Satire Syllabus

RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Satire SP16
Unique: 43280
T/Th 2:00-3:30pm, PAR 6

Instructor: Dr. Aaron Zacks

Office/Hours: PAR 19/T 3:30-5, W 11-12:30
Resources:
Required Texts:
Everything’s An Argument. 6th or 7th Ed. Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012/16.
Easy Writer (EW). 5th Ed. Lunsford. Longman, 2014.
All other course content will be made available via Canvas and UT Libraries.
Note on “Reading”:
Our list of explicitly assigned readings is particularly short this semester. That’s because I’m asking you to perform a good deal of course “reading” on your own. (I’ve put “reading” in quotation marks because I’m using it euphemistically; much of what I’m talking about is material that you’ll watch, either on TV or over the Internet. The semester builds toward a unit on satire about the US Presidential Primary races. In order to address this complex and multi-faceted cauldron of controversies in a responsible way, each one of us will need a handle on the basics: the candidates, their platforms, relevant history, and popular opinion. It is your responsibility to prepare yourself for this unit, beginning Wk. 11, by keeping up-to-date with our society’s most prominent, satiric institution focused on contemporary events: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Throughout the first ten weeks of the semester, students are responsible for keeping up with the Primary-related, satiric content appearing on The Daily Show.
 RHE 309K Course Description:

As with all classes taught in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, the primary aim of Rhetoric of Satire is to improve our ability to interpret and participate in the world around us. We achieve this by learning about and practicing the arts of communication and argument-­making. The skills learned in this class are applicable to all of your academic and professional endeavors. This class will teach you to:

● read critically;
● identify, evaluate, construct, and organize effective arguments;
● revise your own writing
● advocate a specific position responsibly;
● conduct library and web-­based research and document sources;
● produce a clean, efficient writing style and adapt it to various rhetorical situations; and
● edit and proofread formal prose.

RHE 309K carries the Writing Flag and this class will require you to write texts of all kinds from
formal papers to Forum comments and Tweets. This class puts an emphasis on the art of revision and, over the course of the semester, you will receive constructive feedback on your writing from your instructor and classmates.

This section of RHE 309K is taught within the Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL) of the
Department of Rhetoric and Writing (DRW). Therefore, this class seeks to foster digital literacy and
will require you to leverage technology in service to making arguments.

This course requires active participation both in and out of class. Students are expected to come to class
ready to engage with assigned materials and classmates. Students will present to the class on multiple
occasions.

 Rhetoric of Satire Course Description:
Satire — in its many forms — is ubiquitous in contemporary, western culture. Its popularity derives in part from satire’s use of humor, which typically sets out to entertain. But satirists employ humor as a weapon, to speak truth to power, to make earnest arguments, often through irony. Not all humor is satiric; nor is all satire funny.
One etymology connects the word “satire” to the Latin word for “medley” and this class will honor that history by studying a wide variety of satirical arguments about various subjects (music, sports, politics, etc.) in a many genres (television, internet, poetry, video games, radio, etc.). We will examine some classical examples of satire but, because satire is, above all, topical, most of the course content will be relatively recent and engage contemporary issues.
The broad goal of this class (besides improving your research and writing skills) is to refine your  sensitivity to satirical rhetoric and enable you to reflect critically on the role of satire and humor in modern life. To succeed in this course, you’ll need to become comfortable adopting a satiric worldview. This can only be accomplished through immersion ­­ paying attention to contemporary texts like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Daily Show, and The Onion. Depending on your experience and rhetorical skills, adopting a satiric worldview may entail some degree of un­assigned “reading” (e.g. TV watching, web surfing, etc.).
Over the course of the semester, we will consider questions such as:
  • What is satire?
  • How does exposure to satire influence our engagement with the world?
  • What roles can satire play in our culture? As entertainment? As political activism?
  • Can satire produce measurable change?
  • What motivates an author to employ satire?
  • How are contemporary satirists utilizing new media to infiltrate spaces usually reserved for earnest argument?
 Digital Literacy:
The DRW is committed to developing digital literacy throughout its curriculum. My classes require students to develop skillsets required to leverage tools like Google Drive, Evernote, Flipboard, and Skitch.
Submission Instructions: 
Many assignments will require you to work in more than one application or computer program. For example, you might compose some text in Drive or Word and revise it with a partner before pasting the final text into a graphics editor like pixlr or Skitch. In this sense, such assignments are multi-layered and, therefore, will lead inevitably to file format conversion problems. To avoid such annoyances, you’ll submit all of your work in this course — with the possible exceptions of audio-visual projects — as PDFs.
Grading
Unless otherwise indicated in the prompt, EXs will be evaluated on a 10-point scale divided equally between two criteria: Depth of Intellectual Engagement and Thoroughness of Completion.
 FWs will be scored out of 100 points according to the rubrics attached to their prompts.
This class uses Plus/Minus grading according to the following scheme:
Letter
%
GPA
A
94-100
4.00
A-
90-93
3.67
B+
87-89
3.33
B
84-86
3.00
B-
80-83
2.67
C+
77-79
2.33
C
74-76
2.00
D+
67-69
1.33
D
64-66
1.00
D-
60-63
0.67
F
0-60
0.00
Grade Breakdown: 
Exercises (EX)
40%
Formal Writing (FW)
60%
FW Breakdown:
ITS 1st submission
10%
ITS 2nd submission
20%
CC RA 1st submission
10%
CC RA 2nd submission
20%
Term Paper 1st submission
10%
Term Paper 2nd submission
30%
 Also see: