Rhetoric and Stylistics

Code:

MEAAM017

Acronym:

RETE

Instance: 2016/2017 - 1S

Active?	Yes
Responsible unit:	Department of Anglo-American Studies
Course/CS Responsible:	Masters in Anglo-American Studies

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
MEAA	11	Study Plan since 2007/2008	1	-	5,5	-

Teaching language

English

Objectives

The seminar aims at, in the general context of the Course, providing a more systematic knowledge of disciplines often related to indistinct or vague notions, or marked by the feelings of mistrust associated with a formalistic aesthetics without any qualified import, either in the realm of everyday language or at the level of literary studies. Understanding literature will, therefore, find support in the consideration of textual strategies of persuasion or in the attempt to clarify an 'intimate consciousness' open to meaning or ironically elusive in face of interpretation and criticism. Form and content in literary discourse meet in a close association given 'a local habitation and a name' by rhetorical operations, composition techniques, and style modulation. Students are expected to understand Rhetoric in history and in our time, and to achieve some experience and skill in rhetorical textual analysis and in the examination of meaning and form of rhetorical and stylistic devices.

Learning outcomes and competences

The student should be able to produce, from the available literature, a personal discourse about the issues under consideration.

Working method

Presencial

Program

The definition of meaning and relevance given to Rhetoric today does not go without the consideration of strategic moments disseminated in a long way of a discipline with such an enduring tradition in western culture. Platonic rejection of the arbitrary doxa of Sophism, allegedly the enemy of wisdom and truth, the reaction against the rigidity of thought in the prison of the written word, the inscription of Logics and Dialectics in the Aristotelian view, the crucial moral matrix of Isocrates and the stress on eloquence as a central role in the formation of active citizens to be found in Cicero, the comprehensive approach of Quintilian, or even the structure and organization of argument, in some decisive versions that reveal themselves in the subtlety and ubiquity of their existence in our time, document this progression. Then, the discrimination of our discipline in the amalgamate domain of neighbouring areas, or the clarification of its present status justify the importance of such factors in this context. Along the same lines, Stylistics, always to be considered in alliance with Rhetoric and in a similar field of research, will be examined in its wide range of definition, in the centrifugal movements in relation to the dominant versions in the use of the language, as a crucial tool in literary translation, in the devices and figures that, through irony, metaphor and formal and semantic recreation of the linguistic corpus, modulate writing and speech, subvert orthodoxies and conventional codes and reshape their rhetorical contexts.

Mandatory literature

D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera, eds.; English Critical Texts - 16th Century to 20th Century, Clarendon Press, 1962. ISBN: 4167127
Richard Bradfoot; Stylistics, Routledge, 1997. ISBN: 0-415-09768-1
Walter Nash; Rhetoric - The Wit of Persuasion, Blackwell Publishers, 1989. ISBN: 0-631-18625-5
Renato Barilli; Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ISBN: 0-8166-1729-5
D. A. Russell/M. Winterbottom; Classical Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1989. ISBN: 0-19-281830-9
Geoffrey Shepherd; Sir Philip Sidney - An Apology for Poetry, Manchester University Press, 1973
Richard Bradfoot; Stylistics, Routledge, 1997. ISBN: 0-415-09768-1
J. A. Cuddon; The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Penguin Books, 1991. ISBN: 0-14-051227-6
C. Jan Swearingen; Rhetoric & Irony - Western Literature & Western Lies, Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0-19-506362-7
Richard Andrews, ed.; Rebirth of Rhetoric - Essays in Language, Culture & Education, Routledge, 1992. ISBN: 0-415-06262-4
Wendy Olmsted; Rhetoric - An historical introduction, Blackwell, 2006. ISBN: 1-4051-1773-7
Richard Andrews, ed.; Rebirth of Rhetoric - Essays in Language, Culture & Education, Routledge, 1992. ISBN: 0-415-06262-4

Teaching methods and learning activities

Seminar. Classes are based onparticipation and aim at stimulating debate.  Students are provided in each session with documents to be scrutinized in the following one (or a cluster of materials devised to be examined in the next sessions). Sessions will fix an interim information corresponding to 40% of their share in the definition of a final mark. Individual performance and exchange of views are expected to merge into a productive achievement: each candidate introduces a topic to be elaborated on and given to discussion and criticism in the last session or in sessions specifically adjourned (correspnding to 60% of the global assessment).

keywords

Humanities > Literature > European literature > Germanic literature > English literature
Humanities

Evaluation Type

Distributed evaluation without final exam

Assessment Components

Designation	Weight (%)
Participação presencial	40,00
Trabalho escrito	60,00
Total:	100,00

Amount of time allocated to each course unit

Designation	Time (hours)
Estudo autónomo	57,00
Frequência das aulas	30,00
Trabalho de investigação	75,00
Total:	162,00

Eligibility for exams

Students should attend 75% of the scheduled sessions.

Calculation formula of final grade

Cooperation in classes - 50%; final work - 50%.

Examinations or Special Assignments

Not applicable.

Special assessment (TE, DA, ...)

Not applicable.

Classification improvement

Not applicable.