, painting, decorative arts, advertising, etc.) The course will also relate the material directly to aforementioned Carnegie exhibit—both by sending students to the museum to view and, possibly, report on the show (term passes will be made available for a minimal fee) as well as by utilizing the 35mm slides of items in the show that have been purchased by the University. [Return]

This course is an introduction to some of the most recent ideas and developments in an excitingly interdisciplinary field: rhetoric of science. Every year the German academy gives a prize for scientific prose. Like any other intellectuals, scientists rely on language to communicate ideas, assess evidence, and establish truth. Although committed to objectivity, science is not free of metaphors, as scholars have repeatedly claimed for the past decades. But can we say that science is rhetorical? What does it mean to speak of a rhetoric of science? Throughout the course we will grapple with these questions, analyzing their scope and implications, and mustering forces from a variety of theories in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and classical rhetoric. The purpose of this course is twofold. Guided by rhetorical concepts (e.g., evidence, ethos, pathos, figure, stasis), we will consider a number of case studies from the history of science and technology. Our effort will be mainly devoted to understanding and explaining science as a disciplinary formation with certain norms, conventions, and practices. But we will also consider how the application of rhetoric to science might re-shape our view of rhetorical theory and criticism. Students will work collaboratively and individually on a series of assignments that will help them apply and evaluate theories within specific contexts. [Return]