Rhetoric 112-801 -- Prof. Hariman - Spring 1999 -- 105 Medbury Hall; 271-2840 - robert.hariman@drake.edu
Rhetoric and War
Texts:
Assignments:
Papers: Each of the papers should be about 10 double-spaced pages in length and follow standard guidelines for
composition, citation, and formatting. The final presentation will include a statement of the basic question you are
addressing, a synopsis of your texts, a summary of your argument and its implications, and your responses to questions
from the class. The purpose of this presentation is both to challenge the individual student and to contribute to the
learning culture in the classroom.
For the first paper, you should complete one of the following two tasks: (a) Write a commentary on a debate in the History of the Peloponnesian War. Your essay should describe the basic issues in the dispute, analyze the arguments, and defend a judgment articulated in respect to our readings and discussions. (b) Write an analysis of an American military action in terms of the just war theory. Your essay should describe the action and pertinent public debate accurately, analyze the action in respect to the just war theory as it is described in Walzer's text and in class (or in other texts as well), and evaluate the action and the theory.
Books have been placed on reserve to help you with either option.
For the second paper, write a critical essay about a public text in order to explore a major topic of the course. Sample texts include: presidential speeches; major religious denominations' letters on peace; oral histories; news magazine coverage of the various anniversaries of World War I and II; Time-Life or other picture-book series about various wars; a war novel; a war film; the discourse of a campaign to enter a war or to stop a war; the media coverage of a military intervention; the discourse of a war crimes investigation; etc.
Miscellaneous: I am available for consultation at designated office hours or by appointment. An Incomplete grade will be
granted only if the student suffers a medical or familial emergency, notifies me at an early opportunity prior to the end of
the term, and agrees with me upon a plan for completing the course. I follow University policy regarding the prosecution
of plagiarism.
SCHEDULE:
"If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current
standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge
is to be understood." --Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
"To put it in a single word, I would say that our subject is rhetoric, if by that is meant the study of the ways in which character and community--and motive, value, reason, social structure, everything, in short, that makes a culture--are defined and made real in performances of language. Whenever you speak, you define a character for yourself and for at least one other--your audience--and make a community at least between the two of you; and you do this in a language that is of necessity provided to you by others and modified in your use of it. How this complex process works, and can work well, is our concern. As the object of art is beauty and of philosophy truth, the object of rhetoric is justice: the constitution of a social world." --James Boyd White, When Words Lose their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community
"War is hell." --late twentieth-century cliché
Partial Listing of Reference Guides:
Reserve Materials:
Visual Materials:
Educational media houses a number of pertinent video programs, including PBS series on the Vietnam war, on the nuclear age, and on the CIA, other documentaries on the Vietnam war, on the Cambodian war, and on the Gulf war, and tapes of war-related movies and tv shows. Popular films are available from commercial rental stores. CNN coverage of the Gulf War is on file at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City. And, of course, there are many, many sites on the internet.