Speech Communication 412: Speech Criticism Spring 2000 309 Sparks Building Tuesday – Thursday 9:45 – 11:00 a.m. LISTSERV: L-SPCOM412-1@LISTS.PSU.EDU (SpCom 412, Spring 2000 -- Speech Criticism) class photos

Professor Thomas W. Benson 227 Sparks Building 814-238-5277 email: t3b@psu.edu office hours: Thursday 4:00-5:30 and by appt ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jennifer Borda 316 Sparks Building, #9 863-0127 mailto:jlb27@psu.edu

OBJECTIVES Speech Communication 412 is an upper-level course in the critical analysis of rhetoric. Students will become familiar with a selection of significant American speeches and other rhetorical texts that have both stimulated and resisted social change. Intensive classroom study of selected speeches will be extended in on-line discussion of assigned analytical questions. A major part of the course experience will be the preparation of a multi-section research paper on a significant American speech. Various sections of the paper will be submitted as the course proceeds, and each student will then assemble the sections into a final paper that considers the speech's form, themes, setting, and responses--both immediate, popular reactions and later scholarly analyses. The course thus provides an overview of America's rhetorical memory, an opportunity for reflection and discussion about the role of persuasion in American life, and support for students to develop their analytical and writing skills.

We will study how speeches act in the social world--how they shape issues and appeal for judgment, create identities for speakers and their audiences, and construct perceptions of time, space, and the human condition.

SCHEDULE

(1) Tuesday 11 January	Introduction. Overview of the course.
(2) Thursday 13 January	Who may speak? Race, sex, religion, and the right to speak. "Pastoral Letter" of the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts; and Sarah M. Grimke's response to the pastoral letter, in Reid, 363-372.
(3) Tuesday 18 January	Who may speak, and when is the right time to speak? Race, class, religion, and the right to speak. Frederick Douglass, "A Plea for Free Speech in Boston" on-line text at the Douglass Project; Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," available on-line at the Martin Luther King, Jr., papers project at Stanford University. Please print copies of both documents and bring them to class for discussion.
(4) Thursday 20 January	Creating Rhetorical Identity--Time, Space, Eternity, and the American mission. Link to slides on rhetoric of identity Samuel Danforth, "A Brief Recognition of New-England's Errand into the Wilderness," in Reid. Choice of Topic for class project is due.
(5) Tuesday 25 January	Creating Rhetorical Identity--Time, Space, and Patriotic Memory. Daniel Webster, "Bunker Hill Monument Address," in Reid. portrait of Daniel Webster, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. The Bunker Hill Monument is shown in the background. Dartmouth College maintains a Daniel Webster page with other images and the texts of some speeches. Here is a link to a map of Boston showing the location of the Bunker Hill Monument, the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill and Webster's speech 50 years later, on 17 June 1825. Recommended reading and viewing: President Ronald Reagan's speech at Pointe de Hoc on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1984, available as a real-player sound video and a text version of Reagan's speech at Omaha Beach (note that the actual date is 1984, not, as stated in the linked text, 1994); here is a link to a photograph from the Reagan Library of President Reagan delivering the speech at Pointe de Hoc. Prompt for listserv discussion -- compare Webster's speech with Reagan's.
(6) Thursday 27 January	Creating Rhetorical Identity--the politics of optimism and the identity of the self made American. Russell Conwell, "Acres of Diamonds," in Reid; James Hedley, "The Sunny Side of Life," at the Douglass archive. For more on Russell Conwell, who founded Temple University, visit the Temple University web site. Russell Conwell
(7) Tuesday 1 February	Paper 1 -- Setting the scene, sketching the rhetorical situation.
(8) Thursday 3 February	Creating Rhetorical Identity--the limits of voice and the politics of silence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Solitude of Self," in Reid.
(9) Tuesday 8 February	(Re)Creating the Audience The Declaration as rhetorical form: The Declaration of Independence (1776); The Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833); Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls woman's rights convention (1848).
(10) Thursday 10 February	The Audience: Who it is, what it can do. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1st Inaugural Address (in Reid); and First Fireside Chat--"Fireside Chat on the Banking Crisis" available on-line at Texas A&M University
(11) Tuesday 15 February	Paper 2 -- Constructing Identities
(12) Thursday 17 February	The Structure of Controversy I: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the Question of Slavery (Reid, 431-445)
(13) Tuesday 22 February	The Structure of Controversy II: Democratic Primary Debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, New Hampshire, 5 January 2000.
(14) Thursday 24 February	The Structure of Controversy III: Republican Primary Debate, 6 January 2000.
(15) Tuesday 29 February	The Structure of Controversy IV: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois on the Politics of Race in America (Reid, 563-577)
(16) Thursday 2 March	The Structure of Controversy V: James Farmer and Malcolm X on Separation versus Integration (Reid, 784-803).
6 - 10 March	SPRING BREAK
(17) Tuesday 14 March	The Structure of Controversy VI: Testifying on the Equal Rights Amendment--Gloria Steinem (1970) and Phyllis Schlafly (1983) (Reid, 816-829). Phyllis Schlafly (1996) (AP Photo) Gloria Steinem (1997) (AP Photo)
(18) Thursday 16 March	Time and Rhetoric. Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July," in Reid, 387-392.
(19) Tuesday 21 March	Time and Rhetoric. Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address," in Reid, 480-482.
(20) Thursday 23 March	Paper 3: Structural Analysis.
(21) Tuesday 28 March	Time and Rhetoric. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," in Reid, 777-783.
(22) Thursday 30 March	Time to Fight. Woodrow Wilson, "War Message" (2 April 1917), in Reid, 689-698. Wilson delivers the War Message at a joint session of Congress, 2 April 1917
(23) Tuesday 4 April	Time to Fight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "The Arsenal of Democracy" (29 December 1940) and Burton K. Wheeler, "America's Present Emergency" (30 December 1940), in Reid, 724-740.
(24) Thursday 6 April	Time to Fight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "War Message" (8 December 1941), in Reid, 741-743.
(25) Tuesday 11 April	Time and Progress. Mary Church Terrell, "The Progress of Colored Women" (1898) from the Gifts of Speech archive at Sweet Briar College; and Theodore Roosevelt, "The Man with the Muck Rake" (15 April 1906), in Reid, 673-681.
(26) Thursday 13 April	Paper 4. Rhetorical Time.
(27) Tuesday 18 April	The Rhetoric of American Space. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, "The March of the Flag"; Ronald Reagan, on the Challenger Disaster (28 January 1986). Ronald Reagan and his staff watching a videotape replay of the Challenger explosion, The White House, 28 January 1986.
(28) Thursday 20 April	The Rhetoric of American Space. Henry Grady, "The New South" (21 December 1886), in Reid, 551-559.
(29) Tuesday 25 April	The Rhetoric of American Space in the Cold War. Harry Truman, "The Truman Doctrine" (12 March 1947); Ronald Reagan, "The Evil Empire" (8 March 1983).
(30) Thursday 27 April	Study day -- no class.
1-5 May -- FINAL EXAMS	Semester Paper--the final, compiled version of the paper is due on 1 May. The paper should have a title page; an introduction previewing your major lines of analysis; a brief biographical account of the speaker; an analysis of the rhetorical setting of the speech from contemporary and academic accounts and from the speech itself; a section on the speech's depiction of speaker, audience, and other; a section on structure, argument, and style; a section on issues of rhetorical time; a section on metaphors of space and place; a report, if appropriate, on contemporary responses to the speech;and a conclusion summarizing your findings.

 

Required Textbook

Ronald F. Reid, American Rhetorical Discourse, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995).

Electronic Reserves

A selection of supplementary readings in rhetorical criticism is available on electronic reserve. Click on the link and then find your way to the listing for Speech Communication 412. You may find some of these readings interesting supplements to our assigned readings, and useful as background in preparing your semester papers.

Internet Resources

 Some of the texts we will be reading in the course are available as electronic text on the Internet. Several of the readings for this course are archived on-line at the Douglass Project of Northwestern University. To get to those documents, click on the Douglass Project.

For other on-line resources, see

American Public Address, Speech Texts (Bernadette Mink, University of Arkansas)

Allyn and Bacon speech archive

Southern States Communication Association -- Rhetoric and Public Address Division

The History Channel -- speeches

Library of Congress -- American Memory project 

National Archives and Records Administration -- NARA (you can also use this route to find your way to any of the presidential libraries)

Voices of the Civil Rights Era

Program in Presidential Rhetoric, Texas A&M University -- speech archive

Nineteenth Century Documents Project

Gifts of Speech at Sweet Briar College

Women and Social Movements in the United States at SUNY Binghamton -- a collection of documents in women's history, 1830-1930

George Washington University, Speech and Transcript Center

Locating Speeches -- at the Penn State Libraries

Grades

Final grades will be based on class participation and papers.

Participation in class discussion and class listserv -- 20%

paper (1) -- Context and rhetorical situation.-- 10%

paper (2) -- Constructing identities -- 10%

paper (3) -- Formal and structural analysis -- 10%

paper (4) -- Rhetorical time -- 10%

Final Paper -- 40%

Attendance

 Attendance is expected. Readings are due on the date indicated in the syllabus, and students are expected to be ready to discuss them. Please bring to class the assigned readings for the day. Failure to attend will affect final grades. This class is based on a model of cooperation, participation, and active learning. Your work is to learn about rhetorical criticism, and also to teach others through your participation in discussion of course readings.

Academic Integrity

All work submitted for the course is assumed to be your own unless otherwise indicated. Violations of this standard will result in failure of the assignment and possibly in failure of the course or sanctions by University discipliinary authorities. You may of course discuss your work with other students, but all work that is quoted or paraphrased should be clearly identified with the citation systems described in the MLA Handbook. Please consult me if you are in doubt about how to handle these issues. Under no circumstances submit for credit in this course any work that has been submitted in other courses. In selecting a text for critical analysis for your paper, do not write without special permission about a text that is part of the syllabus of other courses you have taken. See also the parallel discussion of plagiarism in student writing maintained on the English department web site.

Papers

You are asked to write a series of papers, compiled and extended into a final semester paper, on a single, significant American speech. For this assignment, you may choose any speech in the Reid anthology that is not otherwise assigned in the syllabus, or any of the following speeches: major speeches by American presidents; significant speeches on civil rights, woman's suffrage and women's rights, American reform movements, and international affairs. For help in finding a speech to write about, you may use the Internet resources listed on this syllabus, but be sure to track down a complete printed copy of the speech from an authoritative source, as on-line copies are sometimes abridged without notice. Choose a speech of sufficient significance and substance to sustain the sort of extended analysis that is called for in the paper assignments.

We strongly advise that you check with the instructors before choosing your speech.

A series of papers on the speech are due according to the following schedule:

Choice of Topic. 1 page. Due Thursday 20 January. Identify briefly the speech you propose to work on during the semester, the time and place of its delivery, and an authoritative printed source for the text.

Situation -- the historical context; the speaker's description of the situation. 5-8 pages. Due Tuesday, 1 February.

Constructing Identities of self, audience, and others, based on close analysis of the text. 5-8 pages. Due Tuesday, 15 February.

Formal and Structural Analysis. An outline of the speech and an analysis of structure (sequence, progression, parallelism, repetiton, argument) and language. 5-8 pages (in addition to the outline). Thursday 23 March.

Rhetorical Time. How the speech places itself in time and structures the temporal experience of listening to the speech. 5-8 pages. Thursday 13 April.

Final Paper. A revision, compilation, and extension of the previous papers. Due 1 May 2000.

In preparing your paper, you should do some library research--in the paper on situation, you should cite at least three printed sources reporting your research. Your final paper may contain a substantial number of citations to historical, biographical, and rhetorical research, and to contemporary press accounts. Citations should be in the format described by the MLA Handbook. Help with this citation style is available online in A Guide for Writing Research Papers at the Capital-Community Technical College; for other citation help see also the online reference shelf section at the Penn State University Libraries.

Access

 "The Pennsylvania State University is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, admissions, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined by University policy or by state or federal authorities. The Pennsylvania State University does not discriminate against any person because of age, ancestry, color, disability or handicap, national origin, race, religious creed, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status." Penn State University Affirmative Action Office.

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