Future graduate courses

The systematic study of effective composition, argument, and persuasion-€”the art of rhetoric-€”dates back at least to the epics of Homer and flourishes today in countless academic disciplines and spheres of social life. In fact, the historical “empire” of rhetoric is so vast that it “digests regimes, religions, and civilizations” (Roland Barthes). This seminar seeks to introduce students to some of the essential concepts, issues, and controversies in the history and theory of rhetoric by analyzing selections from key texts from antiquity and the twentieth century. In addition to demonstrating the relevance of rhetorical theory and criticism to a variety of social, intellectual, and cultural fields (politics, feminism, critical race theory, etc.), the seminar also explores emerging forms of rhetorical practice made possible by new media technologies, such as digital advertising and information warfare. Ideally, students will leave the seminar with a firm grasp of basic concepts of rhetorical theory and a deeper appreciation for rhetoric as an inventive, critical, and multidisciplinary enterprise.

This course is designed to provide graduate students with an introduction to critical digital research methods with a focus on critical internet and social media studies. In order to do good research one must 
first have a solid understanding of what kind of research is even possible to do This course aims to provide a foundational understanding of how to critically study “born digital” and online phenomena. 
Seminar readings on specific research methods will contribute to the formulation of a research project proposal to be carried out during the semester. Recent literature on the theoretical and ethical aspects of these methods will also be considered in the
context of these projects.

This course is an introduction to research methods used in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies. Emphasis is placed on research ethics, the fit of method to research design, the interdisciplinary scope of research methods, the emergence of new research methods, and the development of research proposals. Students will become familiar with a range of methods, including methods in technical and professional communication, mixed methods, and rhetorical field methods, among others. This course suggests method as a practice as well as an object of study, connecting well-known traditional methods in rhetoric, communication design, and writing studies to those that are emergent, new, and mixed. This course allows students to map a variety of methods while understanding the reciprocal relationship between practices (methods) and theoretical frameworks (methodologies), allowing students to imagine and pair research questions and methods for their own projects.

In this course we will explore Jane Austen’s reworking of key rhetorical ideas from the eighteenth century and Romantic era. Austen both adapts and pushes back against new ideas promoted by proponents of the so-called “new rhetoric” of George Campbell and Hugh Blair and by the revivers of attention to performed speech in the elocutionary movement, such as Thomas Sheridan and James Walker. Expanding the study of rhetoric in Austen beyond now-conventional work on emblems (Northanger Abbey) and focalization (Emma), this course will explore emerging topics such as the role of the understanding in argument (in Pride and Prejudice) and the role of gesture and tone in the communication of passion (in Persuasion). 

American modernist authors were writing during an historical period of major technological change and disruption that parallels our own twenty-first century world in many ways. As they responded to those changes, their literary experiments articulated strategies for addressing the new challenges—cultural, social, political, economic, and more—that were emerging. Scholars have argued that modernist texts offer generative “literary lessons” to today’s readers; in this course, we will explore some of those transhistorical resonances by tracking connections between modernist-era texts and four present-day technology keywords: Data, Network, Surveillance, and Automation. 

Drawing on the works of selected writers from different parts of Africa, this seminar examines the specific historical and cultural contexts that shaped contemporary African letters as well as the formal aesthetic innovations and genre reinventions that have accompanied the continent’s imaginative work. We will explore African literature against the backdrop of the continent’s entry into global modernity—slavery, empire, colonialism—on the one hand, and the discontents of the postcolonial condition—statehood, conflict, disillusionment—on the other hand. We will also consider theoretical handles such as the postcolonial, abjection, globalization, Afropolitanism, and race, insofar as they underwrite the genre of African writing. 

This course considers narrative representations of care and caregiving in a variety of genres. Students will engage critically with both literary and theoretical texts to analyze how drama, fiction, and memoir imagine care within broader cultural frameworks and to explore how rhetorics of care are shaped. How do we define and evaluate “care”? How do narratives of care influence and reflect cultural attitudes toward dependency and care work? We will examine the theorization and depiction of dependency and care, considering how literary narratives can provide illuminating perspectives on the complex relational negotiations integral to provisions of care. 

An inquiry into the meaning and value of style, focusing on modern writing, but ranging forward and outward to other arts and media. Navigating between the impressionistic and the analytic, our discussions will recur to a related notion, ethos. Style is an expression of ethos; style is a refusal of ethos and of rhetoric more broadly. In this contradiction, we’ll probe old notions and new, like diction and discourse, modality and manner, and explore topics like the politics of style, the idea of voice, and style and media. Along with their critical and theoretical work, students will have the opportunity to experiment with style themselves, in writing, and to produce media objects that materialize the relationship between style and ethos.

Anti-democratic, xenophobic, ultranationalist movements and ideologies are everywhere on the rise, sowing confusion, stoking enmities, undermining consensual reality, and exploiting economic crises to drive retrograde social and political agendas. A crucial objective for authoritarian regimes and movements is to occupy the rhetorical high-ground. In this course we will explore the history, theory, tactics, and strategies of fascist, neo-fascist, and far-right populist messaging in all its forms and wherever it manifests: in demagoguery, propaganda, symbol, spectacle, art, political rallies, algorithms, platforms, and the common language itself.  

This course will explore how the notion of a uniquely American Enlightenment has been used politically throughout history and how the literature from the period of the American Enlightenment was part of multiple political projects and still is today. Students will work with primary texts from many genres, including sermons, pamphlets, novels, poetry, and journalism, and we will engage with contemporary productions about that primary material, including the 1619 Project, the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission Report, and the legal theory of interpretation known as “originalism.” Finally, we will explore recent critical work expanding the American Enlightenment to include more places and peoples. We will see how contested is the notion of an American Enlightenment, and come to understand that contestation as part of an urgent project to understand the uses of historical memory and to critique how some have shaped and are shaping a useable past for present purposes. 

Is art that makes arguments really art? Middlebrow fiction written between 1880 and 1930 raises this question by depending on familiar plot formulas instead of developing experimental modes of storytelling. This fiction, however, deploys generic formulae to convey radical ideas about family, sexuality, and gender roles. Canadian women were especially successful writers of the middlebrow, using generic convention to disrupt narratives of empire and nation in subtle and surprising ways. This class will examine how early Canadian middlebrow fiction by writers such as Sara Jeanette Duncan, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Winnifred Eaton, and Mazo de la Roche challenged its readers to contemplate liminal identities that did not yet have a name. In this way, these texts fulfilled art’s mandate to compel its audience to see the world differently. 

Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) hugely influential Metaphors we live by was both a service and a disservice to the cognitive humanities. It was a service for the way it brought a rigorous apparatus to the analysis of conceptual figuration (tropes). It was a disservice for the way it both ignored millennia of related scholarship and mangled the notion of trope altogether. We will unmangle that notion to explore literature and other discourses by affiliating traditional and cognitive methodologies.  

This course examines conceptions and constructions of race and racial identity in relation to media/the Internat through multifaceted critical, sociocultural, political/economic lens. Topics include digital constructions of race; mediations of race; racial controversy online; cultural histories of race; social impacts of the internet.