We are surrounded by rhetoric 24/7—from the spaces we inhabit, to the material we encounter, and the media we consume. This course takes our city—Karachi—as a starting point to understand and critically examine how its spaces, media, and materials communicate to us. Indeed, this course does not ENTIRELY depend on language or the alphabetic as the sole source of effective communication—as we will be analyzing the sites, objects, and multimodal media that make Karachi, at the same time as we will be addressing the writings that have established the city’s identity. But we will definitely be relying on language to articulate our critical examinations of its alphabetic or non-alphabetic rhetoric, or simply put, the way it speaks to us as we encounter it. This means while the material of our everyday life speaks to us, we will be capturing and reflecting on its rhetoric through our writing. This course will introduce students to the study of writing and the liberal arts at Habib. As the first class in the liberal core, RhetComm aims to cultivate the foundational skills students will need to be successful throughout the core and, ultimately, throughout their time as undergraduates at Habib. The study of rhetoric stretches back to classical Greece where it was intimately tied to the rise of the Greek city-states and early forms of democratic governance. The link between rhetoric, communication, and rigorous civic debate has been integral to a liberal arts education ever since. The need for civic engagement, for well-reasoned debate in the public sphere, is still of course very much with us, but the study of rhetoric today covers a far wider field of expression. Argument and persuasion are not simply matters for politics and the university but find cultural resonance in a number of symbolic forms. There is a rhetorical dimension, for instance, in pop songs, video games, memes, advertisements, jokes, graffiti, images, public monuments, photographs, films, podcasts, blogs, memos, op-eds, poems, tweets, stories, plays, and so on. Whether verbal, visual, or physical, all these forms of expression carry a certain rhetorical charge. They also imply a distinct relationship between the speaker and her audience, between a text and its context. A rhetorically informed analysis will highlight the intricacies of this complicated social relationship, and thus deepen our understanding of the powerful effects language can have on the structures that frame our everyday lives.
