Exodus, as a powerful narrative of liberation, has been a central imaginative touchstone in the black American struggle against US racism. This book traces the concept in a number of pivotal black thinkers, and explores its signficance for contemporary America.
The exodus story is a fitting allegory for the painful experience of exile that disproportionately afflicted African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it also provides compelling imagery for the triumphant election of Barack Obama in 2008. Building around these themes, Anna Hartnell traces the intellectual development of one of the defining narratives of black American thinking on social justice in the United States.
In placing black America at the centre of the study of US culture, Rewriting Exodus suggests new ways of thinking about America's relationship with the Middle East and the wider postcolonial world. Hartnell's groundbreaking contribution marks a vital new chapter in American cultural and political history.
"Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But unlike many other writers, what intellectuals have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with."
What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, a textbook for the undergraduate classroom, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it.
“Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with.”
What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it. The second edition introduces remixing as an additional signature move and is updated with new attention to digital writing, which both extends and rethinks the ideas of earlier chapters.
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa—from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century—to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
David Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history—literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation—that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent, and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid, and the context of democracy.
Winner of the IARSLCE 2021 Publication of the Year Award and the Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award.
Community members are rarely tapped for their insights on engaged teaching and research, but without these perspectives, it is difficult to create ethical and effective practices. Rewriting Partnerships calls for a radical reorientation to the knowledges of community partners. Emphasizing the voices of community members themselves—the adult literacy learners, secondary students, and youth activists who work with college students—the book introduces Critical Community-Based Epistemologies, a deeply practical approach to knowledge construction that centers the perspectives of marginalized participants.
Drawing on interviews with over eighty community members, Rewriting Partnerships features community knowledges in three common types of community-engaged learning: youth working with college students in a writing exchange program, nonprofit staff who serve as clients for student projects, and community members who work with graduate students. Interviewees from each type of partnership offer practical strategies for creating more ethical collaborations, including how programs are built, how projects are introduced to partners, and how graduate students are educated. The book also explores three approaches to partnership design that create space for community voices at the structural level: advisory boards, participatory evaluation, and community grading.
Immediately applicable to teachers, researchers, community partners, and administrators involved in community engagement, Rewriting Partnerships offers concrete strategies for creating more community-responsive partnerships at the classroom level as well as at the level of program and research design. But most provocatively, the book challenges common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning, demonstrating that community partners have the potential to contribute significantly to community engagement scholarship and program decision-making.
Innovative poetry, philosophy, theology and new sciences converge in the project of rewriting the word “God”
What did it mean for people of color in nineteenth-century America to speak or write "white"? More specifically, how many and what kinds of meaning could such "white" writing carry? In ReWriting White, Todd Vogel looks at how America has racialized language and aesthetic achievement. To make his point, he showcases the surprisingly complex interactions between four nineteenth-century writers of color and the "standard white English" they adapted for their own moral, political, and social ends. The African American, Native American, and Chinese American writers Vogel discusses delivered their messages in a manner that simultaneously demonstrated their command of the dominant discourse of their times-using styles and addressing forums considered above their station-and fashioned a subversive meaning in the very act of that demonstration.
The close readings and meticulous archival research in ReWriting White upend our conventional expectations, enrich our understanding of the dynamics of hegemony and cultural struggle, and contribute to the efforts of other cutting-edge contemporary scholars to chip away at the walls of racial segregation that have for too long defined and defaced the landscape of American literary and cultural studies.
Reynard—a subversive, dashing, anarchic, aristocratic, witty fox from the watery lowlands of medieval East Flanders—is in trouble. He has been summoned to the court of King Noble the Lion, charged with all manner of crimes and misdemeanors. How will he pit his wits against his accusers—greedy Bruin the Bear, pretentious Courtoys the Hound, and dark and dangerous Isengrim the Wolf—to escape the gallows?
Reynard was once the most popular and beloved character in European folklore, as familiar as Robin Hood, King Arthur, or Cinderella. His character spoke eloquently for the voiceless and disenfranchised, but also amused and delighted the elite, capturing hearts and minds across borders and societal classes for centuries. Based on William Caxton’s bestselling 1481 English translation of the Middle Dutch, this edition is an imaginative retelling of the Reynard story, expanded with new interpretations and innovative language and characterizations. With its themes of protest, resistance, and duplicity led by a personable, anti-heroic Fox, this gripping tale is as relevant and controversial today as it was in the fifteenth century.
Bridging the disciplinary divide between writing and literature, Rhetor Response introduces the concept and pedagogical applications of “literary affordances”—the ways in which readers “use” and integrate literature into their own writing or lives. Unconcerned with authorial intent, interpretive meaning, or critical reception, “affordance” signifies a shift in focus from what literary texts mean and do to what one can do with them.
This book presents both opportunities and challenges to writing studies, a field whose burgeoning disciplinary independence ironically relies on a sizable underclass of specialists in literature rather than writing. Incorporating elements of rhetorical theory, literary criticism, pedagogical methodology, political critique, and psychological and philosophical memoir, Peter H. Khost complicates and revives the relevance of literature—from belles lettres to fanfiction—by turning from interpretation to affordance in order to identify readers’ applications of literary textual features to unrelated lived situations.
Rhetor Response theorizes and exemplifies literary affordance as a constructive step toward professional reconciliation, as well as an entry into greater textual power and pleasure for students and readers. It is a one-of-a-kind resource for college writing program administrators, faculty and scholars in English and writing studies, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students across both disciplines.
In response to those who insist that rhetoric and composition should remain only a service discipline, editor Gary A. Olson’s Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work demonstrates that it already is an intellectual discipline, that for at least a quarter of a century the field has developed an impressive tradition of intellectual work in a remarkable assortment of subject areas. Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work suggests the diversity of intellectual projects that have and will continue to make rhetoric and composition more than a service to the university, more than a field devoted solely to improving writing pedagogy, and more than a preliminary to literary studies.
This collection of nineteen essays by some of the most distinguished scholars in the discipline illustrates that rhetoric and composition has much to contribute to the intellectual milieu of the contemporary university, as the field continues to push its disciplinary borders and discover new sites of investigation.
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators.
Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways.
Rhetoric and Guns advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity.
Berlin here continues his unique history of American college composition begun in his Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Colleges (1984), turning now to the twentieth century.
In discussing the variety of rhetorics that have been used in writing classrooms Berlin introduces a taxonomy made up of three categories: objective rhetorics, subjective rhetorics, and transactional rhetorics, which are distinguished by the epistemology on which each is based. He makes clear that these categories are not tied to a chronology but instead are to be found in the English department in one form or another during each decade of the century.
His historical treatment includes an examination of the formation of the English department, the founding of the NCTE and its role in writing instruction, the training of teachers of writing, the effects of progressive education on writing instruction, the General Education Movement, the appearance of the CCCC, the impact of Sputnik, and today’s “literacy crisis.”
Expanding the scope of religious rhetoric
Over the past twenty-five years, the intersection of rhetoric and religion has become one of the most dynamic areas of inquiry in rhetoric and writing studies. One of few volumes to include multiple traditions in one conversation, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century engages with religious discourses and issues that continue to shape public life in the United States.
This collection of essays centralizes the study of religious persuasion and pluralism, considers religion’s place in U.S. society, and expands the study of rhetoric and religion in generative ways. The volume showcases a wide range of religious traditions and challenges the very concepts of rhetoric and religion. The book’s eight essays explore African American, Buddhist, Christian, Indigenous, Islamic, and Jewish rhetoric and discuss the intersection of religion with feminism, race, and queer rhetoric—along with offering reflections on how to approach religious traditions through research and teaching. In addition, the volume includes seven short interludes in which some of the field’s most accomplished scholars recount their experiences exploring religious rhetorics and invite readers to engage these exigent lines of inquiry.
By featuring these diverse religious perspectives, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century complicates the field’s emphasis on Western, Hellenistic, and Christian ideologies. The collection also offers teachers of writing and rhetoric a range of valuable approaches for preparing today’s students for public citizenship in our religiously diverse global context.
Originally published in English in 1980, Rhetoric as Philosophy has been out of print for some time. The reviews of that English edition attest to the importance of Ernesto Grassi’s work.
By going back to the Italian humanist tradition and aspects of earlier Greek and Latin thought, Ernesto Grassi develops a conception of rhetoric as the basis of philosophy. Grassi explores the sense in which the first principles of rational thought come from the metaphorical power of the word. He finds the basis for his conception in the last great thinker of the Italian humanist tradition, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). He concentrates on Vico’s understanding of imagination and the sense of human ingenuity contained in metaphor. For Grassi, rhetorical activity is the essence and inner life of thought when connected to the metaphorical power of the word.
Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947 examines the rhetorical education of African American, female, and working-class college students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rich case studies in this work encourage a reconceptualization of both the history of rhetoric and composition and the ways we make use of it.
Author David Gold uses archival materials to study three types of institutions historically underrepresented in disciplinary histories: a black liberal arts college in rural East Texas (Wiley College); a public women's college (Texas Woman's University); and an independent teacher training school (East Texas Normal College). The case studies complement and challenge previous disciplinary histories and suggest that the epistemological schema that have long applied to pedagogical practices may actually limit our understanding of those practices.
Gold argues that each of these schools championed intellectual and pedagogical traditions that differed from the Eastern liberal arts model—a model that often serves as the standard bearer for rhetorical education. He demonstrates that by emphasizing community uplift and civic participation and attending to local needs, these schools created contexts in which otherwise moribund curricular features of the era—such as strict classroom discipline and an emphasis on prescription—took on new possibilities.
Rhetoric at the Margins describes the recent revisionist turn in rhetoric and composition historiography, argues for the importance of diverse institutional microhistories, and argues that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer rich lessons for contemporary classroom practice. The study brings alive the voices of black, female, rural, Southern, and first-generation college students and their instructors, effectively linking these histories to the history of rhetoric and writing. Appendices include excerpts of important and rarely seen primary source material, allowing readers to experience in fuller detail the voices captured in this work.
Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.
Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.
2016 CCCC Best Book Award in Technical and Scientific Communication
In the past ten years, we have seen great changes in the ways government organizations and media respond to and report on emerging global epidemics. The first outbreak to garner such attention was SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic, Huiling Ding uses SARS to explore how various cultures and communities made sense of the epidemic and communicated about it. She also investigates the way knowledge production and legitimation operate in global epidemics, the roles that professionals and professional communicators, as well as individual citizens, play in the communication process, points of contention within these processes, and possible entry points for ethical and civic intervention.
Focusing on the rhetorical interactions among the World Health Organization, the United States, China, and Canada, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic investigates official communication and community grassroots risk tactics employed during the SARS outbreak. It consists of four historical cases, which examine the transcultural risk communication about SARS in different geopolitical regions at different stages. The first two cases deal with risk communication practices at the early stage of the SARS epidemic when it originated in southern China. The last two cases move to transcultural rhetorical networks surrounding SARS.
With such threats as SARS, avian flu, and swine flu capturing the public imagination and prompting transnational public health preparedness efforts, the need for a rhetoric of global epidemics has never been greater. Government leaders, public health officials, health care professionals, journalists, and activists can learn how to more effectively craft and manage transcultural risk communication from Ding’s examination of the complex and varied modes of communication around SARS. In addition to offering a detailed case study, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic provides a critical methodology that professional communicators can use in their investigations of epidemics and details approaches to facilitating more open, participatory risk communication at all levels.
Explore Romans 4 from a sociorhetorical perspective
Andrew Kimseng Tan examines Romans using sociorhetorical interpretation to determine how Paul attempted to alleviate dissension between Judean (or “Jewish”) and non-Judean (or “gentile”) Christians. Through his analysis of Paul’s rhetoric, Tan reveals that Paul used Abraham’s faith in Genesis to demonstrate that the both groups were equally children and heirs of Abraham whose acceptance by God was through the same kind of faith that Abraham possessed, not through the Mosaic law, which Judean Christians claimed gave them a special honored status with God.
Features
In the context of a growing scholarly literature devoted to the topics of biography and autobiography, especially in the Arabic literary tradition, the essays in this volume explore the forms and meanings of these genres with particular reference to Persian writings, as well as to writings in Arabic and Turkish that were also composed in Persianate societies.
The authors address, among other topics, biographies and autobiographies of women; biographies of specific occupational groups, such as poets; the relation of traditional “lives of poets” to the reception of their literary works; intertextuality across biographical and autobiographical writings and across languages; and the processes involved in translating written biographies for the contemporary television screen.
Readers are invited to glimpse the lives of figures from the past and to appreciate the historical, cultural, and literary contexts that shaped their biographical and autobiographical narratives, and to reflect on the continuing significance of these narratives into the modern era.
Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately, whose works were first published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, constituted the great triumvirate of British Rhetoricians. For 20 years, earlier printings of this book, which contains substantial excerpts comprising the most significant portions of their writings, have been widely used as textbooks in history-of-rhetoric courses. An increasing interest in rhetoric at the college level has created a renewed demand for reprints of such classic primary texts.
The Preface places the three rhetoricians within the context of the rhetorical tradition, which began in 5th-century BCE Greece. The bibliographies have been updated to include 20th-century scholarly work on Blair, Campbell, and Whately, and on the 18th- and 19th-century rhetorical movement. Biographical sketches of Blair, Campbell, and Whately are also provided.
Concerned with both the nature and the practice of discourse, the eighteen essays collected here treat rhetoric as a dynamic enterprise of inquiry, exploration, and application, and in doing so reflect James L. Kinneavy’s firm belief in the vital relationship between theory and practice, his commitment to a spirit of accommodation and assimilation that promotes the development of ever more powerful theories and ever more useful practices.
A thorough introduction provides the reader with clear summaries of the essays by leading-edge theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing and rhetoric. A "field context" for the ideas presented in this book is provided through the division of the various chapters into four major sections that focus on classical rhetoric and rhetorical theory in historical contexts; on dimensions of discourse theory, aspects of discourse communities, and the sorts of knowledge people access and use in producing written texts; on writing in school-related contexts; and on several dimensions of nonacademic writing. A fifth section contains a bibliographic survey and an appreciation of James Kinneavy’s work. The exceptional range of these essays makes A Rhetoric of Doing an ecumenical examination of the current state of mind in rhetoric and written communication, a survey and description of what discourse and those in the field of discourse are, in fact, doing.
A classic in its field, this pathbreaking book humanized the scientific rhetoric of economics to reveal its literary soul. Economics needs to admit that it, like other sciences, works with metaphors and stories. Its most mathematical and statistical moments are properly dominated by comparison and narration, that is to say, human persuasion. The book was McCloskey's opening move in the development of a "humanomics," and unification of the sciences and the humanities on the field of ordinary business life.
The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, one of the most groundbreaking works of twentieth-century Platonic studies, is now back in print for a new generation of students and scholars to discover. In this volume, distinguished classicist Seth Benardete interprets and pairs two important Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, illuminating Socrates’ notion of rhetoric and Plato’s conception of morality and eros in the human soul.
Following his discussion of the Gorgias as a dialogue about the rhetoric of morality, Benardete turns to the Phaedrus as a discourse about genuine rhetoric, namely the science of eros, or true philosophy. This novel interpretation addresses numerous issues in Plato studies: the relation between the structure of the Gorgias and the image of soul/city in the Republic, the relation between the structure of Phaedrus and the concept of eros, and Socrates’ notion of ignorance, among others.
With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.
Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever—will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought.
The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics.
Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts.
The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.
Exploring style in a global culture
In A Rhetoric of Style, Barry Brummett illustrates how style is increasingly a global system of communication as people around the world understand what it means to dress a certain way, to dance a certain way, to decorate a certain way, to speak a certain way. He locates style at the heart of popular culture and asserts that it is the basis for social life and politics in the twenty-first century.
Brummett sees style as a system of signification grounded largely in image, aesthetics, and extrarational modes of thinking. He discusses three important aspects of this system—its social and commercial structuring, its political consequences, and its role as the chief rhetorical system of the modern world. He argues that aesthetics and style are merging into a major engine of the global economy and that style is becoming a way to construct individual identity, as well as social and political structures of alliance and opposition. It is through style that we stereotype or make assumptions about others’ political identities, their sexuality, their culture, and their economic standing.
To facilitate theoretical and critical analysis, Brummett develops a systematic rhetoric of style and then demonstrates its use through an in-depth exploration of gun culture in the United States. Armed with an understanding of how this rhetoric of style works methodologically, students and scholars alike will have the tools to do their own analyses. Written in clear and engaging prose, A Rhetoric of Style presents a novel discussion of the workings of style and sheds new light on a venerable and sometimes misunderstood rhetorical concept by illustrating how style is the key to constructing a rhetoric for the twenty-first century.
The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary explores the most visible and volatile element in the 2004 presidential campaign—the partisan documentary film. This collection of original critical essays by leading scholars and critics—including Shawn J. and Trevor Parry-Giles, Jennifer L. Borda, and Martin J. Medhurst—analyzes a selection of political documentaries that appeared during the 2004 election season. The editors examine the new political documentary with the tools of rhetorical criticism, combining close textual analysis with a consideration of the historical context and the production and reception of the films.
The essays address the distinctive rhetoric of the new political documentary, with the films typically having been shot with relatively low budgets, in video, and using interviews and stock footage rather than observation of uncontrolled behavior. The quality was often good enough and interest was sufficiently intense that the films were shown in theaters and on television, which provided legitimacy and visibility before they were released soon afterwards on DVD and VHS and marketed on the Internet.
The volume reviews such films as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11; two refutations of Moore’s film, Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.11;Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election; and George W. Bush: Faith in the White House—films that experimented with a variety of angles and rhetorics, from a mix of comic disparagement and earnest confrontation to various emulations of traditional news and documentary voices.
The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary represents the continued transformation of American political discourse in a partisan and contentious time and showcases the independent voices and the political power brokers that struggled to find new ways to debate the status quo and employ surrogate “independents” to create a counterrhetoric.
Using traditional and contemporary rhetorical theory, Winterowd argues that the fiction-nonfiction division of literature is unjustified and destructive.
He would bridge the gap between literary scholars and rhetoricians by including both fiction (imaginative literature) and nonfiction (literature of fact) in the canon. The actual difference in literary texts, he notes, lies not in their factuality but in their potential for eliciting an aesthetic response.
With speech act and rhetorical theory as a basis, Winterowd argues that presentational literature gains its power on the basis of its ethical and pathetic appeal, not because of its assertions or arguments.
Changes in English studies today, particularly the rise of cultural studies, have forced reexaminations of historical genealogies. Three complex figures whose places are currently being reassessed include the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668 –1744), the Frenchman Etienne de Condillac (1714 –1780), and the Scotsman James Burnet(t), Lord Monboddo (1714 –1799) in our histories of communication, linguistics, English studies, and now rhetoric.
In Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, Catherine L. Hobbs focuses primarily on these three key figures in whose work rhetoric and linguistics intertwine as they respond to emerging attitudes and values of science and philosophy in the eighteenth century. Through her examination of works of Vico, Condillac, Monboddo and other marginal figures, Hobbs presents a different and more nuanced view of the transformation of rhetoric from classical to modern.
In order to redefine each figure’s position, Hobbs brings together the histories of linguistics, literature, rhetoric, and communication, rather than leaving them isolated in separate disciplines. She examines each figure’s theory of language origin and development as it has motivated their rhetorical theories. The result is Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, an original and significant account of the formation of modern rhetoric.
After explaining how and why women have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn provides the opportunity for Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Hortensia, Fulvia, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, and Elizabeth I to speak with equal authority and as eloquently as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine. Her aim is nothing less than regendering and changing forever the history of rhetoric.
To that end, Glenn locates women’s contributions to and participation in the rhetorical tradition and writes them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. She regenders the tradition by designating those terms of identity that have promoted and supported men’s control of public, persuasive discourse—the culturally constructed social relations between, the appropriate roles for, and the subjective identities of women and men.
Glenn is the first scholar to contextualize, analyze, and follow the migration of women’s rhetorical accomplishments systematically. To locate these women, she follows the migration of the Western intellectual tradition from its inception in classical antiquity and its confrontation with and ultimate appropriation by evangelical Christianity to its force in the medieval Church and in Tudor arts and politics.
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