Participants in this seminar will engage contemporary rhetorical theory as it its own distinct area of inquiry as well as in relation to such topics as contemporary political discourse, posthumanist thought, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, gender, disability, and racial violence. Our class will be fully online and asynchronous (graded deliverables will be due at three separate points in the semester). While we will attend to the history of rhetorical theory and how it has changed over time, our major texts will be book-length studies in rhetorical theory published in the last five years:
Ira Allen’s The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory (U of Pittsburgh P, 2018); Casey Boyle’s Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice (Ohio State UP, 2018); Kenneth Burke’s War of Words (U of California P, 2018); M. Lane Bruner’s Rhetorical Unconsciousness and Political Psychoanalysis (U of South Carolina P, 2019); Dana L. Cloud’s Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture (Ohio State UP, 2018); Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (Southern Illinois UP, 2018); Debra Hawhee’s Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (U of Chicago P, 2016); Jenell Johnson’s American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History (U of Michigan Press, 2016); Ersula J. Ore’s Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (UP of Mississippi, 2019); Robin Reames’ Seeing and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory (U of Chicago P, 2018); Scott Stroud’s Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric (Penn State UP, 2016); the edited collection Precarious Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2018); Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics (U of South Carolina P, 2014).