Time Schedule:
Christine L Harold
COM 495
Seattle Campus
Lecture, seminar, and/or team study. Topics vary.
Class description
Rhetorics of Commerce, Consumerism, and Community: Historian Stuart Ewen has described advertising as “the prevailing vernacular of public address.” In this class we will explore the rhetorical intersections among commerce, consumption, and community. We will look at the effects of commercialization on our everyday lives: our work, play, love, and food, for example. By engaging a variety of scholarly, critical, and popular analyses on the subject of consumer culture, we will investigate the tensions between people and stuff, between “subjects” and “objects,” and between production and consumption. I encourage us to start from the premise that we cannot fully understand our own agency as rhetors, political actors, workers, consumers, or humans without examining our interdependency with the commercial, manufactured world in which we live.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
