| History of Rhetoric II - ENG 6213 - Fall 2008 | |
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Wayne Rebhorn, ed.,Renaissance
Debates on Rhetoric |
 A
historical survey of rhetoric from the Middle Ages to
Thank You for Smoking. We will cover, among other figures, Locke,
Vico, Bacon,
Petrarch, George of Trebizond,
Erasmus,
Melanchthon, Peter Ramus,
Francis Bacon, Blair, Campbell, Whately,
Nietzsche,
Emerson, Emma Goldman,
Jacques
Derrida,
Wayne Booth, and Angela
Davis. We will conclude with Marc Bousquet's "Composition as
Management Science," an article that will challenge some
popular (in North America) views about "rhet/comp."
Among other things, the course should provide students with an understanding of
how people from what is called the Renaissance were able to achieve a
return to classical texts.
Textual transmission plays
a key role, as do the changing technologies that impact
human communication, such as the YouTube video below.
The quotation from Friedrich Kittler on the right also
connects up with overlapping concerns in the study of
rhetoric and technology.
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 "The term discourse network can designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constitute a historically very powerful formation.... Hermeneutics did not deal with the literal materiality of the letter, but with works and traditions, because only these were said to be historical and capable of producing history. Contemporary sociology of literature takes the opposite approach and reads texts as reflections of relations of production, whose paradigm is energy or labor rather than information." -- Friedrich Kittler in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, pp. 369-70.
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