FoolsCap

Okay, so it’s not quite that bad.  But I’m having a Dickens of a time deciding what to take in Fall.  Here’s Dr. Pruchnic’s course description:

When Aristotle defined deductive reasoning as "the body of persuasion" in the Rhetoric he largely purged the discipline of its preexisting concern with the connection between physical embodiment and forces of persuasion. During the past decade these repressed elements — and their related structures of affect, performativity, materiality, and sensation — have returned with a vengeance to rhetorical studies. In this seminar we will examine both the importance of embodiment to the origins of rhetoric as well as its more current return(s): how the body has emerged as a problem for critical thought in the past and the questions it provokes for rhetoric, politics, and ethics in the present. Though grounded in current and emergent rhetorical theory, this seminar will draw on an interdisciplinary range of critical studies into embodiment and its relation to persuasion (including literary and cultural studies, film, neuroscience, and psychology). Our tentative list of readings includes texts by Bataille, Jonathan Beller, Kenneth Burke, Judith Butler, Derrida, Mladen Dolar, Richard Doyle, Epictetus, Foucault, José Gil, Guattari, Kafka, Brian Massumi, Mario Perniola, Plato, Elaine Scarry, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. 

So, cool, right?  There’s all sort of people listed there whose work I know I should read and many of them I want  to read.  And, given my interest in affective rhetoric–which is still nebulous and undirected, but it’s floating around–this definitely sounds like something I should take.  In fact, I’ve already registered for it in advance, but there’s still time to change.

And change I might.  Dr. Watten hasn’t given me a formal course description yet, but informally (in the lobby of the Maccabees, no less), he said the course is going to be based in research and poetics, and how the two have developed in recent years.  So, this too meets my interests: one thing I find so compelling in both Barthes and Ulmer (and Sirc and Rice and and and) is how research can be aesthetic, and then (in turn) how we can use that realization to create a poetics (which is described in TextBook as a heuristic approach to the creation of a text).  So a class (led by the respected Dr. Watten, no less) about research and poetics seems like it too is something I should take.

Now, the final contender: Dr. Shaviro’s Intro to Film and Media Studies.  This was the first course for the fall that I really wanted to be a part of, but given the potential value to my studies of JP’s and BW’s classes, I don’t really know which to enroll in.  I’ve (finally) finished Shaviro’s Connected and really enjoyed it, and I was looking forward to studying with him (like JP’s class, I’ve already enrolled in SS’s.) 

I think for now, until I get Dr. Watten’s promised course description, I’m sticking with Shaviro and Pruchnic.  But if Watten’s decription seems to cater to the sort of Ulmer/Barthes direction of research/poetics/aesthetics, I’ll probably end up moving from Shaviro’s class to Watten’s.

Ah, hell.