Rhetoric, Culture, and, Social Critique – serie

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work.Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. And though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric, rhetoricians have been hesitant to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan’s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies.Lacan’s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies—that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe.As Lundberg shows, Lacan’s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.

By studying the multiracial Jewish organisation Hatzaad Harishon, Janice W. Fernheimer’s Stepping into Zion considers the question “Who is a Jew?” - a critical rhetorical issue with far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike.Hatzaad Harishon (“The First Step”) was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organisation that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy of black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the definition and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.Fernheimer focuses on a period when white Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded - both historically and rhetorically - in gaining increased recognition for black Jews. Fernheimer traces how members of Hatzaad Harishon, who did not share the same set of definitions, were able to create common ground in a process she terms “interruptive invention.”Through insightful interpretation of Hatzaad Harishon’s archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group’s successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand. Stepping into Zion offers “interruptive invention” as a framework for understanding and changing certain dominant discourses about racial and religious identity, allowing those who may lack institutional power or authority to begin to claim it.

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present to illuminate the political dimensions of photographs that highlight social injustice.Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs—often now called “imagetexts”—both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.Carter’s carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal quali­ties of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis’s heart-rending photos of Manhattan’s poor in late nineteenth-century New York, the iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama from James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ted Streshinsky’s images of 1960s social movements, Camilo José Vergara’s photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick’s portraits of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. He argues that social documentary photos have the powerful capacity to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a “rhetoric of exposure” that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objects. His framework enables the analysis of photographs as heterogeneous records of the interaction of social classes and expressions of specific built environments. Rhetorical Exposures also discusses how photographs interact with oral and print media and relate to public memorials, murals, and graphic novels.As the creation and dissemination of new media continues to evolve in an environment of increasing anxiety about growing financial inequality, Rhetorical Exposures offers a very apt and timely discussion of the ways social documentary photography is created, employed, and understood.

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.

In The Politics of the Superficial: Visual Rhetoric and the Protocol of Display, Brett Ommen explores the increasing reliance on images as a mode of communication in contemporary life. He shows that graphic design is a layered experience of images and space. Before images, viewers engage in the personal experience of aesthetics and individual identity. In space, viewers engage in the negotiation of meaning and collective belonging. Graphic design, then, fits the consumerist present precisely because it prompts viewers to differentiate between our collective commitments and individual sense of self.Ommen argues, for example, that on viewing a billboard, a driver isn’t merely being exposed to a set of commercial messages or exhortations, but rather responding in a self-aware way that differentiates her from her collective associations like Democrat, Republican, rich, poor, Catholic, or Jewish.By examining graphic design—as a profession, practice, and academic field—as the nexus for understanding visual display in public culture, The Politics of the Superficial develops two arguments about contemporary visual communication practices: first, that the study of visual communication privileges visual content at the expense of other dynamics, such as context; and second, that interpretations focusing on content conceal the most persuasive and subversive dimensions of the visual.Wide-ranging and stimulating, The Politics of the Superficial ultimately posits that, far from serving as a communal oasis for public imagination, contemporary visual culture offers the possibility for politically engaged communication and persuasion while simultaneously threatening the health of public discourse by atomizing its constituent parts. It will serve as a vital contribution to the field of visual rhetoric.

A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric and fieldwork.A variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric within the contexts of its use and circulation. Employing field methods more commonly used by ethnographers allows researchers to capture rhetoric in action and to observe the dynamic circumstances that shape persuasion in ordinary life.Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion gathers new essays that describe and theorize this burgeoning transdisciplinary mode of field-based scholarship. Contributors document and support this ethnographic turn in rhetorical studies through sustained examination of the diverse trends, methods, tools, theories, practices, and possibilities for engaging in rhetorical field research.This fascinating volume offers an introduction to these inquiries and serves as both a practical resource and theoretical foundation for scholars, teachers, and students interested in the intersection of rhetoric and field studies. Editors Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke have assembled scholars working in diverse field sites to map and initiate key debates on the practices, limitations, and value of rhetorical field methods and research. Working synthetically at the junction of rhetorical theory and field practices, the contributors to this collection build from myriad field-based cases to examine diverse theoretical and methodological considerations. The volume also serves as a useful reference for interdisciplinary qualitative researchers interested in doing research from a rhetorical or discursive perspective in various disciplines and fields, such as English, composition, communication, natural resources, geography, sociology, urban planning, anthropology, and more.

A timely interdisciplinary study that applies psychoanalysis and the rhetorical tradition of the sublime to examine the cultural aftermath of the Atomic Age.Every culture throughout history has obsessed over various “end of the world” scenarios. The dawn of the Atomic Age marked a new twist in this tale. For the first time, our species became aware of its capacity to deliberately destroy itself. Since that time the Bomb has served as an organizing metaphor, a symbol of human annihilation, a stand-in for the unspeakable void of extinction, and a discursive construct that challenges the limits of communication itself. The parallel fascination with and abhorrence of nuclear weapons has metastasized into a host of other end-of-the-world scenarios, from global pandemics and climate change to zombie uprisings and asteroid collisions.Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age explores these world-ending fantasies through the lens of psychoanalysis to reveal their implications for both contemporary apocalyptic culture and the operations of language itself. What accounts for the enduring power of the Bomb as a symbol? What does the prospect of annihilation suggest about language and its limits? Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, this study expands on the theories of Kenneth Burke, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and many others from a variety of disciplines to arrive at some answers to these questions.Calum L. Matheson undertakes a series of case studies—including the Trinity test site, nuclear war games, urban shelter schemes, and contemporary survivalism—and argues that contending with the anxieties (individual, social, cultural, and political) born of the Atomic Age depends on rhetorical conceptions of the “real,” an order of experience that cannot be easily negotiated in language. Using aspects of media studies, rhetorical theory, and psychoanalysis, the author deftly engages the topics of Atomic Age survival, extinction, religion, and fantasy, along with their enduring cultural legacies, to develop an account of the Bomb as a signifier and to explore why some Americans have become fascinated with fantasies of nuclear warfare and narratives of postapocalyptic rebirth.

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.

Highlights feminist rhetorical practices that disrupt and surpass boundaries of time and spaceIn 1917, Alice Paul and other suffragists famously picketed in front of the White House while holding banners with short, pithy sayings such as “Mr. President: How long must women wait for Liberty?” Their juxtaposition of this short phrase with the image of the White House (a symbol of liberty and justice) relies on the same rhetorical tactics as memes, a genre contemporary feminists use frequently to make arguments about reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, sex-positivity, and more. Many such connections between feminists of different spaces, places, and eras have yet to be considered, let alone understood. Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place reconsiders feminist rhetorical strategies as linked, intergenerational, and surprisingly consistent despite the emergence of new forms of media and intersectional considerations.  Contributors to this volume highlight continuities in feminist rhetorical practices that are often invisible to scholars, obscured by time, new media, and wildly different cultural, political, and social contexts. Thus, this collection takes a nonchronological approach to the study of feminist rhetoric, grouping chapters by rhetorical practice rather than time, content, or choice of media.  By connecting historical, contemporary, and future trajectories, this collection develops three feminist rhetorical frameworks: revisionary rhetorics, circulatory rhetorics, and response rhetorics. A theorization of these frameworks explains how feminist rhetorical practices (past and present) rely on similar but diverse methods to create change and fight oppression. Identifying these strategies not only helps us rethink feminist rhetoric from an academic perspective but also allows us to enact feminist activist rhetorics beyond the academy during a time in which feminist scholarship cannot afford to remain behind its hallowed yet insular walls.

How southern universities presently contend with an inherited panoply of words and symbols that embody and perpetuate Old South traditions  In Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities, Stephen M. Monroe presents the US South as a pulsating rhetorical landscape, a place where words and symbols rooted in a deeply problematic past litter the ground and contaminate the soil. This provocative text focuses on predominantly white southern universities where Old South rhetoric still reverberates, empowering rebel flags to stifle racial harmony, school cheers to reinforce racial barriers, and student yearbooks to create and protect an oppressive culture of exclusion. Across the region, in college towns like Oxford, Mississippi, Athens, Georgia, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, communities remain locked in a difficult, recursive, and inherently rhetorical struggle wrestling with this troubling legacy.  Words, images, and symbols are not merely passive artifacts of southern history, Monroe argues, but formative agents that influence human behavior and shape historical events. Drawing on research from many disciplines, including rhetoric, southern studies, history, sociology, and African American studies, Monroe develops the concept of confederate rhetoric: the collection of Old South words and symbols that have been and remain central to the identity conflicts of the South. He charts examples of such rhetoric at work in southern universities from Reconstruction to the present day.  Tracing the long life and legacy of Old South words and symbols at southern universities, this book provides close and nuanced analysis of the rhetorical conflicts that have resulted at places like the University of Mississippi and the University of Missouri. Some conflicts erupted during the civil rights movement, when the first African American students pushed their way into all-white southern universities and colleges, and others are brewing now, as African Americans (and their progressive white peers) begin to cement genuine agency and voice in these communities. Tensions have been, and remain, high. Remnants of the old majority continue to recruit modern adherents. The white majority may be in decline by many measures, but it is also powerful and resilient, still standing guard in defense of Old South traditions.  Ultimately, Monroe offers hope and optimism, contending that if words and symbols can be used to damage and divide, then words and symbols can also be used to heal and unify. Racist rhetoric can be replaced by antiracist rhetoric. The old South can become new. While resisting naÏve or facile arguments, Heritage and Hate ultimately finds the promise of progress within the tremendous power of language.

A rhetorical examination of the rise of populist conservatism.I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States examines a variety of texts—ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets—to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism, including its manifestation in the racially charged presidential election of 1964, its consolidation at the height of Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, and its character in successive moments that saw its fortunes wax and wane, including 1994, the Obama era, and the rise of Donald J. Trump. theorizing conservative populism as a rhetorical form, Johnson advances scholarship about populism away from a binary ideological framework while offering a useful lens for contextualizing scholarship on American conservatism. I The People emphasizes that the populist roots of conservative hegemony exercise a powerful constraining force on conservative intellectuals, whose power to shape and control the movement to which they belong is circumscribed by the form of its public-facing appeals.The study also reframes scholarly understandings of the conservative tradition’s seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest an abiding conservative unease regarding capitalism, showing how racist hostility underwrote a compromise with an increasingly economized understanding of humanity. Johnson also contests the narrative that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism’s public vernacular was a white and masculine identity politics reliant on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or President Barack Obama.

Highlights the persuasive devices most common to fascist appealsFascism has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time. The rise of extremist parties and candidates in Europe, the United States, and around the globe has led even mainstream political commentators to begin using the term “fascism” to describe dangerous movements that have revived and repackaged many of the strategies long thought to have been relegated to the margins of political rhetoric. No longer just confined to the state regimes of the past, fascism thrives today as a globally self-augmenting, self-propagating rhetorical phenomenon with a variety of faces and expressions.The Rhetoric of Fascism defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal. By approaching fascism from a rhetorical perspective, this volume complements established political and sociological understandings of fascism as a movement or regime. A rhetorical approach studies fascism less as a party one joins than as a set of persuasive strategies one adopts. Fascism spreads precisely because it is not a coherent entity. Instead, it exists as a loosely bound and often contradictory collection of persuasive trajectories that have attained enough coherence to mobilize and channel the passions of a self-constituted mass of individuals.Introductory chapters focus on general theories of fascism drawn from twentieth-century history and theory. Contributors investigate specific historical figures and their relationship to contemporary rhetorics, focusing on a specific rhetorical device that is characteristic of fascist rhetoric. A common thread throughout every chapter is that fascist devices are appealing because they speak to us in the familiar language of our culture. As we are seduced by one device at a time, we soon find ourselves part of a movement, a group, or a campaign that makes us act in ways we might never have imagined. This volume reveals that fascism may be closer to home than we think.CONTRIBUTORSPatrick D. Anderson / Rya Butterfield / Nathan Crick / Elizabeth R. Earle / Zac Gershberg / Stephen J. Hartnett / Marie-Odile N. Hobeika / Sean Illing / Jacob A. Miller / Fernando Ismael QuiÑones Valdivia / Patricia Roberts-Miller / Raquel M. Robvais / Bradley A. Serber / Ryan Skinnell

Investigates the rhetorical practices that contemporary evangelical Christian women use to confront theological and cultural issues that stymie deliberation within their communities regarding how to respond to sexual assault and domestic violence, with an eye toward both compassion for victims and accountability for perpetrators.

Delves into the rhetorical work of elective single mothers (ESMs) in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries as they sought—and continue to seek—to legitimize their maternal identities and family formationsScholars of rhetoric have largely overlooked the inherent rhetoricity of family. In The Case for Single Motherhood, Katherine Mack posits family as a central concern of rhetorical studies by reflecting on how language is used by single mothers who seek to reenvision the personal, social, and political meanings of family.Drawing on intersectional and rhetorical theories, Mack demonstrates how the category of elective single motherhood emerged in response to the historically differential treatment of “unwed mothers” along racial and class lines. Through her readings of a range of self-sponsored ESM texts—guidebooks, memoirs, and interactive digital media written by and primarily for other ESMs—and from her perspective as an elective single mother herself, Mack evaluates the rhetorical power, as well as the exclusions and hierarchies, that the ESM label effects. She analyzes how ESMs envision motherhood, visions that entail their musings about who can and should mother. Ultimately, Mack offers women who are considering nonnormative paths to motherhood a way to affirm their maternal identities and paths without disparaging others’.Scholars in the fields of rhetoric and feminist rhetorical studies will find in this volume an illuminating perspective on the rhetorical power of self-sponsored texts in particular. Crafting a methodology to identify and evaluate the goals and effects of legitimacy work and selecting sources that bring academic attention to varied genres of self-sponsored writings, Mack paves the way for future rhetorical studies of motherhood and family.

A powerful cultural critique of soccer’s public rhetoricAmerican sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for cultural, social, and political possibility. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sports largely avoid any political stance other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John M. Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer—a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity despite its struggle to establish major league status—a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality.As a rhetorician who draws on both critical theory and culture, Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, and class. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how those possibilities are constrained can provide valuable insights into neoliberal logics of power, profit, politics, and selfhood.In Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent phenomena: the equal pay dispute between the US women’s national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as “underdogs” despite the nation’s quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. An invaluable addition to a growing bookshelf on soccer titles, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch serves as a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms.

How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describesAmerican public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them.Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality.The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from BeyoncÉ’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically—in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youthDreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex sociopolitical landscape to advocate for immigrant rights and empower undocumented youth to proudly represent their lives and identities, all while under the ever-present threat of detention and deportation. Contributing to rhetorical studies of social movements, immigration, and minoritized rhetorics, Ribero argues that even though Dreamer rhetorics were reflective of the discursive limits of the neoliberal milieu, they also worked to disrupt neoliberal constraints through activism that troubled the primacy of the nation-state and citizenship, refused to adhere to respectability politics, forwarded embodied identity and transnational belonging, and looked for liberation in community—not solely in legislative action.Each chapter presents a different rhetorical situation within the US “crisis” of immigration and the rhetoric that Dreamers used to respond to it. Organized chronologically, the chapters document Dreamer activism during the Obama presidency, from the 2010 hunger strikes advocating for the DREAM Act to undocuqueer “artivism” responding to Trump’s presidential campaign. The author draws not only on the methods and theories of rhetorical studies but also on women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, critical theory, and queer theory. In this way, the book looks across disciplines to illustrate the rhetorical savvy of one of the most important US social movements of our time.

Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves into the paradoxical interplay between acknowledging the genuine threat of cancer and the ingrained American ethos of confidence and control. Agnew’s meticulous research traces the topic’s historical context, unveiling how cancer discourses evolved from a hushed personal concern to a public issue thanks to the rise of cancer research centers and advocacy organizations. However, she unearths a troubling dimension to these discussions—subtle yet persistent eugenic ideologies that taint cancer arguments and advocacy groups. By dissecting prevailing cancer narratives, Agnew brings into focus how ideals rooted in eliminating imperfections and embracing progress converge with concerns for safeguarding societal fitness. Fitter, Happier scrutinizes the military origins and metaphors that permeate government policies and medical research, the transformation of cancer’s association with melancholy into a rallying cry for a positive outlook, and the nuanced implications of prevention-focused dialogues. Reflecting on the varied experiences of actual cancer patients, Agnew resists the neat assimilation of these stories into a eugenic framework. Agnew’s insights prompt readers to contemplate the societal meanings of disease and disability as well as how language constructs our shared reality.

A fascinating survey of the history of political and economic ideas in the US that have led to an increasingly entrenched ultra-rich class of oligarchs.To an American, oligarchy is something that happens somewhere else. In Oligarchy in America, Luke Winslow reveals oligarchy’s deep intellectual roots and alarming growth in America. The book provides conceptual tools the lack of which have prevented Americans from recognizing oligarchy at home. Winslow argues that generic labels like “billionaires” for a class of ultra-rich masks the pervasive structures that entrench their power. He introduces instead the concept of democratic oligarchy—an institutional arrangement in which the ultra-rich form a class consciously creating and leveraging state power to accumulate wealth. Like a master class in political ideas, Winslow traces the intellectual lineage of oligarchy in the US. His lively and compulsively readable survey examines key rhetorical sources such as Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie, Friedrich Hayek, Lewis Powell, Milton Friedman, Charles Koch, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and others. Oligarchy in America maps the connective web of oligarchic ideas uniting these disparate figures. By offering a lucid framework through which to view oligarchic ideas ambient in American culture, Winslow makes a vital contribution to readers and scholars of communication and rhetorical studies, public address, economics, and political science.

Offers a rich interpretation of the region’s vexed history through a detailed study of the commemorative practices enacted—and withheld—at a landmark American museum.

Brings Machiavelli’s wisdom to bear on the myriad crisis—political, environmental, cultural, viral—that loomed in both his time and our own.

Unraveling the intricate dance of pleasure and pain in contemporary American cultureMainstream news and social media often highlight presentations of pain that invite a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, whether the result of war, disasters, crime, accidents, or other catastrophes. This collection of essays explores pleasurable pains and painful pleasures, showing how they pervade contemporary western public culture.Deploying methodologies drawn from psychoanalysis, rhetoric and communication, political theory, and visual culture, Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture offers insightful criticisms and theories about how pleasure and pain function in public discourse, media, and everyday communication practices.The contributors provide a sample of fascinating range of news reportage, television, film and cinema, stage drama, comic performances, street art, and other forms of popular culture. The media cited and analyzed include Spike Lee’s films, Afrofuturism, autoethnography, and the #MeToo movement.The collection takes up engrossing topics such as the cathartic allure of pain, ethical dilemmas surrounding public displays of suffering, and the transformative power of narratives that confront trauma. The essays also draw connections between theory and real-world outcomes, explore the implications of enjoying traumatic comedy, and link the natural world to otherwise mundane instances of interspecies violence. Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination hearings and what they suggest about witnessing trauma is also discussed.Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture will change how a reader sees the world. It imparts a startling vision of western culture permeated by pain and pleasure.

Countermemory: A Rhetoric of Resistance investigates the interdisciplinary dimensions of countermemory through a rhetorical lens by drawing upon a mixed-methodological approach that includes site-based analysis, participant observation, textual analysis, and historiography. The authors apply these approaches to physical locations such as memorial sites and museums, but also in digital spaces like music videos, tv shows, and maps to show the different ways that countermemory may exist.

This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of 'the public' or 'public life', and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map various practices. This volume proposes a new metaphor - modalities - to suggest that publics are forever in flux, and much more fluid and dynamic than the static models of systems or spheres would indicate - especially in the digital age, where various publics rapidly evolve and dissipate. Contributors to the volume - employing approaches from the fields of communication studies, English, sociology, psychology, and history - explore a broad range of texts and artifacts that give rise to publics, and discuss what they reveal about conceptualizations of social space. By focusing on process in public engagement, these scholars highlight questions of how people advance their interests and identities, and how they adapt to situational constraints. Bringing together scholars in rhetorical, cultural, and media studies, this collection of new case studies illustrates a modalities approach to the study of publics. These case studies explore the implications of different ways of forming publics, including alternative means of expression (protests, culture jamming); the intersection of politics and consumerism (how people express their identities and interests through their consumer behavior); and online engagement (blogs as increasingly important public fora). In doing so, they raise important questions of access, community, and political efficacy.

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. ‘Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials’ is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organisational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance. By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimised or erased.

The transnational movement of people and ideas has led scholars throughout the humanities to reconsider many core concepts. Among them is the notion of public memory and how it changes when collective memories are no longer grounded within the confines of the traditional nation-state. An introduction by coeditors Kendall Phillips and Mitchell Reyes provides a context for examining the challenges of remembrance in a globalized world. In their essay they posit the idea of the “global memoryscape,” a sphere in which memories circulate among increasingly complex and diffused networks of remembrance.The essays contained within the volume--by scholars from a wide range of disciplines including American studies, art history, political science, psychology, and sociology--each engage a particular instance of the practices of memory as they are complicated by globalization.Subjects include the place of nostalgia in post-Yugoslavia Serbian national memory, Russian identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union, political remembrance in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the role of Chilean mass media in forging national identity following the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, American debates over memorializing Japanese internment camps, and how the debate over the Iraq war is framed by memories of opposition to the Vietnam War.

Contemporary efforts to revitalise the civic mission of higher education in America have revived an age-old republican tradition of teaching students to be responsible citizens, particularly through the study of rhetoric, composition, and oratory. This book examines the political, cultural, economic, and religious agendas that drove the various—and often conflicting—curricula and contrasting visions of what good citizenship entails. Mark Garrett Longaker argues that higher education more than 200 years ago allowed actors with differing political and economic interests to wrestle over the fate of American citizenship. Then, as today, there was widespread agreement that civic training was essential in higher education, but there were also sharp differences in the various visions of what proper republic citizenship entailed and how to prepare for it.Longaker studies in detail the specific trends in rhetorical education offered at various early institutions—such as Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary—with analyses of student lecture notes, classroom activities, disputation exercises, reading lists, lecture outlines, and literary society records. These documents reveal an extraordinary range of economic and philosophical interests and allegiances—agrarian, commercial, spiritual, communal, and belletristic—specific to each institution. The findings challenge and complicate a widely held belief that early-American civic education occurred in a halcyon era of united democratic republicanism. Recognition that there are multiple ways to practice democratic citizenship and to enact democratic discourse, historically as well as today, best serves the goal of civic education, Longaker argues.Rhetoric and the Republic illuminates an important historical moment in the history of American education and dramatically highlights rhetorical education as a key site in the construction of democracy.

Davin Allen Grindstaff, through a series of close textual analyses examining public discourse, uncovers the rhetorical modes of persuasion surrounding the construction of gay male sexual identity. In Part One, Grindstaff establishes his notion of the ""rhetorical secret"" central to constructions of gay male identity: the practice of sexual identity as a secret, its promise of a coherent sexual self, and the perpetuation of secrecy as a product and strategy of heteronormative discourse. Grindstaff continues in Part Two to examine major issues related to contemporary conceptions of gay male identity: overturning sodomy laws; public debates over same-sex marriages; medical and social responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the rhetorical power of hyper-masculine body images and homoeroticism to creative communities; and, finally, what Grindstaff considers to be the most mysterious and significant rhetorical practice of all: coming out of the closet. By investigating the public discourse--texts and images that circulate, produce knowledge, and become means of persuasion--surrounding the constructions of sexual identity, Grindstaff challenges heteronormative concepts of sexuality itself, thus creating new maps of social power and new paths of resistance.

Elizabeth C. Britt uses a Massachusetts statute requiring insurance coverage for infertility as a lens through which the work of rhetoric in complex cultural processes can be better understood. Countering the commonsensical notion that mandatory insurance coverage functions primarily to relieve the problem of infertility, Britt argues instead that the coverage serves to expose its contours. Britt uses extensive interviews with women undergoing fertility treatments to provide the foundation for her detailed analysis. While her study focuses on the example of infertility, it is also more broadly a commentary on the power of definition to frame experience, on the burdens and responsibilities of belonging to social collectives, and on the ability of rhetorical criticism to interrogate cultural formations.