Introduction to this class
Welcome to this semester's iteration of ENGL 8170, History of Rhetoric and Composition 1. My name is George Pullman. I 've been teaching rhetoric and composition and critical thinking at GSU since 1990. Rhetoric and Composition Some people consider rhetoric and composition distinct disciplines on the grounds that rhetoric is analytical and composition productive. Some people think First Year Composition exclusively when they hear composition and so consider it different from and lesser than rhetoric. Communication might be a better term, but at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) meeting of 1914, a vote was held to determine if people who taught public speaking would remain among their colleagues who taught literature. The vote was a tie, but 17 professors got together and formed the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, later the Speech Communication Association (Cohen, History of Speech Communication, 1994), and thus reading and writing were separated from speaking in American universities. That thinking had nothing to do with either was Philosophy's fault. Thus, today, English departments don't use the word "Communication" in their syllabi but rather the clumsy if bipartisan rhetcomp. In solidarity with my intellectual ancestors, the people this class is about, I use the expression rhetoric and composition and critical thinking. has changed profoundly during those 30 years because it, like so many other facets of life, is now predominantly digital. If you go to my primary website you will see the tag line <ῥητορ> George Pullman </ῥητορ>. Pretentious and cryptic, but succinct.
At the beginning of my career (1990) I was a historian of rhetoric and I thought I would always be one, but in 1995, as it was dawning on me that I might be incapable of learning Greek, which I would need to do if I were to stay on my original path, the first graphical interface to the internet (Mosaic) arrived. As I stood staring at the onramp to the information superhighway, I rationalized that my students would likely benefit more from me learning internet languages than dead ones. So I taught myself HTML. And then CSS. And then PHP and MySQL, and I started writing software in the form of interactive websites. I also designed graduate and undergraduate classes gravitating around learning these languages as a practical way of thinking about Rhetoric for the Digital Age. This class software is a current iteration of my understanding of digital rhetoric.
Although this class is about classical rather than digital rhetoric, it too has changed since 1990. I wrote most of this text in 2020. Since then AI text generators have arrived on the rhetorical scene and everything about rhetoric is again changing fast. As of this moment I don't know what impact they will have on this class. Some of my current thoughts on AI ENGL 8170 started out as Greek and Roman rhetoric, but as the English Department hired more people in rhetoric and composition we added classes and deepened each one, so that for many years we had a Greek class and a Roman class as well as a Medieval, a Modern, and a Contemporary class. Due to faculty shrinkage, this class is once again Greek and Roman and late antiquity as well -- From the pre-Socratics to the rise of Christian rhetoric. Given a 15 week semester, we aren't going to stare too closely at any of the texts we are using to represent 900 years of rhetorical theory and practice (5th be - 400 ad).
Our goal is not to recover messages buried in time but rather to think about ways we might use the fragments and ruins still standing to our own and our students' advantage. A bit like I imagine the fifth wave of refugees from the North (aka the Vandals and Visigoths who came to live rather than plunder) as they camped in the shadow of an abandoned aqueduct and then decided to make a more or less permanent home there, using the rubble and a still standing wall or two of a structure they didn't fully comprehend and didn't care to, a bit like that is how I imagine what we are doing. These texts aren't messages in amphora, and the authors couldn't possibly intend communicating with us, even if they did imagine their immediate audience consisted of all right thinking people and they would accord us as their descendants the benefit of the same doubt. We can't know them and they couldn't possibly imagine us. Even with ubiquitous recordings of daily life from our times our distant descendants won't know what the hell we were doing all those years ago, with our primitive technologies and barbaric social practices.
So we will take what we are reading more or less at face value, with only a very small amount of historical context as a backdrop, knowing that our interpretations are intended to serve our purposes only. We will look at one pre-Socratic fragment (Parmenides' On Nature), then several Sophistic pieces, both fragmentary and complete (Protagoras, Gorgias, the Anonymous Disso Logoi). We will then read two abbreviated pieces from Plato's rival Isocrates. Then two Platonic dialogues,Gorgias and Phaedrus, which are the foundation of "rhetoric" (I'll explain the quotation marks in a bit), then Aristotle, arguably the most significant contributor to the history of rhetoric, then a few minor pieces from the Hellenistic Period (from the death of Alexander to the death of Cleopatra), then what is called the Second Sophistic (first three hundred years of our era), and then a brisk walk through late antiquity arriving finally at St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine.
These periods are just mnemonic devices, convenient constructs, not boundaries in any real sense. Because the literate world at the times we are looking at was relatively small, it's likely that many of the people whose work we still possess knew the work of many of their contemporaries and predecessors. They also would have written out of a similar context, but it's not as though the moment something big happened, everything changed and therefore the way people wrote and thought instantly changed as well.
History is written. It's an artifact, a rhetorical construct, not an actual process of change over time even if changes are discernable in retrospect. Everything that led up to the death of Caesar didn't cause the death of Caesar anymore than a dream he might or might not have had foretold his doom. Everything only makes sense in retrospect and we can't predict the future, even if we do have pretty good statistical practices and predictive analytics at our disposal today. We don't know the past and we can't predict the future. We can fantasize and wonder about the past, fantasize, worry, and plan for the future, but in the end we only live here and now. At least that's my take on history. You are welcome to read and make history as you like.
My goal is to teach you a sophisticated skepticism, a hyper-rhetorical attitude towards language in action. What I mean by sophisticated skepticism will depixalate over the next couple of weeks, but basically it's the awareness that people who would differentiate rhetoric from reality are not debunking mythologies or speaking truth but just trying to replace one rhetoric with another rhetoric -- even if they don't know it. This is not to say there is no reality, no physical universe. There is. It's just that each linguistic representation of reality is always only a social construct (a more or less shared, more or less attenuated, and frequently contested "reality"). Rhetorically astute people sense this. Rhetoric is about how to use language to create and influence our constituencies and how it both makes and uses us. Change your rhetoric (your interior monologue, your fundamental propositions and your default interpretive processes), and you change your mind. Change your mind, and you create a new reality. That is not easy, of course, but it is actually possible and most people don't even sense this let alone practice trying to do it.
Some of you may find sophisticated skepticism, the idea that Truth is a rhetorically generated social construct, depressing, perhaps even a bit threatening. We are all making reality up on the fly and tearing it down and making it up again. It's rhetoric all the way down
That is an echo of a parable. A person climbs a mountain seeking enlightenment from a Sage, specifically they want to know how the earth stays suspended in space. After an arduous climb, they ask, "Sage, what keeps the earth up?" "It rests on the back of a turtle," says the Sage. Content, the seeker descends, but half way down it dawns on them. What's the turtle resting on? So arduously they climb back up, only to be greeted by the Sage smiling, "It's turtle's all the way down.". Let me be clear: COVID-19, for example, exists and it kills human beings at a specific rate as a consequence of its nature and our behavior, and that rate will decline once we have an effective vaccine, but everything else said of COVID-19, whether it's how health organizations convey their current scientific understanding, or how that scientific research is funded, or how politicians try to shape our behavior, or how we think about what's happening because of our education and personal experiences, all of that is rhetorically constructed. Sophisticated skepticism isn't anti-science. It is just anti-authoritarian, anti-tradition, skeptical and flexible, contextually relative, but not nihilistic.
A sophisticated skeptic can hold competing realities simultaneously without cracking under the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance or abandoning one idea and going all in on the other. Sophisticated skeptics can speak or write with appropriate confidence even in the absence of complete data, but they know the data is incomplete because the data is always incomplete.
Protagoras, one of the original sophists, is said to have said, "As to the existence of the Gods I know neither if they do or they don't. Life is too short and the question too difficult." Sophisticated skeptics are faithfully agnostic at the rhetorical stage of invention. What they decide to say may be much more closed off, dictatorial even. But the thinking that preceded it will be open-minded and open-ended until exigent circumstances or the right moment arrives and something has to be said with conviction.
That, at any rate, is the helium-balloon view of the rhetorical attitude I hope you glean in this class. You don't have to accept it.
How this class works
I want to say a couple things about the mechanics of this class (syllabus). Basically you will read translated texts, my notes, and then write your own summaries and reflections about what you have read each week. The resulting reading journal is 50% of your final grade. The other 50% is the final examination, the questions of which you will know in advance. If you find an interesting definition of rhetoric not already in the class collection, you can get a bonus 5%.
As you read my notes, you can leave comments and queries in the column on the right of the screen as long as you are logged in. Each person in the class is welcome to respond to those. I've been using reading journals as my primary pedagogy since my first day of teaching (September 1986, ffs).
This class requires you to write a great deal. Writing shapes thinking and the purpose of a graduate class is to think about the things your predecessors and successors have/will think about as you create your own version from which to build a career. You may never write about Greek or Roman rhetoric again, but you can be pretty sure that any rhetcomp audience you address will have read and thought about the texts you are about to meet. [In my life that has always been "true." I'm not sure it will be in yours, but each generation has to overcome the cultural lag created by its predecessors' rhetorics.]
This website, I hope, is easy to use. The menu bar offers access to everything here. When you login you are taken to "Your Notebook". That is where you will publish your weekly reading journal entries. It auto saves so you shouldn't lose any thinkg. You can make your writing public if you wish. I encourage you to. If you do, your thoughts or rather the words you use to represent them will be visible to your colleagues from "Classmates" on the menu bar. "You" links to the space where you upload an image or avatar Given that traditional rhetoric was all about face to face and public acts of communication, that fact that we can and might let an avatar stand in for us online underscores a significant difference between what rhetoric was and what it has become. No nostalgia implied. of yourself and a brief autobiographical note from which your colleagues will glean your ethos. Ethos is one of Aristotle's three forms of rhetorical proof, the one referring to how you convey your credibility and authority (eunoia, sophrosine, and arete, literally) via your words and gestures. These brief introductions are important. Further too the right is a link to Resources. Click and explore. To the right of everything is the "Syllabus".
Although I am a digital rhetorician for the most part now, I continue to read about classical rhetoric and some of my recent learning is in the "lectures" I've written for you as well as the texts I'm asking you to read.
What kind of rhetorician you are remains for you to discover. I'm here to help.