This book restores the concept of topology to its rhetorical roots to assist scholars who wish not just to criticize power dynamics, but also to invent alternatives. Topology is a spatial rather than a causal method. It works inductively to model discourse without reducing it to the actions of a few or resolving its inherent contradictions. By putting topology back in tension with opportunity, as originally designed, the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for post-critical practice in "wicked discourses" of medicine, technology, literacy, and the environment. Readers of the volume will discover exactly how the discipline of rhetoric underscores and interacts with current notions of topology in philosophy, design, psychoanalysis, and science studies.

This book restores the concept of topology to its rhetorical roots to assist scholars who wish not just to criticize power dynamics, but also to invent alternatives. Topology is a spatial rather than a causal method. It works inductively to model discourse without reducing it to the actions of a few or resolving its inherent contradictions. By putting topology back in tension with opportunity, as originally designed, the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for post-critical practice in "wicked discourses" of medicine, technology, literacy, and the environment. Readers of the volume will discover exactly how the discipline of rhetoric underscores and interacts with current notions of topology in philosophy, design, psychoanalysis, and science studies.

A fascinating addition to rhetoric scholarship, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things expands the scope of rhetorical situations beyond the familiar humanist triad of speaker-audience-purpose to an inclusive study of inanimate objects. The fifteen essays in Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things persuasively overturn the stubborn assumption that objects are passive tools in the hands of objective human agents. Rhetoric has proved that forms of communication such as digital images, advertising, and political satires do much more than simply lie dormant, and Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things shows that objects themselves also move, circulate, and produce opportunities for new rhetorical publics and new rhetorical actions. Objects are not simply inert tools but are themselves vibrant agents of measurable power. Organizing the work of leading and emerging rhetoric scholars into four broad categories, the collection explores the role of objects in rhetorical theory, histories of rhetoric, visual rhetoric, literacy studies, rhetoric of science and technology, computers and writing, and composition theory and pedagogy. A rich variety of case studies about objects such as women's bicycles in the nineteenth century, the QWERTY keyboard, and little free libraries ground this study in fascinating, real-life examples and build on human-centered approaches to rhetoric to consider how material elementsaEURO"human and nonhuman alikeaEURO"interact persuasively in rhetorical situations. Taken together, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things argues that the field of rhetoric's recent attention to material objects should go further than simply open a new line of inquiry. To maximize the interdisciplinary turn to things, rhetoricians must seize the opportunity to reimagine and perhaps resolve rhetoric's historically problematic relationship to physical reality and ontology. By tapping the rich resource of inanimate agents such as """"fish, political posters, plants, and dragonflies,i?1/2 rhetoricians can more fully grasp the rhetorical implications at stake in such issues.