COMM 8504: Textual Analysis and Criticism

Class Schedule

 

Please note that Weeks 1-6 are firmly set; however, the subsequent weeks may change.  I will inform you of changes to the schedule. 

 

Week 1: Sept. 4

Introduction

 

 

Unit I: The Text and Criticism in the Speech Communication Field

 

Week 2: Sept. 11

The Flight from Theory

Ed Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 10-90, 132-147.

Rod Hart, "Theory-building and Rhetorical Criticism: An Informal Statement of Opinion," Central States Speech Journal 27 (1976): 70-77.

Rod Hart, "Contemporary Scholarship in Public Address: A Research Editorial," in Western Journal of Speech Communication 50 (1986): 283-295

W. Charles Redding, "Extrinsic and Intrinsic Criticism," Western Speech 21 (1957): 96-103.

Barnet Baskerville, "Must We All Be 'Rhetorical Critics'?" Quarterly Journal of Speech, 63 (1977): 107-116.

G. P. Mohrmann, "Elegy in a Critical Grave-Yard," Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 265-274.

Edwin Black, “A Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 331-336.

Michael Leff, "Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann," Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 377-389.

Stephen Lucas, "The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 241-260.

 

Week 3: Sept. 18

Textual Analysis, Art, and Ideology

Karlyn K. Campbell, "The Nature of Criticism in Rhetorical and Communication Studies," Central States Speech Journal 30 (1979): 4-13.

Michael Leff, "Interpretation and the Art of the Rhetorical Critic," Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 337-349.

Michael Leff, and Andrew Sachs, "Words the Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text," Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54 (1990):252-273.

Michael Leff, "Things Made by Words: Reflections on Textual Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 223-231.

Michael Calvin McGee, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture," Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54 (1990):274-289.

Barbara Warnick, "Leff in Context: What is the Critic's Role?" Quarterly Journal of Speech (1992): 232-237.

Celeste Condit, "Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff," Western Journal of Communication, 54 (1990): 330-345.

J. Robert Cox, "On 'Interpreting' Public Discourse in Post-Modernity," Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54 (1990): 317-329.

Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 383-409.

 

Week 4: Sept. 25

The Return to “Perspective”

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee," Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 290-316.

John A. Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle Way,” Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 346-376.

James Arnt Aune, "Public Address and Rhetorical Theory," in Texts in Context, Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld, eds. (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 43-51.

Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (1998): 395-415.

Robert Hariman, "Afterword: Relocating the Art of Public Address," in Rhetoric and Political Culutre in Nineteenth-Century America, Thomas W. Benson, ed. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997.

James Jasinski, “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 249-270.

Michael Leff, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Criticism Revisted,” Western Journal of Communication (2001): 232-248.

Bonnie Dow, “Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 337-348.

Stephen Browne, “Context in Critical Theory and Practice,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 330-335.

 

Week 5: Oct. 2

Textual Analysis in Action

Stephen E. Lucas, "The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence," in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Carl R. Burgchardt, ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 531-546

Amy R. Slagell, "Anatomy of a Masterpiece: A Close Textual Analysis of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address," Communication Studies 42 (1991): 155-171.

Michael Leff, "Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln's Second Inaugural," in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Carl R. Burgchardt, ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 526-530.

Martin J. Medhurst, “Reconceptualizing Rhetorical History: Eisenhower’s Farewell Address,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (1994): 195-218.

Stephen H. Browne, "Encountering Angelina Grimke: Violence, Identity, and the Creation of Radical Community,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1996): 55-73.

Beth Innocenti Manolescu, “Style and Spectator Judgment in Fisher ames’s Jay Treaty Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (1998): 62-79.

David Zarefsky, “Lincoln’s 1872 Annual Message: A Paradigm of Rhetorical Leadership,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 5-14.

Edwin Black, “The Ultimate Voice of Lincoln,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 49-57.

 

 

 

Unit II: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Textual Criticism

 

Week 6: Oct. 9

The New Criticism Movement

Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1956).

Definitions and Distinctions, 14-53.

The Extrinsic Approach to the Study of Literature, 73-74, 81-124.

The Intrinsic Approach to the Study of Literature, 139-225, 238-269.

Week 7: Oct. 16

 

 

 

The  New Historicism Movement

Simon During, “New Historicism,” Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 171-189

A. Aram Vesser, The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989).

Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," 1-14.

Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy—An New Historicism?” 231—242.

Schaeffer, “The Use and Misuse of Giambattista Vico,” 89—101.

Lowder Newton, "History as Usual?" 151-167.

Fish, “Commentary: The Young and the Restless,” 303—316.

 

Week 8: Oct. 23

Rhetorical Hermeneutics, Part I

Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

Jost and Hyde, "Introduction," 1-44.

Gadamer, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," 45-59.

Ricoeur, "Rhetoric-Poetics-Hermeneutics," 60-72.

Altieri, "Toward a Hermeneutics Responsive," 90-107.

Palmer, "What Hermeneutic Can Offer Rhetoric," 108-131.

Kahn, "Humanism and the Resistance to Theory," 149-170.

Leff, "Hermeneutical Rhetoric," 196-214.

Garver, "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the Constitution," 171-195.

Mailloux, "Articulation and Understanding: The Pragmatic Intimacy Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," 378-394.

 

Week 9: Oct. 30

Rhetorical Hermeneutics, Part II

Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

Steven Mailloux, “Rhetorical Hermeneutics Revisted,” Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 233-248

 

 

Unit III: The Practice of Textual Criticism

 

Week 10: Nov. 6

Short Paper 1

Style and the Sublime

Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short,“Style and Choice,” in  Style in Fiction, (London: Longman, 1981), 10—41.

Geoffrey Leech, “Stylistics and Functionalism,” in The Linguistics of Writing, Nigel Fabb, ed. (New York: Methuen, 1987), chapter 5.

Richard Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), chapters 1, 3.

Longinus, On the Sublime, James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett, trans. (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), selections.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1970), selections.

 

Week 11: Nov. 13

Short Paper 2

 

Syntax, Structure, and Form

Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short,“The Rhetoric of Text,” in  Style in Fiction, (London: Longman, 1981), 209—256.

Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Hermagoras Press, 1985), chapter 5.

Kenneth Burke, "The Psychology of Form." CounterStatement.

 

Week 12: Nov. 20

Short Paper 3

 

Metaphor and Meaning

I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 92-120.

Max Black, “Metaphor,” 63—82.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 69-125.

David Douglass, “Research on Metaphor in Communication Studies: 1960-1999,” An essay presented at the Western States Communication Association, Sacramento, CA, February, 2000.

 

Weeks 13, 14, and 15.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nov. 27

Short Paper 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dec. 4

Short Paper 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dec. 11

Short Paper 6

 

 

 

 

Choose your topic each week from one of the following:

 

A Trope Through the Textual Woods: Simile, Synecdoche, and Metonymy

Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1945), 503-517.

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc. 1982), 5-17, 49-59.

Stephen J. Brown, “Simile,” “Personification,” and “Metonymy and Synecdoche,” in The World of Imagery: Metaphor and Kindred Imagery (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927), 118-162.

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., “Metonymy,” in The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 319-358.

Irony

Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle: U of Washington Press, 1990), 73-110.

Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
1-44.

Genres both Real and Imagined

review, Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in The Discourse Reader ed. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (New York: Routledge, 1999), 121-132.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction,” in Form and Genre Shaping Rhetorical Action (Falls Church: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 9-32.

Thomas Conley, “The Linnaean Blues: Thoughts on the Genre Approach,” in in Form, Genre, and the Study of Political Discourse (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 1986), 59-78.

George Aichele, Jr. “Genre and Reality,” in The Limits of Story (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1985), 77-102.

Space and Geography in Textual Contexts

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1-67.

Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984), 115-130.

Time in Textual Contexts

Wesley A. Kort, Modern Fiction and Human Time: A Study in Narrative and Belief (Tampa, FL: U Presses of Florida, 1985), 3-21, 61-70, 107-116, 155-165.

Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1968), 1-35.

Paul Ricoeur, “Time and Narrative,” in Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1983), 52-87.

 

 

It is a Narrative World

Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang: 1977), 79-124.

Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell U Press, 1986),
107-151.

John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Re-constructing Narrative Theory: A Functional Perspective,” Journal of Communication 35 (1985): 90-108

 

Week 16: Final Exam Week

Discussion About Final Papers