A Revolution in Tropes is a groundbreaking study of rhetoric and tropes. Theorizing new ways of seeing rhetoric and its relationship with democratic deliberation, Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud explore and display alloiōsis as a trope of difference, exception, and radical otherness. Their argument centers on Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric through particular tropes of similarity that sustained a vision of civic discourse but at the same time underutilized tropes of difference. When this vision is revolutionized, democratic deliberation can perform and advance its ends of equality, justice, and freedom. Marie-Odile N. Hobeika and Michele Kennerly join Sutton and Mifsud in pushing the limits of rhetoric by engaging rhetoric alloiostrophically. Their collective efforts work to display the possibilities of what rhetoric can be. A Revolution in Tropes will appeal to scholars of rhetoric, philosophy, and communication

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Talk is of central importance to politics of almost every kind—it’s no accident that when the ancient Greeks first attempted to examine politics systematically, they developed the study of rhetoric. In Tropes of Politics, John Nelson applies rhetorical analysis first to political theory, and then to politics in practice. He offers a full and deep critical examination of political science and political theory as fields of study, and then undertakes a series of creative examinations of political rhetoric, including a deconstruction of deliberation and debate by the U.S. Senate prior to the Gulf War. Using the neglected arts of argument refined by the rhetoric of inquiry, Nelson traces how everyday words like consent and debate construct politics in much the same way that poets such as Mamet and Shakespeare construct plays, and he shows how we are remaking our politics even as we speak. Tropes of Politics explores how politicians take stands and political scientists probe representation, how experts become informed even as citizens become authorities, how students actually reinvent government while professors merely model politics, how senators wage war yet keep comity among themselves. The action, Nelson shows, is in the tropes: these figures of speech and images of deed can persuade us to turn from ideologies like liberalism toward spectacles about democracy or movements into environmentalism and feminism. His argument is that inventive attention to tropes can mean better participation in politics. And the argument is in the tropes—evidence itself as sights or citations, governments as machines or men, politics as hardball or softball, deliberations as freedoms or constraints, borders as fringes or friends.

The life and work of a mentor to Simon Bolivar

A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic tells the story of the lives and works of Iranian poets whose personal and literary career were shaped by the Iranian revolution in 1979. By drawing on similar examples, such as Soviet Russia, the book tries to tackle some key questions: how did these poets come to be known in the literary scene? What did they write about, and what were their ideas, styles, and literary techniques? And, last but not least, what kind of relationship have they established with the ruling power on the course of the past four decades? In a detailed study, Shams tackles the life and work of ten Iranian poets whose personal and literary lives transformed and were transformed by the 1979 Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, shedding light on ways in which the current ruling state in Iran uses literature and particularly poetry as a tool for ideological dissemination.

A global history of 'Biafra', providing a new explanation for the ascendance of humanitarianism in a postcolonial world.

Latin America occupies an increasingly prominent position within the global political, economic and cultural consciousness, with intra-regional governance structures and multilateral processes now a key topic of interest to foreign policy and international business circles. It has become abundantly clear that outside of Latin America there is a poor understanding of how the shifting sands of regional power are impacting, not only on how regional countries fit into the global system, but also on how intra-regional relations are viewed and managed. The contributions to this collection investigate these issues, examining how changing global power dynamics are in turn impacting on national foreign policies and regional governance structures. The book focuses first and foremost on the Latin American view outwards, not the US or European view to the south. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research.

Explores the ideological and emotional trauma created after the withering of the socialist utopia in Cuba. Mínima Cuba analyzes the reconfiguration of aesthetics and power during the Cuban postrevolutionary transition (1989 to 2005, the conclusion of the “Special Period”). It explores the marginal cultural production on the island by the first generation of intellectuals born during the Revolution. The author studies the work of postrevolutionary poets and essayists Antonio José Ponte, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Iván de la Nuez, among others. In their writing we find the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. The book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary literary and cultural studies, poetics, and film studies in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Marta Hernández Salván tackles head on the complex nature of philosophical tendencies within the poetics of Cuban cultural production in the last few decades to offer magnificent and precise readings of lesser-known writings and films, as well as profound renderings of canonical texts. This is a remarkably rich book that will take multiple readings to give it justice.” — Jacqueline Loss, author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary

What happens to student activism once mass protests have disappeared from view, and youth no longer embody the political frustrations and hopes of a nation? After the Revolution chronicles the lives of student activists as they confront the possibilities and disappointments of democracy in the shadow of the recent revolution in Serbia. Greenberg's narrative highlights the stories of young student activists as they seek to define their role and articulate a new form of legitimate political activity, post-socialism. When student activists in Serbia helped topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000, they unexpectedly found that the post-revolutionary period brought even greater problems. How do you actually live and practice democracy in the wake of war and the shadow of a recent revolution? How do young Serbians attempt to translate the energy and excitement generated by wide scale mobilization into the slow work of building democratic institutions? Greenberg navigates through the ranks of student organizations as they transition their activism from the streets back into the halls of the university. In exploring the everyday practices of student activists—their triumphs and frustrations—After the Revolution argues that disappointment is not a failure of democracy but a fundamental feature of how people live and practice it. This fascinating book develops a critical vocabulary for the social life of disappointment with the aim of helping citizens, scholars, and policymakers worldwide escape the trap of framing new democracies as doomed to failure.