Bodies of Persuasion

English 7007:
Bodies of Persuasion: Rhetoric, Embodiment, Affect

When Aristotle defined deductive reasoning as “the body of persuasion” in the Rhetoric he largely purged the discipline of its preexisting concern with the connection between physical embodiment and forces of persuasion. During the past decade these repressed elements — and their related structures of affect, performativity, materiality, and sensation — have returned with a vengeance to rhetorical studies. In this seminar we will examine both the importance of embodiment to the origins of rhetoric as well as its more current return(s): how the body has emerged as a problem for critical thought in the past and the questions it provokes for rhetoric, politics, and ethics in the present. Though grounded in current and emergent rhetorical theory, this seminar will draw on an interdisciplinary range of critical studies into embodiment and its relation to persuasion (including literary and cultural studies, film, neuroscience, and psychology). Our tentative list of readings includes texts by Giorgia Agamben, J. L. Austin, Jonathan Beller, Lauren Berlant, Kenneth Burke, William S. Burroughs, Judith Butler, William E. Connolly, Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze, Derrida, Richard Doyle, Epictetus, Foucault, Gorgias, Richard Grusin, Guattari, Michael Hardt, Debra Hawhee, Heidegger, Isocrates, Fredric Jameson, Kafka, Maurizio Lazzarato, Richard Marback, Brian Massumi, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Nietzsche, Plato, Plutarch, Brian Rotman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bernard Stiegler, and Michael Warner.

Emphases: Rhetorical Theory, Critical and Cultural Studies, Science Studies

Requirements: weekly written responses, book presentation, research paper