About this course
Journalism largely goes unconsidered as a subject for literary analysis, the writing dismissed as formulaic and artless. But from the genre’s inception, there have been writers who approached it as a literary endeavour, committed to not just telling true stories about the world around us but doing so in ways that captivate and engage a reader’s imagination, with all the nuance and precision that literary techniques can afford. In this course, we will read and consider canonical works of journalism from the last 75 years, discussing them as literary works as well as exploring the reporting methods they draw on and the ethical questions they raise. Students will have a choice of assignment tracks, and either develop their own literary reporting projects or write analyses of the works we study.
Course objectives
Study the fascinating history of rhetoric, including its entanglement with philosophy, politics, and literary studies.
Engage in critical conversations about the roles of truth, persuasion, opinion, reason, feeling, and authority in critical inquiry.
Write about the operation of persuasion in a context of importance to you.
Good to know
This is an introductory course open to all students. No specific background in Writing & Rhetoric is required. The midterm assignment is a short essay and the final assignment is a research essay.
A personal note from your instructor
TBA
I developed WRR201 to provide Writing & Rhetoric students with a solid foundation in the fascinating history of rhetoric, its increasingly-relevant theories, and its thorny historical relationships with philosophy, psychology, and the sciences. As an undergraduate philosophy student, I was trained to have a lot of scorn for rhetoric (which gets a bad rap from philosophy). But when I went to graduate school, the most exciting classes (to me) all seemed to involve rhetoric. I hope to inspire a similar sense of fascination with the radical potentials of the discipline in WRR201.