“Classical Rhetoric and Contemporary Persuasion”
When Aristotle published his Rhetoric in the 4th Century BCE, he described “the available means of persuasion” in ways that remain useful for anyone who wishes to influence other people and to understand how other people influence them: in politics, law, advertising, science, and interpersonal relationships.
This course moves back and forth between ancient readings in rhetorical theory and contemporary readings in rhetorical theory and analysis—and between rhetorical theory and rhetorical practice. It seeks to answer questions like these: How, in daily life, are minds made up and changed? What do people say to get other people to trust them? What do audiences need already to believe, in order to be persuaded by something new? Can an emotional appeal also be a good argument? But it asks, as well, if and why it makes sense to study the careful plotting of arguments, when, in 2021, so many of us are so enraged and so afraid about so much, and when we are most of us living inside the truth of our chosen sources for news—and when, on many topics, many people are, pretty much, unpersuadable.
Rhetorical theory offers a procedure for studying the means of persuasion in public and in private life, in institutional and social settings, across a range of platforms and genres. There is no better way to understand rhetorical theory and method than to study their history. Students will read key texts by Gorgias, Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and apply Classical terms of art to contemporary speeches, campaigns, advertisements, and other rhetorical performances.