ENGL 5/690: Sensory Rhetoric: Sensation, Power, Change (original) (raw)

If Empedecles embraced it en toto, Aristotle dissected and ranked it. If Descartes dismissed it as untrustable, Hobbes acknowledged it as the foundation of all thought. And if Aquinas accused it of obscuring God, Marx praised it as a means to thriving. Whether celebrated or scorned, divided or merged, sensation has been acknowledged as a crucial and inescapable part of human life throughout Western history. This course is concerned to inquire into the many ways that sensation matters as a site of power and danger, stasis and change. Following recent conversations among philosophers, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, historians, and many others, we will take a second look at some long-held commonplaces about sensation: Are there really five senses as we so often assume, or could there be more? Is it useful to divide the senses up at all? Does sensory capacity vary across individuals, times, and cultures? As scholars increasingly answer this last question in the affirmative, sensation's connection to power and change is becoming increasingly apparent. Against our everyday assumptions, for instance, many argue that sensory practices and technologies don't simply connect us with the outside world, but help compose that world, bringing into being the subjects and objects, races and genders, activities and environments that populate it. And as many suggest, sensory practices also regulate the worlds they invent, determining who is valued or denigrated, recognized or ignored. Grounding the relations we enter with others, then, sensory practices are increasingly implicated in our ethics—whether they are critiqued for objectifying, subverting, and excluding or embraced as pathways to mutual wonder, respect, and entanglement. If it works as this growing body of research suggests—moving people to beliefs and actions, composing subjects and objects, grounding thought and meaning—then sensation is in many ways rhetorical. And yet the highly rhetorical perspective on sensation offered by recent scholarship has yet to be extensively explored in the field of rhetoric. This course invites you to do just that. Reading a variety of theories and debates about sensation, we will consider not only the many ways that sensation emerges as a site of power and change, but also what that means for our questions in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and communication. As we proceed through our reading, we will continually seek out connection points in these fields. This will eventually set you up for the seminar paper, where you will focus on a particular debate in RPC, asking how a sensory perspective can inform that debate. As a class, we will also speculate on what rhetorical studies can offer current understandings of sensation.