Instr:                  Professor Alice Gillam
Office:                CRT 493,   229-5454
e-mail:                agillam@uwm.edu
Office hours:     MW, 1-3 PM and  by appointment

Course Information:                      Wednesdays       4:30-7:10         Curtin 284
 

Course Description

"Classical scholarship, precisely because it is, as Nietzsche says, 'unseasonable,' can trouble and disorient our dominant modes of seeing, of theory, in the name of transforming our
world."
Page DuBois Sowing the Body

"The task of the [historian], however, is no longer to 'search for the truth,' . . . or 'to systematize observations,' or 'to improve predictions.'  These are but side effects to which his [her]
attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole."

    Victor Vitanza  "'Notes Toward Historiographies of Rhetoric"

This course introduces students to Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions and contemporary debates regarding these traditions.  Accordingly, the course objectives are four:

1) to acquaint students with the "canonical" texts of  classical rhetoric and with their historical and cultural context;
2)  to familiarize students with the critical debates regarding the status, meaning, and significance of these texts;
3) to compare Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions with other ancient rhetorical traditions;
4) to enable students to use classical rhetorical traditions critically to inform their work as scholars and teachers.

We will proceed both chronologically, beginning with the sophists and concluding with Quintilian, and synchronically, reading simultaneously forward to consider classical texts in
terms of modern criticism and backward to consider later classical texts (such as Plato's Gorgias) in terms of earlier ones (such as Gorgias' On Nature).

Throughout the course, we will consider various inter-related sets of questions regarding:

 1) Rhetoric and History -  What historiographical problems and possibilities do classical rhetorics present in terms of canon formation, revisionist or subversive histories?  What do
classical rhetorics have to offer contemporary rhetorical theory in general and composition studies in particular? How has composition studies appropriated and deployed classical
rhetoric?
2) Rhetoric and Philosophy - How has the ancient quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy shaped the status and evolution of each?  (Stanley Fish says the "history of Western
thought could be written as the history of this quarrel.")  How do various classical rhetoricians conceptualize language and its relationship to reality, truth, and knowledge?  What are
the classical roots of the contrary notions of rhetoric as epistemic and rhetoric as the "dress of thought"?
3) Rhetoric and Poetics - What effects have followed from the separation of rhetoric and poetics?  What might be gained by eliminating or rethinking this division?
4)  Rhetoric, Orality, and Literacy -  How did the cultural context which produced early rhetorical practices and theories, a context in which primary orality was just giving way to
literacy, affect those practices and theories?  In turn, what do these practices and theories have to say to a culture shaped by "advanced" literacy and secondary orality?  What
insights, if any, does classical rhetoric offer in terms of the current debates about literacy?
5)  Rhetorical Education - What is the relationship between rhetoric as an activity and as an object of study?  What does this relationship imply for teachers of rhetoric?  That is, what
does it mean or ought it mean to teach rhetoric?  What are the ethical responsibilities of the teacher of rhetoric?

Required Primary Texts: (Tentative list)

Sprague, Rosamond  The Older Sophists
Isocrates  Against the Sophists, Antidosis, *Helen
Plato      Gorgias,  Protagoras, Phaedrus, Seventh Letter
Aristotle  On Rhetoric  (George Kennedy trans.)
Cicero     De Oratore, Books I & II
Quintilian On the Teaching of Speaking and Writing

Required Secondary Texts: (Tentative list)
Enos, Richard  Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle
Jarratt, Susan.  Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric  Refigured
Neel, Jasper  Plato, Derrida, and Writing
Vitanza, Victor  Writing Histories of Rhetoric

Course Packet

Recommended Secondary Texts:
Connors, Robert, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford.  Essays on  Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse
*Neel, Jasper.  Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing  in America
 *Schiappa, Edward.  Protagoras and Logos