This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues-predominantly purpose-exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid. Accessibility across areas of expertise and experience is stressed in this book. Critics range from junior faculty to emeritus, and represent a broad spectrum of views on criticism. In this sense the book offers a snapshot of the views of a wide swath of successfully practicing, contemporary rhetorical critics.

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues-predominantly purpose-exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid. Accessibility across areas of expertise and experience is stressed in this book. Critics range from junior faculty to emeritus, and represent a broad spectrum of views on criticism. In this sense the book offers a snapshot of the views of a wide swath of successfully practicing, contemporary rhetorical critics.

There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events -- including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and practices. This important new collection, featuring essays by leading scholars and practitioners, provides a much-needed overview and assessment of Marxism's significance to contemporary thinking in communication and media studies. Contributors demonstrate how a Marxist perspective can be usefully applied to specific case studies in communication, providing valuable insights and understandings that are not obtainable using other approaches.

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders. We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.

What are the consequences in American society when social and political activism is replaced by pursuit of personal, psychological change? How does such a shift happen? Where is it visible? In wide-ranging case studies, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics points out this change in American culture and attributes it to the "rhetoric of therapy." This rhetoric is defined as a pervasive cultural discourse that applies psychotherapyÆs lexiconùthe constructive language of healing, coping, adaptation, and restoration of a previously existing orderùto social and political conflict. The purpose of this therapeutic discourse is to encourage people to focus on themselves and their private lives rather than to attempt to reform flawed systems of social and political power. Author Dana L. Cloud focuses on the therapeutic discourse that emerged after the Vietnam War and links its rise to specific political and economic interests. The critical case studies describe in detail not only what the therapeutic style looks like, but how and why therapeutic discourses are persuasive. These studies include: the rhetoric of "family values"; media coverage of "support groups" during the Persian Gulf War; Gloria SteinenÆs Revolution from Within; the film Thelma and Louise; and literature of the New Age Movement. Cloud concludes with a chapter urging resistance to the therapeutic persuasion she describes envisioning in its place engaged public politics. At once unique and engaging, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics is a must read for academics and students interested in communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and media studies.