COURSE OVERVIEW

The work in this course raises the questions: What does it mean to be critical? How does one develop a critical perspective? Why should one want to?

Frequent writings on literature, film, advertising and popular arts help the student develop answers to these questions and to achieve authority in critical performance. We will accomplish this by seeing rhetoric through media. First, we will explore what a text is and how we acquire meaning. Second, we will define rhetoric and how we use rhetoric through media. And, third, we will determine how critical reading will contribute to your writing.

Rhetoric may be thought of as speech, writing, or generally any form of communication directed towards others. The systematic study of how to make ideas more persuasive began year ago in Greece.

Media refers to the principle sources of information and entertainment, such as newspapers and magazines; television, radio and films; and, finally, for our needs, literature, too.

Throughout the semester we will be involved in a series of critical investigations into genres of media to determine how these construct cultural conditions we abide by or aspire to achieve. Along the way, we will investigate how media fashions culture, and vice versa. In essence, we will develop the ability to read media's highly various forms of rhetoric so as to notice their devices and to think analytically about how they work.