SpCom 503
Fall 2001
Thomas W. Benson

Seminar in Rhetorical Criticism

A graduate seminar in the practice of rhetorical criticism, with an emphasis on the working practices of critics of primarily oral, written, and media texts in the discipline of speech communication. Students will read widely in rhetorical criticism and interpretive theory and will write an extended seminar paper. The seminar is conceived as an intensive, advanced workshop in rhetorical criticism and as an intensive, comprehensive review of critical practice in the discipline.

Major topics:

Preliminary Considerations: Theory, Scope, and Method in Rhetorical Criticism.

Rhetoric as a Way of Doing: Rhetoric as situated, instrumental action.

Rhetorical Criticism and the Crisis of Neo-Aristotelianism.

Public Address as a Field of Study and as a Field of Activity.

Rhetoric as a way of knowing.

Ideology, Dramatism , Fantasy, Myth, and Narrative as ways of rhetorical knowing.

Rhetoric as a way of being.

Rhetoric, cultural politics, and the public.

Genre, the constraints of form, and the rhetorical resources of language.

Interpreting the rhetoric of movements.

The issue of theory in criticism; the criticism of politics; and the politics of academic gatekeeping.