ENC 3021 Fall 2024 - Ayers

ENC 3021 is one of three core courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) track, and as such, the course works to provide a foundation for the major. Studying the history of rhetoric provides students with foundational rhetorical principles and building blocks, crucial for writers, editors, and evolving scholars. This course introduces students to key concepts in the study of rhetoric; to frameworks useful for the analysis of texts, events, communication, and other phenomena; and to the principles of rhetoric in contexts across media and cultures. We will trace rhetorical histories and practices. Although this course offers a brief survey of significant Western rhetorical theories and practices from ancient Greece to contemporary culture, it emphasizes the evolution of rhetorical knowledges and meaning making processes across/between cultures, identities, boundaries, and borders. We will consider knowledges, texts, histories, and identities as subjective, partial, incomplete, and ever-changing. To that end, rather than tracing one [Western, white] rhetorical tradition, we will identify and study the histories, theories, and practices of various rhetorics. We will study rhetorical theory as a scholarly conversation, paying attention to the various interventions and interruptions that have contributed to and disrupted the question “What is rhetoric?”