Reaching back to the classical period, rhetoric (the strategic use of language to get things done and the study of these uses) has been closely tied to the civic—that is, to questions about the constitution of the “public,” the relationship between the public and the state, how arguments become legitimated and gather force in the public sphere, and how citizenship is defined and enacted. The driving impetus of this course is to consider how and why one might study rhetoric and rhetorical force in contemporary political theory and in public culture. What does it means to analyze texts, discourses, social phenomenon, and material practices from a rhetorical perspective? What exactly is a rhetorical lens, anyway, and what is the value of thinking rhetorically?

This course will begin by offering some grounding in basic rhetorical concepts and rhetorical theory (glossing the history of rhetoric and focusing on contemporary rhetorical theory). We will train our rhetorical lenses on political theories about democracy, public formations, and citizenship, and we will trace and ground the force of democratic rhetoric in myriad material sites, including affordable housing policy, shifts in welfare policy, global politics, and so on. Why is it that democratic rhetorics (and their attendant topoi) can be persuasive in so many different, and diametrically opposed, social projects—and, in some cases, without referencing any content whatsoever? What are the material vehicles (institutional, discursive, visual, and so on) that enliven such rhetorics? How and to what end do democratic rhetorics dovetail with other logics, such as neoliberalism?

Finally, we will pay explicit attention to your own writing and teaching practice as professional activities that are central to your development as scholars, theoreticians, and rhetoricians. The questions of how to write and how to teach rhetoric more effectively, therefore, will be integrated into the fabric of the curriculum.

Texts under consideration:
Renato Barilli, Rhetoric
Wendy Brown, “Democracy and Bad Dreams” and “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”
Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism
Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects.
Richard Epstein, Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”
Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the
Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Gerald Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres
Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric
Michael Meyer, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason
John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill, eds. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader