Distant publics : development rhetoric and the subject of crisis / Jenny Rice.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rice, Jenny.

Series:

Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rhetoric--Political aspects--United States.

Rhetoric.

Rhetoric--Social aspects--United States.

Persuasion (Rhetoric)--Political aspects--United States.

Persuasion (Rhetoric).

Persuasion (Rhetoric)--Social aspects--United States.

Discourse analysis--Political aspects--United States.

Discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis--Social aspects--United States.

Discourse analysis--Social aspects.

Discourse analysis--Political aspects.

Social aspects.

Persuasion (Rhetoric)--Political aspects.

Rhetoric--Social aspects.

Rhetoric--Political aspects.

United States.

Community development--United States.

Community development.

Physical Description:

x, 230 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

Summary:

Urban sprawl is omnipresent in America and has left many citizens questioning their ability to stop it. In Distant Publics, Jenny Rice examines patterns of public discourse that have evolved in response to development in urban and suburban environments. Centering her study on Austin, Texas, Rice finds a city that has simultaneously celebrated and despised development.

Rice outlines three distinct ways that the rhetoric of publics counteracts development: through injury claims, memory claims, and equivalence claims. She provides case studies of development disputes that place the reader in the middle of real-life controversies and evidence her theories of claims-based public rhetorics. Rice finds that these methods comprise the most common (though not exclusive) vernacular surrounding development and shows how each is often counterproductive to its own goals. She demonstrates that these claims create a particular role or public subjectivity grounded in one's own feelings, which serves to distance publics from each other and the issues at hand.

Rice argues that rhetoricians have a duty to transform current patterns of public development discourse so that all individuals may engage in matters of crisis. She articulates its sustainability as both a goal and future disciplinary challenge of rhetorical studies and offers tools and methodologies toward that end. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Rhetoric's Development Crisis 23

Chapter 2 The Public Subject of Feeling (with Exceptions) 44

Chapter 3 Vultures and Kooks: The Rhetoric of Injury Claims 70

Chapter 4 Lost Places and Memory Claims 99

Chapter 5 The Good and the Bad: Gentrification and Equivalence Claims 129

Chapter 6 Inquiry as Social Action 163.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822962045

0822962047

OCLC:

778857633