Instructors: Judy Segal
Section: 001
Term: 2
Meets: Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays 2:00-3:00pm
The central question for rhetorical study in general is, “In this (particular) situation, who is persuading whom of what, and what are the means of persuasion?” The starting point for the question is the understanding that we are, each of us, engaged in acts of persuasion all the time–even if all we mean to do is, as rhetorician Kenneth Burke says, “direct the attention” of an audience.
The notion of pervasive persuasion, though, is complicated when we consider the realms of science and medicine—when discourse is taking place in spaces we typically don’t think of as rhetorical: for example, in the pages of scientific journals, in laboratories, in working groups tasked with arriving at diagnostic categories, in meetings of the FDA, and so on.
This course looks at persuasion in contemporary science and medicine. Given the prominence of health topics in public discourse currently, we will be especially interested in the rhetoric of health and medicine. We will consider, for example, questions like these: “What is the process of classification by which some states/conditions become diseases and others do not?”, “What are the means, and what are the effects, of pharmaceutical advertising?”, “How has the Internet helped to shape the contemporary health subject?”, and “How does public discourse on health affect the personal experience of illness?”
By the end of this course, students will have developed a rhetorical-theoretical lens through which they can assess more critically scientific and medical information available through professional, public, and social media. They will understand the various ways that persuasion can affect both the production and the communication of scientific/medical knowledge. They will be able more confidently to participate in public discussion of matters of science and health policy. Science students will acquire an additional means to reflect on their own practice.
Note: English 309 requires no special preparation in rhetorical theory or in science and medicine.
Tentative, and partial, reading list:
- Kuhn, Thomas, excerpt from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)
- Burke, Kenneth, “Terministic Screens,” in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley, 1966)
- Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar, “Documents and Facts,” in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, 1979)
- Halloran, Michael, “The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse,” Rhetoric Review (1984)
- Prelli, Lawrence, “The Rhetorical Construction of Scientific Ethos,” in Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (Sage, 1989)
- Solomon, Martha, “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: An Analysis of Medical Reports of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project,” The Western Journal of Speech Communication (1985)
- McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson, and Joan Page Gerring, “Revising Psychiatry’s Charter Document DSM-IV,” Written Communication (1994)
- Emmons, Kimberly K., “Depression, a Rhetorical Illness,” in Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care (Rutgers, 2010)
- Dumit, Joseph, “Responding to Facts,” in Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Duke, 2012)
- Segal, Judy Z., “Internet Health and the 21st-Century Patient: A Rhetorical View,” Written Communication (2009)
- Belling, Catherine, “Be Responsible,” in A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria (Oxford, 2012)
- Solomon, Miriam, “Epistemological Reflections on the Art of Medicine and Narrative Medicine,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (2008)
- Ceccarelli, Leah, “Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric, and Public Debate,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011)
- Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway, “Denial Rides Again,” in Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbery, 2010)
- Malkowski, Jennifer. “Confessions of a Pharmaceutical Company: Voice, Narrative, and Gendered Dialectics in the Case of Gardasil,” Health Communication 29 (2014)
Register here:
https://courses.students.ubc.ca/cs/main?pname=subjarea&tname=subjareas&req=5&dept=ENGL&course=309§ion=001
