Photo Credit:
"critique on September Sunrise over DC" by modezero
At various historical moments, the tools of rhetorical theory and composition theory have been discussed as a shifting ratio—oscillating between the polls of production and interpretation. This course traces contemporary debates about the productive and interpretive dimensions of rhetoric and composition, debates that continue to define the various theoretical agendas of the discipline. In order to understand these debates, we will begin from contemporary texts and then work backwards to their foundations. The contemporary debates of rhetoric and composition can be traced to texts from within the discipline and outside of it, and we will “drill down” to such texts after reading contemporary scholarship on a range of topics: ideology critique, cultural studies pedagogy, hermeneutics, posthermenutics, and invention.
