Unit 1: Exploring how scientific knowledge is constructed, legitimated, and contested through discourse—and what happens when those rhetorical processes become visible or break down.

Core Topics

• Preprints and Peer Review: Peer review as invisible credentialing; how preprints expose, bypass, or reconfigure vetting; COVID-era case studies; anonymity, authority, and the performance of disciplinary norms

• AI-Generated Science: Authorship, accountability, and epistemic responsibility when machines write Methods sections; journal policies as boundary-work; what LLM fluency reveals about scientific prose conventions

• Statistical Rhetoric and the Replication Crisis: P-hacking, HARKing, and selective reporting as rhetorical practices; how genre conventions (IMRaD) encourage narrative tidying; preregistration and registered reports as alternative genres

• Corporate Science and Manufactured Doubt: How corporations use selective data, flawed study design, ghostwritten articles, and strategic uncertainty to mislead public audiences; tobacco industry research and the deliberate obscuring of cancer risk; Purdue Pharma and OxyContin studies framing addiction as rare; funding sources as rhetorical signals; the ethics of disclosure, conflict of interest, and the difference between scientific uncertainty and engineered doubt

• Science Journalism and Translation: How hedges disappear and wonder increases as findings move from journals to press releases to headlines; Fahnestock's "Accommodating Science"

• Science Communication: Explaining scientific concepts to non-expert audiences through analogies, metaphors, and models; benefits and risks of simplification; when analogies clarify mechanisms and when they mislead or overextend; examples include the "lock and key" model in biology, the brain as a computer, or genes as blueprints

• Visual Rhetoric in Science: Graphs, images, and diagrams as arguments; manipulation and selective presentation; the rhetoric of "raw data"

Extended Topics

• Controversy and Boundary-Work: How scientists demarcate legitimate science from pseudoscience; rhetorical strategies in debates over contested knowledge

• Consensus Rhetoric: How agreement gets quantified and deployed ("97% of scientists agree"); boundary-work distinguishing experts from outliers; vulnerabilities when consensus claims meet genuine uncertainty

• The Scientific Paper as Genre: IMRaD structure as rhetorical constraint; the mythology of linear discovery; how introductions get rewritten after results are known

• Citation as Rhetoric: Strategic citation, citation cartels, and the politics of who gets credited; citations as ethos-building and alliance-signaling

• Retraction and Scientific Scandal: How fraud gets detected and narrated; rhetorical rehabilitation; case studies (Wakefield, Stapel, Pruitt); repair rhetoric that reframes error as proof of integrity and progress

• Grant Rhetoric: Promissory writing, broader impacts statements, and the performance of fundability

• MythBusters: Debunking as entertainment science that turns testing into public credibility

• Ashton Forbes and MH370 Conspiracy Promotion: Platform-driven belief entrepreneurship that trades on distrust and visual "proof"

• TED Talks and the "Science Explainer" Style: Charisma plus simplicity as credibility, where narrative structure stands in for method

• The Peer Review Process and "Reviewer 2": Gatekeeping genre that turns criticism into legitimacy, and rejection into quality signals

• COVID-19 Dashboards and Case Curves: Visualization rhetoric where axes, scales, and color choices become arguments about reality

• Lab Coats, Mic Drops, and the "Trust the Science" Slogan: Authority shorthand that compresses uncertainty into identity and allegiance

• Citizen Science Platforms Like Zooniverse: Participation rhetoric that turns volunteers into co-authors of knowledge and trust

• Clinical Trials and the Placebo Story: Experimental theater that persuades audiences that fairness equals truth

• Science Museums and Planetariums: Institutional staging that makes hands-on wonder feel like evidence

• NASA Press Conferences and Mission Livestreams: Public documentation rituals that convert process into collective belief

• Nutrition Science Headlines: Media translation genre where correlation becomes causation through certainty language

Articles

• 1. "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts" (Jeanne Fahnestock, 1986): Foundational study of how scientific findings transform as they move from peer-reviewed journals to popular media, showing how hedges disappear and certainty increases.

  2. "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (John P. A. Ioannidis, 2005): Landmark essay demonstrating that most published research claims are likely false due to bias, low statistical power, and flexible research practices.

  3. "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science" (Open Science Collaboration, 2015): Major replication study finding that only 36% of 100 psychology studies could be successfully replicated, documenting the replication crisis.

  4. "Scientists Rise up against Statistical Significance" (Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane et al., 2019): Call signed by 800+ researchers to abandon p-value thresholds as arbitrary gatekeepers of scientific significance.

  5. "Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics" (Allan M. Brandt, 2012): Historical analysis of how the tobacco industry pioneered the strategy of manufacturing scientific doubt to delay regulation.

  6. "How the Case against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed" (Brian Deer, 2011): Investigative journalism exposing Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent study linking vaccines to autism as deliberate data falsification.

  7. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, 2010): Book documenting how the same scientists who created doubt about tobacco risks later spread climate change denial.

  8. "The Tobacco Industry's Renewed Assault on Science: A Call for a United Public Health Response" (Shyanika W. Rose et al., 2022): Recent analysis showing tobacco industry continues infiltrating scientific journals and conferences despite Master Settlement Agreement restrictions.

  9. "Retraction—Lleal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children" (The Lancet, 2010): The Lancet's full retraction of Wakefield's fraudulent MMR-autism study after exposing ethical violations and falsified data.

  10. "The MMR Vaccine and Autism: Sensation, Refutation, Retraction, and Fraud" (Chidambaram Ganesh Prasad & Anupama Patil, 2011): Medical journal analysis of how Wakefield fraud damaged public health through vaccine hesitancy despite scientific refutation.

  11. "Retracted COVID-19 Studies Tracker" (Retraction Watch): Ongoing documentation of pandemic-era retractions documenting speed versus rigor.

  12. "The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong?" (The Scientist, 2020): How fraudulent hydroxychloroquine data from an obscure company influenced global COVID policy and exposed peer review failures.

  13. Ed Yong's COVID Coverage (The Atlantic): Science journalism foregrounding uncertainty and complexity, contrasting with headline-driven coverage elsewhere.

  14. "The Crisis of Expertise" (Tom Nichols, Foreign Affairs): Anti-elitism as epistemology and resentment toward expert discourse in contemporary culture.

  15. "Why Smart People Fall For Bad Science" (Scientific American): Cognitive rhetoric examining intelligence versus epistemic humility in evaluating scientific claims.

  16. "The Tragedy of the Reviewer Commons" (PNAS): Peer review as unpaid labor and the moral rhetoric of academic duty sustaining scholarly publishing. 

Visual Artifacts

• The "hockey stick" graph (Michael Mann): Climate science's most contested visualization; attacks on the graph as attacks on the science.

• COVID case curves and "flatten the curve" graphics: How data visualization became public rhetoric; the politics of axes and scales.

• The Pale Blue Dot (Sagan): Earth photographed from Voyager; image as argument for humility.

• Hubble/James Webb images: The aesthetics of space photography; color added to data; wonder as rhetorical effect.

• Anatomical illustrations (Vesalius to Netter): The body made visible; authority through visual detail.

• fMRI brain scans in popular media: The rhetoric of "your brain on X"; neuroscience images as persuasive decoration.

Texts

• Jeanne Fahnestock, "Accommodating Science" (1986): The foundational article on how scientific claims transform as they move to popular audiences; genre analysis of science journalism.

• Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (1990): Argues scientific texts are rhetorical through and through; case studies in Darwin, Watson and Crick, Newton.

• Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (1979): Ethnography of the Salk Institute; science as social construction; the "inscription" of facts.

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): Paradigm shifts; normal science vs. revolutionary science; how communities resist anomaly.

• John Ioannidis, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (2005): The statistical critique that launched the replication crisis discourse; itself a rhetorical event.

• The Wakefield Lancet paper (1998) and its retraction (2010): Primary documents for studying scientific fraud, media amplification, and retraction rhetoric.

• IPCC Summary for Policymakers (any year): Consensus rhetoric in action; how uncertainty gets quantified and communicated; the politics of language negotiation.

• NIH or NSF grant application guidelines: The genre conventions of promissory science writing; broader impacts as required rhetoric.

• Retraction Watch (website): Ongoing archive of scientific scandal; how retractions get framed and explained.

• PubPeer (website): Post-publication peer review; anonymous critique as accountability mechanism.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859): Opening chapters as rhetorical strategy; anticipating objections; ethos construction; "one long argument."

• James Watson, The Double Helix (1968): Scientific discovery narrated as competition and personality; the mythology of the eureka moment; Rosalind Franklin's erasure.

• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962): Science writing as activism; industry response and credibility attacks; the rhetoric of environmental alarm.

• Randy Schekman, "How Journals Like Nature, Cell and Science Are Damaging Science" (The Guardian, 2013): Nobel laureate critiquing prestige publishing; insider dissent as genre.

• Elisabeth Bik's scientific integrity work: Image forensics as fraud detection; Twitter as platform for post-publication review.

• ChatGPT-authored papers and journal responses (2023-present): Real-time case studies in AI authorship debates; evolving journal policies as boundary-work.

• Steven Shapin, "Cordelia's Love" (1994): Trust and credibility as the core of scientific authority; science as moral economy.

• Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch (1990): Expertise, policy, and the institutional performance of objectivity.

• Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007): Visual epistemology; the historical rhetoric of "seeing without interpretation."

• Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (1998): How "facts" become rhetorically stabilized; accounting, numbers, and authority.

• Deborah Mayo, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing (2018): Competing rhetorics of evidence; what "good testing" means.

• Peter Medawar, "Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?" (1963): Early critique of the IMRaD myth; science as retrospective narrative.

Podcasts

• Retraction Watch podcast: Discussions of scientific fraud and correction.

• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: Science communication and debunking; the rhetoric of skepticism.

• Radiolab, "Gonads" series: Narrative science journalism; how storytelling shapes understanding of research.

• This Podcast Will Kill You: Epidemiology for popular audiences; translation strategies.

• Revisionist History (Malcolm Gladwell): Narrative reframing of evidence; selective emphasis as persuasion.

• Ologies: Enthusiastic expertise; persona-driven science communication.

• Science Vs: Performative skepticism; rhetorical combat format.

Films

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017): Consent, exploitation, and the erasure of subjects from scientific narratives; who gets credited in discovery stories.

• Behind the Curve (2018): Flat-earthers and the rhetoric of alternative epistemology; community formation around rejected knowledge; the documentary's own rhetorical stance toward its subjects.

• Theranos documentaries (The Inventor, 2019; The Dropout, 2022): Scientific fraud as performance; how charisma substitutes for data; the rhetoric of disruption applied to medicine; investors as audience.

• Don't Look Up (2021): Scientific communication failure as satire; the gap between expert consensus and public/political response; media framing of existential risk.

• Contagion (2011): CDC communication during pandemic; the tension between scientific uncertainty and public need for clear messaging; conspiracy theories as competing narrative.

• An Inconvenient Truth (2006) / An Inconvenient Sequel (2017): Climate science as persuasive presentation; Gore's ethos construction; data visualization as rhetoric; the "hockey stick" graph as icon.

• The Social Dilemma (2020): Tech insiders as whistleblowers; the rhetoric of confession and warning; reenactments as persuasive device.

• Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008): Intelligent design's rhetorical framing as suppressed science; the "academic freedom" argument; boundary-work from the other side.

• Food, Inc. (2008): Science in service of industry vs. science as exposé; competing claims to objectivity.

• Icarus (2017): Accidental investigation of Russian doping; how evidence gets assembled and legitimated; the scientist as source and character.

• The Bleeding Edge (2018): Medical device regulation failures; industry science vs. patient testimony; how harm gets documented and narrated.

• Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020): Pre-COVID documentary that became artifact; scientific prediction and public indifference; the rhetoric of preparedness.

• Picture a Scientist (2020): Gender discrimination in science; how harassment gets documented; the rhetoric of institutional accountability.

• The Beginning of Life (2016): Neuroscience of early childhood translated for policy audiences; science as advocacy.

• Particle Fever (2013): The Higgs boson discovery; big science as collaborative spectacle; how physicists narrate uncertainty and confirmation.

Music

• Thomas Dolby, "She Blinded Me with Science" (1982): Science as spectacle and seduction; the "mad scientist" trope played for pop.

• Coldplay, "The Scientist" (2002): The scientist as romantic figure; "nobody said it was easy" as knowledge-work lament.

• They Might Be Giants, "Why Does the Sun Shine?" (1993): Educational science song; genre conventions of making science accessible.

• Björk, "Cosmogony" (2011): Origin myths set to music; science and creation narratives blended.

• Kraftwerk, "Radioactivity" (1975): Technology and science as aesthetic; ambivalence about nuclear power.

• Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the Moon" (1970): Space science vs. social priorities; funding rhetoric and exclusion.

• Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime" (1980): Technocratic modernity; systems beyond individual control.

• David Bowie, "Space Oddity" (1969): Scientific progress as alienation; astronaut as rhetorical figure.

Unit 2: How belief systems use rhetoric to persuade, perform, and create meaning—and how ritual action, sacred language, and embodied practice produce authority, community, and transcendence.

Core Topics

• Witches & Witchcraft: Rhetoric of accusation, gender, and power; performative aspects of spellcraft; the witch trial as rhetorical event; confession under duress; contemporary Wicca and the reclamation of "witch" as identity; belladonna and broomstick flight narratives where demonology and pharmacology compete to explain "experience" as evidence

• Mythology: Myths and storytelling as rhetorical tools; archetypes and cultural narratives; creation stories as cosmological argument; hero's journey as universal structure (Campbell) vs. culturally specific reading; myth as charter for social order

• Creation Stories: Origin myths as rhetorical acts that explain not just how the world began, but why it is ordered the way it is; creation as argument about power, gender, labor, nature, and the divine; narrative as authority ("this is how it has always been"); conflict vs. harmony models of origin; creation stories as tools for legitimizing hierarchy, ritual practice, and moral law; comparison across cultures (Genesis, Enuma Elish, Popol Vuh, Dreamtime, scientific cosmology) as competing rhetorical systems

• Charismatic Authority & Conversion: Evangelists and cult leaders; emotional appeal and the art of conversion; apocalyptic rhetoric and urgency; love-bombing, isolation, and totalistic language; case studies (Billy Graham, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Keith Raniere)

• Corrida de Toros (Spanish Bullfight): Violence, aesthetics, and national identity; the matador as tragic hero; performance that transforms danger into meaning and tradition into authority; Hemingway's mythologization; animal rights counter-rhetoric; heritage spectacle that argues tradition, identity, and moral legitimacy

• Catholic Mass: Repetition, sacrifice, and sacrament; how ritual language and embodied practice produce authority, presence, and communal belief; call-and-response as participatory rhetoric; transubstantiation as speech act; the Latin Mass controversy

• College Football: Rule-bound ritualized combat, heroic performance, and collective identity; how ritual competition channels aggression and sustains social cohesion; tailgating as pilgrimage; fight songs and chants; the stadium as sacred space; spectacle that produces communal identity, authority, and sacred tradition

Extended Topics

• 1. • NXIVM & DOS Branding: Self-improvement and "empowerment" leading to hierarchy, secrecy, and coercion into authority and belief

• Vision Quests: Solitude, ordeal, and altered perception; how private experience becomes meaningful through narrative and communal interpretation; the rhetoric of authenticity; cultural appropriation debates

• Peyote Rituals (Native American Church): Altered states, song, and collective framing; ritual authority, healing narratives, and the interpretation of experience; legal rhetoric around religious exemption

• El Colacho (Devil's Jump, Spain): Men dressed as devils jump over mattresses with babies; cleansing and protection from evil; the grotesque as sacred; risk as ritual meaning

• Kapparot (Jewish Tradition): Chicken swung over the head while reciting prayers before Yom Kippur; symbolic transference of sin; animal rights, tradition; embodied atonement

• Calligraphy in Ritual: Sacred scripts and aesthetic significance; power of written word; Islamic calligraphy as divine presence; Torah scrolls; the mantra as visual object

• Black Magic & Occult Traditions: Mystery, secrecy, rhetoric of fear and taboo; left-hand path traditions; Aleister Crowley and transgressive performance; Satanic panic as moral rhetoric

• Fortune Telling & Divination: Symbolism, ambiguity, and the art of cold reading; tarot as narrative generator; the I Ching and structured randomness; the diviner's authority

• Voodoo (Vodou/Vodun): Syncretism, ritual objects, and cultural misrepresentation; possession as performance and presence; colonial and racist framing

• Mediumship & Spirit Communication: Trance, authenticity, and the performance of the unseen; 19th-century Spiritualism; cold and hot reading techniques; grief as vulnerability; the medium as translator

• Alchemy: Transformation metaphors and esoteric symbolism; proto-science or spiritual practice; the philosopher's stone; Jung's psychological reading; laboratory as sacred space

• Shamanism: Healing narratives, ritual journeys, and mediation between worlds; drumming, costume, and altered states; the shaman's social function; neo-shamanism and appropriation debates

• Séances: Parlor theatrics, ritual space, and belief engineering; table-turning and ectoplasm; the Fox sisters and Spiritualism's origins; debunking (Houdini) and persistence of belief; ritual genres that publicly stage who may speak, who is believed, and who belongs

• Baptism & Water Rituals: Death and rebirth enacted through immersion; purification across traditions (Jewish mikvah, Hindu Ganges bathing, Christian baptism); water as threshold substance

• Exorcism: Demonic rhetoric and the battle for the body; Catholic rite vs. charismatic deliverance; performative authority; psychological and religious explanations in tension; ritual genres that publicly stage who may speak, who is believed, and who belongs

• Pilgrimage: Journey as transformation; Mecca, Camino de Santiago, Varanasi; the rhetoric of suffering and reward; tourism vs. devotion; communitas among strangers

• Glossolalia (Speaking in Tongues): Unintelligible speech as divine evidence; interpretation as rhetorical act; in-group marker; linguistic analysis vs. spiritual experience

• Sacrifice: Blood, substitution, and exchange with the divine; from animal sacrifice to metaphorical offerings; the rhetoric of "giving up" something valuable; scapegoating as social mechanism

• Funeral Rites: Managing death through language and ritual; eulogy as genre; mourning practices across cultures; the rhetoric of consolation and closure

• Prosperity Gospel: Wealth as sign of divine favor; seed-faith rhetoric; "name it and claim it"; Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, and megachurch persuasion; critique as class and race analysis; sermon and donation genres that fuse testimony, promise, and moral economics

• Confession: Catholic sacrament and secular therapeutic confession; the booth, the priest, the formula; Foucault on confession as power; AA's public testimony model

• Snake Handling (Appalachian Christianity): Mark 16:18 as literal mandate; risk as faith demonstration; legal and journalistic framing; the spectacle of belief

• Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos): Death as continuation; altars, marigolds, and offerings; syncretism of Catholic and Mesoamerican traditions; commodification and cultural authenticity debates

• Communion/Eucharist: Bread and wine as body and blood; transubstantiation vs. symbolic memorial; the rhetoric of presence; who may participate (closed vs. open communion)

• Prayer as Rhetoric: Addressing the divine; petition, praise, confession, thanksgiving; public prayer as performance; the rhetoric of "thoughts and prayers" after tragedy

• Aleister Crowley and the Thoth Tarot: Occult design manual that performs expertise through symbolism and system building

• Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies: Photographic "evidence" as wonder proof, mediated by celebrity scientific ethos

• For-profit Ayahuasca Retreats: Ritual rebranded as wellness, with consent language and safety claims as modern authority tools

• Excommunication: Ritual genres that publicly stage who may speak, who is believed, and who belongs

• Visionary Prophecies of Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce: Prediction genres that convert ambiguity into retrospective certainty

• Werewolves, Lunatics, & Moonlight: Folklore causality that turns correlation into cultural explanation

• Dowsing Rods & Water Finding: Practical divination genre where success stories build folk expertise

• The Grim Reaper Icon: Visual rhetoric that teaches audiences how to fear, narrate, and domesticate death

• Icelandic Elves & Nature Conservation: Folk belief mobilized as environmental argument and land use authority

• The Oracle of Delphi & Asymmetrical Politics: Prophetic counsel as strategic ambiguity for governance under uncertainty

• The Tooth Fairy: Family myth as socialization technology that trains belief, secrecy, and reward logic

• Sleepover Rituals: Bloody Mary and Light as a Feather peer-performed scripts that generate temporary belief through participation

• The Sistine Chapel Ceiling: Michelangelo's theological program; the creation of Adam; art as doctrine

• Orthodox Icons: The icon as window to the divine; veneration vs. idolatry; iconoclasm controversies

• Rosary Beads: Tactile prayer; counting as meditation; material object as spiritual technology

• Tarot Decks (Rider-Waite, Marseille): Visual symbolism and narrative flexibility; the reader as interpreter

• Voodoo Dolls: Hollywood artifact vs. actual practice; sympathetic magic

• The Televangelist's Set: Staging authority; flowers, suits, and the 1-800 number; PTL Club, Trinity Broadcasting

• Megachurch Architecture: The arena as sanctuary; screens, lighting, and production values; sacred or spectacle?

• Día de los Muertos Altars (Ofrendas): Photographs, marigolds, favorite foods; the dead as present

• Protest Signs at Westboro Baptist Church: Hate speech as religious expression; legal battles; counter-protest rhetoric

Media

• "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot" by A. E. Waite  (Part III, §3)

• Tarot Cards: History (MET | YouTube), Rider-Waite (WikiMedia), Thoth Tarot, Merseilles

Articles

1. "A Performative Approach To Ritual" (S. J. Tambiah): A foundational model of ritual as "doing" through patterned language, repetition, and performance that manufactures authority and efficacy.

2. “The Cold Reading Technique” (Denis Dutton)

3. "Sacrament And Ideology" (Denys Turner): Explains how sacramental and liturgical language works like action, showing how "saying" can institute presence, commitment, and power.

4. "God Changes People: Modes Of Authentication In Evangelical Conversion Stories" (Maaike Klaver): Breaks down the rhetorical techniques that make conversion testimonies sound true, urgent, and divinely caused.

5. "Identity, Memory, Self-Fashioning: Narratives Of Non-Confession In The Witch-Trial Of Margaretha Horn, 1652" (Alison Rowlands): Shows the witch trial as a coerced rhetorical arena where refusal, memory, and self-presentation become survival strategies.

6. "Resisting Rhetorics Of Violence: Women, Witches And Wicca" (Jo Pearson): Traces how contemporary Wicca reframes "witch" into a protective identity, reversing older accusation scripts and gendered stigma.

7. "Glossolalia As Regressive Speech" (William J. Samarin): A classic linguistic account of speaking in tongues that treats glossolalia as socially learned religious discourse, not random noise.

8. "The Book of Genesis And Other Allegorical Origin Stories" (B. K. Walther): Reads origin narratives as arguments about how the world should be ordered, linking cosmology to social and moral authority.

9. "One Myth To Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them" (R. Hanney): A focused critique of monomyth thinking that shows how "universal" story templates can function as persuasive, flattening rhetoric.

10. "Classy Performances: The Performances Of Classes In The Andalusian Bullfight From Horseback (Rejoneo)" (Kirrilly Thompson): Analyzes corrida as embodied rhetoric where class, tradition, and spectacle are performed into legitimacy.

11. "From Lost Cause To Third-And-Long: College Football And The Civil Religion Of The South" (Eric Bain-Selbo): Treats college football as a civic-sacred system where ritualized combat, chants, and pilgrimage-like fandom produce communal belief and identity.

12. "The Sociology Of Charismatic Authority" (Max Weber, from Economy and Society): How charisma legitimates power; routinization of charisma; applicable to cult leaders and evangelists.

13. Bounded Choice (Janja Lalich, 2004): Cult psychology; how totalistic groups constrain decision-making.

14. "Reinventing the Self: NXIVM's Promises, Secrets, and Lies" (International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation): Compares NXIVM's subgroups—ESP, Jness, SOP, and DOS—revealing how reinventive and totalistic elements coexisted, blurring lines between empowerment and control.

15. "3 Psychological Principles NXIVM Used to Brainwash Its Members" (Psychology Today): Breaks down the psychological manipulation techniques including self-control depletion, authority compliance, and progressive commitment that enabled Raniere's control.

16. "Cult Capitalism" (Project MUSE): Analyzes NXIVM's combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy, group therapy, and ideologies from Steiner, Ayn Rand, and Scientology, examining how professional success rhetoric masked abusive control.

17. "Introduction to the IJCAM Special Edition: Comparative Reflections on Scientology and NXIVM" (International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation): Presents evidence about Scientology's possible influence on Keith Raniere and NXIVM, examining similarities between the two organizations.

18. "Trafficking Narratives and the Prosecution of NXIVM" (Journal of Human Trafficking): Examines the 2019 trial of Keith Raniere, analyzing how prosecutors addressed cult abuses through human trafficking charges by focusing on gaslighting, coercive control, and trauma-coerced attachment.

19. Megachurch Sermon Transcripts: Analyze rhetorical moves, audience engagement, prosperity themes.

20. Retraction/Apology Statements From Religious Institutions: Catholic Church abuse apologies; Southern Baptist Convention reckoning; the rhetoric of institutional contrition.

Texts

1. How to Do Things with Words (J. L. Austin): The cleanest foundation for “words that do things” (oaths, blessings, consecrations, curses, sacraments).

2. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Émile Durkheim): Social mechanics of religious and magical rhetoric: how groups generate the sacred, authorize voices, and amplify meaning.

3. Malleus Maleficarum (1487): The witch-hunter’s manual: rhetoric of accusation and demonology, plus gender and heresy.

4. The Book of the Law (Aleister Crowley): “Do what thou wilt”: transgressive spirituality and the rhetoric of liberation and darkness.

5. The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell): Myth as a meaning-making rhetoric for modern life, centered on recurring narrative patterns and their persuasive psychological pull.

6. Bounded Choice (Janja Lalich, 2004): Cult psychology; how totalistic groups constrain decision-making.

7. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell): Monomyth and the hero’s journey as universal structure, with major influence on popular culture including Star Wars.

8. Religion as a Cultural System (Clifford Geertz): Religion as a persuasive symbolic system that shapes “moods and motivations” by making a worldview feel like common sense. 

9. The Rhetoric of Religion (Kenneth Burke): Treats theology as rhetorical equipment: hierarchy, guilt, redemption, identification. 

10. Purity and Danger (Mary Douglas): The rhetoric of purity, pollution, and taboo as boundary-making: what belongs, what threatens, what must be cleansed or expelled.

11. The Gnostic Gospels (Elaine Pagels): Alternative Christianities and suppressed texts, with orthodoxy framed as rhetorical victory.

12. Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM (Sarah Berman, 2021): Investigative journalist's comprehensive exposé of NXIVM's rise, multi-level marketing structure, use of blackmail and branding, and decades of evading prosecution through legal intimidation.

13. Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life (Sarah Edmondson, 2019): Memoir detailing 12 years in NXIVM, recruitment of over 2,000 members, induction into DOS, the branding ceremony, and becoming a key witness in the federal case against Raniere.

Documentary Series

1. The Vow (HBO, 2020-2022): Nine-part documentary series following former members Sarah Edmondson, Mark Vicente, Bonnie Piesse, and Anthony Ames as they escape NXIVM and work to expose Keith Raniere's criminal enterprise.

2. Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult (Starz, 2020): Four-part documentary focusing on India Oxenberg's seven-year experience in NXIVM and DOS, examining her culpability, abuse, and relationship rebuilding with her mother Catherine Oxenberg.

Podcasts

• Uncover: Escaping NXIVM (CBC Podcasts, 2018): Investigative podcast series following Sarah Edmondson's journey from high-level recruiter to whistleblower, examining how NXIVM functioned as both self-help group and criminal enterprise.

Films

• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988): Vodou, zombification, and Western fear; ethnobotany meets horror; Haiti as exotic other.

• Cabin in the Woods (2012): Ritual sacrifice as genre mechanics; meta-commentary on horror's religious structure; the ancient ones must be appeased.

• The Witch (2015): Puritan rhetoric of sin and damnation; accusation and confession; "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?" as seduction and liberation.

• The Seventh Seal (1957): Death personified; the knight's crisis of faith; chess as existential negotiation; silence of God.

• Pan's Labyrinth (2006): Fairy tale as parallel world; ritual tasks and transformation; fascism and fantasy; obedience vs. moral autonomy.

• The Wicker Man (1973): Pagan vs. Christian rhetoric; the outsider among believers; sacrifice as communal renewal; the burned offering.

• The Craft (1996): Teenage witchcraft as empowerment and danger; "light as a feather, stiff as a board"; the coven as sisterhood and rivalry.

• Midsommar (2019): Pagan ritual as horror and healing; the outsider drawn in; grief processed through cult; daylight horror and flower crowns.

• The Exorcist (1973): Possession and institutional religion's response; the priest's crisis of faith; medical vs. spiritual explanation; the body as battleground.

• Apostle (2018): Cult infiltration; the price of faith community; sacrifice and desperation; utopia's dark underbelly.

• The Master (2012): Charismatic leadership and the vulnerable follower; Scientology parallels; "processing" as rhetorical technique; the seduction of certainty.

• Holy Smoke (1999): Cult deprogramming; who defines brainwashing; the deprogrammer's own seduction.

• Jesus Camp (2006): Evangelical children's ministry; speaking in tongues, weeping, and warfare rhetoric; the formation of young believers.

• Marjoe (1972): Documentary of a child evangelist turned skeptic; the con from inside; charisma as learned performance.

• Inherit the Wind (1960): Scopes trial dramatized; science vs. biblical literalism; courtroom as rhetorical arena.

• The Omen (1976): Antichrist narrative; biblical prophecy as horror plot; signs and portents.

• Rosemary's Baby (1968): Satanic cult in Manhattan; pregnancy as violation; paranoia validated.

• Silence (2016): Jesuit missionaries in Japan; apostasy under torture; what faith means when hidden; God's silence.

• Spotlight (2015): Institutional cover-up of clergy abuse; journalism as accountability; the rhetoric of apology and deflection.

• First Reformed (2017): Environmental despair as spiritual crisis; the minister's journal; radicalization through conviction.

• Häxan (1922): Silent-era documentary on witchcraft; historical reenactment and sensationalism; the witch as medieval and modern.

• The Rite (2011): Exorcism training in Rome; skeptic becomes believer; demonic rhetoric and institutional process.

• Sound of My Voice (2011): Cult leader claims to be from the future; the journalist's infiltration; belief creep.

Music

• "Sympathy for the Devil" (Rolling Stones, 1968): Satan as narrator; the charming devil; historical atrocity as demonic work.

• "Jesus Walks" (Kanye West, 2004): Faith in hip-hop; the hustler and the holy; "they say you can rap about anything except for Jesus."

• "Like a Prayer" (Madonna, 1989): Catholic imagery as pop provocation; stigmata, burning crosses, and Black Jesus; the Vatican's condemnation.

• "Personal Jesus" (Depeche Mode, 1989): Reach out and touch faith; intimacy and religion; televangelism critique.

• "Losing My Religion" (R.E.M., 1991): Not about religion but uses its language; obsession as devotion; the mandolin as longing.

• "Spirit in the Sky" (Norman Greenbaum, 1969): Simple salvation rock; "never been a sinner, I never sinned"; Jewish songwriter's Christian anthem.

• "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen, 1984): Biblical references (David, Samson); the broken hallelujah; sacred and erotic intertwined; covered endlessly, each version a reinterpretation.

• "Ave Maria" (Schubert, 1825): Marian devotion; the sacred feminine; classical music as worship.

• "Black Sabbath" (Black Sabbath, 1970): Occult imagery; the tritone ("devil's interval"); heavy metal as dark ritual.

• "Take Me to Church" (Hozier, 2013): Worship as metaphor for love; critique of organized religion; "I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies."

• "House of the Rising Sun" & "Amazing Grace” by Athens Creek (YouTube)

• "Shout" (Isley Brothers, 1959): Gospel energy in R&B; call-and-response; the church as source of popular music forms.

• "Highway to Hell" (AC/DC, 1979): Damnation as party; rock and roll as devil's music (and embrace of that framing).

• "God Only Knows" (Beach Boys, 1966): Devotion that dares to invoke God in a pop song; Brian Wilson's ambition.

• "What if God Was One of Us" (Joan Osborne, 1995): Theological thought experiment as pop hit; accessibility and irreverence.

• Gregorian chant: Monophonic medieval worship; the rhetoric of sacred sound; timelessness and tradition.

Unit 3: Exploring how political speech is used to construct authority, mobilize action, shape belief, and manufacture consent, often framing crisis, assigning victory, confirming national identity, or rewriting history.

Core Topics

• Foundational American Oratory: How early American speeches established templates for democratic persuasion, national identity, and moral argument; revolutionary urgency in Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death"; the ironic address in Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (speaking to a nation that excludes you); brevity as power in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (redefining the war's purpose in 272 words); reconciliation as rhetorical project in Lincoln's Second Inaugural (malice toward none).

• Presidential Inaugural Addresses: The genre's conventions of unity, vision, and humility before the task; how inaugurals establish tone, signal priorities, and perform democratic transition; Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" (antithesis and chiasmus); Obama's 2008 "Yes We Can" speech (repetition, hope as rhetorical strategy); Trump's "American carnage" (inaugural as grievance; breaking genre expectations); FDR's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (depression-era reassurance).

• Wartime Rhetoric: How leaders mobilize populations, justify sacrifice, name enemies, and frame conflicts through language; Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" (catalogue as defiance; the list that refuses surrender); FDR's "Day of Infamy" (Pearl Harbor and the rhetoric of moral clarity); George W. Bush at Ground Zero (the bullhorn moment; spontaneous vs. scripted); Bush's "Axis of Evil" (naming enemies; how labels frame conflicts).

• Political Cartoons & Visual Satire: Condensed argument through image and caption; exaggeration, caricature, and metaphor as persuasion; cartoons as fast-moving counter-speech that responds to events faster than essays or speeches; Thomas Nast's attacks on Boss Tweed (visualizing corruption); Cold War and Vietnam-era cartoons; modern editorial cartoons as meme ancestors; the limits of satire when audiences no longer share assumptions.

• Civil Rights Oratory: How marginalized speakers claim authority, reappropriate national ideals, and make injustice visible through public address; Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" (anaphora, biblical cadence, the American Dream reappropriated); Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" (the alternative voice; threat as persuasion); Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony (witness as argument; the body as evidence); John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (remembrance as ongoing call).

Extended Topics

• Rhetoric of Dissent & Protest: How speakers challenge institutions, mobilize movements, and risk credibility by breaking with consensus; Mario Savio's "Bodies upon the gears" (Berkeley Free Speech Movement); Gloria Steinem's addresses on feminism; Harvey Milk's "Hope Speech" (identity politics as coalition-building); Greta Thunberg's "How dare you" (generational accusation; youth as ethos).

• Presidential Debates: How televised confrontation changed political persuasion; the tension between substance and performance; Kennedy vs. Nixon (the television turn; those who listened vs. those who watched); Reagan's "There you go again" (dismissal as tactic); Lloyd Bentsen's "You're no Jack Kennedy" (the devastating comparison); the town hall format and its demands.

• The Concession Speech: The rhetoric of democratic transfer and grace in defeat; how losing candidates perform legitimacy and unity; Al Gore 2000 (conceding the contested); Hillary Clinton 2016 (the glass ceiling unbroken); McCain 2008 (defending Obama to his own supporters).

• Apology & Scandal Management: How politicians deploy contrition, deflection, and linguistic precision to survive scandal; Nixon's "Checkers Speech" (the dog, the cloth coat, pathos as deflection); Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations" (parsing language; legal precision as evasion); Clinton's later apology (what contrition requires rhetorically); politicians' non-apology apologies ("mistakes were made").

• Demagoguery & Dangerous Speech: How rhetors scapegoat, inflame, and mobilize resentment; the ethics of analyzing dangerous rhetoric without amplifying it; Father Coughlin's radio addresses (1930s populist antisemitism); Joseph McCarthy's accusations (the list as weapon; "I have here in my hand..."); George Wallace's "Segregation forever" (white supremacy as states' rights).

• Propaganda & State Rhetoric: How authoritarian regimes use spectacle, repetition, and controlled language to manufacture consent and suppress dissent; Nazi rally oratory (spectacle, repetition, scapegoating); Soviet socialist realism in speech; North Korean state rhetoric; how totalitarian language differs from democratic persuasion.

• The Filibuster as Performance: Endurance as argument; how the physical body becomes a political instrument through sustained speech; Strom Thurmond's 24-hour stand against civil rights; Wendy Davis on abortion rights.

• Speechwriters & Ghostwriting: The collaboration between voice and pen; who deserves credit for great lines; the ethics of speaking another's words; Ted Sorensen and Kennedy; Peggy Noonan and Reagan; Jon Favreau and Obama.

• Campaign Slogans & Political Branding: Compression as persuasion; how three words carry ideology and frame elections; "Morning in America," "Hope and Change," "Make America Great Again," "Build Back Better."

• The State of the Union: Genre conventions of the annual address; the guests in the gallery, the opposition's response, the laundry list problem; memorable moments (Clinton's "The era of big government is over"; Obama's "You lie" interruption; Pelosi's clap).

• Eulogy as Political Speech: How grief becomes argument; using death to reframe national meaning; Reagan on the Challenger disaster ("slipped the surly bonds of earth"); Obama's Charleston eulogy for Clementa Pinckney (breaking into "Amazing Grace").

• International Political Oratory: How political speech operates across different national contexts and under conditions of crisis, repression, or war; Nelson Mandela's Rivonia trial speech ("an ideal for which I am prepared to die"); Václav Havel's New Year's Address 1990 (post-communist truth-telling); Volodymyr Zelensky's wartime addresses (the t-shirt, the video selfie, presence as resistance).

• Women's Political Speech: The double bind of women's political voice; how female speakers navigate expectations of authority and femininity; Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" (intersectionality before the term); Barbara Jordan's 1976 DNC keynote (the outsider claiming the Constitution); Shirley Chisholm's campaign rhetoric.

• Social Media & the Death of the Speech: How digital platforms transformed political communication; Twitter as direct address bypassing media; how 280 characters changed rhetoric; the speech reduced to the clip, the soundbite, the meme.

• Donald Trump's "Big Lie" and January 6th: Repeat-assertion genre where factual defeat becomes narrative betrayal; evidentiary vacuum filled by procedural suspicion and testimonial loyalty

• Edward Snowden's Manifesto Leaks: Whistleblower disclosure that converts classified secrecy into moral transparency, weaponizing institutional credibility against itself

• Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches": Wartime oratory that transforms military retreat into defiant national myth through repetition and place-naming

• Joseph McCarthy's "List of Communists": Accusation without disclosure—where the claim of evidence performs more work than evidence itself

• Nayirah Testimony (Gulf War Incubator Story): Coached emotional testimony presented as eyewitness fact; later debunked but effective in mobilizing intervention

• The Zinoviev Letter (1924 UK Election): Forged document used as campaign weapon—authenticity less important than timing and plausibility

• Greta Thunberg's "How Dare You" Speech: Youth moral authority weaponized against institutional delay; emotional urgency as counter-rhetoric to technocratic caution

• Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall": Performative demand staged for symbolic resonance rather than diplomatic negotiation

• Nixon's "Checkers Speech": Preemptive confession and emotional appeal (the dog, the cloth coat) to redirect scandal into relatability

• Bernie Sanders' Stump Speech Consistency: Repetition as authenticity marker; refusal to "evolve" positioned as integrity against poll-tested messaging

Speeches

• Pericles' Funeral Oration: The democratic ideal articulated; Thucydides as recorder; is this what he actually said?

• Gettysburg Address: Why 272 words outlasted the two-hour speech before it

• "I Have a Dream": Structure, improvisation, and the moment King departed from his text

• "Letter from Birmingham Jail": Not a speech but functions as one; the written word as public address

• Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall": State Department's objections; the line that almost wasn't

• Obama's "A More Perfect Union": The race speech; addressing Reverend Wright; the speech as survival

• Barbara Jordan's Watergate Statement: Constitutional authority claimed by those the Constitution originally excluded

• Zelensky's Address to Congress: Video link from a war zone; invoking Pearl Harbor, 9/11, MLK; tailoring appeals to American memory

• George Washington, Farewell Address: Unity, factionalism, and restraint; the speech that warns against speeches.

• Susan B. Anthony, "On Women's Right to Vote": Legal rhetoric as moral claim; constitutional interpretation from exclusion.

• Eugene V. Debs, Canton Speech (1918): Anti-war dissent; free speech under threat; the speech that led to imprisonment.

• Robert F. Kennedy, Indianapolis Speech on MLK's Assassination: Improvised grief rhetoric; calming a city on the brink.

• Ronald Reagan, Challenger Address: Mourning as reassurance; poetic language as national balm.

• Margaret Thatcher, "The Lady's Not for Turning": Refusal as rhetoric; firmness turned into brand.

Articles

• "The Case for Civility" (The Atlantic): Civility as rhetorical demand vs. silencing mechanism.

• "How Political Language Shapes Thought" (Scientific American): Cognitive framing and persuasion.

• "The Soundbite Presidency" (Columbia Journalism Review): Media compression and rhetorical loss.

• "Dog Whistle Politics" (Ian Haney López): Racial coding without explicit language.

• "The Rise of Performative Authenticity in Politics" (NYT Magazine): Folksiness as strategy.

Texts

• Aristotle, Rhetoric (Book I): Foundations of political persuasion; deliberative rhetoric; ethos, pathos, logos as civic tools.

• Isocrates, "Against the Sophists": Education, citizenship, and eloquence; rhetoric as moral training.

• Demosthenes, Philippics: Urgency and warning rhetoric; naming threats before it's politically safe.

• Hannah Arendt, On Revolution: Speech, action, and public freedom; rhetoric as world-making.

• George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant!: Framing theory; metaphor as political infrastructure.

• Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason: How "the people" get rhetorically constructed.

• Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Trust, rhetoric, and democratic fragility.

• Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency: How modern presidents govern by speech rather than law.

• Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Attack rhetoric, dog whistles, and plausible deniability.

Podcasts

• Presidential: Voice, cadence, and persona across administrations.

• Citations Needed: Media framing, propaganda, and rhetorical power.

• Throughline (NPR): Historical political speeches placed in long context.

• Slow Burn: Political scandal as serialized rhetoric.

• FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast: Data-driven rhetoric; numbers as persuasion.

Films

• The King's Speech: George VI's stammer; the voice as instrument; wartime radio address as national performance

• Lincoln: Spielberg's film; the Thirteenth Amendment as rhetorical campaign; Lincoln's storytelling as political method

• Selma: King's speeches reconstructed; the march as embodied rhetoric; LBJ's "We Shall Overcome" address to Congress

• Good Night, and Good Luck: Murrow vs. McCarthy; broadcast journalism as counter-speech

• All the President's Men: Watergate; what happens when political speech is exposed as lies

• The Great Dictator: Chaplin's final speech; satire's relationship to political oratory; the barber who speaks truth to power

• Milk: Harvey Milk's rhetoric of hope and visibility; assassination and martyrdom

• Vice: Dick Cheney and the rhetoric of the unseen; power exercised through others' mouths

• Primary (1960 documentary): Kennedy and Humphrey; the birth of modern campaign coverage

• A Face in the Crowd: Media-made demagogue; the folksy voice as manipulation

• Frost/Nixon: The interview as confrontation; forcing the apology

• The Ides of March: Cynicism behind the inspiring speech; the machinery of message

• W.: Bush's rhetoric examined; misunderestimation as strategy or accident

• Network: The mad prophet on television; rage as political authenticity.

• Dr. Strangelove: Cold War rhetoric pushed to absurdity; language as annihilation.

• Seven Days in May: Civil-military rhetoric and coup anxiety.

• The War Room: Campaign messaging as strategy, not belief.

• Our Brand Is Crisis: Exporting American campaign rhetoric abroad.

• Snowden: Whistleblowing as counter-speech; secrecy vs. public address.

Music

• "This Land Is Your Land": Woody Guthrie; the verses they don't teach; folk music as political speech

• "A Change Is Gonna Come": Sam Cooke; the anthem adjacent to oratory

• "Alright": Kendrick Lamar; contemporary protest music; "We gon' be alright" as counter-speech

• "Born in the U.S.A.": Springsteen misread; how politicians misuse music; the difference between chorus and verse

• Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'": Prophecy as political address.

• Public Enemy, "Fight the Power": Confrontational rhetoric; naming injustice directly.

• U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday": Moral appeal without policy prescription.

• Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On": Question as political rhetoric.

• Childish Gambino, "This Is America": Visual and lyrical political speech.

Rhetoric of the Moon & Stars

Unit 4: Exploring the moon's influence across culture, literature, and media—and how lunar rhetoric shapes belief, identity, and persuasion. This unit treats the moon and stars not as causal forces, but as rhetorical resources—used to organize time, identity, authority, and wonder.

Core Topics

• Moon Landing as Rhetorical Event: Kennedy's Rice University speech as promissory rhetoric; "We choose to go to the moon" as national identity construction; the Cold War space race as competitive spectacle; "One small step" as crafted utterance; conspiracy theories as counter-narrative.

• Moon Landing Denial: Rhetorical structure of conspiracy arguments; the burden of proof and its manipulation; distrust of institutions as epistemological stance; how "just asking questions" functions as persuasive strategy.

• Scientific Perspectives: Aristotelian perfection vs. Galileo's cratered observations; the telescope as rhetoric-disrupting technology; how seeing differently enables arguing differently; the moon as first evidence that heavens aren't divine.

• Literary References: Shakespeare's "swear not by the inconstant moon" as warning against unstable oaths; Romantic poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron) and lunar sublimity; the moon as muse, madness-bringer, and memento mori; werewolf transformation as lunar determinism.

• Cultural Symbolism: Mythological moons across traditions (Selene, Diana, Chandra, Chang'e, Tsukuyomi); the moon as feminine principle; menstrual and agricultural cycles tied to lunar phases; lunacy as moon-caused madness; the moon as symbol of mystery, reflection, and borrowed light.

• Astrology as Non-Institutional Authority: Zodiac signs, constellations, and birth charts as symbolic systems; how astrology constructs credibility and personal meaning without expert gatekeeping or institutional validation.

Extended Topics

• Sun Sign Columns and the Barnum Effect: How vague statements feel personal; the history of newspaper horoscopes (R.H. Naylor's 1930 column for Princess Margaret); horoscopes as genre with predictable moves; the rhetoric of "this could apply to anyone but feels like it's about me."

• The Natal Chart as Identity Document: The birth chart as biography written in advance; how "rising sign," "moon sign," and "sun sign" create a layered self; astrology as personality taxonomy competing with Myers-Briggs, enneagram, Big Five; why people find planetary explanations more satisfying than psychological ones.

• Astrology's Revival in the Digital Age: Co-Star, The Pattern, and other apps as personalized rhetoric engines; push notifications as daily interpellation ("You may feel conflicted today"); the algorithm as astrologer; meme astrology on Twitter/TikTok and its ironic-but-sincere tone; how millennials and Gen Z reclaimed astrology from newspaper horoscopes.

• Astrology & Lunar Phases: Moon signs vs. sun signs; the moon as emotional interior vs. solar public self; new moon intentions and full moon releases as ritualized self-help; how astrology apps frame lunar events as personal guidance; the rhetoric of "mercury retrograde" and similar phenomena.

• Debunking Astrology (And Why It Doesn't Work): The Forer experiment; Shawn Carlson's 1985 double-blind study; why scientific refutation doesn't reduce belief; astrology as unfalsifiable by design.

• Moon in Advertising & Branding: Lunar imagery selling romance, mystery, femininity; "Moonlight" as product name convention; the moon as shorthand for dreams and aspiration.

• Art and Media: Moonlit landscapes in Romantic painting (Friedrich, Turner); Méliès' A Trip to the Moon as early cinema spectacle; the moon shot as photographic cliché and genuine wonder; lunar imagery in album covers, fashion, and design.

• The Werewolf & Lunar Transformation: The full moon as trigger; loss of control attributed to celestial forces; lycanthropy as metaphor for repressed nature; the moon as excuse for becoming monstrous.

• Tides, Fertility, and Folk Belief: Planting by moon phases; beliefs about births and full moons; how correlation gets narrated as causation; the persistence of lunar folk wisdom despite scientific debunking.

• Zeitgeist & Lunar Consciousness: The moon as cultural mirror; how different eras project anxieties and aspirations onto the lunar surface; the moon as blank screen for collective imagination.

• Astrology as Gendered Discourse: Why astrology is culturally coded as feminine; the dismissal of "girl hobbies"; astrology as women's way of knowing vs. masculine empiricism; Susan Miller as celebrity astrologer.

• Historical Astrology and Power: Court astrologers advising kings; John Dee and Elizabeth I; Reagan and Joan Quigley; astrology's proximity to political decision-making; the tension between public dismissal and private consultation.

• Zodiac as Character Shorthand: How fiction uses signs to signal personality (the "such a Scorpio" trope); zodiac in screenwriting and character design; astrology as narrative convenience.

• Astrology as Agricultural Timekeeping: Seasonal planning rhetoric that treats celestial cycles as actionable knowledge

• NASA Moon Landing Hoax Theories: Counter-visual rhetoric that treats image artifacts, flag movement, and shadow angles as "proof" of deception

• Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger): Telescopic observation as new epistemic authority that challenges scriptural cosmology

• The Wow! Signal and SETI Interpretation: Single data anomaly elevated into decades of speculative meaning-making; silence treated as significant

• Apollo 13 "Successful Failure" Narrative: Crisis management rhetoric that redefines disaster as triumph of ingenuity and teamwork

• Percival Lowell's Martian Canals: Observational desire projected onto planetary surface; imagination mistaken for or performing as empirical discovery

• The "Blood Moon" Prophecy Genre: Lunar eclipse reframed through apocalyptic biblical interpretation as divine warning system

• Elon Musk's Mars Colonization Rhetoric: Techno-utopian future projection that treats speculative engineering as inevitable destiny

• Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot: Cosmic perspective argument that uses astronomical scale to generate humility and environmental ethics

• The Tunguska Event Interpretations: Unexplained explosion debated through competing frameworks—comet, asteroid, UFO, Tesla experiment

• Astrology Memes and Gen Z Revival: Algorithmic redistribution of zodiac stereotypes as identity performance and ironic-but-sincere belief

Articles

• Theodor Adorno, "The Stars Down to Earth" (1957): Horoscope columns as mass culture; astrology as ideology and affective reassurance.

• Shawn Carlson, "A Double-Blind Test of Astrology" (Nature, 1985): The canonical experimental refutation—useful precisely because it fails rhetorically.

• Dennis Cosgrove, "Apollo's Eye": Earthrise photography and the moon as vantage point; vision, power, and global consciousness.

Visual & Cultural Artifacts

• Earthrise (Apollo 8 photograph): The moon as platform for planetary self-recognition.

• NASA mission patches: Symbols, Latin mottos, and mythic framing of science.

• Zodiac wheels and star charts (medieval–modern): Visual taxonomies of personality and fate.

• Astrology app push notifications: Direct address and algorithmic intimacy.

• Moon phase jewelry and tattoos: Embodied identity through celestial symbolism.

Texts

• Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (1610): The moon's surface as empirical shock; how telescopic observation destabilizes Aristotelian cosmology; seeing as rhetorical intervention.

• Plutarch, "On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon": Ancient philosophical debate about the moon's substance; early speculative science as rhetorical inquiry.

• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Balloon-Hoax" (1844): Pseudo-scientific lunar travel report; credibility cues and journalistic style as persuasion.

• Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" (1963): Moon landing as philosophical rupture; technological transcendence vs. human meaning.

• Mary Roach, Packing for Mars (2010): Space science translated through humor; bodily realities vs. heroic narratives.

• Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space (2016): How scientists rhetorically make alien worlds familiar; mapping, naming, and narrating celestial bodies.

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies (selections): Myth as second-order signification; useful for reading lunar imagery as naturalized meaning.

• Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology (2003): Astrology as symbolic interpretation rather than prediction; meaning-making over causation.

• Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology (vol. 1): Astrology's historical legitimacy; courts, medicine, and cosmology.

• Stuart Vyse, Believing in Magic (2014): Cognitive psychology of belief persistence; why astrology survives debunking.

Podcasts

• Radiolab, "Apollo": Sound design and wonder; how audio storytelling constructs scientific awe.

• You Are Not So Smart, "The Forer Effect": Cognitive bias explained narratively; why vague claims feel accurate.

• Decoder Ring, "The Zodiac Killer" episode: Astrology, pattern-making, and cultural obsession.

• BBC In Our Time, "Astrology": Historical overview; astrology as intellectual system rather than superstition.

• Ologies (Astrophysics episodes): Enthusiastic expertise; persona-driven science communication.

Films

• The Shining: Moonlit horror; madness and cycles; the Overlook as lunar space

• Room 237: Moon landing conspiracy theories applied to Kubrick; interpretation as obsession

• The Twilight Saga: Lunar transformation and supernatural romance; the moon governing bodies

• Moonlight: Identity constructed in phases; the title as structural metaphor

• Apollo 13: The moon as destination denied; mission failure as national drama

• The Man in the Moon: Coming-of-age and lunar symbolism; first love under southern skies

• First Man: The moon landing as grief narrative; Armstrong's interiority vs. the spectacle

• Paper Moon: The moon as con; false promises and borrowed light

• Moonstruck: Lunar madness and romantic inevitability; "la bella luna" as permission to feel

• A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902): Early cinema's lunar fantasy; the moon as colonial destination

• Moon (2009): Isolation, identity, and repetition; lunar space as psychological mirror.

• Ad Astra (2019): Masculinity, exploration, and emotional repression; space as interior journey.

• For All Mankind (Apple TV+): Alternate-history moon race; national identity and speculative rhetoric.

• Apollo 11 (2019 documentary): Archival purity; the rhetoric of "letting the footage speak."

Music

• "Fly Me to the Moon": Sinatra's lunar romance as aspiration

• "Bad Moon Rising": CCR's apocalyptic warning

• "Talking to the Moon": Bruno Mars; the moon as absent lover's proxy

• "Moon River": Longing, drifting, dreaming

• Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon: The unseen as psychological metaphor

• David Bowie, "Space Oddity": The astronaut as existential figure; disconnection beneath technological triumph.

• Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the Moon": Space funding vs. social neglect; moon rhetoric as political critique.

• Brian Eno, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks: Ambient sound as lunar affect; the moon as emotional landscape.

Unit 5: The art and impact of written correspondence across time and context. Letters are rhetoric slowed down. They are persuasion, confession, and power shaped by distance, delay, and material form.

Core Topics

• Letters as Power at a Distance (Connection Without Co-Presence): Written correspondence as connective tissue between people; how mailed letters, emails, long-form texts, and DMs create direct, sustained connection across space and time; why writing enables deliberation, intimacy, and self-revision that speech cannot; handwritten letters, travel letters, letters home, and prison letters as durable bonds under separation; the role of address, delay, and permanence in producing presence; why social media posts and broadcasts fail to generate the same reciprocal or enduring connection.

• Open Letters (Private Address, Public Audience): Letters written to be read by more than their named recipient; the strategic expansion of audience; open letters as moral appeal, accusation, or pressure tactic; the tension between intimacy and publicity; performative sincerity; historical and contemporary examples from politics, activism, academia, and culture; how open letters leverage the authority of personal address while mobilizing collective judgment.

• Medical Letters & Clinical Writing (Care, Authority, and Distance): Physician letters to patients, diagnosis letters, referral letters, end-of-life correspondence, and medical chart notes as quasi-letters; how medicine operates through written communication that often replaces dialogue; tone, clarity, euphemism, and omission as rhetorical choices; documentation as care, control, and liability; how clinical writing reshapes lives without conversation; medicine as epistolary power disguised as care.

• Mentorship, Gatekeeping, and Career-Making Letters: Letters of recommendation, evaluation, and endorsement as hidden mechanisms of academic and professional sorting; praise as ritualized rhetoric; coded language, faint praise, and strategic omission; asymmetries of power between writer, subject, and reader; how careers are advanced or quietly stalled through epistolary judgment; benevolence, obligation, and reputational risk in elite pipelines.

• Military Letters: Letters home from the battlefront (Vietnam, Gulf War, Civil War, WWI trenches); the rhetoric of reassurance vs. the unspeakable; Sullivan Ballou's letter before Bull Run; censorship and self-censorship; the telegram as death announcement.

• Love Letters: John Keats and Fanny Brawne (longing, mortality, poetic excess); Abelard and Heloise (forbidden desire, theological wrestling); Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (queer intimacy, literary collaboration); Napoleon and Josephine (passion, jealousy, imperial ego); Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn (royal desire before royal wrath); Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera (devotion and fury intertwined).

Extended Topics

• Historical Letters: King Henry VIII to the Pope (sovereignty vs. papal authority; the letter as diplomatic rupture); Mary, Queen of Scots' plea to Elizabeth I (royal address between rivals; the rhetoric of kinship and mercy); Václav Havel's prison letters (intellectual resistance under surveillance; philosophy smuggled through censorship); Nelson Mandela's correspondence (dignity maintained across decades; letters as lifeline and witness).

• Secret Diplomatic Letters: Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis (back-channel rhetoric; performative restraint; the letter as de-escalation); the Zimmermann Telegram (interception and revelation; how leaked correspondence changes history).

• Letters of Protest & Persuasion: Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (the epistle as manifesto; addressing white moderates); Émile Zola's "J'Accuse" (open letter as public indictment); James Baldwin's letters on race in America.

• Suicide Notes & Final Letters: Rhetoric of farewell; the letter as last word; Virginia Woolf to Leonard; Kurt Cobain's note; the ethical complexities of reading what was never meant for us.

• The Epistolary Novel: Letters as narrative device; intimacy manufactured through fictional correspondence; Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa; Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons; Alice Walker's The Color Purple; the reader as interceptor.

• Fan Mail & Celebrity Correspondence: Parasocial intimacy; the illusion of personal address; Mark David Chapman's letters to John Lennon; fan letters as devotion, demand, and delusion.

• Break-Up Letters & Dear John Letters: The rhetoric of ending; cowardice or mercy; the letter as avoidance of confrontation; how written rejection differs from spoken.

• Letters to the Editor: Public correspondence as civic participation; the compressed argument; letters as temperature-check of public opinion.

• Business & Professional Letters: The cover letter as self-presentation; letters of recommendation as ritualized praise; resignation letters (professional courtesy vs. bridge-burning).

• Letters to the Dead: Writing to those who cannot read; grief correspondence; letters left at graves, memorials, the Vietnam Wall; the letter as ritual rather than communication.

• The Death of the Letter: Email, text, DM as successors; what's lost when correspondence becomes instant and ephemeral; the materiality of paper, ink, envelope, stamp; handwriting as intimacy.

• Letters as Evidence: Correspondence in trials and investigations; authentication and forgery; the Hitler Diaries hoax; how letters become documents.

• The Unsent Letter: Therapeutic writing; the letter as catharsis without consequence; letters discovered posthumously; the ethics of reading another's mail.

• Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Curated self narrative where private voice becomes public authority

• Jacques Derrida, "Envois" in The Post Card: Fragmentary epistolary theory that destabilizes authorship, address, and meaning

• Martin Luther King Jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail": Moral argument letter that fuses urgency, audience targeting, and ethical authority

• Abigail and John Adams Letters: Domestic political archive where intimacy becomes a record of governance

• Cicero's Letters: Status performance where friendship language doubles as persuasion and reputation management

• Kafka's Letters to Felice: Romantic address as self construction, using confession as control over interpretation

• Soldier Letters from World War I and II: Censored intimacy where what cannot be said becomes part of the message

• "Open Letters" in Newspapers and Online: Public address disguised as personal address to pressure institutions through visibility

• Epistolary Novels like Dracula: Document bundle rhetoric where letters simulate evidence and make fiction feel investigative

• Email Leaks as Modern Letter Archives: Private genre repurposed as proof, where timestamps and forwarding become credibility cues

• First Corinthians: Paul's corrective letter addressing divisions, moral conduct, and spiritual gifts; community unity and love become authoritative through exhortation, rebuke, and self-sacrifice

• Second Corinthians: Paul's defense of his apostleship and ministry, blending personal vulnerability with divine authority; trust is built through suffering, testimony, and shared hope

Articles

• Jacques Derrida, "Envois" (The Post Card): Delay, misdelivery, and the instability of address; the letter that may never arrive.

• Stanley Cavell, "Knowing and Acknowledgment": Letters as acts of acknowledgment rather than information transfer.

• Michel Foucault, "Self Writing": Letters as technologies of the self; self-formation through correspondence.

• Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Theoretical foundation for letters as narrative and rhetorical form.

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading": Useful for reading letters as sites of suspicion, care, and vulnerability.

Texts

• Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road

• Nick Bantock, Griffin and Sabine trilogy (visual epistolary)

• C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (demonic correspondence as theological argument)

• Pliny the Younger, Letters: Roman epistolarity as self-fashioning; letters written for circulation as much as for recipients; public intimacy.

• Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Moral instruction through personal address; philosophy as private counsel and public performance.

• Cicero, Selected Letters: Politics conducted through correspondence; persuasion under exile and threat.

• Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters: Epistolary voice as alternative to publication; intimacy, withdrawal, and control of audience.

• Kafka, Letters to Milena: Obsession, anxiety, and self-sabotage; the letter as emotional loop rather than communication.

• James Joyce, Letters to Nora Barnacle: Erotic rhetoric; the limits of decorum; desire intensified by distance and writing.

• Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre, Selected Correspondence: Intellectual intimacy; letters as collaborative thinking and negotiation of freedom.

• Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Curated self-presentation; performance of wellness and ambition.

Podcasts

• Modern Love (NYT Podcast): Letters transformed into spoken narrative; private writing made public.

• This American Life, "Notes on Camp": Letters as community-building and identity formation.

• The Memory Palace: Epistolary history told through intimate address.

• Dear Sugars (archived): Advice columns as public letters; the epistolary voice without envelopes.

Films

• The Letters: Mother Teresa's correspondence and crisis of faith

• The End of the Affair: Graham Greene's jealousy and devotion; the diary as cousin to the letter

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: WWII correspondence as community-building; the letter as lifeline under occupation

• The Notebook: Letters undelivered, love preserved; the letter as proof of constancy

• Legends of the Fall: Letters across distance and war; miscommunication and tragedy

• Atonement: The intercepted letter as plot engine; Robbie's explicit note and its consequences; the typed vs. the intended

• 84 Charing Cross Road: Transatlantic book-buying correspondence; friendship through formality

• Her: Letters written for others; intimacy outsourced; what happens when we can't find our own words

• Message in a Bottle: The letter as random transmission; grief sent to sea

• Letters from Iwo Jima: The enemy humanized through correspondence; letters as counter-narrative to propaganda

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "Dear Friend" as opening; the letter as confessional frame

• The Postman (Il Postino): Poetry as correspondence; learning to write desire; letters and voice intertwined.

• Dear Zachary: Letters, testimony, and the ethics of address to the dead.

• The Lives of Others: Surveillance of letters; privacy violated; correspondence as political risk.

• In the Mood for Love: Letters never sent; restraint, repression, and missed connection.

• Cold War (2018): Love letters across borders; absence and longing intensified by censorship.

Music

• "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter": Fats Waller; the fantasy of self-correspondence

• "Please Mr. Postman": The Marvelettes; waiting as longing; the postman as fate

• "Return to Sender": Elvis Presley; the rejected letter; communication refused

• "I Will Always Love You": Dolly Parton (Whitney Houston); the song as farewell letter

• "Stan": Eminem; fan letters as escalating obsession; correspondence unanswered until too late

• "The Letter": The Box Tops; urgency, brevity, desperation

• Carole King, "So Far Away": Distance and deferred communication; longing articulated as letter-like address.

• Joni Mitchell, "A Case of You": Intimate address and retrospective letter-writing.

• Paul McCartney, "Paperback Writer": Authorship, rejection, and self-promotion through letters.

• Taylor Swift, "Dear John": Naming, accusation, and public epistolary revenge.

• Leonard Cohen, "Famous Blue Raincoat": Confessional letter-song; ambiguity of address and blame.

Unit 6: How visual art persuades, provokes, and communicates with specific audiences and how artists, critics, institutions, and viewers negotiate meaning, value, and power through images and objects.

Core Topics

• Persona (Fashion, Style, Bearing, Language, & Gestures): How bodies and appearances function rhetorically; clothing, posture, gesture, and facial expression as arguments about authority, identity, and belonging; portraits, self-fashioning, and performance across art, politics, and celebrity; when style persuades more powerfully than content.

• Fine Art (Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Drawing, Fresco, & Relief): Line, shape, composition, balance, symmetry, color, and scale as rhetorical tools; how realism, naturalism, and technical mastery appeal to truth, stability, and authority; proportion, perspective, anatomy, lighting, and finish as credibility cues that make images feel timeless, objective, or "right"; content and subject matter reinforcing hierarchy, continuity, and shared cultural values; why representational art often appears apolitical precisely because its persuasive strategies have been normalized.

• Multimodal Art: Artworks that combine image, text, sound, movement, space, and digital interaction—mirroring how knowledge is communicated through figures, captions, slides, simulations, and interfaces; how meaning emerges from the coordination of modes rather than any single element; sequencing, juxtaposition, scale, and sensory overlap as rhetorical strategies; installations, performance, video, mixed media, and interactive works; scientific posters, data dashboards, models, and visual abstracts.

• Cave Painting: From a rhetorical perspective, Paleolithic cave painting operates as one of the earliest complex systems for constructing knowledge, authority, and belief—not through empirical accuracy but through performative and procedural mechanisms. Cave art doesn't "record" the hunt—it constructs knowledge about reality itself. This spatial rhetoric constructs epistemic gatekeepers. Someone had to guide you into the dark. Someone had to know which chamber held which images. Someone controlled when and how the community accessed this knowledge. 

• Photography (Evidence, Objectivity, & Visual Trust): Photography that shapes or stages reality; war photography ethics (Robert Capa's Falling Soldier—record or construction?); photojournalism, cropping, enhancement, and selective framing; how photographs acquire evidentiary authority; the cultural assumption that images show "what really happened"; why photographs often feel more trustworthy than words and how that trust can be constructed, manipulated, or misplaced.

• Rhetoric of Allegory: How abstract ideas are communicated through symbolic narratives, images, and figures rather than direct argument; allegory as persuasion through indirection, requiring audiences to interpret rather than merely receive meaning; classical, religious, political, and artistic allegories as tools for teaching, critiquing power, and shaping belief; why allegory thrives under censorship, controversy, or uncertainty; the role of cultural literacy in decoding allegorical meaning; how allegory invites judgment by asking audiences to connect form, symbol, and truth rather than accept claims at face value.

• Scientific & Anatomical Imaging: Medical, scientific, and anatomical images as persuasive artifacts rather than neutral windows; microscopy, scans, diagrams, and illustrations as constructed views shaped by framing, color, scale, resolution, and selection; the body rendered as object of knowledge through anatomy, atlases, and imaging technologies; how conventions of clarity, cleanliness, and realism produce trust and authority; whose bodies are depicted as "normal," whose are excluded; why images meant to explain often also persuade, simplify, or conceal uncertainty.

• Propaganda Art: Soviet socialist realism (the worker idealized; art in service of the state); Nazi aesthetics (classical bodies, degenerate art exhibitions); Maoist posters (the Great Leap Forward visualized); how regimes weaponize beauty; the line between persuasion and coercion.

Extended Topics

• Religious Art: Medieval cathedrals as sermons in stone; iconography and illiteracy (art for those who couldn't read); the Counter-Reformation and Baroque excess (overwhelming the senses for the Church); icon veneration vs. iconoclasm (what's at stake when images are destroyed).

• Patronage & Power: The Medici and Renaissance Florence (art as political legitimacy); papal commissions (the Sistine Chapel as theological argument); royal portraiture (Holbein's Henry VIII; Velázquez's Philip IV); how paying for art shapes what art says.

• The Portrait as Argument: How subjects are constructed through pose, costume, setting; presidential portraits and their controversies (Obama's Kehinde Wiley portrait); the selfie as democratic self-portraiture; who gets to be seen and how.

• Protest Art & Political Resistance: Picasso's Guernica (the bombing made visible; the painting that travels); Diego Rivera's murals (socialism on government walls); Ai Weiwei's installations (dissent as art; art as evidence); Banksy's anonymity and the street as gallery; Kara Walker's silhouettes (history cut in black paper).

• The Rhetoric of Museums: What gets displayed, what gets stored; colonial collections and repatriation debates (the Elgin Marbles, Benin Bronzes); how wall text frames interpretation; the museum as temple, classroom, or theme park; who feels welcome, who feels surveilled.

• Art Forgery & Authenticity: What makes the "real" valuable; Beltracchi, van Meegeren, and the experts fooled; the rhetoric of provenance; why copies disturb us; Walter Benjamin's "aura" and mechanical reproduction.

• The Artist's Statement: Genre conventions of explaining one's work; the tension between visual and verbal; when the statement obscures rather than clarifies; art that refuses explanation.

• Art Criticism as Rhetoric: Clement Greenberg and the construction of Abstract Expressionism; how critics create movements; the review as taste-making; the power to name what matters.

• Shock & Transgression: Mapplethorpe and the NEA controversy; Serrano's Piss Christ (what offends and why); Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (elephant dung and Giuliani); the rhetoric of outrage; who benefits when art scandalizes.

• Public Art & Public Space: Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the wound in the earth; the controversy over abstraction); Confederate monuments (memorialization vs. glorification; removal as rhetorical act); murals, graffiti, and who owns the walls.

• Art and Commerce: Damien Hirst's diamond skull (art or commodity?); Jeff Koons and the aesthetics of kitsch; auction prices as meaning-making; when the price becomes the point.

• Conceptual Art & the Death of the Object: Duchamp's urinal (the readymade as argument); Sol LeWitt's instructions (the idea as the work); performance art and the body as medium; when art is the gesture, not the thing.

• The Male Gaze & Feminist Critique: Berger's Ways of Seeing (men look, women appear); the Guerrilla Girls and institutional sexism; reclaiming the nude; how gender shapes who makes art, who views it, who's depicted.

• Appropriation & Ownership: Sherrie Levine rephotographing Walker Evans; Richard Prince's Instagram "portraits"; when borrowing becomes theft; cultural appropriation in visual art; who gets to use whose images.

• Art Manifestos: Futurism's glorification of speed and war; Dada's anti-art declarations; the Surrealist manifesto; how movements announce themselves; the manifesto as performance.

• Public Murals & Community Voice: The Mexican muralist tradition (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros); WPA murals during the Depression; contemporary community murals; who speaks for the neighborhood.

• Digital Art & NFTs: The rhetoric of scarcity in infinitely reproducible media; Beeple's $69 million sale; crypto-art and environmental critique; authenticity in the age of the blockchain.

• Art Destruction: Iconoclasm as argument; Ai Weiwei dropping the Han dynasty urn; Banksy's shredded Girl with Balloon; the Taliban and the Bamiyan Buddhas; when destroying art is the art.

• Hidden Ciphers in Shakespeare's First Folio: Cryptic authorship genre that manufactures alternative authority

• Chauvet Pont d'Arc Cave Paintings: Deep time imagery framed by museums and dating science as institutional truth making

• Banksy's Shredded Girl With Balloon: Destruction-as-art that generates value through spectacle, authenticity crisis, and market disruption

• The Elgin Marbles Debate: Museum possession framed as "preservation" vs. "theft"; institutional care vs. cultural repatriation as competing authority

• Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Rooms: Immersive installation that manufactures "experience" as sellable, Instagrammable proof of participation

• Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds: Mass-produced handmade objects that critique labor, originality, and political suppression through material rhetoric

• Kehinde Wiley's Presidential Portraits: Genre subversion that places Black bodies in aristocratic visual codes; tradition weaponized as inclusion argument

• The Salvator Mundi Authentication Wars: Art market epistemology where attribution = value; competing connoisseurship claims and scientific analysis

• Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Buildings: Temporary transformation rhetoric that makes familiar spaces strange, generating public debate as the "real" artwork

• Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present: Durational performance where silent eye contact becomes emotional labor, intimacy commodity, and endurance spectacle

• The Guerrilla Girls' Institutional Critique Posters: Anonymity and data visualization weaponized against museum gender/race exclusion

• NFT Art and Bored Ape Yacht Club: Digital scarcity manufactured through blockchain; community access and status performance as the "art" itself

• Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll: Body-as-text feminist performance that confronts viewer discomfort as part of its argumentative force

• The Sistine Chapel Ceiling Restoration Controversy: Cleaning as revelation vs. destruction—competing claims about what constitutes "original" intent

Artists

• Kehinde Wiley: Black subjects in Old Master poses; who gets heroic portraiture

• Kara Walker: Silhouettes of slavery and violence; beauty and horror combined

• Ai Weiwei: Activism as art; surveillance, documentation, witness

• Barbara Kruger: Text over image; "Your body is a battleground"; advertising language weaponized

• Cindy Sherman: The self-portrait as fiction; identity as costume

• Banksy: Anonymity, street art, and institutional critique; the auction house prank

• Jean-Michel Basquiat: Graffiti to gallery; crowns and skulls; the commodification of rebellion

• Frida Kahlo: Pain made visible; the body as canvas; icon and brand

• Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party; feminist art and craft reclaimed

• Theaster Gates: Art as urban renewal; labor and material as meaning

• Jenny Holzer: Text as public art; truisms on LED signs; language in space

• Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (replicas): Institutional authority vs. artistic intent.

• Édouard Manet, Olympia: Scandal, gaze, and modern spectatorship.

• Goya, The Third of May 1808: Violence, martyrdom, and moral outrage.

• Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat: Revolutionary martyrdom; classical form as propaganda.

• Faith Ringgold: Quilts as narrative rhetoric; domestic craft as political speech.

• Yoko Ono, Cut Piece: Audience complicity; vulnerability as argument.

Articles

• "Why Are We So Afraid of Fake Art?" (The Atlantic): Authenticity anxiety; value as belief.

• "The White Cube" (Brian O'Doherty): Gallery space as rhetoric; neutrality as illusion.

• "Who Owns Culture?" (New Yorker): Repatriation debates; art, empire, and moral authority.

• "The Shock of the New" (Robert Hughes): Modern art as confrontation; rhetoric of rupture.

• "NFTs and the Problem of Artificial Scarcity" (Artforum): Blockchain rhetoric vs. artistic practice.

Texts

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing (how we learn to look; class, gender, and the image)

• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (aura, authenticity, and politics)

• "Degenerate Art" Exhibition Catalog (1937): Nazi rhetoric against modernism

• Guerrilla Girls' Posters: Statistics as protest; humor as critique

• Futurist Manifesto: Marinetti's glorification of war and speed; rhetoric of rupture

• Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Iconography and iconology; how images argue through symbols before words.

• W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: Images as agents; visual desire and power; why images provoke fear, devotion, and censorship.

• Susan Sontag, On Photography: Seeing as appropriation; ethics of looking; photographs as claims to reality.

• Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Who gets to see and speak; art's redistribution of the sensible.

• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: Taste as social power; art appreciation as class performance.

• Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde": Repetition, originality, and myth-making in modern art.

• Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Trauma, shock, and the rhetoric of the avant-garde.

Podcasts

• The Lonely Palette: Slow looking; teaching viewers how to see rhetorically.

• ArtCurious: Art history as mystery and narrative.

• 99% Invisible (art & design episodes): Hidden rhetoric of everyday visual environments.

• Decoder Ring (art-world episodes): Cultural meaning-making around images and objects.

Films

• Exit Through the Gift Shop: Banksy's documentary (or hoax?); street art, authenticity, and the artist

• F for Fake: Orson Welles on forgery, Elmyr de Hory, and the nature of authorship

• The Art of the Steal: The Barnes Foundation controversy; who controls collections

• Herb & Dorothy: The postal workers who built a world-class collection; art and class

• Basquiat: The artist's rise and the rhetoric of primitivism; Black genius and white gatekeepers

• Frida: Kahlo's self-portraits as autobiography and political statement

• Pollock: Abstract Expressionism and the cult of the tortured genius

• Woman in Gold: Nazi art theft and restitution; who owns cultural property

• The Square: Satire of contemporary art world; the museum as absurdist space

• Tim's Vermeer: Can technology recreate genius?; what counts as art-making

• Loving Vincent: Van Gogh's biography told through his aesthetic; the painting as narrator

• Big Eyes: Margaret Keane and artistic credit stolen; gender and authorship

• Velvet Buzzsaw: Horror-satire of the art market; what happens when commerce consumes creation

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Paleolithic art; origins of visual meaning; art before language.

• The Price of Everything: Art markets, value, and speculation; who decides what matters.

• National Gallery: Conservation as interpretation; restoration choices as rhetorical acts.

• My Kid Could Paint That: Expertise, cynicism, and the performance of taste.

• Waste Land: Vik Muniz; garbage as medium; dignity, labor, and visibility.

Music

• "Pablo Picasso": Modern Lovers/David Bowie (the artist as sexual mythology)

• "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)": Don McLean (Van Gogh romanticized; the tortured genius narrative)

• "Andy Warhol": David Bowie (pop art and persona)

• "Basquiat": Swizz Beatz (contemporary homage; art and hip-hop)

Rhetoric of the Moon & Stars

Unit 4: Exploring the moon's influence across culture, literature, and media—and how lunar rhetoric shapes belief, identity, and persuasion. This unit treats the moon and stars not as causal forces, but as rhetorical resources—used to organize time, identity, authority, and wonder.

Core Topics

• Moon Landing as Rhetorical Event: Kennedy's Rice University speech as promissory rhetoric; "We choose to go to the moon" as national identity construction; the Cold War space race as competitive spectacle; "One small step" as crafted utterance; conspiracy theories as counter-narrative.

• Moon Landing Denial: Rhetorical structure of conspiracy arguments; the burden of proof and its manipulation; distrust of institutions as epistemological stance; how "just asking questions" functions as persuasive strategy.

• Scientific Perspectives: Aristotelian perfection vs. Galileo's cratered observations; the telescope as rhetoric-disrupting technology; how seeing differently enables arguing differently; the moon as first evidence that heavens aren't divine.

• Literary References: Shakespeare's "swear not by the inconstant moon" as warning against unstable oaths; Romantic poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron) and lunar sublimity; the moon as muse, madness-bringer, and memento mori; werewolf transformation as lunar determinism.

• Cultural Symbolism: Mythological moons across traditions (Selene, Diana, Chandra, Chang'e, Tsukuyomi); the moon as feminine principle; menstrual and agricultural cycles tied to lunar phases; lunacy as moon-caused madness; the moon as symbol of mystery, reflection, and borrowed light.

• Astrology as Non-Institutional Authority: Zodiac signs, constellations, and birth charts as symbolic systems; how astrology constructs credibility and personal meaning without expert gatekeeping or institutional validation.

Extended Topics

• Sun Sign Columns and the Barnum Effect: How vague statements feel personal; the history of newspaper horoscopes (R.H. Naylor's 1930 column for Princess Margaret); horoscopes as genre with predictable moves; the rhetoric of "this could apply to anyone but feels like it's about me."

• The Natal Chart as Identity Document: The birth chart as biography written in advance; how "rising sign," "moon sign," and "sun sign" create a layered self; astrology as personality taxonomy competing with Myers-Briggs, enneagram, Big Five; why people find planetary explanations more satisfying than psychological ones.

• Astrology's Revival in the Digital Age: Co-Star, The Pattern, and other apps as personalized rhetoric engines; push notifications as daily interpellation ("You may feel conflicted today"); the algorithm as astrologer; meme astrology on Twitter/TikTok and its ironic-but-sincere tone; how millennials and Gen Z reclaimed astrology from newspaper horoscopes.

• Astrology & Lunar Phases: Moon signs vs. sun signs; the moon as emotional interior vs. solar public self; new moon intentions and full moon releases as ritualized self-help; how astrology apps frame lunar events as personal guidance; the rhetoric of "mercury retrograde" and similar phenomena.

• Debunking Astrology (And Why It Doesn't Work): The Forer experiment; Shawn Carlson's 1985 double-blind study; why scientific refutation doesn't reduce belief; astrology as unfalsifiable by design.

• Moon in Advertising & Branding: Lunar imagery selling romance, mystery, femininity; "Moonlight" as product name convention; the moon as shorthand for dreams and aspiration.

• Art and Media: Moonlit landscapes in Romantic painting (Friedrich, Turner); Méliès' A Trip to the Moon as early cinema spectacle; the moon shot as photographic cliché and genuine wonder; lunar imagery in album covers, fashion, and design.

• The Werewolf & Lunar Transformation: The full moon as trigger; loss of control attributed to celestial forces; lycanthropy as metaphor for repressed nature; the moon as excuse for becoming monstrous.

• Tides, Fertility, and Folk Belief: Planting by moon phases; beliefs about births and full moons; how correlation gets narrated as causation; the persistence of lunar folk wisdom despite scientific debunking.

• Zeitgeist & Lunar Consciousness: The moon as cultural mirror; how different eras project anxieties and aspirations onto the lunar surface; the moon as blank screen for collective imagination.

• Astrology as Gendered Discourse: Why astrology is culturally coded as feminine; the dismissal of "girl hobbies"; astrology as women's way of knowing vs. masculine empiricism; Susan Miller as celebrity astrologer.

• Historical Astrology and Power: Court astrologers advising kings; John Dee and Elizabeth I; Reagan and Joan Quigley; astrology's proximity to political decision-making; the tension between public dismissal and private consultation.

• Zodiac as Character Shorthand: How fiction uses signs to signal personality (the "such a Scorpio" trope); zodiac in screenwriting and character design; astrology as narrative convenience.

Articles

• Theodor Adorno, "The Stars Down to Earth" (1957): Horoscope columns as mass culture; astrology as ideology and affective reassurance.

• Shawn Carlson, "A Double-Blind Test of Astrology" (Nature, 1985): The canonical experimental refutation—useful precisely because it fails rhetorically.

• Dennis Cosgrove, "Apollo's Eye": Earthrise photography and the moon as vantage point; vision, power, and global consciousness.

Visual & Cultural Artifacts

• Earthrise (Apollo 8 photograph): The moon as platform for planetary self-recognition.

• NASA mission patches: Symbols, Latin mottos, and mythic framing of science.

• Zodiac wheels and star charts (medieval–modern): Visual taxonomies of personality and fate.

• Astrology app push notifications: Direct address and algorithmic intimacy.

• Moon phase jewelry and tattoos: Embodied identity through celestial symbolism.

Texts

• Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (1610): The moon's surface as empirical shock; how telescopic observation destabilizes Aristotelian cosmology; seeing as rhetorical intervention.

• Plutarch, "On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon": Ancient philosophical debate about the moon's substance; early speculative science as rhetorical inquiry.

• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Balloon-Hoax" (1844): Pseudo-scientific lunar travel report; credibility cues and journalistic style as persuasion.

• Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" (1963): Moon landing as philosophical rupture; technological transcendence vs. human meaning.

• Mary Roach, Packing for Mars (2010): Space science translated through humor; bodily realities vs. heroic narratives.

• Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space (2016): How scientists rhetorically make alien worlds familiar; mapping, naming, and narrating celestial bodies.

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies (selections): Myth as second-order signification; useful for reading lunar imagery as naturalized meaning.

• Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology (2003): Astrology as symbolic interpretation rather than prediction; meaning-making over causation.

• Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology (vol. 1): Astrology's historical legitimacy; courts, medicine, and cosmology.

• Stuart Vyse, Believing in Magic (2014): Cognitive psychology of belief persistence; why astrology survives debunking.

Podcasts

• Radiolab, "Apollo": Sound design and wonder; how audio storytelling constructs scientific awe.

• You Are Not So Smart, "The Forer Effect": Cognitive bias explained narratively; why vague claims feel accurate.

• Decoder Ring, "The Zodiac Killer" episode: Astrology, pattern-making, and cultural obsession.

• BBC In Our Time, "Astrology": Historical overview; astrology as intellectual system rather than superstition.

• Ologies (Astrophysics episodes): Enthusiastic expertise; persona-driven science communication.

Films

• The Shining: Moonlit horror; madness and cycles; the Overlook as lunar space

• Room 237: Moon landing conspiracy theories applied to Kubrick; interpretation as obsession

• The Twilight Saga: Lunar transformation and supernatural romance; the moon governing bodies

• Moonlight: Identity constructed in phases; the title as structural metaphor

• Apollo 13: The moon as destination denied; mission failure as national drama

• The Man in the Moon: Coming-of-age and lunar symbolism; first love under southern skies

• First Man: The moon landing as grief narrative; Armstrong's interiority vs. the spectacle

• Paper Moon: The moon as con; false promises and borrowed light

• Moonstruck: Lunar madness and romantic inevitability; "la bella luna" as permission to feel

• A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902): Early cinema's lunar fantasy; the moon as colonial destination

• Moon (2009): Isolation, identity, and repetition; lunar space as psychological mirror.

• Ad Astra (2019): Masculinity, exploration, and emotional repression; space as interior journey.

• For All Mankind (Apple TV+): Alternate-history moon race; national identity and speculative rhetoric.

• Apollo 11 (2019 documentary): Archival purity; the rhetoric of "letting the footage speak."

Music

• "Fly Me to the Moon": Sinatra's lunar romance as aspiration

• "Bad Moon Rising": CCR's apocalyptic warning

• "Talking to the Moon": Bruno Mars; the moon as absent lover's proxy

• "Moon River": Longing, drifting, dreaming

• Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon: The unseen as psychological metaphor

• David Bowie, "Space Oddity": The astronaut as existential figure; disconnection beneath technological triumph.

• Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the Moon": Space funding vs. social neglect; moon rhetoric as political critique.

• Brian Eno, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks: Ambient sound as lunar affect; the moon as emotional landscape.