Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, May 02, 2009

My Course This Summer at Berkeley

Rhetoric 20: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
Tu-W-Th: 3:00pm-5:30pm, 130 Wheeler Hall

Just what is the relationship of argument to interpretation? "Interpretation" derives from the Latin interpretatio, a term freighted with the sense not only of explication, but of translation. What are the conventions that govern intelligible acts of interpretation, translation, argumentation? What are the conventions through which we constitute the proper objects of interpretation in the first place? And who are the subjects empowered to offer up interpretations that compel our attention and conviction? What happens when objects object to the interpretations we impose and then demand the standing of subjects themselves? How does the interpretation of literary texts differ from an interpretation of the law? How does it differ from a scientist's interrogation of her environment? Or from any critical engagement with the "given" terms of the social order in which one lives? Or even from the give and take through which we struggle to understand one another in everyday conversation? These are questions with which we will begin our survey of some of the themes, problems, and conventions in the rhetoric of interpretation. Where we will have arrived by the end will of course be very much a matter open to interpretation.

Required Texts (All Available in a Course Reader):

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; Ecce Homo (excerpts); Freud, On the Interpretation of Dreams (excerpts), "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia;" Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (excerpts), "On the Fetishism of Commodities," Barthes, Mythologies; Carpenter, "They Live" (film); Foucault, Discipline and Punish; History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (excerpts); Arendt, The Human Condition (excerpts), Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (excerpts), Burroughs, "On Coincidence," "Immortality," Solanas, "The SCUM Manifesto," Mercer, "The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe," Adams, "Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity," Brown, "Thing Theory," Latour, Making Things Public, Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy (excerpts), Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters," Butler, Undoing Gender, Frames of War (excerpts)

1 comment:

Ryan Berg said...

Dale,

I got into Cal! I got deferred admission for Spring 2010. I CANNOT sit on my ass until then though. I would love to take this course. I'm going to try and do it.

Hope to see you soon,