Literary Theorist Stanley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Power of Arguments

Stan­ley Fish, the well-known lit­er­ary the­o­rist and legal schol­ar, now has a short online course called “Rhetoric and Real­i­ty” that’s being offered through AIA Acad­e­my. The course (which requires a user­name and pass­word) cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

Argu­ments are woven through­out our pub­lic and pri­vate lives. What deter­mines which win the day? Renowned lit­er­ary and legal the­o­rist Stan­ley Fish leads us through lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics and the domes­tic to reveal the pow­er — and inevitabil­i­ty — of rhetoric.

From the court­room to the bed­room, argu­ments are woven through­out our pri­vate and pub­lic lives: they are how we decide what’s right, what’s true and what we should do. With exam­ples rang­ing from Milton’s Par­adise Lost to the legal­iza­tion of same sex mar­riage and Don­ald Trump, Fish shows us how the rules of engage­ment shift between con­texts — and how rhetoric is the key to suc­cess in all of them.

Draw­ing from his best­selling book Win­ning Argu­ments, Fish makes the con­tro­ver­sial claim that facts are mere­ly opin­ions that have been made to stick — and what makes them stick is noth­ing more than suc­cess­ful­ly deployed argu­ments.

Take the course to learn:

–What Milton’s Par­adise Lost teach­es us about the pow­er of rhetoric and the first ever domes­tic quar­rel
–The tech­niques Shakespeare’s Mark Antho­ny uses to pro­voke his audi­ence to vio­lence
–What char­ac­ter­izes Don­ald Trump’s rhetor­i­cal style – and how it breaks all the rules
–How the case for same sex mar­riage was real­ly won through a cul­tur­al shift rather than care­ful legal argu­ment
–The tricks cli­mate change deniers use to sow doubt
–The Five Key Truths about domes­tic quar­rels – and why self-help guides to mar­i­tal har­mo­ny almost nev­er work

“Rhetoric and Real­i­ty” will be added to our big list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

IAI Acad­e­my Now Offers Free Cours­es: From “The Mean­ing of Life” to “A Brief Guide to Every­thing”

Take Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es from The Insti­tute of Art and Ideas: From “The Mean­ing of Life” to “Hei­deg­ger Meets Van Gogh”

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writ­ing Clear and Tight Prose