This course will treat heuresis as the study of creativity in language. Since the publication of books like Hayden White's Metahistory and Edward Said's Orientalism in the 1970s, literary and cultural critics have taken a renewed, "political" interest in the question of how discourse invents its object. There was an invention craze in the late 1980s. The excitement generated by Judith Butler's work in the 1990s showed that the question had lost none of its force. Today the invention of race and culture are pressing areas of research. So what is invention? It is a question that traditionally belongs to heuristics, an area of rhetoric, yet as Genette noted years ago, modern criticism tends to reduce rhetoric to the study of tropes, notably metaphor and metonymy. The restriction of rhetoric follows the racialization of tropes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which was partly Vico's legacy, for it was Vico who argued that the "first nations" of Europe "created things according to their ideas." After the Tylor school of anthropology took over Vico's legacy, invention was made an attribute of "savage thought." Today the creativity of savage thought has been rehabilitated under the banner of postmodernism.
We will begin by approaching heuresis as a problem of reference. "The innumerable writing that dominate our lives are made intelligible by a preordained agreement as to their referential authority," writes Paul de Man, but since the agreement is "contractual" rather than "constitutive," it can be broken wherever a piece of writing is "questioned to its rhetorical mode." After "questioning" how such contracts are made, enforced, and breached in everyday acts of reading, we will turn to the problem of how discourse makes its referent. The readings will fall into two categories. Required readings will focus on canonical works of rhetoric, but there will be a second list of readings in (more or less) contemporary criticism. Participants will give a brief presentation on one of the primary readings, but will choose one of these secondary readings as a topic for sustained research. This research will be presented first as a seminar presentation and later as a term paper. The aim is to ask how classical rhetorical concepts and practices inform contemporary fields of research, such as postcolonialism or feminism, that affirm the constructedness or inventedness of social forms. For an introduction to rhetoric, read Part Two of Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives. For the idea behind the course, read Derrida's "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" in Reading de Man Reading, ed Waters and Gödzich. We will discuss Aristotle's Rhetoric in our first meeting; please read it in advance. Note that this will not be a course in composition theory.
Readings for Class:
Readings for presentations and papers (one text or cluster of texts per student); please note that this list is under construction: