English Language - Theoretical Part - 1st year biennale - Traduzione Letteraria - Academic Year 2007-08

English Language - Theoretical Part - 1st year biennale - Traduzione Letteraria - Academic Year 2007-08

CORSO DI LAUREA SPECIALISTICA IN TRADUZIONE LETTERARIA



LINGUA INGLESE – PRIMO ANNO

Programma Anno Accademico 2007/08

Dott: Geoffrey Gray



RHETORIC AND PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE (16 ore)



ESSENTIAL TEXTS:

Persuading People: an Introduction to Rhetoric, R. Cockcroft &

C. Cockcroft, 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

* Supplementary reading material will be indicated in the lesson.



Lesson 1: Introduction

Overview of course ▪ Rhetoric defined ▪ Rhetoric in history ▪ Rhetoric in modern linguistic theory: Jakobson and Sassure, Bakhtin, Halliday, Discourse theories ▪ Exemplar: the rhetoric of Catch 22. (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.1-27)



Lesson 2: The Persuasive Repertoire

Lexical choice in literary and functional persuasion ▪ Sound patterning ▪ Figurative language or tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, mislabelling) ▪ Schematic language (antithesis, puns and word-play, syntactic devices, repetition, amplification and diminution, tricks and ploys). (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.161-189)



Lesson 3: Personality and Stance

Personality ▪ Stance (the persuader and the self, the persuader as humorist, persuader and topic, persuader and audience) ▪ A model of the communication situation. (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.28-39)



Lesson 4: Personality and Stance in Practice

Functional persuasion (examples from advertising and political discourse) ▪ Literary persuasion (examples from Austen and J.D. Salinger). (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.40-54). ▪ Extension: ‘Foreigners’: reading of Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech*



Lesson 5: Pathos and Emotional Engagement

Emotion: Universal and Contingent ▪ Emotion and Prejudice ▪ The Orientation of Emotion ▪ Orientation and Engagement (orientation via phatic, metalingual and poetic language, and the ‘emotional laser’. (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.55-68)



Lesson 6: Pathos and Emotional Engagement in Practice

Reverse bias (how to manipulate your audience into reversing their opinion): Mark Anthony’s manipulative address to the crowd in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. ▪ Examples of emotional engagement in functional and literary persuasion (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.69-80). ▪ Extension: ‘Louis must perish because our country must live’: reading of Robespierre’s 1792 speech demanding Louis XVI’s execution without trial*



Lesson 7: The Persuasive Process

Ideas of order (e.g., comparison of persuasion in ancient Rome and Labov’s account of oral narrative in New York) ▪ the Question of Genre ▪ Hunston and Thompson’s theory of evaluation. (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.135-146). ▪ Extension: ‘Mirror images of worlds apart’: reading of speeches in 2001 by President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden*



Lesson 8: Variations and Examples of Persuasive Ordering and Genres

The ‘body metaphor’ in Queen Elisabeth I’s speech (9 August 1588) ▪ Examples of persuasive ordering and genres in functional and literary persuasion. (See Cockcroft and Cockroft, pp.146-160)