Our Syllabus

Who Holds the Keys?
Rhet 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
Summer 2010

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dalec@berkeley.edu
Course Blog: http://rhettwenty.blogspot.com
7/6-8/13 T-W-R 3-5.30 160 Dwinelle

Att/Part, 14%; Precis, 14%; Mid-Term, 36%; Final, 36%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One
July 6 -- Administrative Introduction
July 7 -- Introductions
July 8 -- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Week Two
July 13 -- Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
Why I Am So Wise
Why I Am So Clever
Why I Am a Destiny (or Fatality)
July 14 -- Marx, from The German Ideology, Idealism and Materialism
Marx on Commodity Fetishism from Capital
July 15 -- Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry

Week Three
July 20 -- Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" [reader]
July 21 -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies [Purchase Book]
Kobena Mercer, On Mapplethorpe [reader]
July 22 -- Naomi Klein, No Logo One
Two
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Week Four
July 27 -- Carpenter (dir.), They Live In-Class Screening -- First Essay Due (4-5pp.)
July 28 -- William Burroughs, "Coincidence" and "Immortality" [reader] Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
July 29 -- Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? [reader], Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future [reader], and Louis Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.

Week Five
Aug 3 -- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Purchase Book], Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [reader]
Aug 4 -- Paul Gilroy, from Postcolonial Melancholia [reader]
Carol Adams, “Preface” & “On Beastliness and Solidarity" [reader]
Aug 5 -- Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space
CS Lewis Abolition of Man

Week Six
Aug 10 -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Aug 11 -- Bruno Latour, A Plea for Earthly Science
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Aug 12 -- Conclusions -- Second Essay Due (5-6pp.)