Sample Graduate Course Offerings in Communication
Our courses are sometimes crosslisted with other programs such as Cultural Studies (CLST) or History and Philosophy of Science (HPS).
Recent Courses Offered
2014 Argumentation
Gordon Mitchell
This course interrogates argument as a product, process, and method of inquiry, using a variety of theoretical approaches as points of departure, including pragma-dialectics, speech act theory, controversy studies, informal logic, visual communication, and forensics, as well as critical perspectives such as invitational rhetoric and feminist argumentation theory. Theoretical analysis will be grounded in a series of thematic case studies that serve as touchstones for seminar discussion and avenues for exploring how various theoretical concepts work as tools of criticism. Requirements include regular attenednace, participation in seminar discussions, preparation of discussion questions, and completion of a term paper.
2035 Seminar Audience & Reception History
Ronald J. Zboray
This course introduces varying approaches to reconstructing historical audiences for different types of media and specific media productions. Exercises and case studies will be drawn from the nineteenth-century United States, and will emphasize both visual and typographic aspects of imprints (i.e., books, newspapers, magazines, ephemera), but the interdisciplinary scholarly literature that we will read and individual projects that students will undertake may encompass other media forms and time periods. Overall, special attention will be paid to dimensions of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and region in discerning who read (and could read) what, when and where and what it meant to them. Research avenues we will explore may include intertextual response in letters, media consumption evidenced in diaries, life course study through personal reading lists, self-reportage of reading in published autobiographies, material evidence in book artifacts as socially charged objects, book ownership witnessed in probate inventories, audience agency through amateur literary production, small group reception via group literary circles and clubs, and comparative subgroup analysis through library charge records linked to public records. We will also look at broader audience conceptions emerging from bestseller analysis, printed discourse (e.g., book reviews), textually implicit intended audiences (especially as reflected in novels), celebrity promotion (e.g., author tours), publishing industry documentation (such as sales records, subscription lists, trade papers), and visual representations of reading or authorship. For each meeting students will read and discuss a few article length reading assignments and undertake individual exercises in primary sources documents. Half of the final course grade will reflect student performance in these discussions and exercises. The other half will be based upon a term paper that will evaluate the varying approaches we have discussed in light of a specific case study that individual students will choose. Offered ever other or third year. Crosslisted in History, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies.
Download the syllabus for this course (PDF)
2036 History of American Environmental Rhetoric
William Fusfield
This course is designed to provide students with a solid grounding in the history of American environmental rhetoric from pre-European Native American conceptualizations of nature and humanity to contemporary disputes regarding environmental policy and philosophy. Course units will include: 1) traditional Native American Conceptualizations of nature and humanity; 2) the Puritan errand into the wilderness; 3)Thomas Jeffersons continent for civic virtue; 4) Henry Thoreaus Transcendental Ecology; 5)Realism and Darwinism; 6) from preservation to conservation; 7) Silent Spring, Earth Day and after; 8)deep ecology, eco-feminism and their critics; 9) Cultural studies of nature. Throughout the course, special emphasis will be placed upon situating the history of American environmental thought within the broader context of the history of American ideology, rhetorical practice and social transformation.
2040 Voices of Remembrance: Oral History Theory, Method, and Interpretation
Ronald J. Zboray
Oral history provides an opportunity for voices of socially-oppressed peoples to augment and often challenge the official, published archive that shapes how the past is remembered, what about it is remembered, and who is allowed to remember it and on what terms. Oral history, in this sense, offers an affirmative answer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's question, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" by providing a forum for the otherwise silenced to be heard and have what they say be recorded, engaged by informed interviewers/listeners, and, ultimately, made available as a public resource for reimagining and rethinking the past. With an eye to race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, this course aims to introduce methods of, theories about, and interpretative strategies for capturing voices of remembrance to students wishing to develop an oral history component in their research. Models for discussion will be drawn primarily from a range of sources originating from twentieth-century US history, from WPA narratives of former slaves to more recent testimony of striking Chicana garment workers and of San Francisco nurses first confronting the AIDS epidemic. However, readings will also include research from investigators around the world. Issues related to IRB oversight, exemption, or exclusion will be discussed, as will the ethics surrounding conducting interviews, interpreting them, and presenting them to the public. Students will devise an oral history project in which they will conduct interviews, transcribe and analyze them, and interpret them in a journal-article-length research paper. Crosslisted in Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies.
Download the syllabus for this course (PDF)
2041 Interdisciplinary Theorization
Barbara Warnick
By its very nature, the discipline of communication makes extensive use of theories from outside the field and intersects with other scholarly traditions. Our researchers draw from important theorists in anthropology, sociology, linguistics, ethnic and gender studies, political science, and many other fields. Its potential audience includes all students in our graduate program, and the course may enroll some students from communication-related programs outside the department. In its first offering, the course will include readings in primary source materials (books, mainly) from major theorists in history/philosophy (Michel Foucault), ethnic/gender studies (Edward Said), and either literary theory (Mikhail Bakhtin) or social theory (Pierre Bourdieu). A decision on which of the last two theorists we will read will be made at the beginning of the quarter, depending on the needs and interests of the seminar students. These theorists are pervasively cited in our journals and are highly thought of in our field. For the three I’ve decided on, the following works (and examples of uses of these works) will be read: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1994/1978); Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge; Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (1980); Selections from The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984).
2201 Rhetorical Criticism
Olson
In this graduate seminar, you will become acquainted with practices and methods of rhetorical criticism in the United States during the twentieth century. The seminar concentrates on about 12-15 major approaches to the analysis and interpretation of persuasive messages ranging from speeches to symbolic action. In addition, you will demonstrate your ability to perform rhetorical criticism by employing conventional rhetorical criticism by employing conventional research methods to conduct a sustained study of a significant rhetorical message or series of related messages. Evaluation: You will write one formal paper and two informal papers. These papers will employ a conventional research practice to perform a rhetorical criticism of a significant artifact or series of related artifact, which you select for study throughout the semester
Cross-listed with Cultural Studies.
2203 Philosophy and Rhetoric
Poulakos
This seminar will concern itself with the conflict of philosophy and rhetoric. The conflict will be considered both historically and critically. Some of the questions guiding our study will include the following: How did the conflict first come about? What important changes did it undergo in subsequent centuries? How does it exist today? Although consideration will be given to a variety of perspectives, the emphasis will be on Plato and Nietzsche. Each student in the seminar will be responsible for at least one seminar session. During the session, the student will present the basic issues of the conflict as it manifests itself in an assigned set of readings, and will handle the ensuing discussion. Each student will write a major paper (15-20 pages).
Cross-listed with Cultural Studies.
2214 Contemporary Public Argument
Lester Olson
Visual Rhetoric in Contemporary U.S. Culture: approaches and techniques this seminar focuses on visual rhetoric in contemporary U.S. culture with an emphasis on concepts, techniques, approaches, sensibilities, and methods for reserarch. It will consider a wide range of these in the spirit of open inquiry. The seminar will focus on significant examples of visuality and pictorial persuasion in recent years as a way of generating discussion about research techniques. The content of the seminar will not duplicate any of the materials from the version of it offered two years ago. Considerations of gender, sex, race, sexuality, and class will be interwoven throughout the course materials and discussions.
2216 American Rhetorical Idioms
William Fusfield
This course examines a wide variety of rhetorical & ideological resources that have been utilized historically to constitute, reproduce, criticize and transform American cultural practices. The course begins by reviewing several popular conceptualizations of American culture. We then investigate in turn: 1. Pre-colonial European conceptualizations of the New World, 2. Puritan rhetoric of Old and New England, 3. the "American Jeremiad" controversy, and 4. the Rise of "civil millennialism" and national election. We proceed to a consideration of: 5. civic humanist, 6. possessive individualist, 7. classical liberal, 8. conservative, 9. perfectionist/cultivationalist, 10. racialist, nationalist and imperialist, and 11. consubstantialist ideologies. We analyze as well the practical utilization and efficacy of these rhetorical/ideological forms in the discourse interventions of those advocating radical social transformation--e.g. abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, libertarians, communitarians, advocates of gay, civil and human rights, feminists, environmentalists, etc. Class discussion is focused both on primary historical documents and on relevant secondary analyses of rhetoric’s and ideologies these documents exemplify. Requirements: One 20-25 page essay with bibliography, and one class presentation.
2217 Modern Theories of Rhetoric
Lyne
An examination of major theories of, and theoretical frameworks for, rhetoric in the Twentieth Century, including such theorists as Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, Wayne Booth, Chaim Perlman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, C.S. Peirce, Umberto Eco, Hannah Arendt, Michael McGee, Martha Nussbaum, Lloyd Bitzer, Calvin Schrag, and others. Requirements: several short papers and report, one long paper.
2245 Classical Rhetoric
Poulakos
This seminar concerns itself with the antagonism between philosophy and rhetoric in the classical Hellenic period (5th and 4th centuries). Specifically, it examines: a) the emergence of rhetoric as a cultural practice, b) the hostile reception it occasioned in the hands of Plato, and c) the compromises of Isocrates and Aristotle. Insofar as this antagonism has shaped the long histories of philosophy and rhetoric the focus of the seminar is both on the ways each side articulated the conflict and on historico-critical perspectives that help explain it. The readings include the extant fragments of the sophists against the background of the poetic and religious past; Plato's Gorgias, Protagoras, Sophist, and Phaedrus, Isocrates, Against the Sophists, On the Peace, and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric, Politics, and Ethics. Each student in the seminar will be responsible for at least one seminar session. During the session the student will report on a particular rhetorical tradition and will handle the ensuing discussion. Each student will write a major research paper of publishable quality.
2285 Science and Its Rhetoric (Cross-listed with CLST 2685 and HPS 2685)
McGuire/Lyne
This seminar will explore the following questions. What role, if any, do rhetorical interpretations play in the discourse of science? Can the acceptance of scientific ideas be exhaustively explained in terms of epistemic criteria alone, or is there always necessarily recourse to rhetorical topoi? What role does rhetoric play in the internal dialogues of science, and how is rhetoric mobilized when science addresses dialogues of science, and how is rhetoric mobilized when science addresses its lay audience? Can a hermeneutical approach to understanding illuminate its role in the natural as well as the social sciences? What relations are there between historicism, rhetorical, and scientific change? These questions will be explored through exemplary cases chosen from both the natural and the human sciences.
2296 Proseminar
Mitchell
This course aims to provide new graduate students with a working introduction to the field of communication. Inquiry and discussion pivot around four areas of scholarly emphasis in the Department of Communication: history, theory and criticism of Rhetoric; Media and Cultural Studies; Public Argument and Discourse; and Rhetoric of Science. A variety of faculty members select readings and steer the trajectory of discussion during weekly visits. Four five-page papers are required.
2298 Research Colloquium
The Research Colloquium provides a forum in which graduate students, faculty, and invited lecturers present research in progress. It is required each semester for all graduate students in Communication and Rhetoric, except those who have successfully completed the comprehensive exam. The colloquium convenes every other week.
3302 Seminar in Rhetorical Criticism
Olson
This seminar focuses on the intersections among rhetoric, human rights, and symbolic representations of sexualized aggression in the United States during the twentieth century. Because the seminar is broad, we will only be able to touch on a few significant instances of such rhetoric, including but not limited to anti-gay and anti-lesbian violence, sexual and racial harassment, domestic violence, rape, violence against women, incest, child molestation, pornography, lynching, and female genital mutilation. The seminar will focus upon public speeches by such people as Kevin Berrill, Elizabeth Birch, Bill Clinton, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Greg Herek, bell hooks, Martha Fineman, Anita Hill, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Martha Minow, Carol Mosley-Braun, Diana Ortiz, Bernice Johnson Reagan, Janet Reno, Adrienne Rich, Donna Shalala, John Stotltenberg, Urvashi Vaid, and Jennifer Wriggins. In addition to discussing public speeches and essays that reflect upon communication practices across significant differences, we will discuss the diverse roles of community, institutions, victims and perpetrators in instances of sexualized aggression. Participants in the seminar will concentrate on the practice of rhetorical criticism through classroom exercises, readings, and writings about the texts of public speeches. Participants will demonstrate their ability to perform rhetorical criticism by conducting a sustained study of a series of related speeches addressing an aspect of sexualized aggression and human rights.
3306 Seminar in Rhetoric and Culture: American Rhetorical Idioms (Cross-listed with CLST 3306)
Fusfield
This course examines a wide variety of rhetorical and ideological resources that have been utilized historically to constitute, reproduce, criticize and transform American cultural practices. The course begins by reviewing several popular conceptualizations of American culture. We then investigate in turn: 1. Pre-colonial European conceptualizations of the New World, 2. Puritan rhetoric of Old and New England, 3. the “American Jeremiad,” controversy, and 4. the Rise of “civil millennialism” and national election. We proceed to a consideration of: 5. civic humanist, 6. possessive individualist, 7. classical liberal, 8. conservative, 9. perfectionist/cultivationalist, 10. racialist, nationalist and imperialist, and 11. consubstantialist ideologies. We analyze as well the practical utilization and efficacy of these rhetorical/ideological forms in the discourse interventions of those advocating radical social transformation – e.g. abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, libertarians, communitarians, advocates of gay, civil and human rights, feminists, environmentalists, etc. Class discussion are focused both on primary historical documents and on relevant secondary analyses of rhetorics and ideologies these documents exemplify.
Requirements: One 20-25 page essay with bibliography, and one class presentation.
3306 Seminar in Rhetoric and Culture: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Rhetoric and Politics of Social Redemption
William Fusfield
Cross-listed with CLST 3306
This course will examine several seminal texts of Frankfurt School Critical Theory with special attention to how these workers conceptualize the possibilities for social redemption in advanced capitalist societies. While a general survey of the Frankfurt School's global research project will aos be provided, the course will empahisze those works by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and predominatly, Herbert Marcuse, which rework traditional messianic, aesthetic, rhetorical and psychoanalytic categories to theorize the possibilties for the socio-political redemption of contemporary social existence. To situate the Frankfurt School's analysis of the redemptive imagination historically, early sessions will also examine several texts by Fredrich Schlegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Martin Heidegger, and Georg Lukacs, which profoundly influenced the Frankfurt School apropos social redemption. The middle sessions will then provide a more general introduction to the larger Frankfurt School research project, while the later sessions will focus more specifically on Marcuse's treatment of acute problems of imagining and initiating social orders like contemporary America.
3314 Seminar in Public Argument: Rhetorical Production
Gordon Mitchell
This seminar explores rhetorical production as a practical project and a topic of theoretical reflection. Students will be invited to take one of their completed scholarly essays and devise a plan for amplifying its key arguments to new audiences. Refinement and execution of this plan will entail reflection on rhetorical concepts such as telos, audience, invention, topoi and ingenium, as well as engagement with readings drawn from classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Requirements include production of a suitable text and/or performance for amplification and three short papers leading up to a final 15-20 page paper featuring reflexive analysis on the theoretical and practical implications of the project.
3317 Seminar in Rhetorical Theory: Common Sense
John Lyne
Notions of “common sense” are explained, criticized, and employed in the literatures of philosophy, sociology, psychology, cognitive science, law, among others. It is seen variously as the sense of the community, the regulative hand of ideology, a pool of commonly held beliefs, the domain of everyday reasoning, a restriction on understanding, or as a bulwark against the tyranny of expertise. The term has a special resonance within American political culture, where it is often treated as the most reliable court of appeal. It is invoked by name. In everyday discourse, it is spoken of as something we can somehow forget and need to be reminded of, even though it is “what everyone knows.” To the extent that rhetoric draws upon commonly held opinion (doxa, sensus communis, practical judgment, conventional wisdom, symbolic capital, etc.) there is a natural affinity with conceptions of common sense, but the rhetoric of common sense has not been mapped out. The seminar will explore “common sense” in its dual role as rhetorical artifact and theoretical concept. Key questions will be: What are the discursive contours of “common sense”? How is it performed, mobilized, and credited? What is its repertoire, and how does it support invention? How does the appeal to common sense work as a strategy of persuasion? What are its resources? What is its role in mediating between different domains of expertise?
3326 Seminar in Media Studies: Visualizing Race, Class and Gender
Ronald J. Zboray
Introduction to communication research techniques in visual culture studies through hands on archival exercises using nineteenth-century U.S. print media artifacts. We will situate the mid-century boom in industrially-based image production, distribution, and consumption in contemporaneous public discourses on race, class and gender to assay answers to questions like: What happens when representation of “The Other” suddenly become widely visible in books, magazines, newspapers, and on sheet music covers, trade cards, handbills, posters, billboards, product wrappers, and lithographs? Did emergent visualizations of the “Other” simply illustrate the then-current state of longstanding courses or did they modify them? How have some negative visualization become fixed as stereotypes and what accounts for this? How have “Others” themselves acted to counter such negative images through participating in image production and distribution? How did visualization unfold at the intersections of race, class, and gender (depictions of middle-class black women, for example)? Course grades will be based on a combination of archival exercises (25 percent), discussion of weekly readings (25 percent) and a research paper (50 percent) reflecting the course theme of visualizing race, class and gender in print media history, but not necessarily confined to the nineteenth century or to the U.S.
Download the syllabus for this course (PDF)
3326 Seminar in Media Studies: War, Media, and Remembrance.
Ronald J. Zboray
US media's current relationship to the so-called War on Terror (as well as the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation) has longstanding, yet often overlooked precedents in the nation's previous wars, which this course will survey. Questions to be considered include: How much does the media "sell" the war in light of what government leaders want to convey, given the public's right to know even "bad" news about the war's conduct? How much do dissenting voices have access to mass media during wartime and how much are they censored? How does mass-mediated war-making help to reconfigure gender and race relations? How does war irrevocably change media consumption patterns and the course of technological innovation in media production and dissemination? How does war differentially play through the full contemporary media array, including, say, newspapers, magazines, books, sheet music, posters, films, photographs, records, radio broadcasts, and television programs. Special attention will be paid to media's implication in ways that past wars have been remembered (or forgotten), as new conflicts emerge.
Daily course work accounts for one-half of the final grade. This work includes discussion of assigned readings, field trips to history-preserving archives and museums for hands-on work with media artifacts from past wars, online exercises using archival websites, and occasional reports on the research project. That project, a journal-article-length, primary-source-based research paper will be the basis of the remaining half of the final course grade. Crosslisted with Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies.
Download the syllabus for this course (PDF)
3326 Seminar in Media Studies: Orality to Print
Ronald J. Zboray
This course provides an introduction to scholarship treating two important transitions in communication history: from orality to literacy, and from manuscript to print. Larger historical, social, and cultural influences on these transitions will be considered, as will, conversely, the supposed consequences of literacy and print for social psychology, cultural practice, and historical development. The key question asked will be: what was the meaning of these transitions as they occurred in different times and places for standing practices of communication? Reading assignments will be drawn from the classic work of Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord, Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Ruth Finnegan, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Benedict Anderson, and Jurgen Habermas, as well as more recent research on the two topics by a range of scholars, including David Barton, Richard D. Brown, Michael Clanchy, Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner, Joyce Coleman, David Cressy, Robert Darnton, Margaret Ezell, Adam Fox, Ignace Gelb, Kathleen Gough, Harvey Graff, Adrian Johs, Kenneth Lockridge, Rosamond McKitterick, Jennifer Monaghan, David Olson, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, David Saenger, David Shields, Jesper Svenbro, Deborah Tannen, Rosalind Thomas, and Michael Warner. Evaluation of students will be based on weekly book critiques, ongoing discussion of assignments, and a term paper (literature review).
3326 Seminar in Media Studies: Reconstructing Audiences
Zboray
A critical and methodological introduction to the interdisciplinary humanities scholarship which has attempted to reconstruct audiences for various media. In pursuit of the questions of who engaged what when and where—and the key one of what it meant to them—the course emphasizes historical ethnography and biography. Readings , discussion, and ten short critiques (30 percent of final grade) of significant articles, essays, and book excerpts on the audience perspective. Throughout the semester each student will undertake closely directed research in primary sources for a reconstruction of a historical media audience and its experiences, with the aim of producing a publishable scholarly article manuscript (70 percent of final grade).
3326 Seminar in Media Studies: Reconstructing Audiences.
Ronald J. Zboray
A critical and methodological introduction to the interdisciplinary humanities scholarship which has attempted to reconstruct audiences for various media. In pursuit of the question of who engaged what when and where—and the key one of what it meant to them—the course emphasizes historical ethnography and biography. Readings, discussion, and ten short critiques (30 percent of the grade) of significant articles, essays, and book excerpts on the audience perspective. Throughout the term each student will undertake closely directed research in primary sources for a reconstruction of a historical audience and its experiences, with the aim of producing a publishable scholarly article manuscript (70 percent of the final course grade).
3340 Rhetoric of Science Policy
Mitchell
This course will examine rhetorical dynamics of science policy controversies as they play out in public disputes over medical ethics. Rapid change in state-of-the-art medical technology has not only yielded dramatic new opportunities for treatment and prevention of illness; such change has also saddled policy makers, medical practitioners, patients, and citizens with new and perplexing ethical quandaries. We will look at the various settings in which these quandaries are negotiated, paying particular attention to the way that stakeholders from different backgrounds voice their unique concerns as they participate in policy arguments, and how such concerns receive varying degrees of recognition as legitimate contributions to the policy dialogue. Regular attendance and participation in the seminar are mandatory. Three short papers addressing the role-play exercises, and one term paper, 20 pages, is required. The exact topics for the term paper will be negotiated with the instructor.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Students with a solid background in any field are welcomed, but they must be prepared to deal with literature in the sociology and rhetoric of science, much of which presents a critical view of how science works. Also, students should expect to participate in dramatic role-play performances that thematize the rhetorical dynamics involved in medical ethics controversies under consideration.
3384 Teaching Practicum
Ronald J. Zboray
The Teaching Practicum acquants graduate students with basic pedagogical principles and techniques for teaching communication classes. It is required for all first-year Communication graduate students. The first half of each meeting is devoted to instructional issues surrounding Public Speaking (COMMRC 0520); this segment offers case-specific guidance to new students teaching that course or planning to teach it. The second half focuses on more general and theoretical pedagogical issues. Students present a lecture, write one formal paper, and prepare a teaching portfolio, including syllabus, lesson plans, and two examinations for one communication course.
Goals:
1. The course unfolds in the conviction that theory and practice can merge so seamlessly into praxis that the two inform each other. The emphasis is upon developing a scholarly pedagogical praxis that works with each student's own talents, backgrounds, elective affiliations and identities, considered beliefs, and canons of taste. Thus, approaches are presented as possible alternatives in an overall educational philosophy, not as a search for the one best practice - a hopeless quest that has over the centuries too often stultified learning.
2. Out of this concern for the "big picture" the course aims at near-at-hand implementations through instruction in basic teaching techniques: course planning, syllabus writing, and assignment construction and evaluation, to name but a few.