This course is an exploration of the classical rhetorical tradition and the various ways in which it has been adapted in modern American rhetoric up to the present. We will analyze rhetorical theory and practice in ancient Greece and Rome, using classical rhetoric as a lens through which to explore the craft of speech in American history, and vice versa. You will emerge from this course being able to tell aposiopesis from praeteritio, but rather than dry lectures on the history of rhetoric, the approach in lectures and section discussions will be comparative through and through, staging curious conversations between ancient and modern as we examine the paths of words through history. We will consider what makes individual speeches noteworthy in their local, historical contexts, as well as within a wider rhetorical tradition, and we will analyze the role of ideologies of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion in the construction of the rhetorical subject. In addition, the classical rhetorical tradition of Greece and Rome will also be compared and contrasted with parallel traditions of classical rhetoric in other cultures. Due attention will be paid to methodological problems in the history of rhetoric, such as sources for speeches, the reconstruction of the context for speeches, and situation criticism. Towards the end of the course we will look at theorizations of digital rhetoric and how AI perturbs the idea of the idea of the rhetorical subject. However, the focus throughout will be the study of rhetoric as the still not outmoded technology of speaking, and the course will offer opportunities to hone your rhetorical technique as well as to become an even more sensitive listener to and critic of the rhetoric of others.

Authors and orators to be studied include: Gorgias, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Demetrius, Quintilian, Theon, Lucian, Plutarch, Longinus, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tecumseh, Caleb Bingham, Simón Bolivár, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Ida. B. Wells, Sitting Bull, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, John Chilembwe, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Robert F. Kennedy, Sukarno, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, Wendy Brown, and Barack Obama. Lectures will provide a thorough overview of topics and debates in rhetorical theory.