Note: I want to be clear that this is not a "coverage" course. There are many scandalous ommissions, a few of the most obvious being Marx, Heidegger, Lacan, and, in a rhetoric class: Kenneth Burke. I'll make every attempt to bring these and other voices into the discussion whenever possible. But I also invite you to bring them in. You may want to make Burke's A Grammar of Motives your cultural artifact, for example, or Heidegger's Being and Time or What is Called Thinking

Books:
Milan Kundera. The Joke
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals
Judith Butler. Gender Trouble
Jacques Derrida. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
Alexander Garcia Düttmann. At Odds With AIDS: Thinking and Talking about a Virus
Avital Ronell. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania

Articles or Chapters (I'll get these to you):

[optional: ARS Website. Position papers on the question of rhetorical agency.]

Ballif, Michelle. Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure. Introduction.

[optional: Ballif, Michelle. "Seducing Composition: A Challenge to Identity-Disclosing Pedagogies." Rhetoric Review 16.1 (Fall 1997): 76-91.

Biesecker, Barbara. ("Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance." Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110-130.

[optional: Biesecker, Barbara. "Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century." Quarterly Journal of Speech 88.4 (2002): 393-409.]

Freud. Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Geisler, Cheryl. "How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?" Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (Summer 2004): 9-17.

[optional: Gaonkar, Dilip. "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." Southern Communication Journal 58 (4): 258-295.]

Gronbeck, Bruce. " Musings on the Emptiness and Dreariness of Postmodern Critique." Burke Repository. http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/engl/dblakesley/burke/gronbeck.html#fnB23

Leff, Michael. "Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric." Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003): 135-147.

Levinas, Emmanuel. "Substitution." Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Poulakos, Takis. "Human Agency" in Speaking for the Polis.

Ronell, Avital. "Trauma TV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska P, 1994.305-327.

Vitanza, Victor. "The Hermeneutics of Abandonment." Parallax 4/4 (1998): 123-39.

[optional: Vitanza, Victor. Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric.]