Since no one can engage in discourse without discovery, so the system of discourse is the system of discovery

—Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

Quoth the calendar:

"A study of rhetorical theories and practices from late Antiquity, Medieval, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment periods, with an emphasis on how those theories and practices reflect changing attitudes towards language, society, and the self."

Well, yes, there's that. More specifically, though, we will see rhetoric in middle age—mature, reflective, strong and hitting its stride, but also a little grey at the temples, a bit soft around the middle, undergoing a crisis of identity and looking for a hot little red sports car to maintain its vigour (theology, poetics, business, psychology—anything cool).

[The past] is so rich and strange that, if we turn to it merely for answers to our own questions, we shall needlessly impoverish our own intellectual lives. ... [But] if we allow ourselves to approach the past with a less importunate sense of 'relevance,' we may find our studies are taking on a relevance of a different and more authentic kind. We may find, in particular, that the acquisition of an historical perspective helps us to stand back from some of our own current assumptions and habits of thought, and perhaps reconsider them. The study of the past need not be any less instructive when it uncovers contrasts rather than continuities with the present.

Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15

Required

English 309B-S08 Course reader (purchase from bookstore)

Web readings, as listed on the schedule below (follow the links).

Wells, H. G. 1920. A Short History of the World. New York: MacMillan, 1922. ReadMe.

Style guide:

The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. First Canadian edition. Aaron and McArthur. Toronto: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997.

Midterm exam

Final exam

Essay

Being rhetorical

Midterm

You will have to know both "facts" and "ideas" for this course. The midterm will test mostly the former, with multiple-choice, true/false, short-answer questions. It will cover material up to and including the 17 June class. These facts will come mostly from the readings (chiefly from the primary texts, though there will be a few quite general historical questions thrown in as well, so you will have to be familiar with the Wells' chapters too). You need to read carefully, take good notes, ask any questions that surface, talk to each other; most of all, think about and apply what you read. If you use the information, it will stick.

Final

More of the same, but with some essay questions thrown in to chart the "ideas" quotient of the course. It will cover the entire course, but the facts-questions will have a bit more emphasis on the post-midterm readings.

Come to class, contribute to discussions, participate in the development of the course. You need to be engaged in the course every time you're in class (and you need to be in class).

Ways to get a good grade: ask relevant questions, make salient observations, look for and point out connections in the material, use the rhetorical concepts we encounter to complain about the unbelievable pressure of having to be rhetorical on demand, ...

Ways to get a mediocre grade: sit in your seat; avoid eye contact with the professor.

Ways to get a poor grade: stay away from class (of course, but also), make long irrelevant commentaries, treat your fellow students with notable disrespect while they are commenting to class, read your e-mail, text your friends and enemies, review the calls on your cell phone, have a sandwich and a thermos of soup, ...

Your essay grade is the largest and most important component of your mark. Start thinking about your essay right away. I'm not kidding. It will not have to be very long (2,000 - 2, 500 words), but it will have to be very good. This is a third-year RPW course in the department of English Language and Literature; you should be writing and thinking about rhetorical issues at an advanced level, and you should know how to research and write an academic essay.

There are two options. You can do a critical analysis or a theoretical analysis.

A critical analysis will rhetorically examine a semiotic artifact in the light of some theory or theorist from the period we are studying. A typical artifact for analysis would be an oration, a political or cultural or scientific argument, a novel or play, perhaps an argumentative exchange. But a scene from a movie is perfectly acceptable, too, or a website or a DVD interface, or the poster over your room-mate's bed, even a gum wrapper would work. The aftifact can be from the period we are studying, but it need not be. The theory and/or theorist, however, must be from the period we are studying.

A theoretical analysis will take a concept or a particular theorist's framework and examine it for the rhetorical payoff it provides (or fails to provide)—what it tells us about the world, or fails to tell us about the world. The first step is to become an authority on some concept (ethos, figuration, stasis, ...) or theorist (Augustine, Vinsauf, Whatley, ...). As an authority, you will then see with particular clarity how successful the concept or theorist is, where the failures might be, whether there is a need to augment, constrain, reshape, or even discard the concept or framework. Your paper will argue such a position. It will not just be an explanation of the concept or the framework, but an analysis of it.

What matters for your understanding, and consequently for your grade, is how you develop your analysis: what your examination yields in terms of understanding the artifact or the concept or the framework, and how you demonstrate that yield (significantly including the research you marshall and deploy, and the cogency of your argument).

Whichever form your paper takes, you will need to write up a proposal and discuss it with me before you write the essay. You will need to identify the thesis you will be arguing (for instance, the argument in Brian De Palma's Redaction is effective, or not, because of its understanding, or not, of the relation between, presumption, burden proof, and emotion; Augustine's notion of ethos is obsolete, or not, because its conception of rhetorical situation is not applicable to digital social networks). You will need to do preliminary research on your thesis—what are the important primary and secondary texts, and why are they important—which means visiting the library, even if only virtually, and going beyond the course readings, lectures, and discussions.

My evaluation of the essay (including the proposal) will depend on the soundness, analytical sophistication, research depth, and rhetorical appropriateness of your work, along the following metrics:

Proposal
Articulation of your thesis	3%	10%
Research outline	4%
Style and grammar (sentence and paragraph structure, diction, spelling, punctuation, agreement, ...)	3%
Essay
Articulation of your thesis	10%	90%
Research	20%
Use of evidence (research and analysis)	20%
Quality of argument	20%
Style and grammar (as above)	20%

Do the readings before the assigned class.

If you have any questions, please make sure you ask them.

Familiarize yourself with Policy #71, especially as to plagiarism and other forms of cheating.