It’s very strange how teaching begins altering the way your brain processes the way you consume information — everything book you read, browse through, or even glance at gets parsed by your brain in terms of if, when, and how you could incorporate it into a course. I’ve always been an inveterate syllabus writer — I have one simply entitled “Leviathans” that starts in Assyria, runs through Bodin and Furnivall, and ends in Latour — but this is getting ridiculous. My latest endeavor is to create a syllabus based on the fact that all of the books are the same size. I’d call it ‘Politics Through Pamphlets’ and it would be a gentle, featherweight elective course that breezed through some version of the relation between authority, self-presentation, and rhetoric in politics and the academy. Required texts include:
Don’t Think Of An Elephant by George Lakoff
Talking Politics by Michael Silverstein
Microcosmographia Academica by F.M. Cornford
On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
Any other ideas?
Fun stuff, Rex … I really want something on there by Goffman … maybe ‘The Lecture’ from Forms of Talk. Or, if the requirement is to adhere strictly to a stand-alone publication, then what about Interaction Ritual. (Frame Analysis seems too ‘weighty’ for this class.)
And how about one of James Hynes’ three tales of tenure and terror from ‘Publish or Perish’? The 90 page (or so) text called simply ’99’ might work.
(This syllabus also reflects a concern for the increasing cost of books on student wallets. Nice consideration …)
“a gentile, featherweight elective course”
As opposed to a Talmudic heavyweight required course?
Everybody’s a critic. Fixed now. Thanks, Yarrow. Tad — thanks for the rec. Amazon tells me this is “David Lodge rewritten by Mikhail Bulgakov.” Rawk — I will surely check it out if there is a copy on island.
Randolph Bourne wrote pamphlets on the state and state power. I am still in a state of partial packedness, so can’t cite with any positivity, but I think one was entitled “On Transnationalism”.