on graduate course development: the object

Music: A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar (2009)

Last semester I prepared or "prepped" a new undergraduate course titled "Celebrity Culture." I hadn't developed a new course from the ground-up in over five years, and dudes, I forgot how much work developing a new course is! Then again, I think the longer that I teach (going on fifteen years now, if you can believe that!) the more time I take to develop classes. When I think back to my graduate school days, I can recall literally throwing a class together in a week. As a professor, however, I spend half a year---sometimes longer---thinking about a new course, and about two months putting together the readings and syllabus. "Celebrity Culture" was also exceptionally challenging because I made the leap into slide software for the lectures (Apple's Keynote program, which is amazing; I detest PowerPoint). I'm still anxious to see my student evaluations: did the course do what I hoped it would? Did the students find it useful to their everyday lives? Did I convince the students that Paris Hilton is really quite brilliant? We shall see.

I'm also in the middle of putting together a new graduate student seminar this week. For some reason, I feel much less anxiety about this. In a graduate student seminar, your students are actually your colleagues, and so the whole tone is different. Basically, I get to walk in on the first day and say, "this is a new class, this is an experiment. Work with me here, lets explore this new world together." It's really kind of exciting, in a way, because I don't know at this moment what I am going to say or where the class will go. For undergraduate preps, I set down three or four goals for the class and I map everything out. For the new graduate seminar, I have a map of topics, but I don't really have a set endpoint. A new graduate seminar is a glorified reading group, basically. I've found if I say this on the first day of a new seminar, folks are generally cool with it. If I learned anything from my advisor, R.L. Scott, it's that graduate seminars are opportunities to enjoy everyone thinking aloud (but within reason, of course; we don't suffer "the rhetoric of horses").

So, what is the course? I'm calling it "the object." The seminar is actually inspired by course that Badiou teaches of the same title (which is hilarious), but I confess I decided against teaching Badiou in the class because Badiou is actually much more invested in theorizing the subject. The general idea behind the class is to survey anxieties about "the object" vis-à-vis disciplinarity. I already teach a course titled "The Subject," which is a survey of subjectivity theory, so I think "The Object" will be a nice curricular counterpoint. In my mind, this course is yet another "nuts and bolts" seminar that, I hope, will prepare graduate students for the field of communication studies (and rhetorical studies, in particular). At the very least, I think a course that theorizes "the object" will really help to set-up our seminar in rhetorical criticism.

As a graduate instructor, I see it as my job to offer survey-style courses for our graduate students to provide good conceptual background. I often teach material that I do not personally enjoy or agree with---and I try not to pass judgment (ok, so, I really have issues with Badiou, but I teach him; same goes with Richard Vatz). In my roster of graduate courses---Basic Rhetorical Criticism, The Idiom of Haunting, Rhetoric and Film, Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis, and The Subject---only one class is geared toward a specific interest of mine, "The Idiom of Haunting." Classes on specific interests, in my opinion, should be limited to something "on occasion"---and in my case the haunting class trucks in material I'm currently writing a book on. Once I finish the book, I will no longer offer the haunting seminar.

If I can toot our horn here at UT just a bit, the graduate curriculum in rhetoric consists of survey-style courses on major theoretical nodes. So, for example, Dana Cloud teaches seminars on ideology, public sphere theory, postmodern theory, and feminism, while Barry Brummett teaches a general rhetorical theory survey course, as well as one on Burke, and Rick Cherwitz covers our contemporary rhetorical theory and new rhetoric angles. Our newest hire, Scott Stroud, is gearing up to teach a new seminar on rhetoric and pragmatism---and Dewey unquestionably runs very deep in our field. If you take Talia Stroud and Sharon Jarvis's courses in political communication into account, we really have a lot of the bases covered, I think. The only things we lack here are sustained courses on public address and classical rhetoric---but students can take courses over in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing that do just that (Jeff Walker is an expert on the classics, Trish Roberts-Miller and Mark Longacker has pub addy down). It does "take a village," but if you come to study rhetoric at UT, you're going to have the opportunity to get a really good lay of the land.

What I'm thinking is that a seminar on "The Object" would add a theoretical foundation for understanding disciplinarity and the tensions any discipline has between its "object" and "methods." What I learned teaching the basic rhetorical criticism seminar for the fist time last year was that many graduate students today don't have a strong grasp of the history of the field. Country-wide, rhetorical criticism courses usually attempt to provide at least a cursory history of the field, but it's just that: cursory! So I decided that a course on "the object" could double as a history of the field in an interesting way.

Yesterday I finalized the conceptual course outline. I hope to have the syllabus and reading list developed by the end of the week (I'm still reading). I thought I'd share what I've come up with thus far, because I know a number of regular RoseChron readers might be interested and have some suggestions. Here goes:

Part One: What is an Object?

The first part of the seminar examines how the object has been intellectually conceptualized. The field to do this most directly is, of course, philosophy, so we begin by reading Hume and Kant on the subject/object distinction. We move to Heidegger and "thing theory." Then, we turn to critical theory and read Hegel, Adorno, and others who critique the Enlightenment conception.

After critical theory, the course moves on to consider object relations psychology. This begins with Mauss on "the gift," then Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and other object relations people in psychology. The final stroke here is on reification, fetishism, and the commodity (yes, Lacan).

Part One of the course rounds-out with a number of different essays on the object of disciplinarity: essays about the proper object of art history, sociology, and anthropology make an appearance. We'll spend some time on Kant's argument about "the object of reason" as the center of philosophy, and probably some of the essays about "Big rhetoric" too.

Part Two: The Object of Speech

The second section of the class---and the one we spend the most time in---will look at the history of the field of Speech Communication. We'll examine here formative essays in The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking, and later, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, that concern centering "speech" as the object of an academic discipline. "Speech" is killed off at the end of the twentieth century, and so we'll examine the debate on whether or not to drop "speech" in the 1990s in relation to Derrida's critique of speech and Mladen Dolar's excellent analysis of "voice." The idea here is that objects are inherently unstable, and "speech" is something of a monster (there's a parallel here with "text" as an object, but I think this has already been done to death in the theoretical humanities).

Part Three: The Un-Object of Cultural Studies

The final few weeks of the class will be devoted to looking at an academic field or identity that disavowed the object: cultural studies. What happens when a field exchanges politics for the object? I think cultural studies is a good example of an object-less field (or at least an attempt to avoid object-ing its center). Right now, James Carey and Larry Grossberg's work will center the discussion. I plan to focus on parallels between the adult education movements in Britain and the United States.

Ok, so that's the rough outline of the course. I don't know how well this will come off, or if it will even work. But I figure by the end of the class we'll all have a better understanding of what "the object" is in intellectual life, and how it has been figured. I'm my mind, it seems to be my own contribution to "the political" in our curriculum. Whereas the seminar on "the subject" ends up soundly in questions of ethics, it seems to me a course on "the object" lends itself to taking up the question of politics. The tacit assumption here is that objects, in the end, betoken people. This is unquestionably a psychoanalytic habit, but that's why rhetoric is fundamentally distinct from philosophy. In the final analysis, principles are really about the other, about people.