One key contribution that rhetorical study has made to contemporary disciplinarity is the idea that perhaps time, whether chronos (linear, watch time)Ā or kairos (opportunity, situational time), isn’t a particularly useful method for understanding how ideas come into being, how they operate, how they proliferate or how they move into disuse. In fact, rhetorical study continues to suggest that while any historical moment may privilege certain ideas about the world, about language, about writing, and about text, each of these moments also contains a host of resistant, subversive, or counter ideas that exist for the effective rhetor to marshal/make use of.
As such, this course is both a ‘history’ in the sense that we are goingĀ to explore certain rhetoricians/rhetorsĀ based on when they lived and what ideas they worked with during their lives, but it is also an applied course in that we will be working to connect rhetorical concepts over time to the impact those ideas had on our ideas about writing/composing, and ultimately how those ideas worked to shape modern and contemporary composition instruction.
This website will serve as our course site both for common documents as well as for posting student-generated content like reading responses. While the course syllabus, schedule, and assignments descriptions are available to the public, students must be logged in to post or comment on each other’s posts and those materials are available only to members of the course.