Dr. Ramona Naddaff is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric. Professor Naddaff is also the director of the Art of Writing program. She is a co-director and editor of Zone Books, an independent nonprofit publisher focused on the humanities and social sciences. Professor Naddaff’s research interests include Ancient Greek philosophy, culture, poetics and rhetoric; the history of philosophy; theory of literary censorship; theory of the novel; and aesthetics. She is currently working on a book entitled Never Alone: The Making of Madame Bovary, and published Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic in 2002. She received her PhD from Boston University.
To start, could you introduce yourself? How did you decide to pursue academia, and what are your research interests?
I’m a Professor in the Rhetoric Department, where I primarily teach courses on ancient rhetorical theory, the history of Western philosophy, philosophy and literary, and literary censorship. In recent years, since I am directing the Art of Writing program at the Townsend Center, I have been teaching advanced non-fiction writing courses focused on specific themes—for example, the philosophy and politics of lying, or fictions of and on the 21st-century “American” family, or contemporary crises and emergencies.
For the moment, my research and writing are focused on a subject I rarely—if ever—teach: the history of the composition and publication of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I had to completely retrain for this project, delving deep into the scholarship on Flaubert and historical archives. The only time I teach Flaubert is when I offer my course on censorship and the novel. We read Madame Bovary and then the 1857 censorship trial in Paris.
As I mentioned above, I’m the founding director of the Art of Writing Program at the Townsend Humanities Center. For the past years, this program has been my obsession, delight, and mission. I want to make sure Berkeley offers upper-divisions writing courses to undergraduates and that they have the experience of learning to write, think and read with our amazing faculty.
Since I started at Berkeley, I have continually focused on undergraduate education, whether as the Rhetoric Department’s undergraduate advisor, or as founding director of Course Threads, or as a committee member of the Undergraduate Council. My experience as an undergraduate was transformative and I hope to find ways for our students to experience the same. As I say this, I am reminded—as I often am—of Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins with wonder. I would say that as an undergraduate one should always be in a state of wonder—and sometimes of shock.
Can you tell us more about the Townsend Center for the Humanities , and specifically the Art of Writing Program ?
The Art of Writing Program offers upper-division non-fiction writing courses taught by faculty from many of Berkeley’s divisions on their research subjects and interests. It is an interdisciplinary and transdivisional program. The program is founded on the simple assumption that writing isn’t a gift you’re born with; it’s a skill you develop through constant revision, reflection, and collaboration. As is so often stated, writing is rewriting. And writing must also be accompanied by acts of critical reading and thinking. Since Berkeley doesn’t offer many writing courses beyond the Reading & Composition series, especially in creative nonfiction, we created this program to fill this gap and to assure that Berkeley undergraduates have the opportunity to write throughout their career and to develop their own voices and styles—this is especially important now that ChatGPT seems to have become popular as a rather uninteresting but sometimes useful writing assistant.
Art of Writing courses are designed to be small and intimate, giving students the chance to revise their work and receive lots of feedback from both professors and peers. We wanted to make sure undergraduates have access to our top writers and researchers, so we encourage tenure-track and tenured professors to teach these courses.
Initially, faculty would co-teach with a graduate student, who helped develop the syllabus and served as another editor and mentor in the classroom. This allowed faculty to teach on topics they were passionate about. We have offered courses from faculty across many divisions: in Engineering, English, Sociology, Statistics, East Asian Literature, and beyond. For example, Professor Kim Voss taught a writing seminar on partisan politics; Professor Paul Fine offered a course in his introduction to integrative biology; Professor Alan Tasman focused on empathy and its limits; Professor Deborah Nolan taught statistics and data; and I’ve led courses on writing about recent social movements, with modules on MeToo, climate change, and Black Lives Matter. We also invite guest speakers and offer internships, workshops, and writing fellow and tutor programs—all aimed at undergraduates.
The Townsend Center is becoming more and more involved with undergraduate experience—with its Course Threads program, Honors Thesis Program, and work-study opportunities. I think it’s a wonderful place for undergraduates to explore the breadth of the humanities, with a great lineup of events and speakers throughout the year. Professors often give book talks, so students can hear firsthand what their instructors are researching and writing about.
Could you describe the Rhetoric major and how it differs from other writing-based disciplines like English or History?
That’s the million-dollar question! At commencement, we always joke about how students will answer the, “What is Rhetoric?” question. Part of a Rhetoric education is, in fact, learning how to define rhetoric.
Our department is primarily interdisciplinary, studying how language, discourse, and representation shape politics, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and actions. We use different methodologies than the English Department, though there’s some overlap. We examine historical and social contexts, do close readings, and analyze how a single word can create or subvert meanings, among other things.
There’s an old definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion, but that’s just the starting point. The world is shaped by how we use language—how it grants or denies power and agency, and how those dynamics play out in different contexts and in different historical and political situations.
You also focus on censorship, which must be complicated given gaps in archival information. What major challenges have you faced in studying censorship, and how have you overcome them?
My interest in censorship began with Plato’s Republic, where he censors and exiles the poets. I wanted to understand why he does this and how it relates to his ideas about the formation of subjects within or outside political regimes as well as his own definition of philosophy and the work it is meant to perform. To answer my questions, I had to read about the history of poetry in Ancient Greece, where Homer’s works were the main medium for learning about the world—geography, history, and more. He was, as it was once put, “society’s encyclopedist,” a walking, talking Wikipedia of sorts. Plato’s interest, I argue, was to shift the poet’s power, epistemological, political, emotional and ethical, to the philosophers. His censorship of the poets was both repressive and productive so as to achieve this end. On the one hand, he had to censor, silence, and marginalize the poets. At the same time, Plato had to appropriate literary forms—dialogue, myth, and poetry—to advance his own ideas, to overcome the limits imposed by a “purely” philosophical (and rational) discourse.
From there, I developed a course and a research project on the censorship of the novel with case studies on, for example, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The goal was to show that you can’t understand censorship without understanding the historical and political contexts, the author’s influences and anxieties, and the very process of the composition of the novel. We’d read the novel, historical sources, and the trial transcripts, treating the trial as a performative event with legal and literary stakes. I am fascinated by how censorship creates fiction as a dangerous and crucial event and intervention in both the private and public realm,
Can you talk about the courses you regularly teach for undergraduates? You mentioned a recent course on Aesthetics and Rhetoric—what is that class about?
My main service to the department is teaching the history of ancient rhetorical theory and practice. Rhetoric majors are required to take courses in both ancient and modern rhetorical theory. I focus on the ancient side, along with two other professors, each of us bringing a different approach. I often joke with the students at the beginning of the seminar about how this is their least favorite course to take and many wait until senior year. I make it my aim to prove this statement wrong. I hope to bring them into a world of ancient theories and practices, which “rhyme” with their own ways of being in and thinking about the world. Right now, for example, Plato has much to offer in explaining the world of disinformation, manipulation, exclusions and oppressions, and cruel authoritarianism that the current administration seems to delight in.
Rhetoric offers concentrations in narrative and image, public discourse, and history and theory. I’m primarily involved in narrative and image, and history and theory. My courses include censorship of the novel, tragedy and philosophy, the philosophy of lying, autobiography and memoir, and recently, rhetoric and aesthetics.
This year, I structured the aesthetics course around how foundational Western philosophers thought about music—how it reflected aesthetic principles like beauty, the value of art, and representation, and how these ideas connected to their broader philosophies, such as theories of subjectivity and of judgment. To understand their views on music, I suggested that one had to understand their ideas about knowledge—its limits, and whether music can express emotions, unlike language or whether it is a universal language. What does music do that language can’t or doesn’t want to do? How does musical expression create a new symbolics or semiotics-- or does it? How do philosophers explain—each in their own way—the ways in which music moves our emotions, actions, and dispositions? Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for example, concentrated on music’s capacity to dissolve, break down, the boundaries between individuals and the boundaries between an individual’s interior and exterior.
One challenge I face with this course is that many of the philosophers mostly discuss classical music, which is sometimes foreign or uninteresting to students. To bridge that gap, I create a playlist and have students contribute songs that came to mind while reading Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, for example. We also incorporate novels and modern essays on music. This year, students watched the new Bob Dylan movie with Timothée Chalamet, then read essays by Timothy Hampton and Greil Marcus, which helped them understand Dylan’s cultural impact as well as the movie itself. This year, as well as other years, I must say many of the students were musical artists themselves, some trained in classical music. They taught me new ways to think and to listen. An amazing experience.
How have you seen—and do you expect to see—writing pedagogy change with the rise of AI?
That’s another million-dollar question. Here’s what I’m trying to do: I’ve started a project bringing together professors who teach writing to develop assignments that don’t fight against AI, but use it thoughtfully, encouraging students to think and write for themselves. I want students to interact with AI critically, so they’re active thinkers rather than passive recipients. My goal is to avoid the passivity that AI can sometimes foster.
After finishing a recent course, I told students I can’t spend my time policing AI use. If someone chooses to use AI dishonestly, that’s plagiarism—but ultimately, it’s their loss. I don’t want to become the police, and it’s hard to detect AI-generated work anyway. But, as has been said of pornography, you know it when you see it. I love this idea of hallucination and want to see the students respond critically and creatively to this might mode of making sometimes malicious misinformation. I just watched the new movie Mountainhead and can’t wait to teach this movie with Plato’s theory of the cave and of art (especially poetry). Something more than just plain lies and lying is at stake with AI.
I hope to teach a class on AI and writing soon, with two other professors. We plan to explore the history of writing, technologies of writing, questions of authorship and plagiarism, and how to develop policies around AI. Some people say this is the end of writing—just as some predicted the end of reading—but I’m not convinced. I’m hopeful we can use this disruption to experiment with new writing techniques and pedagogies.
For example, when teaching Plato, I have students pretend they’re Socrates and question AI, using what they’ve learned from The Apology to mimic his style. This kind of role-playing leads to deeper learning and engagement. That’s the kind of innovation I’m interested in when it comes to AI and writing pedagogy.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
My go-to recommendation is always Plato. (Have I mentioned him enough in this interview???) I’d suggest reading The Apology and The Phaedrus. But I also love our program, On the Same Page, where everyone reads the same book and a community is created around a reading event. Each year, the university also creates a fantastic Summer Reading List . This year Chisako Cole and Tim Dilworth curated a list around the theme of generosity. This program is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It’s fantastically fun to review all the past reading lists. I wish I had the time and energy to read all the books recommended. I would be a better and more interesting person if I did.