Rhetoric, through everyday things / edited by Scot Barnett & Casey Boyle.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Barnett, Scot, 1977- editor.

Boyle, Casey Andrew, editor.

Series:

Rhetoric, culture, and social critique

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rhetoric.

Material culture.

Communication and culture.

Rhetoric--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

x, 270 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Rhetoric, through every day things

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, [2016]

Summary:

"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 elements--human and nonhuman alike--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," rhetoricians can more fully grasp the rhetorical implications at stake in such issues." -- Publisher's description

Contents:

Introduction: rhetorical ontology, or, how to things with things / Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle

The new ontology of persuasion. Listening to strange strangers, modifying dreams / Marilyn M. Cooper

Implicit paradigms of rhetoric: Aristotelian, cultural and heliotropic / John Muckelbauer

Rendering and reifying brain sex science / Christa Teston

Alinea phenomenology: cookery as flat ontography / Katie Zabrowski

Writing things. Writing devices / Donnie Johnson Sackey and William Hart Davidson

The material culture of writing: objects, habitats, and identities in practice / Cydney Alexis

The things they left behind: toward an object-oriented history of composition / Kevin Rutherford and Jason Palmeri

Object-oriented ontology's binary duplication and the promise of thing-oriented ontologies / S. Scott Graham

Seeing things. Materiality's rhetorical work: the nineteenth-century parlor stereoscope and the second-naturing vision / Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Circulatory intensities: take a book, return a book / Brian J. McNely

On rhetorical becoming / Laurie Gries

So close, yet so far away: temporal pastiche and dear photograph / Kim Lacey

Assembling things. Assemblage rhetorics: creating new frameworks for rhetorical action / Jodie Nicotra

Objects, material commonplaces, and the invention of the "new woman" / Sarah Hallenbeck

Encomium of QWERTY / James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel A. Rivers

Afterword: a crack in the cosmic egg, turning into things / Thomas Rickert.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [233]-533) and index.

ISBN:

9780817319199

0817319190

OCLC:

930257240