Drake University Rhetoric 106

Honors/Rhetoric 134 -- Professor Hariman -- Spring 1997 - x2840; rh0661r

The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

This course is grounded in two basic ideas. The first of these is that the modern human sciences have yet to adequately understand the texture of ordinary, everyday activity--the world of vernacular discourse, common apparel, mundane decor, and minute decisions regarding what we are to do next. The second idea is that these decisions contain as an important element aesthetic considerations--largely tacit and probably not very coherent norms of taste or style that are embedded in all our familiar artifacts and interactions. Although everyone is occasionally aware that they are making aesthetic decisions--e.g., when buying a sweater or looking at a new building--I suspect that a thorough attentiveness to the amount of design in one's environment would be unsettling, and that an attempt to explain what one finds would push one into some fundamental problems in social understanding.

We each will bring particular experiences and perspectives to our common inquiry, each of which will have its strengths and weaknesses in respect to understanding our subject. For example, my aesthetic sense has been shaped by growing up in a middle class home in North Dakota, which imparted to me both a love of abstract forms and a lack of cultural sophistication, and my disciplinary perspective develops the assumption that ornamental display is also operating as a mode of persuasion--that is, as something capable of altering our consciousness and capacity for action--but the same perspective also carries with it biases toward conventional definitions of politics and verbal modes of expression that might be disabling when studying ordinary social practices. We will discover various personal interests, insights, and blind spots during the course as we consider, individually and together, what we see and can't see, value and disregard, perform and avoid in our everyday performances of who we are. I have no doubt that our task requires pooling our resources, for we are attempting to study something that is often tacit and that lies outside of most forms of disciplinary scholarship.

The primary objective of the course is to develop some understanding of the following issues: (1) how much and how our social environment is organized according to aesthetic norms; (2) how personal and social identity are shaped by those norms; (3) how particular norms contribute to or inhibit the good life; (4) what ordinary aesthetic sensibilities reveal about the distinctive character of everyday communicative practices and social consciousness.

Texts:

Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (Basic Books, 1988)
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979)
Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (U. of Chicago Press, 1992)
Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion (Routledge, 1994)
Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (Fawcett/Ballantine, 1984)
Christena Nippert-Eng, Home and Work (U. of Chicago Press, 1995)
Anne Norton, Republic of Signs (U. of Chicago Press, 1993)

Assignments:

First paper: 5-8 pages 30 % of final grade.
Second paper: 7-10 pages 40 % of final grade.
Journal: no limit 20 % of final grade
Class discussion: 10 % of final grade
Journal: You are to keep a record of your reading, observations, questions, and commentary throughout the course. Some of the time I will supply questions or exercises for you to use but much of the time you will be free to develop your own lines of inquiry. The primary discipline is that you should provide some synopsis or discussion of the course texts on a regular basis; you needn't discuss every reading assignment but you should be summarizing and commenting on many of them. You also are strongly encouraged to record and comment on ordinary, everyday phenomena, whether to log them for later discussion, interpret them in respect to (or in opposition to) the course texts, or develop a clear sense of your own aesthetic preferences and their relation to the determination of identity, community, and power. You also can comment on our discussions in class, on other class discussions or readings, on other cultural experiences, etc. You can use one style of writing or multiple styles. In every case, the point of the journal is to help you develop your ability to understand the texture of everyday life.
First paper: You are to apply an argument and method of interpretation from one of the course texts to a particular aspect of your daily life. You might focus on one object (such as your shirt), or ensemble (what you wear at home on Saturdays), or routine (getting dressed), or practice (shopping), or interaction (making a purchase), or event (a birthday party). You can use any one of the course texts, and you can take a single analysis as your model or you can follow the text's more comprehensive program of inquiry. Since we will working along these lines in many of our class periods, I expect that you will be able to define your project well before it is due. You also will make an oral presentation of your work to the class for discussion; the presentations begin on the day the paper is due, which is Tuesday, March 4.
Second paper: You are to present a systematic account of some element or aspect of everyday life in respect to pertinent issues, themes, or theories that we have discussed in this course, with particular attention to the question of power. All of the texts that we have read emphasize that the texture of everyday life is the result of complex processes of influence, resistance, co-optation, adaptation, and other forms of communicative practice and social control. You need to come to terms with this question of who or what is likely to be determining and benefiting from the typical conventions and individual decisions that make up the day-to-day features of our ordinary environments and interactions. If you focus on a particular object or locale, be sure to explicate it in a manner that can contribute to understanding a general range of phenomena; if you focus on a basic theoretical claim, be sure your answer includes attention to particular cases. You also will make an oral presentation of your work to the class for discussion; the presentations begin on the day the paper is due, which is Thursday, April 24.

Be sure to contact me if you have any questions or concerns about any assignment.

Schedule:

January: 14 TU Introduction; 16 TH Ewen 1-53; --; 21 TU Craik 1-43; Davis 3-18; 23 TH Craik 92-175; --; 28 TU Davis 19-30, 55-99; 30 TH Davis 101-158
February: 04 TU Davis 159-206; Craik 204-225; 06 TH Ewen 57-108; journals due; --; 11 TU Hebdige 1-140; 13 TH Hebdige 1-140; --; 18 TU Brownmiller 11-238; 20 TH Film: Paris is Burning; --; 25 TU Craik 44-91; 27 TH Craik 176-203; Davis 31-54; Ewen 176-198
March: 04 TU First paper due; presentations; 06 TH Presentations; --; 11 TU Presentations; 13 TH Nippert-Eng 1-104; --; 18 TU Nippert-Eng 105-151; 20 TH Nippert-Eng 194-228; 25-27 Spring Break
April: 01 TU Ewen 111-149; 03 TH Ewen 153-176, 199-232; --; 08 TU Ewen 233-271; 10 TH Ewen 233-271; --; 15 TU Norton 1-86; 17 TH Norton 87-174; --; 22 TU Synopsis; journals due; 24 TH Presentations; second paper due; --; 29 TU Presentations
May: 01 TH Presentations; --; 07 W 2:00-3:50 (final exam period): presentations