A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY81 start with S start with S
Using a wide range of methods and data – including in-depth interviews with 76 current and former politicians, policy-makers, diplomats, and commercial actors across 12 countries and 16 cities – Sanctions with Chinese Characteristics: Rhetoric and Restraint in China’s Diplomacy examines the ways in which China had employed economic sanctions to further its political objectives, and the factors explaining China’s behaviour. This book provides a systematic investigation into the ways in which Chinese decisionmakers approached sanctions both at the United Nations Security Council and unilaterally, and shows how China’s longstanding sanctions rhetoric has had a constraining effect on its behaviour, resulting in its inability to employ sanctions in complete alignment with its immediate interests.
Frank Farmer has contributed important essays to the study of Bakhtin in composition, and in Saying and Silence he gathers some of those, along with several new essays, into a single volume. Scholars who specialize in Bakhtin will find this work engaging, but equally Farmer wants to explicate and apply Bakhtin for readers whose focus is teaching or some other nonspecialist dimension of writing scholarship.
Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.
What he offers, then, is a compact collection that addresses major areas of Bakhtinian thought and influence on composition practice to date. And he does this in a voice and style that will be accessible to the general scholar as well as the specialist and will be suitable for use with the advanced composition student, too.
Antonin Scalia is considered one of the most controversial justices to have been on the United States Supreme Court. A vocal advocate of textualist interpretation, Justice Scalia argued that the Constitution means only what it says and that interpretations of the document should be confined strictly to the directives supplied therein. This narrow form of constitutional interpretation, which limits constitutional meaning to the written text of the Constitution, is known as textualism.
Scalia v. Scalia:Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation examines Scalia’s discussions of textualism in his speeches, extrajudicial writings, and judicial opinions. Throughout his writings, Scalia argues textualism is the only acceptable form of constitutional interpretation. Yet Scalia does not clearly define his textualism, nor does he always rely upon textualism to the exclusion of other interpretive means.
Scalia is seen as the standard bearer for textualism. But when textualism fails to support his ideological aims (as in cases that pertain to states’ rights or separation of powers), Scalia reverts to other forms of argumentation. Langford analyzes Scalia’s opinions in a clear area of law, the cruel and unusual punishment clause; a contested area of law, the free exercise and establishment cases; and a silent area of law, abortion. Through her analysis, Langford shows that Scalia uses rhetorical strategies beyond those of a textualist approach, concluding that Scalia is an opportunistic textualist and that textualism is as rhetorical as any other form of judicial interpretation.
Bringing together genre studies and the rhetoric of science, Mehlenbacher examines a range of new forms of science communication that challenge traditional presumptions about experts and nonexperts—including Twitter and Reddit AMAs, crowdfunding proposals such as Kickstarter and Experiment.com, civic-minded databases such as Safecast, and the PLOS blogging network. Science Communication Online illustrates the unique features of these genres and connects them to their rhetorical functions and the larger context leading to their emergence and evolution—from the democratization of science, challenges to expertise and expert status, and new political economies. Science Communication Online captures the important moment we find ourselves in now—one not defined by science and society but science in society.
Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances.
The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.
Secrets to Writing Great Papers illustrates how to work with ideas—develop them, hone them, and transform them into words. It provides techniques and exercises for brainstorming, choosing the right approach, working with an unknown or boring assigned topic, overcoming writer’s block, and selecting the best point of view.
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.
Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.
The rhetorical tradition, Michelle Ballif asserts, is based on the systematic exclusion of sophistry. In keeping with Aristotle’s prescription, rhetoric continues to be a counterpart to dialectic, a handmaiden to the pursuit of truth—even if that truth is merely probable.
According to Ballif, this search for truth manifests itself among current rhetoric and composition scholars in the form of an assumption that language is primarily communicative (i.e., that language can represent truth more or less faithfully). Ballif shows how invested we are in the notion of truth, in the idea that language represents truth, and in the assumption that the speaking/writing subject has, or should have, some essential relation to truth.
Provocatively, Ballif questions why the profession wants to retain these beliefs in the face of vociferous arguments from "new rhetorics" that the discipline no longer posits a foundational self or truth, and in the face of the poststructuralist critique, which has demonstrated that founding truth is always accomplished by first positing and then negating an “other.” As an alternative to this negative and violent rhetorical process, Ballif suggests a turn to sophistry as embodied in the figure of Woman, one with the power to seduce us (literally, to lead astray) from our truth and our demand for it.
This figuration of Woman, however, is not the dialectical other used to sustain the identity and privilege of Man. On the contrary, this Woman is an Other Woman: A Third Woman as a Third Sophistic practice that escapes Plato’s binary (philosophic rhetoric vs. sophistry) and renders the distinction between truth and deception incalculable. Ballif examines three figurations of the Third Woman as Third Sophistic as offered by Gorgias, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean Baudrillard.
Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.
The five essays presented here—Rhetoric, Style, Language, Conversation, and Greek Literature—were published together for the first time in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey in 1889–1890. Frederick Burwick brings the essays together again in this volume, introducing them by tracing the sources and development of a belletristic theory of rhetoric, which he says “is one of the most original, and for a few critics, the most puzzling of the nineteenth century.” Burwick makes the edition complete with a comprehensive index and a selected bibliography.
Pagans’ advocate.
Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.
As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.
Pagans’ advocate.
Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.
As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.
Interest in autoethnography is growing among writing studies scholars, who see clear connections to well-known disciplinary conversations about personal narrative, as well as to the narrative turn in general and social justice efforts in particular. Contributions by authors from diverse backgrounds and institutional settings are organized into three parts: a section of writing studies autoethnographies, a section on how to teach autoethnography, and a section on how ideas about autoethnography in writing studies are evolving.
Self+Culture+Writing discusses the use of autoethnography in the writing classroom as both a research method and a legitimate way of knowing, providing examples of the genre and theoretical discussions that highlight the usefulness and limitations of these methods.
Contributors: Leslie Akst, Melissa Atienza, Ross Atkinson, Alison Cardinal, Sue Doe, Will Duffy, John Gagnon, Elena Garcia, Guadalupe Garcia, Caleb Gonzalez, Lilly Halboth, Rebecca Hallman Martini, Kirsten Higgins, Shereen Inayatulla, Aliyah Jones, Autumn Laws, Soyeon Lee, Louis M. Maraj, Kira Marshall-McKelvey, Jennifer Owen, Tiffany Rainey, Marcie Sims, Amanda Sladek, Trixie Smith, Anthony Warnke
Nick Tingle investigates the psychoanalytic dimensions of composition instruction in Self-Development and College Writing to boldly illustrate that mastering academic prose requires students to develop psychologically as well as cognitively. Asserting that writing instruction should be an engaging, developmental process for both teachers and students, he urges reaching for new levels of consciousness in the classroom to aid students in realigning their subjective relationships with knowledge and truth.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and twenty years of experience as a teacher, Tingle outlines the importance of moving beyond usual ways of thinking, abandoning the common sense of everyday reality, and coming to understand beliefs as beliefs and not absolutes. These developmental moves must be accompanied, Tingle says, by a new attitude towards language—not as something that points to things, but as a series of concepts that arrange the very things one points to. And this development is necessary not just in order to perform well in the writing class, but also to fully participate in and reap the academic rewards of structured, university life.
Self-Development and College Writing calls attention to the psychological destabilization this method may produce for students. Tingle explains that, if writing instructors are to respond to this destabilization, they must conceive of the classroom as a transitional space, or a kind of holding environment. They must also become aware of their psychological allegiances to particular theories of writing if they are to construct such environments.
But the goal of the transitional environment is worth pursuing, Tingle argues, contending that university education fails to address students’ developmental needs. With purposeful writing and deft analyses, Tingle shows that this goal also affords a means by which to place writing courses at the center of the educational curriculum. Conceived as a transitional space, the writing class may support and stabilize students in their developmental passage, thereby fostering an improved understanding of their academic work and, more importantly, an increased intellectual understanding of themselves and the complex world in which they live.
Why is it difficult to talk about climate change? Debra Hawhee argues that contemporary rhetoric relies on classical assumptions about humanity and history that cannot conceive of the present crisis. How do we talk about an unprecedented future or represent planetary interests without privileging our own species? A Sense of Urgency explores four emerging answers, their sheer novelty a record of both the devastation and possible futures of climate change. In developing the arts of magnitude, presence, witness, and feeling, A Sense of Urgency invites us to imagine new ways of thinking with our imperiled planet.
The book is divided into two sections: Sensemaking with Tutors and Teachers, and Sensemaking and Institutional Structures. Chapter authors employ several theoretical approaches to sensemaking, ranging from individual experience to institutional history to document design, providing readers with ideas for how to administer and teach within their programs more effectively; how to advocate for their programs within larger university contexts; and how to positively influence the lives and careers of those they work with.
Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers theorizes daily experiences from working lives and suggests problem-solving strategies. Writing program administrators, writing department chairs, and writing center directors, tutors, and staff will find value in its pages.
In extended commentaries on Gadamer, the Gadamer/Habermas debate, and Derrida, Schaeffer shows that Vico offers the possibility of analyzing social phenomena and constellations of power from within the humanist rhetorical tradition. Vico’s achievements have powerful implications for relating ethics and hermeneutics to the world of concrete social practice, particularly in an age in which the electronic media have replaced print as the primary means of communication and in which a “secondary orality” (a cast of mind similar to that of nonliterate peoples) is appearing within our literate civilization.
In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity.
In published scholarship and research, the path toward discovery seems clean and direct. The dead ends, backtrackings, start-overs, and stumbles that occur throughout the research process are elided, and seems that the researchers started at point A and arrived safely and neatly at point B without incident, as if by magic. The path, however, is never truly clear and straight. Research and writing is messy. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research features chapters from twenty-three writing scholars who have experienced moments of serendipity in their own work—not by magic or pure chance but through openness and active waiting, which offer an opportunity to prepare the mind.
Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research illustrates the reality of doing research: there is no reliable prescription or one-size-fits-all manual, but success can be found with focused dedication and an open mind.
Contributors: Ellen Barton, Zachary C. Beare, Lynn Z. Bloom, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Caren Wakerman Converse, Gale Coskan-Johnson, Kim Donehower, Bill Endres, Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Brad Gyori, Judy Holiday, Gesa E. Kirsch, Lori Ostergaard, Doreen Piano, Liz Rohan, Ryan Skinnell, Patricia Wilde, Daniel Wuebben
The authors included in this volume—Ilarion, Klim Smoljatic, and Kirill of Turov—are remarkable for both their personal and literary achievements. Appointed in 1051 by Prince Jaroslav the Wise, Ilarion was the first of only two recorded “native” metropolitans of Kiev. His “Sermon on Law and Grace” constitutes the finest piece of eleventh-century Rus’ rhetorical literature. Klim Smoljatic, the second “native” metropolitan of Rus’ (from 1147), is the author of the controversial “Epistle to Foma,” which addresses the debate over the proper nature and limits of Christian learning. Finally, the twelfth-century monk Kirill of Turov is best known for his collection of allegorical lessons and some of the most accomplished sermons of Kievan Rus’. The volume contains the first complete translations of the “Epistle to Foma” and the lessons and sermons of Kirill, as well as an entirely new rendering of the “Sermon on Law and Grace.”
Simon Franklin prefaces the texts with a substantial introduction that places each of the three authors in their historical context and examines the literary qualities as well as textual complexities of these outstanding works of Rus’ literature.
Analyzes the rhetoric of contemporary sex panics to expose how homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia define public, political, and scholarly preoccupations with sexuality and gender
In Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions, Ian Barnard makes the counter-intuitive argument that contemporary “sex panics” are undergirded by queerphobia, even when the panics in question don’t appear to have much to do with queerness. Barnard presents six case studies that treat a wide range of sex panic rhetorics around child molesters, sex trafficking, transgenderism, incest, queer kids, and pedagogy to demonstrate this argument. By using examples from academic scholarship, political discourse, and popular culture, including the Kevin Spacey scandal and the award-winning film Moonlight, Barnard shows how homophobia and transphobia continue to pervade contemporary Western culture.
Barnard is concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are the more obvious objects of antihomophobic and antitransphobic critique. The author’s focus, rather, is on excavating the significant traces of these panics in a neoliberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past, and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that has swept popular media and political culture in the United States and elsewhere. During a time of increasing conservative backlashes against advancing LGBTQ rights and human rights discourses in general, this book shows why it is important to attend to the liberal covers for sex panics that are not too far removed from their rhetorically conservative cousins.
Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.
Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.
Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.
Combining feminist and historical approaches with attention to the "matter" of language as well as of race and gender, Parker's brilliant "edification from the margins" illuminates much that has been overlooked, both in Shakespeare and in early modern culture. This book, a reexamination of popular and less familiar texts, will be indispensable to all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period.
Serves both as a script for performance and as a text for high school and college theater and English classes.
This self-contained script brings together different scenes from Shakespeare’s plays to portray women “in all their infinite variety.” Two narrators, a man and a woman, introduce and comment on these scenes, weaving together the different characters and situations.
This book combines literary and theatrical techniques in examining Shakespeare’s women. Its promptbook format provides clear, helpful stage directions on pages facing each of the scenes. Also helpful are concise glosses and footnotes to define difficult words and phrases plus a commentary to explain each scene in its dramatic context.
Other features include sheet music for each song in the play, a bibliography on the topic of women in Shakespeare’s plays, and suggestions for directors who wish to stage the play.
From charts, texts, and graphs to illustrations, icons, and screens, we live in an information age saturated with visual language. Yet the underlying principles that provide structure for visual language have long eluded scholars of rhetoric, design, and engineering. To function as a language that reliably conveys meaning, visual language must embody codes that normalize its practices among both the designers who employ it and the readers who interpret it.
In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication—text design, data displays, illustrations—is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, and a broad array of historical and contemporary examples, Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions explores the processes by which conventions evolve and proliferate and shows how conventions serve as the medium that designers use to shape, stabilize, and streamline visual information.
Kostelnick and Hassett extend contemporary theories that define rhetoric as a social act, arguing that visual conventions also thrive within discourse communities and are fragile forms that vary widely in their longevity and scope. Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions is a thorough guide for scholars, teachers and practitioners of rhetoric and business and technical communication and for professionals in engineering, science, design, and business.
In Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies, author Scott Wible explores the significance and application of two of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s key language policy statements: the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy. Wible draws from a wealth of previously unavailable archived material and professional literature to offer for the first time a comprehensive examination of these policies and their legacies that continue to shape the worlds of rhetoric, politics, and composition.
Wible demonstrates the continued relevance of the CCCC’s policies, particularly their role in influencing the recent, post-9/11 emergence of a national security language policy. He discusses in depth the role the CCCC’s language policy statements can play in shaping the U.S. government’s growing awareness of the importance of foreign language education, and he offers practical discussions of the policies’ pedagogical, professional, and political implications for rhetoric and composition scholars who engage contemporary debates about the politics of linguistic diversity and language arts education in the United States. Shaping Language Policy in the U.S. reveals the numerous ways in which the CCCC language policies have usefully informed educators’ professional practices and public service and investigates how these policies can continue to guide scholars and teachers in the future.
In Shaping Science with Rhetoric, Leah Ceccarelli addresses such questions through close readings of three scientific monographs in their historical contexts—Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), which inspired the "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology; Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944), which catalyzed the field of molecular biology; and Edward O. Wilson's Consilience (1998), a so far not entirely successful attempt to unite the social and biological sciences. She examines the rhetorical strategies used in each book and evaluates which worked best, based on the reviews and scientific papers that followed in their wake.
Ceccarelli's work will be important for anyone interested in how interdisciplinary fields are formed, from historians and rhetoricians of science to scientists themselves.
Lueck explores Civil War- and Reconstruction-era challenges to the University of Louisville and nearby local high schools, their curricular transformations, and their fate in regard to national education reform efforts. These institutions reflect many of the educational trends and developments of the day: college and university building, the emergence of English education as the dominant curriculum for higher learning, student-centered pedagogies and educational theories, the development and transformation of normal schools, the introduction of manual education and its mutation into vocational education, and the extension of advanced education to women, African American, and working-class students.
Lueck demonstrates a complex genealogy of interconnections among high schools, colleges, and universities that demands we rethink our categories and standards of assessment and our field’s history. A shift in our historical narrative would promote a move away from an emphasis on the preparation, transition, and movement of student writers from high school to college or university and instead allow a greater focus on the fostering of rich rhetorical practices and pedagogies at all educational levels. As the definition of college-level writing becomes increasingly contested once again, Lueck invites a reassessment of the discipline’s understanding of contemporary programs based in high schools like dual-credit and concurrent enrollment.
Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use argues that rhetoric, ideology, and myth have played key roles in influencing the development of the 100-year conflict between first the Zionist settlers and the current Israeli people and the Palestinian residents in what is now Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually treated as an issue of land and water. While these elements are the core of the conflict, they are heavily influenced by the symbols used by both peoples to describe, understand, and persuade each other. The authors argue that symbolic practices deeply influenced the Oslo Accords, and that the breakthrough in the peace process that led to Oslo could not have occurred without a breakthrough in communication styles.
Rowland and Frank develop four crucial ideas on social development: the roles of rhetoric, ideology, and myth; the influence of symbolic factors; specific symbolic factors that played a key role in peace negotiations; and the identification and value of criteria for evaluating symbolic practices in any society.
"Like articles representing the positions of proponents of the measure, those representing opponents constructing the nation as potentially in danger as a result of undocumented immigration."
How do we learn to recognize the damning effects of good rhetorical intentions? And where will we find arguments which escape this trap that permeates the liberal social policy world? Shifting Borders uses an evaluation of the debate over California Proposition 187 to demonstrate how this quandary is best understood by close interrogation of mainstream reports and debates and by bringing to the fore voices that are often left out of mediated discussions.
It is these voices outside the mainstream, so-called "outlaw" discourses, that hold the best possibilities for real social change. To illustrate their claim, the authors present dominant and outlaw discourses around Proposition 187, from television reports, internet chat sites, and religious discourse to coverage of the Los Angeles Times. Their critique ably demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a position outside the mainstream, but also how important it is for the press, citizens and scholars to actively search out such voices. The findings are organized through a model that provides an innovative method for understanding events and arguments through their rhetorical and communicative construction. In a world where the mediated word defines so much of what we know, Shifting Borders provides a lucid introduction to analyzing the spoken and written word that constitutes political debate in contemporary U.S. culture. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to any future development of progressive political strategy.
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In Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts,editors Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe bring together seventeen essays by new and established scholars that demonstrate the value and importance of silence and listening to the study and practice of rhetoric. Building on the editors’ groundbreaking research, which respects the power of the spoken word while challenging the marginalized status of silence and listening, this volumemakes a strong case for placing these overlooked concepts, and their intersections, at the forefront of rhetorical arts within rhetoric and composition studies.
Divided into three parts—History, Theory and Criticism, and Praxes—this book reimagines traditional histories and theories of rhetoric and incorporates contemporary interests, such as race, gender, and cross-cultural concerns, into scholarly conversations about rhetorical history, theory, criticism, and praxes. For the editors and the other contributors to this volume, silence is not simply the absence of sound and listening is not a passive act. When used strategically and with purpose—together and separately—silence and listening are powerful rhetorical devices integral to effective communication. The essays cover a wide range of subjects, including women rhetors from ancient Greece and medieval and Renaissance Europe; African philosophy and African American rhetoric; contemporary antiwar protests in the United States; activist conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine; and feminist and second-language pedagogies.
Taken together, the essays in this volume advance the argument that silence and listening are as important to rhetoric and composition studies as the more traditionally emphasized arts of reading, writing, and speaking and are particularly effective for theorizing, historicizing, analyzing, and teaching. An extremely valuable resource for instructors and students in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts will also have applications beyond academia, helping individuals, cultural groups, and nations more productively discern and implement appropriate actions when all parties agree to engage in rhetorical situations that include not only respectful speaking, reading, and writing but also productive silence and rhetorical listening.
Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies
How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience.
Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities.
The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.
"Why write together?" the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.
Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.
The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: "Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate."
Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize
Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication. Sites of Translation is relevant to researchers and teachers of writing as well as technology designers interested in creating systems, pedagogies, and platforms that will be more accessible and useful to multilingual audiences. Gonzales presents multilingual communication as intellectual labor that should be further valued in both academic and professional spaces, and supported by multilingual technologies and pedagogies that center the expertise of linguistically diverse communicators.
Responding to a growing pedagogical paralysis in debates over the nature and status of composition studies as an academic discipline, Lisa Ede offers a provocative inquiry into the politics of composition’s place in the academy. The result is a timely and engaging reflection on the rhetoric, ideology, and ethics of scholarship and instruction in composition studies today.
Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location delves into some of the most vexing issues presently facing the field: its status in relation to English studies, the nature and consequences of the writing process movement, the uneven professionalization of composition teachers, and the widening chasm between theory and practice. Ede interrogates key moments and texts in composition’s evolution, from the writing process movement to Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, through the interpretive lenses of historical analysis, theoretical critique, feminist and cultural theory, and Ede’s own two decades of experiences as a teacher and writing program administrator.
Questioning the narratives of progress and paradigm shifts that inform the field’s highly regarded recent theoretical studies, Ede urges scholars to carefully reconsider these claims, to honor the roles of teachers and students as more than dupes of ideology, and to more fully acknowledge—and utilize—the differences between the practice of theory and the practice of teaching. As academic hierarchies of knowledge increasingly privilege scholarship over instruction, Ede warns researchers to be cognizant of the politics and power inherent in their own location in the academy, particularly when professing to speak for teachers and students. To that end, the volume’s conclusion advocates pragmatic avenues for change and proffers topics for future discussion and debate.
All of these teachers have spent their careers teaching multiple sections of writing classes each semester or term, so this book presents readers with an impressive—and perhaps unprecedented—abundance of pedagogical expertise, teaching knowledge, and classroom experience. Sixteen Teachers Teaching is a book filled with joyfulness, wisdom, and pragmatic advice. It has been designed to be a source of inspiration for high school and college English teachers as they go about their daily work in the classroom.
Contributors: Peter Adams, Jeff Andelora, Helane Adams Androne, Taiyon J. Coleman, Renee DeLong, Kathleen Sheerin DeVore, Jamey Gallagher, Shannon Gibney, Joanne Baird Giordano, Brett Griffiths, Holly Hassel, Darin Jensen, Jeff Klausman, Michael C. Kuhne, Hope Parisi, and Howard Tinberg
This volume represents the collective experiences and insights of writing consultants involved in the large-scale curriculum reform of the entire College of Engineering; they collaborated closely with faculty members of the various departments and taught writing to engineering students in engineering classrooms. Collaborators developed syllabi that incorporated writing into their courses in meaningful ways, designed lessons to teach various aspects of writing, created assignments that integrated engineering and writing theory and concepts, and worked one-on-one with students to provide revision feedback. Though interactions were sometimes tense, the two groups––writing and engineering––developed a “third culture” that generally placed students at the center of learning.
Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures provides a guide to successful collaborations with STEM faculty that will be of interest to WPAs, instructors, and a range of both composition scholars and practitioners seeking to understand more about the role of writing and communication in STEM disciplines.
Contributors:
Linn K. Bekins, Sarah A. Bell, Mara K. Berkland, Doug Downs, April A. Kedrowicz, Sarah Read, Julie L. Taylor, Sundy Watanabe
How do college writing teachers learn new ways to teach? Most current composition research focuses almost exclusively on student writers, ignoring the role the teacher plays in classroom development. Here is the first book to focus on college writing teachers and the ways in which they are affected by graduate rhetoric pedagogy courses.
Wendy Bishop observed teachers enrolled in a doctoral seminar, titled "Teaching Basic Writing," and then conducted case studies of five of those teachers in their college writing classrooms to investigate how their teaching practices changed and how their previous professional and personal histories influenced their ability to make those changes.
An adversarial advocate.
Aeschines, orator and statesman of Athens, 390 or 389–314 BC, became active in politics about 350. In 348 he was a member of a mission sent to the Peloponnese to stir up feeling against the growing power of King Philip of Macedon; but in 347, when part of a peacemaking embassy to Philip, was won over to sympathy with the king, and became a supporter of the peace policy of the Athenian statesman Eubulus. On a second embassy in 346 to ratify a peace Aeschines’ delaying tactics caused the famous orator Demosthenes and Timarchus to accuse him of treason, a charge that he successfully rebutted in the strong extant speech Against Timarchus. In 344–343, when Demosthenes accused him again in a speech, Aeschines replied in the fine extant speech having the same title On the False Embassy and was again acquitted. In 336, when Ctesiphon proposed that Demosthenes should be awarded a crown of gold for state service, Aeschines accused him of proposing something that would violate existing laws. At the trial Aeschines’ extant speech Against Ctesiphon was answered by Demosthenes in his masterpiece On the Crown. Aeschines, discredited, left Athens and set up a school of rhetoric at Rhodes. He died in Samos.
As examples of Greek oratory the speeches of Aeschines rank next to those of Demosthenes, and are important documents for the study of Athenian diplomacy and inner politics.
For almost thirty years, William F. Gavin wrote speeches at the highest levels of government. Speechwright is his insider’s view of politics, a shrewd critique of presidential and congressional rhetoric, and a personal look at the political leaders for whom he wrote speeches. While serving President Richard Nixon and candidate Ronald Reagan, Gavin advocated for “working rhetoric”—well-crafted, clear, hard-hitting arguments that did not off er visions of the unattainable, but instead limited political discourse to achievable ends reached through practical means. Filled with hard-earned wisdom about politics and its discontents, Speechwright describes Gavin’s successes, his failures, and his call for political rhetoric built on strong argument rather than the mere search for eloquence.
In spring of 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower sat down with his staff to discuss the state of American strategy in the cold war. America, he insisted, needed a new approach to an urgent situation. From this meeting emerged Eisenhower’s teams of “bright young fellows,” charged with developing competing policies, each of which would come to shape global politics. In Spirits of the Cold War, Ned O’Gorman argues that the early Cold War was a crucible not only for contesting political strategies, but also for competing conceptions of America and its place in the world. Drawing on extensive archival research and wide reading in intellectual and rhetorical histories, this comprehensive account shows cold warriors debating “worldviews” in addition to more strictly instrumental tactical aims. Spirits of the Cold War is a rigorous scholarly account of the strategic debate of the early Cold War—a cultural diagnostic of American security discourse and an examination of its origins.
Drawing on his workshops in Rochester, Talarico describes a unique approach for eliciting poetry from people of many ages and backgrounds—particularly underpriviledged urban kids and the elderly. The process—from dialogue to self-expression to publication to public event—illuminates the urgency and meaning of releasing the spirit captured in each man and woman and child’s experience. "Some people say that Ross Talarico has done the impossible," the Today Show remarked of his success in Rochester; and with this book Talarico offers the same opportunity to others. Teachers, community leaders, parents, and children will be able to follow his practical, hands-on approach to encouraging self-expression in diverse, even unlikely, settings. They will see here how poetry is indeed relevant, ever more crucial to our identity as the culture evolves—how it is, finally, the place where the inarticulate can come to speak for themselves.
Erik Gunderson explores these and other questions in ancient rhetorical theory using a variety of theoretical approaches, drawing in particular on the works of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. His study examines the status of rhetorical theory qua theory, the production of a specific version of body in the course of its theoretical description, oratory as a form of self-mastery, the actor as the orator's despised double, the dangers of homoerotic pleasure, and Cicero's De Oratore, as what good theory and practice ought to look like.
Erik Gunderson is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin, Ohio State University.
These authors enrich the TA experience by supporting agency and self-efficacy, encouraging TAs to take active roles in understanding their positions and making the most of that experience. Many chapters are written by current or former TAs who are writing as a means of preparing, informing, and guiding new rhet/comp TAs, encouraging them to make choices about how they want to think through and participate in their teaching work.
The first work on the market to delve deeply into the TAship itself and what it means for the larger discipline, Standing at the Threshold provides a rich new theorizing based in the real experiences and liminalities of teaching assistants in composition and rhetoric, approached from a productive array of perspectives.
Contributors: Lew Caccia, Lillian Campbell, Rachel Donegan, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannady, Jennifer K. Johnson, Ronda Leathers Dively, Faith Matzker, Jessica Restaino, Elizabeth Saur, Megan Schoettler, Kylee Thacker Maurer
Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies firmly establishes the rhetorical analysis of science as a respected field of study. Alan G. Gross, one of rhetoric’s foremost authorities, summarizes the state of the field and demonstrates the role of rhetorical analysis in the sciences. He documents the limits of such analyses with examples from biology and physics, explores their range of application, and sheds light on the tangled relationships between science and society. In this deep revision of his important Rhetoric of Science, Gross examines how rhetorical analyses have a wide range of application, effectively exploring the generation, spread, certification, and closure that characterize scientific knowledge. Gross anchors his position in philosophical rather than in rhetorical arguments and maintains there is rhetorical criticism from which the sciences cannot be excluded.
Gross employs a variety of case studies and examples to assess the limits of the rhetorical analysis of science. For example, in examining avian taxonomy, he demonstrates that both taxonomical and evolutionary species are the product of rhetorical interactions. A review of Newton’s two formulations of optical research illustrates that their only significant difference is rhetorical, a difference in patterns of style, arrangement, and argument. Gross also explores the range of rhetorical analysis in his consideration of the “evolution of evolution” of Darwin’s notebooks. In his analysis of science and society, he explains the limits of citizen action in executive, judicial, and legislative democratic realms in the struggle to prevent, ameliorate, and provide adequate compensation for occupational disease. By using philosophical, historical, and psychological perspectives, Gross concludes, rhetorical analysis can also supplement other viewpoints in resolving intellectual problems.
Starring the Text, which includes fourteen illustrations, is an updated, readable study geared to rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and sociologists interested in science. The volume effectively demonstrates that the rhetoric of science is a natural extension of rhetorical theory and criticism.
Engaging interdisciplinary conversations from the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, Kessler takes an innovative look at how stigma functions on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. In doing so, Kessler reveals how stories and lived experiences have much to teach us not only about how stigma functions but also about how it can be dismantled.
In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe.
While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.
Using data from the study, the authors offer six specific strategies—including how to manage time, how to create a work/life balance, and how to collaborate with others—that readers can use to prepare for the composition and rhetoric job market and to begin their careers as full-time faculty members. Readers will learn about the possible responsibilities they may take on as new faculty, particularly those that go beyond teaching, research, service, and administration to include navigating the politics of higher education and negotiating professional identity construction. And they will also engage in activities and answer questions designed to deepen their understanding of the field and help them identify their own values and desired career trajectory.
Stories of Becoming demystifies the professoriate, compares what current new faculty have to say of their job expectations with the realities that students might face when on the job, and brings to light the invisible, behind-the-scenes work done by new faculty. It will be invaluable to graduate students, those who teach graduate students, new faculty, and hiring administrators in composition and rhetoric.
Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.
By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.
Based on an ethnographic study spanning four years, George H. Jensen’s Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis calls upon Bakhtinian theory to analyze storytelling in AA.
Jensen introduces his study with an analysis of “Bill W.’s Story” as it appears in the first chapter of AA’s central text, Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing on Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy, he argues that “Bill W.’s Story” as it appears in print cannot fully capture the oral tradition of storytelling as it occurs in AA meetings.
In his first section, Jensen discusses storytelling as practiced by the Washingtonians, a temperance organization much like AA. He also discusses the influence of the Oxford Group’s (an international and interdenominational religious movement seeking to recapture the enthusiasm and dedication of first-century Christianity) spiritual program to the development of AA’s Twelve Steps. The remainder of the first section serves as an introduction of the culture of AA to outsiders.
In the second section, Jensen covers Bakhtin’s theory of the relationship between the author and the hero of a text, using Lillian Roth’s autobiographies as counterexamples of AA talks. He devotes an entire chapter in this section to explaining how AA meetings provide an example of what Bakhtin meant by carnival, a process through which humor, irony, and parody supply a mechanism for questioning commonly held beliefs. He shows how newcomers to AA move away from their egocentric personae as practicing alcoholics to adopt a new identity within AA. Drawing further on Bakhtin, he examines the autobiographical moments of AA talks, stressing that these moments never become fully autobiographical. AA talks, Jensen argues, are fragmented, yet achieve coherence through the interweaving of two important chronotopes. Finally, using Bakhtin’s discussion of heroes in autobiography, Jensen discusses the kinds of heroes one typically finds in AA talks.
The thirteen contributors to this volume enter these debates from a variety of critical perspectives. They address questions of language and ideology, the tradition of the sentimental novel, biblical influences, and the rhetoric of antislavery discourse. As much as they disagree on various points, they share a keen interest in the cultural work that texts can do and an appreciation of the enduring power of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Though commonly thought of as a kind of worldliness at its best and an elitist snobbery at its worst, sophistication, Litvak reminds us, remains tied to its earlier, if forgotten, meaning of "perversion"—a perversion whose avatars are the homosexual and the intellectual. Proceeding with his investigations from a specifically gay academic perspective, Litvak presents thoroughly inventive readings of novels by Austen, Thackeray, and Proust, and of theoretical works by Adorno and Barthes, each text epitomizing sophistication in one of its more familiar modes. Among the issues he explores are the ways in which these texts teach sophistication, the embarrassment that sophistication causes the sophisticated, and how the class politics of sophistication are inseparable from its sexual politics. Helping gay, queer, feminist, and other provocative critics to make the most of their bad publicity, Litvak mindfully celebrates sophistication’s economy of taste and pleasure.
Using a new theoretical framework—that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful—Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways.
Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.
Style and Story is for those who wish to craft nonfiction texts that do more than simply relay facts and arguments. Pyne explains how writers can employ literary tools and strategies to have art and craft add value to their theme. With advice gleaned from nearly a dozen years of teaching writing to graduate students, Pyne offers pragmatic guidance on how to create powerful nonfiction, whether for an academic or popular audience.
Each chapter offers samples that span genres, showcasing the best kinds of nonfiction writing. Pyne analyzes these examples that will help writers understand how they can improve their nonfiction through their choice of voice, words, structure, metaphors, and narrative. Pyne builds on his previous guide, Voice and Vision, expanding the range of topics to include openings and closings, humor and satire, historical writing, setting scenes, writing about technical matters and deep details, long and short narration, reading for craft, and thoughts on writing generally. He also includes in this volume a set of exercises to practice writing techniques.
Style and Story will be treasured by anyone, whether novice or expert, who seeks guidance to improve the power of their nonfiction writing.
Taking the position that style has a value in its own right, that language forms a major component of the story a nonfiction writer has to tell, Anderson analyzes the work of America’s foremost practitioners of New Journalism—Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion.
Anderson does for nonfiction what insightful critics have long been doing for fiction and poetry. His approach is rhetorical, and his message is that the rhetoric of Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, and Didion is a direct response to the problem of trying to convey to a general audience the sublime, inexplicable, or private and intuitive experiences that conventional rhetoric cannot evoke.
The emphasis in this book is on style, not genre, and the analysis characterizes the distinctive styles of four American writers, showing how the richness and complexity of their prose discloses an important argument about the value of language itself. Their prose is complex, nuanced, layered, affecting, always aware of itself as style. This self-consciousness, Anderson contends, prepares the reader to regard style as argument, a “tacit but powerful statement about the value of form as form, style as style.”
"Buy Williams's book. And dig out from storage your dog-eared old copy of The Elements of Style. Set them side by side on your reference shelf."—Barbara Walraff, Atlantic
"Let newcoming writers discover this, and let their teachers and readers rejoice. It is a practical, disciplined text that is also a pleasure to read."—Christian Century
"An excellent book....It provides a sensible, well-balanced approach, featuring prescriptions that work."—Donald Karzenski, Journal of Business Communication
"Intensive fitness training for the expressive mind."—Booklist
This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs.
The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form.
The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake.
This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.
Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the “good life”
Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue.
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.
One of Library Journal's Top 20 Best-Selling Language Titles of 2019
In an ethnographic study spanning the last years of research collaborator and friend Susan Lundy Maute’s life with terminal breast cancer, author Jessica Restaino argues the interpretative challenges posed by research and writing amid illness and intimacy demand a methodological break from accepted genres and established practices of knowledge making. Restaino searches their experiences—recorded in interviews, informal writings, and correspondence—to discover a rhetoric of love and illness. She encourages a synthesis of methods and the acceptance of a reversal of roles—researcher and researched, writer and written-about—and emphasizes the relevancy of methodological diversity, the necessity of the personal, and the analytical richness of unpredictability and risk in being who we are in our scholarship at any given moment.
Bringing together critical analysis, qualitative-style research methods, close reading, Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics inLove and Illness resists traditional ideas about academic writing and invites others to pursue collaborations that subvert accepted approaches to representation, textual production, and subjectivity. Restaino demonstrates a way of writing—the rendering of the academic text itself—that suggests how we do our work has resonance for what we produce. She offers framing questions for use by others interested in doing similar kinds of scholarship that may frighten, overwhelm, or confound. This book deepens our understanding of subjectivity and the gains made by feminist resistance to conventional concepts of objectivity in research collaborations.
Focusing on the importance of discussions about sovereignty and of the diversity of Native American communities, Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story offers a variety of ways to teach and write about indigenous North American rhetorics.
These essays introduce indigenous rhetorics, framing both how and why they should be taught in US university writing classrooms. Contributors promote understanding of American Indian rhetorical and literary texts and the cultures and contexts within which those texts are produced. Chapters also supply resources for instructors, promote cultural awareness, offer suggestions for further research, and provide examples of methods to incorporate American Indian texts into the classroom curriculum.
Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story provides a decolonized vision of what teaching rhetoric and writing can be and offers a foundation to talk about what rhetoric and pedagogical practice can mean when examined through American Indian and indigenous epistemologies and contemporary rhetorics.
Contributors include Joyce Rain Anderson, Resa Crane Bizzaro, Qwo-Li Driskill, Janice Gould, Rose Gubele, Angela Haas, Jessica Safran Hoover, Lisa King, Kimberli Lee, Malea D. Powell, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Gabriela Raquel Ríos, and Sundy Watanabe.
Susan Wells is associate professor of English at Temple University.
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