I was doing so well posting here. I even got a comment from Dave Weinberger. And then last week happened.
I spent most of today finishing my syllabi for the fall and submitting my book orders. Here’s how my two classes shape up:
Historical Rhetorics
- Week One (summer reading, discussed week one): Gorgias, Republic VII
- Week Two: Phaedrus, ???
- Week Three – Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 1-2
- Week Four – Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 3, Isocrates’ “Against the Sophists”
- Week Five – Isocrates’ Antidosis w/ Welch “An Isocratic Literary Theory” and Vitanza “Isocrates, the Padeia, and Imperialism”
- Week Six – Paper Day #1
- Week Seven – Gorgias / Protagoras, Dissoi Logoi, Plato’s Timaeus (w/ Ulmer, Heuretics 61-78; Schiappa “Toward an Understanding…” 64-85)
- Week Eight – Vitanza (chapters 1, Ex. 6) / Jarratt (all of Rereading the Sophists) / Poulakous “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric”
- Week Nine – McComiskey (chapters 1 and 2) / Consigny (Chapters 4, 5, and 6)
- Paper Day #2
- Week Eleven – Cicero (De Oratore, Book 1 and 3)
- Week Twelve – Quintilian (from books 1, 2, and 10) / Lanham, “The Q Question”
- Week Thirteen – Augustine’s On Christian Teaching
- Week Fourteen – Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
- Week Fifteen – Grassi’s Rhetoric and Philosophy (w/ Proctor on Petrarch)
- Week Sixteen – Paper Day #3
Yup. That’s a lot of reading.
Last time I taught the course, I concluded with Locke and Campbell, Whatley, and Blair, to give some frame of the Enlightenment’s disparagement of rhetoric (and its later emphasis on rhetoric as style). But I think Ong’s explication of Ramus does that sufficiently; this time I want to dig into the humanist rejection of Cicero’s “civic obligation” as our concluding note.
New Media
My undergrad students will read four books next semester:
- Kalman, Maria. And The Pursuit of Happiness 1594202672
- Stolley, Karl. How to Design and Write Web Pages Today 0313380384
- Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous 0805088113
- Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention 0321126920
I’ve already read everything here. This will be my first time teaching Weinberger, but I think it will compliment our New Media Wiki project nicely.
So that’s what I am reading this fall–what are others looking forward to?
