What is rhetoric? What is the history and theory of rhetoric? What do you hope to gain from this course?

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It has to do with the way we use language to incite, excite, convey, impress, cajole. Persuasion, as an art, has many different intentions. Rhetoric and the study of rhetoric have to do with how we parse out those intentions rather than just reacting. What designs does an author have on us as readers? Why do we feel so stimulated by certain orators, even when the content is not always stimulating? I’ve long believed that you cannot have control over the way someone reacts to an impetus. We are all too wound up with prior experiences and emotions for even the color blue to mean the same thing to you and you and you. But the study of rhetoric helps to streamline this wildness.

I enjoyed reading about the long history of rhetoric juxtaposed with the relatively short history of the English Department. I especially enjoyed our discussion of the Four Stages of Composition (product, process, post-process, beyond-post-process) because it gave me a workable framework in which to understand what I’m currently teaching and how I’m teaching it.

I also wondered how the decline in Classics since around 1883 and the rise of modern languages has affected our love for rhyme and myth. Rhyme and myth, so powerful in the Classics, are obviously still strong components of modern literature, but in less obvious forms.

I always struggle to read about uncertainty around “sufficient substance of English as an academic subject.” What could possibly be more important than the way we communicate with each other? What could be more nuanced, more exciting, more tied to every other field? Especially as we move through an era where people are communicating more than ever, universities have a responsibility to “hold down the fort” of academic English. How can we continue to improve upon a subject if we are not in touch with its history?

During this course, I hope to better understand how and why we make each other feel, what the “science of communication” is. Especially as a poet, I’m interested in why so few students read poetry. Why are they willing to spend hours with a movie or television show, or weeks with a book, but not sit with a poem for a few moments? What is the difference in transfer of emotion, of intuition? Through the study of rhetoric and its history, I think I can better understand how this gap widened, and how to help narrow it again.