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.

Rhetoric, culture, and social critique

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rhetoric--Social aspects.

Rhetoric.

Communication and culture.

Material culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 269 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa, [Alabama] : The University 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.

Contents:

Introduction: Rhetorical ontology, or how to do things with things / Scot Barnet and Casey Boyle

l. THE NEW ONTOLOGY OF PERSUASION

1. Listening to strange strangers, modifying dreams / Marilyn M. Cooper

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

3. Rendering and reifying brain sex science / Christa Teston

4. Alinea phenomenology: cookery as flat ontography / Katie Zabrowski

II. WRITING THINGS

5. Writing devices / Donnie Johnson Sackey and William Hart-Davidson

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

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

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

III. SEEING THINGS

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

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

11. On rhetorical becoming / Laurie Gries

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

IV. ASSEMBLING THINGS

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

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

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

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

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8173-8994-6

OCLC:

952339080