COML530 - Pre-Modern Rhetorics

This course offers an overview of the ancient, medieval, and early modern rhetorical traditions, and aims to work very broadly across cultural and textual histories. It should be useful for any students working in early and later periods (including post-Renaissance) who want a grounding in the intellectual and institutional history of rhetoric, the "discourse about discourse" that was central to curricular formation, aesthetics, politics, ideas of history, and ideas of cannons. We will read materials from sophistic rhetoric, from Plato and Aristotle, from Cicero, Quintilian, and rhetorical theoriests from late antiquity (including Augustine); we will work through medieval materials from monastic and cathedral schools to the universities, considering how Ciceronian rhetoric carries an overwhelming influence into Middle Ages; we will consider the professional stratification of various kinds of rhetorical production and theory in the late Middle Ages and look at some crucial literary embodiments of rhetoric as disciplinary force.