Academics
Arguing, Persuading, Blogging:
Public Talk in America
FLT 191
(Fulfills 3 credits of the General Education Requirements in the Arts and Humanities)
Dr. Margaret Marshall, Department of English
Mon./Wed., 3:35-4:50/Section HX
Talk radio, internet blogs and television certainly influence our perceptions of current events and public issues, but what forces shaped public debate and opinion before these technologies were invented? While newspapers on-line now allow readers to post comments and carry on a dialogue of sorts, has this practice strengthened public debate or polarized the citizenry? How, in fact, did earlier citizens express their points of view or try to influence each other? How has the official rhetoric of Presidents or other leaders interacted with these public venues for open discussion? In this seminar we’ll look at specific forms of public discourse from newspapers and lecture circuits to blogs and talk shows as we consider how public discourse works--or doesn’t--to inform and entertain Americans, shape opinion and forge common bonds. We’ll also examine the rhetoric of several American leaders and consider what made their words and arguments effective and memorable, or not.
We’ll begin with the historic, examining the essays printed in newspapers to “deliberate” on the Constitution. We’ll then turn to speeches that were given on lecture circuits and in public forums and the essays and round tables that appeared in popular magazines during the nineteenth century, noting in particular the rhetoric surrounding the movements for abolition, female suffrage and public education. A third section of the course will compare written rhetoric with oral performances using speeches from the civil rights movement and Presidential speeches, many of which are available on the American Rhetoric Association website (www.americanrhetoric.com). Finally, we’ll turn to current blogs, on-line reader commentary, talk radio, political comedy shows and the Sunday Morning talk show circuit as forums for current public discussions. Throughout the course, students will be asked to consider how scholars examine the public debates of the past and present, what they learn from doing so, and how attention to rhetoric is different from as well as similar to attention to content, historical and social context, or ideology.
Students will write informal reader responses, posting these on the course Blackboard site. They will do short papers of rhetorical analysis and develop a project of their own tracking public discourse or analyzing specific texts on a public debate—historical or current—that they find interesting. The course is meant to be adaptable, then, to any number of majors, but might be especially interesting to students in political science, history, English, cultural studies, law, or communication.
Margaret Marshall (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1991) is an expert in the fields of composition, writing pedagogy, and rhetorical studies. Her research is focused on the rhetoric of educational discourse. Dr. Marshall’s first book, Contesting Cultural Rhetoric: Public Discourse and Education, 1890-1900 (University of Michigan Press, 1995), examined public discussion of education, the use of narrative in arguments for educational reform and the role of education as a key term in American culture. Her second book, In Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), traces the history of calls to improve education through the professionalization of teachers and demonstrates that this history is repeated in current reform efforts directed at higher education. She has also written articles examining the rhetoric of curricular objectives, of The American Educational Research Journal, of National Board standards for teacher evaluation, and of intellectual work in the politics of evaluating faculty and in graduate education. Her textbook for first-year composition students, Composing Inquiry (Prentice Hall, 2008) began as a collaborative project with teachers in UM’s Composition Program and features inquiry methods and projects. Her current project involves public discussions of education and race in the post-reconstruction period.
