Bøger i Rhetoric Culture and Social Critique Series serien

Presents a collection of essays that reassess history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice.

Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighbourhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the 'good life' their residents pursue.

Examines a variety of texts - ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets - to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism.

Defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal, and which has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time.

Explores the ways climate change and extreme weather are negotiated politically in a border community. Kenneth Walker takes a place-based approach to his study of San Antonio to explore how extreme weather events and responses to them shape local places, publics, and politics.

Identifies the Civil War as the central narrative around which official depictions of southern culture have been defined. Patricia Davis traces how the increasing participation of black public voices in the realms of Civil War memory has begun to create a more fluid sense of southernness that welcomes contributions by all of the region's peoples.

Offers a rhetorical analysis of Civil War battlefields and parks, and the ways various commemorative traditions - and their ideologies of race, reconciliation, emancipation, and masculinity - compete for dominance.

Contributors to this volume highlight continuities in feminist rhetorical practices that are often invisible to scholars, obscured by time, new media, and wildly different cultural, political, and social contexts. Thus, this collection takes a nonchronological approach to the study of feminist rhetoric, grouping chapters by rhetorical practice.

Looks at many instances of writing as punishment, including forced tattooing, drunk shaming, court-ordered letters of apology, and social media shaming, with the aim of bringing understanding and recognition to the coupling of literacy and subjection.

Addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages.

Positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable.

Addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages.

Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life. Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life.

Highlights scientific studies grounded in publicly gathered data and probes the rhetoric these studies employ. James Wynn analyses the discourse that enables these scientific ventures, as well as the difficulties that arise in communication between scientists and lay people and the potential for misuse of publicly gathered data.

Explores world-ending fantasies through the lens of psychoanalysis to reveal their implications for both contemporary apocalyptic culture and the operations of language itself. What accounts for the enduring power of the Bomb as a symbol? What does the prospect of annihilation suggest about language and its limits?

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.

Explores the increasing reliance on images as a mode of communication in contemporary life. Wide-ranging and stimulating, The Politics of the Superficial posits that contemporary visual culture offers the possibility for politically engaged communication and persuasion while simultaneously threatening the health of public discourse by atomizing its constituent parts.