Essential Rhetorical Texts

Here's a list of texts I'll be studying for my comprehensive exams. Rhetoric is one of my two secondary areas of study.

Isocrates. Against the Sophists.

Plato. Republic Book X.

Aristotle. Rhetoric Books 1-2.

Cicero. De Oratore.

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. Ecclesiastes.

De Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies.

Vico, Giambattista. On the Study Methods of Our Time.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. History.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

Bakhtin, M. M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. & The Problem of Speech Genres.

Langer, Susanne. “The New Key.” Philosophy in a New Key (1942).

Burke, Kenneth. “The Range of Rhetoric.” A Rhetoric of Motives (1950).

Habermas, Jurgen. “Communicative Ethics.” The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory.

—. “The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory.” Knowledge & Human Interest.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. & The Order of Discourse.

Kristeva, Julia. “What of Tomorrow’s Nation?” & “The Nation and the Word.” Nations Without Nationalism (1993).

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey (1988).

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1995).

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” Glyph I (1977).

Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country (1998).

Of course, not all of these texts are the most representative of their respective writer's interest in rhetoric. The texts are generally geared as much as possible to my own work in community as well.

Currently

Reading:

Derrida "Signature Event Context"

Foucault from The Archaeology of Knowledge

A bunch of criticism on early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown

Anything about things

A little Melville

Listening:

John Coltrane My Favorite Things

John Coltrane Impressions

Writing:

A painful essay on narrative structure and material objects in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Ormond.

Syllabuses for next semester. What?

Thinking:

About sleeping more and more often

About why it's been raining for 40 hours literally non-stop

Anticipating:

December

Now

Reading:

The Coquette Hannah Webster Foster
Ormond Charles Brockden Brown
The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
from The Philosophy of the Present George Herbert Mead
Things ed. Bill Brown
from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Mikhail Bakhtin
from Cane Jean Toomer

Listening:

Annuals
The Black Keys

Watching:

Awesome Monday Night Football matchup last night
Anticipating 30Rock premier this week
MLB Playoffs-think I'm pulling for the Phillies-as a Reds and Braves fan (born in Louisville, KY and lived 4 years in Atlanta), I normally pull for the NL, and while I'd love to see Torre and the Dodgers come back and stick it to the Yankees, I can't be a Manny fan ever again.

Grading:

Close Reading Essays
Intro. to Narrative Midterm Exams

Caring for:

A sick wife.
Everyone out there drink lots of fluids and pound some vitamin C.

Everything All At Once

Community
Things
Objects
Narrative
Human Nature
Language
Rhetoric
History
Fiction
Commodities
Consumerism
Systems
Touching
Connection


Bill Brown
Martin Heidegger
Walter Benjamin
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jonathan Safran Foer
Don DeLillo
Jhumpa Lahiri
Brian McHale

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Nietzsche Wordle

CLICK HERE

Spencer Wordle

Click Here

American Renaissance Word Map

Click HERE to check out the results of a new discovery: wordle.net

The site constructs a word map of sorts based on text that you either copy and paste or link to under their "create" page. I copied and pasted the notes I took on F. O. Matthiessen's classic work of criticism American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.