Nate Kreuter's Courses

"On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over."

-opening paragraph of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction Report to the President of the United States

While this course is titled "Rhetoric of Spying," it is primarily a rhetoric class, not a complete look at spying or the intelligence community. "Spying" in this class will be broadly defined, and always rhetorically contextualized. Rhetoric can be several things. It can be viewed as the art of arguing, the art of persuasion. Rhetoric can also be the manufacture of language, written or spoken. And rhetoric can just as easily be the study of written and spoken pieces of language. We will work from all three of these rhetorical perspectives.

We will also study, through the example of the US Intelligence Community, how disciplines collect, articulate and convey knowledge, and eventually students will do a disciplinary study of a piece of writing chosen from within their own major. There will be two other major writing assignments during the semester as well. In addition to studying rhetorical theory and focusing intensely on improving student writing, we will look to "spying" for rhetorical examples. We will begin by looking at the documents surrounding 9/11 and the war in Iraq before moving on to broader concepts of spying, which will include, but not be limited to, corporate espionage, personal spying and popular depictions of spying and espionage.

This is also a SPURS partnering class. Handouts for the class are available through the links below, which will be updated throughout the semester.