ENC 3021 Spring 2018 Thomsen

ENC 3021 is one of three core courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) major, 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 be tracing Western rhetoric as it has evolved and changed throughout its 2500-year history. Although this course will offer a survey of significant Western rhetorical theories and practices from ancient Greece to contemporary culture, it will also emphasize the evolution of rhetorical knowledges and meaning making processes across/between cultures, identities, boundaries, and borders. We will begin to consider knowledges, texts, histories, and identities as subjective, partial, incomplete, and ever-changing. To that end, we will study deeply the foundations of the western rhetorical tradition, but we will also build upon this material by studying the various interventions and interruptions that have contributed to and disrupted that tradition.