Prof. Stuart Murray
Winter 2010
ENG 520: The Language of Persuasion
"Technoculture - The Rhetorics of Man and Machine"
Calendar Description: This course explores how language functions in personal and professional life. As George Orwell has observed, no writing is truly free of political bias, or "the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." Students will read and analyse material from such areas as: business, law, journalism, politics, advertising, in order to understand how language achieves its most powerful effects.Detailed Course Description: "Technoculture -- The Rhetorics of Man and Machine"
The Oxford English Dictionary defines persuasion as "...the addressing of arguments or appeals to a person in order to induce cooperation, submission, or agreement...." Language is defined somewhat more broadly as the "system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure"; but also as the "means of communicating other than by the use of words, as gesture, facial expression, etc.; non-verbal communication." What, then, is the "language of persuasion"? Inducing cooperation, submission, or agreement is not limited to spoken words or written forms; the power of persuasion extends to all manner of communication, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate.
Through a reading of several modern theoretical and literary texts, this course examines some of the ways that persuasion is mediated in contemporary technoculture, through words and deeds, bodies and technologies, by humans, by machines, and through the discursive distinctions we maintain between these terms. These texts variously offer a politics of persuasion, drawing attention to the often implicit ways in which we are manipulated emotionally, how we form opinions and beliefs, as well as what we take to be unshakeably true.
Texts to Purcahse
- Karel Capek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Penguin Classics Edition, trans. Claudia Novack (New York: Penguin, 2004), ISBN: 9780141182087
- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey Edition, Reissue (New York: Random House, 1996), ISBN: 9780345404473
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Broadview Editions, 2nd Ed., eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), ISBN: 9781551113081
- Course Reader, ENG 520: The Language of Persuasion, "Technoculture - The Rhetorics of Man and Machine" (available at Ryerson Bookstore only)
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