Welcome to English 106, Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition
This course seeks to develop composition ability with a number of traditional and emerging mediums while explicating key rhetorical concepts--especially stressing the importance of context and contingency in the composing process. This semester, we'll work with traditional text, photo manipulation software, social authorship software, and cinematography software. We'll discuss composition in print and visual terms, equipping you not only with "ways of seeing," but also principles for production.
The title for my section this semester is "Presenting University"--an intentional play on the multiple meanings of "presenting." In one way, I intend to introduce you to the history of university education and the questions that surround it--what is it? what is it supposed to do? We'll be looking at a wide range of thinkers from a number of eras in an attempt to trace the complex (and at times contradictory) history of higher education. Additionally, we will be thinking about particularly contemporary issues, and thus, in a sense, presenting the university--contextualizing these complex historical issues into our own contemporary moment. Finally,I will also be attempting to present the academic operations and values that mark higher edation to you. To enter a university is to encounter a new culture, one with its own languages, customs, values, and procedures--this course works to enculturate you into the world of the university while paradoxically equipping you with the tools to question, critique, or resist any such enculturation.
Our knowledge is never complete. In the face of this incompleteion, two kinds of people emerge: those who, frightened by their lack of knowledge, propose to know everything (or imagine a future day when we-will-have-come-to-know-everything), and those who confront their fear, accept that we never could know everything, and work within their limitations. The former concentrates on answers, the latter on questions. I try to be of the latter, and therefore my ultimate goal is to equip you with questions, not answers. Questions for me represent the possibility of experiencing infinity, since a question comes to us tentative, unsure of itself.
Why are you here?