C505 Productive
Criticism of Political Rhetoric
Spring 2007
Professor: Robert Ivie
Time &
Place: Monday, 3:00 – 5:30 p.m., Mottier 112
Office
Hours: Wednesday, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m., and
by appointment, Mottier 203
Office
Phone and E-mail: 855-5467; rivie@indiana.edu
Purpose of the Course
We
conceptualize rhetoric in this course as an act of engaged cultural critique,
focusing on the problem of the scapegoat, or demonized Other,
and the corresponding challenge of articulating a more inclusive democratic
culture. We ask how the scholarship of
the rhetorical critic might contribute to a more democratic practice, that is,
how an agonistic rhetoric might enact democratic pluralism.
We draw on
Kenneth Burke’s dramatism as a framework for
rhetorical critique of tragic rituals of victimization and rites of redemptive
violence. Burke’s treatment of the comic
corrective is complemented by Lewis Hyde’s representation of the mythic trickster
and by Michel de Certeau’s treatment of the tactical
tricks of everyday life, and is extended by Frank Lentricchia
into the realm of social criticism.
In addition
to conceptualizing a practice of culturally engaged rhetorical critique, we
undertake individual projects in productive criticism designed for presentation
and publication in scholarly venues.
Assigned Books
Kenneth
Burke, Attitudes Toward
History, 3rd. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
Kenneth
Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd
ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice
of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
Lewis Hyde,
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998).
Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Schedule of Meetings
Note: Please complete your reading of the
designated essays and books before each class meeting in order to facilitate
optimum discussion of the material.
1/8 Democracy, Dehumanization, and Engaged
Rhetorical Critique
Read: Robert L. Ivie, “Productive Criticism
Then and Now,” American Journal of
Communication 4 (Spring 2001): on
line http://www.acjournal.org/
Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘
Robert L. Ivie, “The Rhetoric of Bush’s ‘War’ on Evil,” KB
Journal 1 (Fall 2004): on line http://www.kbjournal.org
Martha Solomon (Watson), “The
Rhetoric of Dehumanization: An Analysis
of Medical Reports of the
Robert L. Ivie,
“Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26.1 (2005): 55-65. (Available through IU library’s online
full-text journals)
1/15 MLK
Day (reading but no class meeting):
Intellectual Roots of Engaged Rhetorical Critique
Read: William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, Critical Questions: Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of
Discourse and Media (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 3-70.
Terry Eagleton,
“Political Criticism,” in Literary Theory,
2nd ed. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 169-89.
Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling,
“American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude,” in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies,
ed. Thomas Rosteck (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 137-67.
James F. Klumpp
and Thomas A. Hollihan, “Rhetorical Criticism as
Moral Action,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 75 (1989): 84-97.
Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-111.
Michael Calvin McGee, “The
‘Ideograph’: A Link Between
Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal
of Speech 66 (1980): 1-16.
Philip Wander, “The Ideological
Turn in Modern Criticism,” Central States
Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1-18.
Philip Wander and Steven Jenkins,
“Rhetoric, Society, and the Critical Response,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 441-50.
1/22 Rhetorical Agonistics and Democratic
Pluralism: The Problem of the Other
Read: Iris Marion Young,
“Communication and the Other: Beyond
Deliberative Democracy,” in Intersecting
Voices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 60-74.
Chantal Mouffe,
“For an Agonistic Model of Democracy,” Chapter 4 of her The Democratic Paradox (
Robert L Ivie,
“Speaking
Democratically in the Backwash of War:
Lessons from Brigance on Rhetoric and Human
Relations,” unpublished manuscript.
Erik Doxtader, “Reconciliation—A Rhetorical Conception,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (November 2003): 267-292.
More Intellectual Roots:
Read: Thomas Rosteck,
“Form and Cultural Context in Rhetorical Criticism: Re-reading Wrage,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84
(1998): 471-498.
Ernest J. Wrage,
“Public Address: A Study in Social and
Intellectual History,” Quarterly Journal
of Speech, 33 (1947): 451-457.
1/29 Burkean Criticism
for Social Change
Read: Frank Lentricchia,
Criticism and Social Change
Raymie E. McKerrow and Jeffrey St. John, “Review Essay: The Public Intellectual and the Role(s) of
Criticism, Quarterly Journal of Speech
92 (August 2006): 310-319.
2/5 Project Proposals: Presentations and Discussion
More Intellectual Roots, Continued
Read: Michael C. Leff, “Things Made by
Words: Reflections on Textual
Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
78 (1992): 223-231.
Dilip Parameshwar
Gaonkar, “Object and Method in Rhetorical
Criticism: From Wichelns
to Leff and McGee,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 290-316.
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Deconstruction and Theoretical Analysis: The Case of Paul de Man,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73
(1987): 482-528.
James
Arnt Aune, “Beyond
Deconstruction: The Symbol and Social
Reality,” Southern Speech Communication
Journal 48 (1983): 255-268.
2/12 Project Proposals: Presentations and Discussion Continued
Read: Deepa Kumar, “Media, War, and
Propaganda: Strategies of Information
Management During the 2003
Michael
L. Buterworth, “Ritual in the ‘
Bradford
Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical From and Commemorative Politics on
September 11, 2002,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 92 (February 2006): 1-26.
Michael
Kaplan, “Imagining Citizenship as Friendship in The Big Chill,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 91 (November 2005):
423-455.
2/19 Group Discussion (WSCA)
Read: Stephen John Hartnett and Daniel Mark Larson, “’Tonight Another Man Will Die’:
Crime, Violence, and the Master Tropes of Contemporary Arguments about the
Death Penalty,” Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (December 2006): 263-287.
Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Seriality and
Multicultural Dissent in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (June 2006):
141-161.
Darrel
Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and
Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (May 2006):
174-201.
Stephanie
Houston Grey, “Ally McBeal
as Allegory: Setting the Eating
Disordered Subject in Opposition to Feminism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (December 2006): 288-306.
2/26 Rhetorical Critic as Trickster
Read: Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes
This World
John Arthos,
Jr., “The Shaman-Trickster’s Art of Misdirection: The Rhetoric of Farrakhan and the Million
Men,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87
(February 2001): 41-60.
Robert L. Ivie,
"Democratic Dissent and the Trick of Rhetorical Critique," Cultural
Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 5 (August 2005): 276-93.
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive
Democracy,” in Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of
the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1996), pp. 31-45.
3/5 Rhetorical Critique and the Tactics of
Democratic Dissent
Read: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Robert L. Ivie,
“Academic Freedom and Antiwar Dissent in a Democratic Idiom,” College Literature 33 (Fall 2006):
76-92.
Sheldon S. Wolin,
“Postmodern Democracy: Virtual or
Fugitive?” in his Politics and
Vision: Continuity and Innovation in
Western Political Thought, Expanded ed. (
3/12 Burke’s Comic Corrective
Read: Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, pp. 3-175
Steven Schwarze, “Environmental
Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech,
92 (August 2006): 239-261.
William H. Rueckert, “Comic Criticism: Attitudes toward History, 1937-84,” in Encounters with Kenneth Burke
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994), pp. 110-31.
3/19 Burke on Analyzing Symbolic Form
Read: Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, pp. 179-344, 377-434
3/26 Spring Break; no class
4/2 Burke on Analyzing Symbolic Form,
continued
Read: Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of
Literary Form, pp. 1-190; 234-57; 293-304.
4/9 From Metaphor to Archetype, Myth, and
Ritual
Read: Robert L. Ivie, “Metaphor and the Rhetorical
Invention of Cold War ‘Idealists,’” Communication
Monographs 54 (1987): 165-182.
Robert L. Ivie,
“Fighting Terror by Rite of Redemption
and Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007):
forthcoming.
Michael
Osborn, “Archetypal Metaphor in Rhetoric:
The Light-Dark Family,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 33 (1967): 115-126.
Janice
Hocker Rushing, “Evolution of ‘The New Frontier’ in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal
Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 1-25.
Martha
Solomon (Watson), “The ‘Positive’ Woman’s Journey: A Mythic Analysis of the Rhetoric of STOP
ERA,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65
(1979): 262-274.
Janice
Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz,
“The Gods Must be Crazy: The Denial of
Descent in Academic Scholarship,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 85 (August 1999): 229-246.
Joshua
Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination
and Its Decline in
4/16 Panel #1: Paper Presentations
4/23 Panel #2: Paper Presentations
Graded Assignments
Weekly
Discussion Participation and Reading Summaries (25%)
You are
asked to participate actively in the weekly discussions of the assigned
readings and will be assigned to present a three-minute synopsis of one of the
assigned readings on all or most of the scheduled class meetings. The synopsis should be designed to stimulate
class discussion of the reading.
Project
Proposal and Final Paper Presentation (25%)
The project
proposal should be submitted to me in written form the day you are assigned to
discuss it in class (either 2/5 or 2/12).
Your presentation in class should be designed to take 10-15 minutes,
preferably in an extemporaneous manner (as distinguished from an impromptu or
manuscript presentation), covering the subject of your study, your guiding
question and/or the working thesis you would like to test, the documents and
other materials you plan to examine, the issues of dehumanization/othering, democratic pluralism, rhetorical agonistics, etc.
that are being featured in your study, the scholarly literature most relevant
to your study, and an explanation of the critical approach you expect to adopt
as your method of study. The paper
version of your presentation should be 2,500 – 3,000 words.
Your
presentation of the final paper should be 15 minutes in length in the style of
a convention presentation. You will be
assigned to speak on either 4/16 or 4/23
Term Paper
(50%)
As a
project in engaged rhetorical critique designed for presentation at a
professional conference and submission to a scholarly journal, this paper
should be 7,000 – 8,000 words plus endnotes or list of sources cited if using
parenthetical documentation style (follow MLA or Chicago Manual of
Style). This paper should reflect the orientation of the course in its selection
of problem, topic, and approach. It is
due on the day you are assigned to make your panel presentation (4/16 or 4/23).