For Discussion Wednesday

Extra Credit

This is just a quick post to summarize the Extra Credit assignment I will be proposing for you in our class together tomorrow, Thursday. The extra credit assignment asks you to illustrate ten notions we've explored in the course so far by finding, transcribing, and labeling an example of each one that you find within the pages (whether digital or pulp) of a single issue of a daily newspaper or monthly magazine.

The examples I seek include:

1. A logos appeal.
2. A pathos appeal.
3. An ethos appeal.
4. A piece of formal reasoning, illustrating a valid modus ponens or modus tollens inference or the formal fallacies of either affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent (to be clear, I am looking for an example of just one of these, not an example of each of them).
5. An informal fallacy.
6. A second, different informal fallacy.
7. One of the Four Master Tropes.
8. A second trope, not one of the Four Master Tropes.
9. A scheme.
10. A second, different scheme.

In order to get credit for any of the illustrations you find you must provide examples of all ten. You will receive one extra credit point for each of the ten illustrations you get right. If you provide good illustrations for all ten you will receive an extra five bonus points in addition to the ten you receive for each individual correct illustration. And so, this Extra Credit assignment is worth fifteen points at most. Whatever points you earn on this assignment will be added to the score you received on your Mid-Term Examination (as you can see, this might amount at best to a letter grade and a half of extra credit points for the Mid-Term).

Remember, this assignment is entirely voluntary and is due next Thursday, June27, the same day you are doing the Writing Workshop for the final paper. If you do choose to turn in this Extra Credit assignment, I strongly recommend you work on it earlier rather than later -- your time will be better spent ensuring your final papers and notebooks are in fine shape than working for ten to fifteen extra credit points for the Mid-Term!

About the Upcoming Midterm Exam

I encourage you all to arrive at the scheduled start time for our class rather than our more usual ten-minutes delayed "Berkeley time." I will provide you with the first half of your mid-term examination worksheet at 2 o'clock, or any time you arrive thereafter. The second half of the exam will begin at 3.15, or any time thereafter. The examination will continue to the scheduled end of our class at 4.30. You should bring writing implements but otherwise everything will be provided for you.

Again, I urge you to use your syllabus and the Study Sheet I distributed on Thursday to prepare for the exam. So long as you have a decent definition of each of the terms on the Study Sheet and remember the SKILL SETS we covered in our various workshops in the first half of the course you should do very well on the exam. Indeed, I hope you will enjoy completing the exam and its various puzzles and exercises. The following video clip provides a clue to assist you in one of the exercises on Tuesdays exam, enjoy the cheesy retro 80s hair...



By all means, use the comments section under this post to ask questions of one another or make plans for study sessions if you like. I hope everybody has a lovely weekend.

Our Syllabus

Rhetoric 10: The Rhetoric of Argument

"What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation"

Summer 2019, Session A, 2-4.30pm., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 88 Dwinelle Hall

Instructor, Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edy; ndaleca@gmail.com;
Course Blog: http://whatiscompelling.blogspot.com

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 25%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Mid-Term Exam, 30%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 30%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Course Description

                The arc of the moral universe is a longing... and it bends from just us.

This course provides students with tools they can use to make better, more compelling, arguments and also to read arguments in better, more critical, ways. We will draw the tools for our argumentative toolboxes from the long history of rhetoric, from sophistical dissoi logoi, to the Aristotelian appeals, to Quintilian's four master tropes, to the rich archive of formal and informal fallacies, to argument modeled on litigation via Toulmin's schema, to argument modeled on mediation via Rogerian synthesis, to the pragmatism of the ends of argument. All the while we are workshopping these technical skills we will also be reading and discussing a range of texts that tackle questions of the reach and forms of violence and nonviolence in historical struggle and in everyday life. These texts will likewise draw from a long history, from Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt to Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We will also talk through a play by Euripides, an essay by Nietzsche, a novel by Octavia Butler, a film by Cronenberg… The crucial thing to understand about the course is that we will not be taking on two separate projects, one practical and another theoretical. This course proposes that there is an indispensable relation between the traditional focus of rhetoric as instruction in the art of making compelling arguments and the theoretical preoccupation of many rhetoricians with questions of what violence or compulsion ultimately consists. It is commonplace to see Persuasion offered up as an alternative to the violent adjudication of disputes or hear Argument idealized as a space "outside" of violence. But the truth is that many arguments rely on the acceptance of a violent status quo or depend on conventional assumptions that deny marginal testimonies to violation. Also, many arguments stealthily threaten violence while at once congratulating themselves on their peacefulness. Ultimately, the course proposes that it is rhetoric's definitive concern with the traffic between the literal and figurative dimensions of language and its situated understanding of truth-telling that connects the work of rhetoric with a project of reconciliation that resists violence even as we cannot help but risk it.

A Provisional Schedule of Meetings

                Week One
May 28 SKILL SET: Key Definitions
[1] Rhetoric is the facilitation of efficacious discourse as well as an ongoing inquiry into the terms on the basis of which discourse comes to seem efficacious or not.
[2] A text is an event experienced as arising from intention, offered up to the hearing of an audience, and obligating a responsiveness equal to it.
[3] An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
Introductions: Rhetoric as occasional, interested, figurative; The literal as conventional, the figurative as deviant.
May 29 SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Audience/Intentions -- Audiences: Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Intentions: Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliation
Euripides: Hecuba (Here is a link to the last few lines of the play, cut off from the online version for some reason)
May 30 SKILL SET: Aristotelian rhetoric; Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Writing A Precis
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

                Week Two
June 4  SKILL SET: Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Performativity
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
June 5 SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
William May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death" (In-Class Handout)
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace

June 6 SKILL SET: Rogerian Rhetoric
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Logan Rimel, My "Nonviolent" Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men

supplemental/referenced texts this week:
Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown; Howard Zinn, On Henry David Thoreau and When To Resist An Immoral State ; Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam; Ella Baker, Bigger Than A Hamburger; Combahee River Collective Statement

                Week Three
June 11 SKILL SET: Logoi Dissoi

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish (this is a .pdf of the entire book from which you should read from the excerpts as far as you like) from "The Body of the Condemned" (pp. 3-31), "Docile Bodies" (pg. 135 +), and "Panoptism" (pg. 195 +).

Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? Chapters 1, 2, 6

June 12 SKILL SET: Propositional Analysis; Enthymemes, Syllogisms, Formal/Informal Fallacies (short day)
June 13 SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes
Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

supplemental/referenced texts this week:
Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy; Nietzsche, selections from The Gay Science

                Week Four
June 18 Mid-Term Examination
June 19 Screening and Discussion of the Film, "A History of Violence," dir. Cronenberg
June 20 Hannah Arendt, Reflections On Violence (if this link does not work for you, an expanded version of "On Violence" is available as a chapter in the book Crises of the Republic, beginning on p. 103, which you can read a .pdf of here) and "Must Eichmann Hang?" (In-Class Handout)

Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence from The Wretched of the Earth

supplemental/referenced texts this week:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations; Hannah Arendt on forgiveness from The Human Condition

                Week Five
June 25 Octavia Butler, Kindred (Purchase in time for class. ISBN-10: 0807083690 ISBN-13: 978-0807083697)
June 26 SKILL SET: Debate

June 27 SKILL SET: Workshopping Final Paper: Producing a Strong Thesis; Anticipating Objections; Providing Textual Support

supplemental/referenced texts this week:
Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Meaning and Practice of Ahimsa; Karuna Matena, The Power of Nonviolence; Gene Sharp, How Nonviolent Struggle Works; Rev. William Barber, The Third Reconstruction; Correspondence of Tolstoy and Gandhi; Jane Addams, New Ideals of Peace: Passing of the War Virtues

                Week Six
July 2 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Introduction, pp. [1]-44.). 

Robert Bullard, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism 

John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism 

July 3 Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto {Bacchanal} Final Paper Due