SESSION A
Are We Not Men? Classical Rhetoric for Real
Rhet 103A: Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetorical Theory
Course Description
Rhetoric was conceived in antiquity as the art of speaking well. But the act of speaking, peer to peer, was always also a doing of deeds, and even well done it could do you in -- whether one was declaiming in the assemblies and courts of the radical democracies and anti-democracies of the Greek city-states, or drawing up ideal Republics in dreamy discourses among scholars, or engaging in the rough and tumble of state-craft and electioneering in the all too real and corrupt Republic of Rome, or circulating satires among snickers in the shadow of Emperors. Although we will be reading texts in which philosophy declares its opposition to rhetoric's opportunism and deceit, we will read them as rhetorical skirmishes in the politics of truth-telling. Although we will be reading discourses on civic deliberation, we will read them as anxious testaments to ubiquitous violence. Although we will be reading orations aspiring to a world of Heroes and of Men, we will read them as brutal reflections on a world in which many were not heroes and many were not men.
We will be reading works by Aristophanes, Aristotle, Marcus and Quintus Cicero, Euripides, Gorgias, Homer, Juvenal, Libanus, Petronius, Plato, Quintillian, Sappho, Seneca, Suetonius, Terence, and Thucydides. All of the readings will be available either online or in a course reader.
Rhet 103A: Are We Not Men? Classical Rhetoric for Real
Summer 2012
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://arewenotmenrhetforreal.blogspot.com
Session A, May 21-June 29, TWR 4.30-7pm, 110 Wheeler
Reading Notebook, 30%; Precis, 20%; Mid-Term, 25%; Final, 25%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One
May 22 – Introduction, and a selection of poems by Sappho
May 23 – Homer, from the Iliad, Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen"
May 24 – Thucydides, from the History of the Peloponnesian War
Week Two
May 29 – Euripides, Hecuba
May 30 – Plato, Apology, and from Republic
May 31 – Aristophanes, Wasps; Plato, Symposium
Week Three
June 5 -- Plato, Gorgias, Phaedrus
June 6 – Aristotle, Rhetoric, and from Politics
June 7 – Aristotle, Rhetoric, and from Topics and Poetics
Week Four
June 12 – Marcus Tullius Cicero, Against Verres, Against Cataline -- First Essay Due (5-6pp.)
June 13 – Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator
June 14 – Quintus Tullius Cicero, How to Win an Election
Week Five
June 19 – Terence, Eunuchus
June 20 -- Quintillian, from Institutio Oratoria
June 21 – Juvenal, Satires
Week Six
June 26 – Suetonius, Caligula; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii
June 27 – Gaius Petronius, Satyricon
June 28 – Libanus, "The Silence of Socrates" -- Second Essay Due (5-6pp.)
SESSION D
Rhet 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation: Who Holds the Keys?
Course Description
Our course is asking the question, "Who Holds the Keys?" This is first of all the question, who are the ones who know how to decipher inscrutable texts, and who are the ones who know how to unlock intractable histories? But when we begin to question further, when we ask just what it is to know these things, and how we know them, and how we know who knows them, we come to realize that our initial question contains within it troubling answers to other sorts of questions, questions about what we think it means to be a "who" and not a "what" in the first place.
“Interpretation” derives from the Latin interpretatio, a term freighted with the sense not only of explication and explanation, but of translation. What are the conventions that govern intelligible acts of interpretation, translation, argumentation? What are the conventions through which we constitute the proper objects of interpretation? Who are the subjects empowered to offer up interpretations that compel our attention and conviction? What happens when objects object to our interpretations or demand the standing of subjects themselves? How does the interpretation of literary texts differ from a scientist’s interrogation of her environment or from any critical engagement with the “given” terms of the social order in which one lives or even from the give and take through which we struggle to understand one another in everyday conversation?
These are questions through which we will survey together themes, problems, and conventions in the rhetoric of interpretation. We will discover that for many of our conversational partners in these investigations, our questions will turn out to turn, astonishingly enough, on various construals of the phenomenon of fetishism. Where we end up together will, of course, be very much a matter open to interpretation.
We will be reading Carol Adams, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, William Burroughs, Judith Butler, Guy Debord, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Donna Haraway, Daniel Harris, David Harvey, Franz Kafka, Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, CS Lewis, Karl Marx, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Valerie Solanas, Gayatri Spivak, and Oscar Wilde. We will also watch a monster movie by John Carpenter and a couple of YouTube clips of Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek at the People's Mic. All of the works will be available either online or in a course Reader.
Who Holds the Keys?
Rhet 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
Summer 2012
Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://interpretatio.blogspot.com
Session D, July 2-August, 10 TWR, 4.30-7pm, 219 Dwinelle
Reading Notebook, 30%; Precis, 20%; Mid-Term, 25%; Final, 25%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One
July 3 -- Introduction
July 4 -- Holiday
July 5 -- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism; Preface to Dorian Gray; Phrases and Philosophies for the Instruction of the Young
Week Two
July 10 – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
July 11 -- Marx and Engles, Manifesto of the Communist Party; Marx on "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Capital
July 12 -- Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility"; Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry"
Week Three
July 17 -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Daniel Harris, "The Futuristic"
July 18 – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Naomi Klein, from No Logo
July 19 – John Carpenter (dir.), "They Live," In-Class Screening
Week Four
July 24 – Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber"; The Future of an Illusion -- First Essay Due (5-6pp.)
July 25 -- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"; Kobena Mercer, "On Mapplethorpe"
July 26 – Fanon, from Black Skin, White Masks, Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender; Gayatri Spivak, "Translation As Culture"
Week Five
July 31 -- Frantz Kafka, "Give It Up!" Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Hannah Arendt, "The Gap Between Past and Future"
Aug 1 -- William Burroughs, "Coincidence" and "Immortality"; Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Aug 2 -- Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity"; David Harvey "Fetishism of Technology"
Week Six
Aug 7 -- Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space," CS Lewis "Abolition of Man"
Aug 8 -- Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"; Bruno Latour, "A Plea for Earthly Science"
Aug 9 – Zizek and Butler at the People's Mic; Conclusions -- Second Essay Due (5-6pp.)
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