ENG 5028 Fall 2021 Fleckenstein

The latter part of the twentieth century is marked by what neopragmatist Richard Rorty has called the “linguistic turn,” where we live the world historically and know it linguistically. Language is the tool of tool in our cultural toolbox, a move that realigns poetics, aesthetics, and the architectonic arts of rhetoric. While Rorty announced this linguistic turn in 1964, philosopher I.A. Richards made a similar argument for the centrality of rhetoric 30 years earlier. Thus, our entry into modernism during the early decades of the twentieth century and our entry into post-modernism during the latter decades of the twentieth century can be characterized as a rhetorical as well as a linguistic turn.

Our goal in this course is to identify configurations of twentieth- and twenty-first century rhetorics, trace their Western roots, and interrogate both roots and rhetorics. We will do that by exploring the play of truth, knowledge, power, and performance across various theories of rhetoric, seeking to create a dialectic rather than a binary between Western and non-Western, masculinist and feminist, rational and nonrational, discursive and material.

Requirements include four response essays (2-3 pages single spaced), a midterm project, a “Did You Know?” presentation, and a final seminar paper that evolves from your midterm project.