English 576 History and Theories of Rhetoric Fall 2012
Journal Entries
Samples from earlier journal entries are here.
1. (Due 9/5) Discuss fully the rhetorical movement involved when you changed your mind radically about something important in any area of your life and thought. How did you persuade yourself to change your mind? How did somebody else (if applicable) persuade you? What specific artistic appeals (i.e., examples of logos, ethos, pathos) were involved? What made you as an audience particularly receptive to these appeals?
2. (Due 9/17) For this one you can either question 3 on pg. 47, question 2 on pg. 66, or write something you feel to be interesting and worth discussing (though not formally finished) on the Sophists, Plato, or both.
3. (Due 9/24) Do an argument map of a short chunk of Socrates' reasoning from either the Phaedrus or the Gorgias. See here for a simple explanation/how to. Sample here.
4. (Due 10/1) Paper topic for Paper One.
5. (Due 10/15) Pick a brief piece of writing, of any genre, that you think of as being particularly excellent. Briefly discuss its excellence in terms of the five sources of great writing described by Longinus (Herrick 107-09). Which of these five aspects contributes greatly to its quality -- mental conception, inspired emotion, figures of speech, diction, structure? Or write something you feel to be interesting and worth discussing (though not formally finished) on the Romans, Aristotle, or both.
6. (Due 10/22) Choose either question 2 on page 136, question 3 on page 161, or question 4 on page 162. Or write about something you feel
to be interesting and worth discussing (though not formally finished) on Augustine, Erasmus, or other medieval or Renaissance rhetoricians -- since you're working on your paper anyway, it can be helpful if you find something thematically similar in this material and expound on it.
7. (Due 10/31) Summarize, in two paragraphs, Nietzsche's argument in "Truth and Lies." Your first paragraph should summarize why the nature of language makes an unambiguous view of truth impossible (this should, given the structure of Nietzsche's own argument, be your longer paragraph). The second paragrpah should summarize what we can/should do about this situation, in Nietzsche's view.
8. (Due 11/5) Using what you've learned from "Pentadic Criticism," do a brief pentadic/dramatistic analysis of a text other than a political one.
9. (Due 11/19) Describe the difficulties of reading Cixous and/or Foucault's texts, and do at a level midrange on the ladder of abstraction -- that is, don't simply give a list of specific ideas/principles you found difficult, and don't say "these writers don't write very clearly at all." Group together and generalize from a few difficult ideas or passages to give a broader (but not overbroad) description of what type of difficulty these authors ask us to deal with.
10. (Due 11/28) Using what you've learned from Schuster's article on Bakhtin, do a brief Bakhtinian analysis of a text other than a political one.
11. (Due 12/3) Here are the two questions for this year's M.A. Comprehensive Exam in the History of Rhetoric:
1. Since the 5th Century B.C.E. there has been a controversy about the degree to which rhetoric is epistemic -- that is, to what extent it creates new knowledge rather than simply packaging existing knowledge to be persuasive. Make an argument that rhetoric either is or is not essentially epistemic, making reference to both classical and modern rhetoricians, and reflecting both sides of the controversy fairly.
2. Kenneth Burke has famously said, ""You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his" (A Rhetoric of Motives). Discuss some of the strategies, as identified by both classical and modern rhetoricians, through which a rhetor can accomplish this goal.
Write
two possible fair and challenging final exam questions for this course. Since your final exam
is intended as preparation for the M.A. Comprehensive, the questions should be
of
