Graduate course?
Hi! I'm hoping for some advice--I'm an undergrad hoping to take a graduate course next semester on "Rhetoric & Poetics, Ancient to Modern". I have to talk to the professor before I can register, and I don't want to go in there completely unprepared. I'm hoping someone on here is a rhetoric/philosophy/literary theory person and can help me out.
This course will be a broad survey of the evolution of and fluctuating relationships between rhetorical theory and poetics from antiquity to modernity - with the emphasis on antiquity as foundation or background for modern developments. Among our concerns will be the ways a "rhetoric" can function as a "poetics" (a literary theory), and vice versa, and what it may mean to talk about “rhetorical poetics” or to do “rhetorical” criticism. We will also be concerned with matters of historical perspective, in particular the emergence of rhetoric in antiquity and its connection to Sophistic, Platonic, and Aristotelian epistemologies; the evolution of “grammatical” approaches to literature in later antiquity; the fate of rhetoric (and poetics) under a post-classical “regime of Truth”; the rediscovery of “the Sublime”; and the re-emergence of “new” rhetorics and rhetorically inflected literary theories from Nietzsche into the 20th century.
Based on that, are there any books I can pick up and read to give me the best background I can hope for?
This course will be a broad survey of the evolution of and fluctuating relationships between rhetorical theory and poetics from antiquity to modernity - with the emphasis on antiquity as foundation or background for modern developments. Among our concerns will be the ways a "rhetoric" can function as a "poetics" (a literary theory), and vice versa, and what it may mean to talk about “rhetorical poetics” or to do “rhetorical” criticism. We will also be concerned with matters of historical perspective, in particular the emergence of rhetoric in antiquity and its connection to Sophistic, Platonic, and Aristotelian epistemologies; the evolution of “grammatical” approaches to literature in later antiquity; the fate of rhetoric (and poetics) under a post-classical “regime of Truth”; the rediscovery of “the Sublime”; and the re-emergence of “new” rhetorics and rhetorically inflected literary theories from Nietzsche into the 20th century.
Based on that, are there any books I can pick up and read to give me the best background I can hope for?