Kreuter, Nathan
TR 9:35 AM
Park Hall 61
ENGL 8900: Rhetorics of Making and Doing
Nate Kreuter, Department of English
In Gorgias, using the conveniently dead personage of Socrates as a mouthpiece, Plato accused rhetoric of being “cookery,” an unhealthy indulgence, a form of flattery, not a genuine art. This course takes historic and contemporary criticisms and defenses of rhetoric, which originate in Plato, and contrasts these critiques with manifestos written by people who work with their hands, cooks, fermenters, fabricators, builders, and repairers. The course puts contemporary theories of rhetoric in contact with theories and practices of doing that have arisen in the early 21st century “maker movement,” the right to repair movement, and the contemporary revival of folk arts and crafts. This is not a course in New Materialism or Object Oriented Ontology, both of which we will engage only long enough to dismiss, if at all, and indeed is set up in contrast with both, framed to privilege the expertise of non-academic practitioners, people who make and who do.
Using Hannah Arendt’s theorization of homo faber, we will explore the extra-academic rhetorics of people who have devoted themselves and their careers to acts of physical creation that defy a larger culture of mass production and designed obsolescence. What are the rhetorical, political, and social implications of such intentional acts of creation, which circumvent the structures of mass production and consumption?
The course is organized into seven units: Foundations (2 weeks); Cookery (2 weeks); Fermentation (2 weeks); Fabrication (2 weeks); Building (2 weeks); Repair and Libraries of Things (1 week); Doing (4 weeks). In the final unit students will engage in an act of doing or making of their choice, connecting the work of the hands to theories of rhetoric through the actual production or repair of an object, and an accompanying paper or alternative form of documentation.
Students will read works by Plato, Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, Laurie Gries, Michael Twitty, Camas Davis, Sandor Katz, Matthew Crawford, Julia Watson, Gary Rogowski, and many others.