ENC3021 - Fall 2026 - Shambach

What does it mean to communicate — really communicate — across time, culture, and media? This course invites you to ask that question seriously. We will trace the development of rhetorical thought across roughly 2,500 years, beginning with the foundational texts of Greek and Roman rhetoric and moving through a rich, contested, and often surprising history of ideas about how language, image, and symbol shape the worlds we inhabit.

Rather than treating rhetoric as a fixed set of rules for persuasion, we will approach it as a living process — something that evolves, travels, and transforms depending on who is using it and why. We will read canonical texts alongside rhetorics rooted in feminist, Black, Indigenous, and other traditions that have too often been left out of the story, and we will explore visual and digital rhetorics, asking how meaning-making works beyond the written word.

Throughout, we will return to a central question: what can rhetoric do? How has it been used to consolidate power — and to challenge it? How do ideas from centuries ago continue to circulate in conversations today?

By the end of the semester, you will have a working vocabulary of key rhetorical concepts and theorists, experience applying them to real texts and case studies, and a new way of seeing how communication works in the world around you. No prior background required — just bring your curiosity.