1. An Overview of Rhetoric.
Rhetoric and Persuasion.
Defining Rhetoric.
Rhetorical Discourse.
Social Functions of the Art of Rhetoric.

2. The Origins and Early History of Rhetoric.
The Rise of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece.
The Sophists.
Three Influential Sophists.
Aspasia’s Role in Athenian Rhetoric.

3. Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric on Trial.
Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric on Trial.
Rhetoric in Plato’s Phaedrus: A True Art?

4. Aristotle on Rhetoric.
Aristotle’s Definitions of Rhetoric.
Three Rhetorical Settings.
The Artistic Proofs.
The Topoi or Lines of Argument.
Aristotle on Style.

5. Rhetoric at Rome.
Roman Society and the Place of Rhetoric.
The Rhetorical Theory of Cicero.
Quintilian.
Longinus: On the Sublime.
Rhetoric in the Later Roman Empire.

6. Rhetoric in Christian Europe.
Rhetoric, Tension, and Fragmentation.
Rhetoric and the Medieval Curriculum.
Rhetoric in the Early Middle Ages: Augustine, Capella, and Boethius.
St. Augustine.
Martianus Capella.
Boethius.
Three Rhetorical Arts in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries.
The Art of Preaching.
The Art of Letter Writing.
The Art of Poetry.

7. Rhetoric in the Renaissance.
Features of Renaissance Rhetoric.
Lorenzo Valla: Retrieving the Rhetorical Tradition.
Women and Renaissance Rhetoric.
Italian Humanism: A Catalyst for Rhetoric’s Expansion.
Rhetoric as Personal and Political Influence.
Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Study
of Classical Texts.
Petrarch and the Origins of Italian Humanism.
Pico della Mirandola and the Magic
of Language.
Juan Luis Vives.
Rhetoric and the Vita Activa.
The Turn toward Dialectic: Rhetoric and Its Critics.
Renaissance Rhetorics in Britain.

8. Enlightenment Rhetorics.
Vico on Rhetoric and Human Thought.
British Rhetorics in the Eighteenth Century.
The Elocutionary Movement.
The Belletristic Movement.
George Campbell and Scientific Rhetoric.
Richard Whately’s Classical Rhetoric.

9. Contemporary Rhetoric I: Argument, Audience, and Science.
Argumentation and Rational Discourse.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca:
A New Rhetoric.
Stephen Toulmin and the Uses of Argument.
Jurgen Habermas and the Conditions
of Rational Discourse.
Argumentation and Scientific Inquiry.
Deirdre McCloskey and the Rhetoric
of Economics.
Clifford Geertz and Rhetoric in Anthropology.
Michael Billig and the Rhetoric of Social Psychology.
John Campbell on the Rhetoric of Charles Darwin.

10. Contemporary Rhetoric II: The Rhetoric of Situation, Drama, and Narration.
Rhetoric in Its Social Context:
The Dramatic and Situational Views.
Kenneth Burke and Rhetoric as Symbolic Action.
Lloyd Bitzer and Rhetoric as Situational.
Rhetoric as Narration.
Mikhail Bakhtin and the Polyphonic Novel.
Wayne Booth and the Rhetoric of Fiction.
Ernest Bormann and the Rhetoric
of Fantasy.
Walter Fisher and Rhetoric as Narration.

11. Contemporary Rhetoric III: Discourse, Power, and Social Criticism.
Michael Foucault: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power.
Jacques Derrida: Texts, Meanings,
and Deconstruction.
Richard Weaver: Rhetoric and the Preservation of Culture.
Feminism and Rhetoric: Critique
and Reform in Rhetoric.
George Kennedy and Comparative Rhetoric.