This course is designed to facilitate original research by class
members on the topic of democratic dissent considered as a necessity
of healthy democratic culture.  It focuses throughout the semester
on each class member’s original research for the course.

Each student will develop a specific research project throughout the
semester on a subject of his or her choice related to the focus of
the seminar.  Subjects for research can be historical or
contemporary but in either case should focus on the practice of
dissent within U.S. political culture or compared to U.S. political
culture.   Seminar meetings throughout the semester will feature
discussions of ongoing student research projects intertwined with
common readings.  Members of the class will lead discussions about
their evolving research project at various points throughout the
term, culminating in a final research paper for each student.

Readings will provide grounded accounts of dissent to explore
through discussion the confluence of political philosophy and
rhetorical practice.  The politics of agonistic pluralism extended
to rhetorical constructions of identification and division provide
the basis of a working notion of consubstantial rivalry.

Consubstantial rivalry is an idea emerging from my forthcoming book
[Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, in press)].  It is a notion that
focuses critical attention precisely on the constructive role to be
played by perspective and rhetoric in the management of necessarily
hierarchical relations within and between diverse polities and
perspectives.  It gives us added purchase on the production of
threatening images of domestic and foreign Others, a practice that
stifles dissent by associating difference with deviance (and even
with malevolence) and demands consensus and quiescence as a mark of
allegiance, loyalty, and virtue.  And it points to how democratic
dissent can be otherwise privileged by constructing rivals as
concurrently divided from and identified with one another, that is,
as simultaneously adverse and complementary, associated and
dissociated, similar and dissimilar in varying degrees.
Constructing appropriately flexible linguistic boundaries to produce
intersecting attitudes rather than rigid categorical distinctions of
identity and difference enables dissent to perform the democratic
function of holding delimited perspectives accountable to one
another.

While I have not made a final selection of readings for the course,
examples of the kinds of books we will read in common, in order to
stimulate discussion and research, include:

Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions
of Antebellum America (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2002).

Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, The Price of Dissent:  Testimonies to
Political Repression in America (Berkeley:  University of California
Press, 2001).

Randall B. Woods, ed., Vietnam and the American Political
Tradition:  The Politics of Dissent (New York:  Cambridge University
Press, 2003).

Phil Scranton, ed., Beyond September 11:  An Anthology of Dissent
(London:  Pluto Press, 2002).

Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, ed., Dissent from the
Homeland:  Essays after September 11 (Durham, NC:  Duke University
Press, 2002).