ENG 5933 Spring 2019 McElroy

What do Pablo Picasso, Gilles Deleuze, Miley Cyrus, termite colonies, Rube Goldberg machines, and Facebook have in common? As we will see, they all deal in/with assemblages: from early 20th century artistry to 21st century ontologies, assemblage has manifested in a diverse variety of practices, concepts, and ways of be/come/ing. In this class, we will survey these various manifestations in order to better understand the ways the term has been used—that is, the rhetorics about assemblage—across movements and disciplines. Meanwhile, we will pursue the question, posed by Alex Reid and others, of what it might mean to ‘conceive of composing as a process involving the participation of human and nonhuman objects’—that is, to frame rhetorical action as a function of assemblages. Through our readings, discussions, activities, and assignments, we will ‘experiment in contact with the real’ toward an ‘expansion of possibilities’ for rhetorical action, particularly as we turn our attention to the social-media assemblages functioning in our private lives, our institutions, and our political discourse (Deleuze & Guattari; Shavino). Ultimately, we will seek to determine whether assemblage rhetorics live up to the succinct promise offered by Leslie Dema, as ‘a practical and simple-to-implement way of participating in the world.’