When: W 2-5pm
Where: PAR 8A

In "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class," James Berlin exposed the extent to which the teaching of composition is the teaching of a worldview: every rhetoric of composing presumes and propagates a particular relationship among the writer, the reader, language, and "reality." In the field of Rhetoric and Composition, this relationship is almost always a foundational one, pushing, for example, the intentionality of the subject and the representational value of language. We will begin this course by examining the various humanist presumptions and motivations grounding current traditionalist, cognitivist, expressivist, social epistemic, and (even) social-expressivist rhetorics on writing. The aim of the course, however, is to move beyond the typical boundaries of the field to familiarize ourselves with contemporary theoretical challenges to Rhet/Comp's major rhetorics of composing, to encounter some of the non-humanist, non-representational theories of writing that the field has yet to embrace--or, often, even to acknowledge. Paradoxically, these writing theories stress the profound ethical and communitarian value of writing after the crises in legitimation and representation, after each of rhetoric's fundamental signifiers--writer, reader, message--have been exposed as catachrestic, as non-substantial concept-metaphors. Indeed, these rhetorics on writing suggest that it is precisely inasmuch as writing is ungrounded, inasmuch as it exceeds and overwrites the tiny bounds of the subject's intentions, that it involves the exposition of "community," that it testifies to and affects the possibilities for being-together-in-the-world.

Attendance Policy. I suppose it needs to be said: Your grade will suffer if you don't show up for class. Not because I have a thing for attendance but because if you miss class, we miss what you should have been there to offer us. Your significant contribution to class discussions will be expected.