Results by title

Attuned to the subtle choreographies of the classroom, Gestural Listening In and Beyond the Classroom investigates how students and instructors show that they are listening to each other—and, sometimes, that they are not. While rhetorical scholarship traditionally focuses on speaking and writing, listening can also be understood as a rhetorical force that makes things happen. Listening has the power to move, bring about, cause, and catalyze. This conductive aspect of listening is its embodied manifestation—termed “gestural listening.”

Laura Feibush first traces the roots of embodied listening through cultural and rhetorical history and then uses findings from a classroom study to inform an insightful discussion of respect, resistance, and self-regulation as the key dynamics that characterize listening in contemporary educational spaces. She reveals how the gestures of listening refract across identity categories in ways that have surprising effects on how classroom participants respond to one another. This accessibly written book attends to hands and faces, nodding and note-taking, and the presence of phones and laptops, as well as other forms of nonverbal backchanneling, such as where people sit, when they interrupt, and when they engage in impactful quietness.

The power of gestural listening is not limited to the classroom. Its quiet yet profound influence can elucidate many sites of interaction: in-person and virtual academic settings as well as those far beyond the educational space, such as scenes of protest, worship, and performance. Gestural Listening In and Beyond the Classroom shows how, when understood as possessing its own repertoire of impressive and expressive capacities, listening emerges as a fascinating site of study and offers exercises, activities, and other materials to help educators, counselors, and all those engaging in communicative work enact a new awareness of gestural listening as a rhetorical force.

In the ongoing debate about evolution, scholars frequently argue either the perspective that humans stand as the end product of a deliberate process or that they derive from a series of random acts of natural selection. David F. Armstrong’s new book Original Signs embraces the Darwinian concept of natural selection and extends it to apply to the formation of language. While most current linguistic theory envisions language as a system for translating the contents of the mind into linear strings of arbitrary symbols, Armstrong asserts that this model does not characterize signed languages. He shows that language is inherently a multichannel activity, of which the two primary channels are auditory and visual.

Original Signs employs a more expansive notion of language that takes into account the full range of human communicative behavior. By making no strict separation between language and gesture, this thought-provoking work reveals that the use by deaf people of signs to create a fully formed language is also a natural facet of communication development for hearing people.

Armstrong explores the influences of Plato and Descartes on modern linguistics, and delineates the theories of earlier anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who thought of language as natural experiments connected to individual cultures. This exceptional work of scholarship methodically demonstrates that the intricacies of how languages develop, whether they depend upon words or signs, and that the complexity among languages that contact one another cannot be accounted for by the sequential hierarchical processes previously put forth by linguists and logicians. Original Signs will prove to be a fascinating, watershed work invaluable to linguists, anthropologists, and all other scholars and students engaged in the search for the origin of language.