483 G TOPICS IN WRITING PEDAGOGY AND PROGRAM DESIGN, Hawhee.  M 3-4:50

TOPIC: Rhetorics/Bodies

Same as C & I 466

 Est enim actio quasi sermo corporis

For by action the body talks. - Cicero, De Oratore III.lix.22

This course will consider the ways in which rhetoric and bodies produce, inhabit, and collide with each other by examining work loosely called "body studies" alongside conceptions of rhetoric.  Readings for the course will consist of a) primary rhetorical texts ranging from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke to Judith Butler, and b) secondary and more recent scholarly work that might fall under the rubric of body studies, both within and outside of rhetorical studies (if such a distinction can be made).  Additional projects will encourage a focus on the body and rhetoric as sites of interdisciplinary study.  Students in the course will be asked to engage these texts by constantly interrogating what rhetoric and bodies might be and what they are doing in these texts.  How are studies of corporeality relevant for rhetoric?  To what extent do common conceptions of rhetoric rely on a mind/body split?  What would a history of rhetoric written through the body look like?  What does a consideration of physical "bodies" do to notions of subjectivity/agency/identity?  In short how does the materiality of the body make a difference for rhetoric?

Possible Texts: Rhetorical Bodies, ed.  Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (excerpts); Plato, "The Sophist"; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (excerpts); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice; Roy Porter, "History of the Body”; Caroline Bynurn, "Why All the Fuss about the Body?  A Medievalist's Perspective"; Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs" in A Thousand Plateaus; Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish, 7he Use of Pleasure, "Open up a Few Corpes" (from Birth of a Clinic); selections from Zone books, Incorporations and Fragments for a History of the Human Body; selections from Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter; Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self Presentation in 4ncient Rome; Donna Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto"; selections from Deviant Bodies, ed.  Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Uria; Page duBois, Torture and Truth; Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, Ann Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered.Body: Reading Cyborg Women; selections from The Male Body,Laurence Goldstein, ed.