Storytelling is an important technique across the arts and humanities. For rhetoricians, stories provide avenues to raise awareness, persuade audiences, and provide counter histories to dominant narratives. For creative writers, storytelling is the very vehicle for their art. And, of course, art is rhetoric and rhetoric can be art.
All stories are made of time. Writers move readers through time, control the flow of time in a narrative, flash forward and back in time, or construct stories across various times, places, and spaces. And time, of course, is not just one thing. Time can be understood across queer, feminist, and disability contexts, even scientists have competing theories about the nature of time.
In this class, students will study these many different dimensions of time, read scholarly and creative texts about different concepts of time, and construct their own narratives that use time as a creative or rhetorical tool.