Speech Communication 438

Modernity and the Rhetorics of Violence:

Arguing about Murder, Mayhem, and Monsters in America, 1683-1845

This course covers three areas of inquiry regarding violence: 1) theories of its political sources, psychological urges, and symbolic functions; 2) secondary histories of its uses in America from roughly 1683, when William Penn hanged his first indentured servant in the settler town of Philadelphia, to 1845, when Walter Whitman (he didn’t become Walt until 1855) began a series of scathing editorials attacking New York City’s clergy’s support for hanging; and 3) primary case studies exhibiting how Americans argued about violence in general and the death penalty in particular. Students will thus learn to write interdisciplinary cultural history by addressing primary materials through a combination of critical theory, historical recovery, and rhetorical criticism. As we shall see as the semester unfolds, many Americans have argued that murder is the most extreme form of social mayhem wrought by monsters; others have argued that murder is but one form of the violence produced by modernity itself. There are of course many perspectives on these questions, but one fact is clear: arguing about murder, mayhem, and monsters has always served as an opportunity for asking much larger questions about identity and citizenship, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, race and slavery, religion and modernity, and Enlightenment and democracy. Indeed, this course demonstrates that arguing about murder, mayhem, and monsters is one of the central components of how our society has functioned ever since the first European settlers came to the New World.

We will begin the semester by reading four of the canonical theoretical texts on violence: Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil (1967), Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972), and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). We will then spend the rest of the semester analyzing seminal public debates about violence, including (among others, with students encouraged to make additional suggestions): Benjamin Rush v. “Philochorus” in 1787 and 1792, Abraham Johnston’s abolitionist supporters v. his murderous neighbors in 1797, Helen Jewett and other sexy antebellum criminals v. the appalled clergy and misogynist press in 1836, John O’Sullivan v. George Cheever in 1842, and Walt Whitman v. the last Calvinists in 1845. Much of the primary material for these debates will be provided by SJH; some of it will be provided by students, all of whom will become intimately familiar with the intricacies of archival research. Each week’s debate will be supported with historical materials, including selections from, among others, Roger Lane’s Violent Death in the City (1979), Daniel Cohen’s Pillars of Salt (1993), Karen Halttunen’s Murder Most Foul (1998), David Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), Louis Masur’s Rites of Execution (1989), Paul Gilje’s Road to Mobocracy (1987), Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997), and Erik Monkkonen’s Crime & Justice in American History (1991).

In addition to short weekly written assignments, two in-class presentations, and required archival work, students will write a seminar paper of no less than 25 pages. For these essays each student will choose an antebellum text covering some aspect of violence, reconstruct the historical context of the document, and engage in detailed rhetorical criticism of both the text itself and the larger cultural discourse surrounding it.