|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
Rhetorical Realism responds to the surging interest in nonhumans
across the humanities by exploring how realist commitments have
historically accompanied understandings of rhetoric from antiquity
to the present. For a discipline that often defines itself
according to human speech and writing, the nonhuman turn poses a
number of challenges and opportunities for rhetoric. To date, many
of the responses to the nonhuman turn in rhetoric have sought to
address rhetoric's compatibility with new conceptions of
materiality. In Rhetorical Realism, Scot Barnett extends this work
by transforming it into a new historiographic methodology attuned
to the presence and occlusion of things in rhetorical history.
Through investigations of rhetoric's place in Aristotelian
metaphysics, the language invention movement of the seventeenth
century, and postmodern conceptions of rhetoric as an epistemic
art, Barnett's study expands the scope of rhetorical inquiry by
showing how realist ideas have worked to frame rhetoric's scope and
meanings during key moments in its history. Ultimately, Barnett
argues that all versions of rhetoric depend upon some realist
assumptions about the world. Rather than conceive of the nonhuman
as a dramatic turning point in rhetorical theory, Rhetorical
Realism encourages rhetorical theorists to turn another eye toward
what rhetoricians have always done-defining and configuring
rhetoric within a broader ontology of things.
Rhetorical Realism responds to the surging interest in nonhumans
across the humanities by exploring how realist commitments have
historically accompanied understandings of rhetoric from antiquity
to the present. For a discipline that often defines itself
according to human speech and writing, the nonhuman turn poses a
number of challenges and opportunities for rhetoric. To date, many
of the responses to the nonhuman turn in rhetoric have sought to
address rhetoric's compatibility with new conceptions of
materiality. In Rhetorical Realism, Scot Barnett extends this work
by transforming it into a new historiographic methodology attuned
to the presence and occlusion of things in rhetorical history.
Through investigations of rhetoric's place in Aristotelian
metaphysics, the language invention movement of the seventeenth
century, and postmodern conceptions of rhetoric as an epistemic
art, Barnett's study expands the scope of rhetorical inquiry by
showing how realist ideas have worked to frame rhetoric's scope and
meanings during key moments in its history. Ultimately, Barnett
argues that all versions of rhetoric depend upon some realist
assumptions about the world. Rather than conceive of the nonhuman
as a dramatic turning point in rhetorical theory, Rhetorical
Realism encourages rhetorical theorists to turn another eye toward
what rhetoricians have always done-defining and configuring
rhetoric within a broader ontology of things.
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.
|
|