Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, I was persuaded by my dissertation advisor to submit my work to the editor of a book series: a man who was at the time very well known in the field of composition and rhetoric. My dissertation dealt with the writing classroom as a site of institutional and symbolic violence and with the possibilities, given that context, for performative nonviolent pedagogies – that is for teaching that both critiques and resists violence and teaches for a more peaceful world. The editor responded that the term “violence” is so overused that it cannot be theorized and nonviolence so naïve an idea as to be absurd on its face.

The response stung me. And so, I laid aside my dissertation after it was finished and began to do and re-theorize the work I had begun in it using other terms. But I never thought he was right and I stilldon’t. The problem of defining violence, and of historicizing and theorizing the ideological conditions for and material conditions of violence as well as the rhetorical means by which the reproduction of violence is assured is not to be avoided because it is hard or complicated. Nor is the apparent ubiquity of violence a reason not to study it. This course takes up a single central question: how are individuals and groups persuaded to tolerate as well as to participate  in violence?

To be clear, I do not know the answer, nor do I expect any of us will know the answer in any definitive sense by the end of the term. Instead, my hope is that, together, we will work at the intersections and within the interstices of critical theory, rhetorical theory, and the creative arts to take up this question: its grounds, the definitional and conceptual terms it raises, and its implications for the work any of us may do as scholars, teachers, writers, artists, activists, and as citizens. The assigned readings situate this question in a large (big-here, long-now) sense and provide address of it from a variety of perspectives. My own conviction is, however, that the purpose of both theory and art is not merely to represent or describe the world, but to change it. Whether in the projects you choose to work at over the course of the term or in your teaching or in your everyday lives, I hope that you will be able to use your learning in this course not merely to theorize the world around you and the means and forms of persuasion to which we are all subject, but also to perform yourself and your relations more justly – as you come to understand what that term might mean. The course will be discussion-based, rather than driven by lecture. I hope that you will freely and courageously bring your own insights, questions, lived experience, and intellectual and political commitments to the work we do together during our discussions and that you will produce work in the class that furthers your own interests and commitments, that moves those interests and commitments beyond the abstract to the real, material, and the lived, and that contributes to the collective learning of the class.