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Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

The Everest Effect is an accessibly written cultural history of how nature, technology, and culture have worked together to turn Mount Everest into a powerful and ubiquitous physical measure of Western values.

In The Everest Effect Elizabeth Mazzolini traces a series of ideological shifts in the status of Mount Everest in Western culture over the past century to the present day and links these shifts to technologies used in climbs. By highlighting the intersections of technology and cultural ideologies at this site of environmental extremity, she shows both how nature is shaped—physically and symbolically—by cultural values and how extreme natural phenomena shape culture.

Nostalgia, myth, and legend are intrinsic features of the conversations that surround discussions of historic and contemporary climbs of Everest, and those conversations themselves reflect changing relations between nature, technology, and ideology. Each of the book’s chapters links a particular value with a particular technology to show how technology is implicated in Mount Everest’s cultural standing and commodification: authenticity is linked with supplemental oxygen; utility with portable foodstuffs; individuality with communication technology; extremity with visual technology; and ability with money. These technologies, Mazzolini argues, are persuasive—and increasingly so as they work more quickly and with more intimacy on our bodies and in our daily lives.

As Mazzolini argues, the ideologies that situate Mount Everest in Western culture today are not debased and descended from a more noble time; rather, the material of the mountain and its surroundings and the technologies deployed to encounter it all work more immediately with the bodies and minds of actual and “armchair” mountaineers than ever before. By moving the analysis of a natural site and phenomenon away from the traditional labor of production and toward the symbolic labor of affective attachment, The Everest Effect shows that the body and nature have helped constitute the capitalization that is usually characterized as taking over Everest.
 

Employing the trope of architecture, Jane Sutton envisions the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house: a structure erected in ancient Greece by men that, historically, has made room for women but has also denied them the authority and agency to speak from within. Sutton’s central argument is that all attempts to include women in rhetoric exclude them from meaningful authority in due course, and this exclusion has been built into the foundations of rhetoric.

Drawing on personal experience, the spatial tropes of ancient Greek architecture, and the study of women who attained significant places in the house of rhetoric, Sutton highlights a number of decisive turns where women were able to increase their rhetorical access but were not able to achieve full authority, among them the work of Frances Wright, Lucy Stone, and suffragists Mott, Anthony, and Stanton; a visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the busts that became the Portrait Monument were displayed in the Woman’s Building (a sideshow, in essence); and a study of working-class women employed as telephone operators in New York in 1919.

With all the undeniable successes—socially, politically, and financially— of modern women, it appears that women are now populating the house of rhetoric as never before. But getting in the house and having public authority once inside are not the same thing. Sutton argues that women “can only act as far as the house permits.” Sojourn calls for a fundamental change in the very foundations of rhetoric.

A handbook for students of literature with particular attention to all those who have ever been made to feel like outsiders in our field, The Imposter’s Guide to Writing About Literature democratizes access to the knowledge necessary for successful professionalization—and especially publication—within literary studies.

Examining how motherhood, consumption, and privilege shape identities in contemporary culture.

The Motherhood Business is a piercing collection of ten original essays that reveal the rhetoric of the motherhood industry. Focusing on the consumer life of mothers and the emerging entrepreneurship associated with motherhood, the collection considers how different forms of privilege (class, race, and nationality) inform discourses about mothering, consumption, mobility, and leisure.

The Motherhood Business follows the harried mother’s path into the anxious maelstrom of intelligent toys, healthy foods and meals, and educational choices. It also traces how some enterprising mothers leverage cultural capital and rhetorical vision to create thriving baby- and child-based businesses of their own, as evidenced by the rise of mommy bloggers and “mompreneurs”over the last decade.

Starting with the rapidly expanding global fertility market, The Motherhood Business explores the intersection of motherhood, consumption, and privilege in the context of fertility tourism, international adoption, and transnational surrogacy. The synergy between motherhood and the marketplace demonstrated across the essays affirms the stronghold of “intensive mothering ideology” in decisions over what mothers buy and how they brand their businesses even as that ideology evolves. Across diverse contexts, the volume also identifies how different forms or privilege shape how mothers construct their identities through their consumption and entrepreneurship.

Although social observers have long commented on the link between motherhood and consumerism, little has been written within the field of rhetoric. Penetrating and interdisciplinary, The Motherhood Business illuminates how consumer culture not only shapes contemporary motherhood but also changes in response to mothers who constitute a driving force of the economy.
 

Essays that show what a broad conception of rhetoric means and does in relation to practice

Rhetoric is the art of emphasis, in the ancient sense of bringing to light or obscuring in shadow, and it is both a practice and a theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a “practical art.” The Practice of Rhetoric: Poetics, Performance, Philosophy presents just such an account of rhetoric that presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The essays gathered in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric’s educational mission and its investments in both theory and practice.

The book extends that vision through the prisms of poetics, performance, and philosophy of argument. Poetics shows rhetoric’s meaning making in all its verbal possibilities and material manifestations, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the twentieth century. Performance puts what is created into the heat of public life, tapping out the rhythms of Byzantine prose or using collage to visually depict the beliefs and convictions of Martin Luther King Jr. Philosophy of argument enacts the mutually constitutive relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, offering new insights on and contexts for old tools like stasis and disputation, while keeping the focus on usefulness and teachability.

Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the cooperation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. This volume will rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission.
 

This book demonstrates, in part through a history of emotions, how assumptions and prejudices about queer lives were challenged throughout the decade through the deceptively prosaic medium of television. Passion and disgust neatly outline the contours of the gay community’s press for equal rights at the dawn of the 1980s, just as fear and anxiety encapsulate the inchoate reactions to the emerging epidemic and the simultaneous explorations of privacy that were initiated by the onslaught of television as technology. While queer people anguished over their very survival and over the indifference of many to their situation, hope surfaced as a cause and potential treatments for HIV emerged and as the Supreme Court decided to make its first direct ruling on gay rights in a generation. When that latter hope was dashed by the Hardwick decision, the anger of gay rights advocates was trebled as they massed for the national March on Washington in homage to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that lent its key political organizing and messaging tactics to it. With the realization that progress would then be slow and all-consuming, a desperation to change queer lives was enjoined by a determination to do so in the most visible ways possible, through television.

A groundbreaking collection that bridges linguistics and literature, offering powerful tools to uncover how language shapes meaning, identity, and power in literary texts.

The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics, edited by Cynthia Bernstein, presents a groundbreaking collection of essays that demonstrate how linguistic tools can enrich literary analysis. The volume brings together scholars who explore the intersections of language, literature, and culture—examining how syntax, discourse, gender, power, and regional dialects shape meaning in texts. From Tennessee Williams to Harry Crews, from Dickens to immigrant literature, the essays offer models for integrating linguistic theory with literary interpretation. This book is essential for scholars of stylistics, discourse analysis, and anyone interested in the evolving relationship between language and literature.

The Total Black Experience is the first book to chronicle the history and social significance of Positively Black, one of the longest-running public affairs shows in the history of television. Spurred on by the findings of the Kerner Commission, executives at WNBC-TV greenlit the show and turned production over to a small but dedicated team of storytellers who quickly made it their mission to carve out a space for serious and nuanced discussion of issues important to the Black community and to celebrate all aspects of Black culture. They believed that accurate representation of their experiences was a right, not a privilege. The show’s first cohosts included the well-known Harlem-based activist Rev. Eugene Callender and Gus Heningburg, activist, successful consultant and mediator, and advocate for organized labor. Callender had founded Harlem Prep to equip young Black people for college, while Heningburg played a key role in stabilizing life in Newark following the rebellion there in the late 1960s. Both were adept at using the media to reach their constituencies. Combining in-depth interviews with painstaking archival research, The Total Black Experience introduces readers to key members of the Positively Black production team and analyzes thematic shifts in the show’s content. The book celebrates Positively Black’s longevity and challenges readers to explore the current state of Black representation on television.

An urgent and cautionary examination of the totalizing effect of smart home technology on the lives of those who live in them—and those who don’t

Smart homes are here—domestic spaces bristling with networked technologies that appear to enhance work, entertainment, logistics, health, and security. But these technologies may also extract a cost in attention, money, and privacy. In Threshold, communication and technology expert Heather Suzanne Woods applies rhetorical theory to answer the urgent question of how swiftly proliferating smart homes alter those who inhabit them.

Building on extensive research into smart homes in the United States, Woods recounts how smart homes arose and predicts the trajectory of their future form. She pulls back the curtain on the technology, probes who is in control, and questions whether a home can be too smart. She reveals how smart homes incentivize ubiquitous computing as a daily practice, priming smart home occupants for permanent transactional existence largely controlled by corporate interests.

Woods suggests a dynamic cultural framework for understanding smart homes that takes into account sociotechnical variables such as gender, class, income, race, criminal justice, and more through which smart homes shape human life. Woods’s framework reveals how smart homes both reflect social norms about technology as well as whet consumer appetites for an ever more totalizing relationship with technology. She argues that this progression leads to “living in digitality,” a cultural state of constant use and reliance on technology.

Written for homeowners, policymakers, technology enthusiasts, and scholars, Threshold interweaves meticulously researched critical analysis with matter-of-fact graphics that map relationships between digital tools and social life. Readers will appreciate this bracing assessment of smart technologies that empowers smart home users to make informed decisions about their dwellings.
 

Toxins can be found in every body and every place around the globe, yet they are not always visible. Toxic Imaginary explores the multiple ways Western cultures “see” toxins. With incisive vision, Jennifer Peeples examines how individuals and societies use collective stories, images, symbols, and rituals to navigate the uncertainty of living in a toxic environment. Each chapter provides an example of everyday images that make up the Western toxic imaginary and introduces new rhetorical and environmental concepts for readers to critically engage with visual media. Peeples pays particular attention to the injustices and inequities of toxins, revealing how powerful entities use toxic images to obscure the reality that all people live in polluted spaces that are damaging to their health. As the number and potency of contaminants continues to rise, this exploration into how scientists, journalists, activists, designers, and artists make toxins visible is imperative for understanding how people engage with contaminants in their environments.