English 206: Rhetorics of Everyday Life

Civic Capacities for Being Together in Difference

Course Description

Rhetoric!?! What exactly is rhetoric and why should anyone care to study it?

Given intensifications of violence, political divide, and precarity in our everyday lives, and at a time when coordinated work across difference is desperately needed to respond to our urgent public problems, this course turns to rhetoric's longstanding civic role of preparing individuals and communities to respond creatively, effectively, and ethically to our most urgent public problems. We will explore various Western and global traditions in rhetorical studies aimed at developing collective capacities for problem solving and negotiating across radical difference and that push against models of argument and ethics that seem to merely entrench positions through winning rhetoric, zero-sum debates, and dehumanizing and scapegoating those with whom we disagree.

In this course, then, we turn to rhetoric as an interdisciplinary public art that facilitates capacities for problem solving, collective action, and negotiating a life in common across radical difference.

Course Goals and Learning Outcomes:

This course aims to help you:

• develop knowledge about and practice in various rhetorical theories and practices of listening, peacekeeping, and negotiating across difference
• explore various positions within an urgent public issue of your choice in order to deepen knowledge of that issue, practice listening and empathy, engage with diverse stakeholders, and clarify one’s own commitments
• deepen your rhetorical knowledge and commitments to the ethical practice of studying, responding to, and crafting rhetoric

• build capacity for collaboration, problem-solving, and collective social action across difference, within various communities and situations, and in response to urgent, complex public problems