Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resources for succeeding generations. Several of the contributions show how rhetorical cultural forms can themselves create emergencies. The contributors bring expertise from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and communications studies, underlining the volume's wider relevance as a reflection on the human condition.

The Sixth Edition of Barry Brummett’s Rhetoric in Popular Culture provides readers with in-depth insight into the techniques of rhetorical criticism to analyze the full spectrum of contemporary issues in popular culture. Exploring a wide range of mass media texts including advertisements, magazines, movies, television, popular music, and social media, Barry Brummett presents key rhetorical concepts and applies them with critical analysis to a variety of exciting examples drawn from today′s popular culture. Ideal for courses in rhetorical criticism, the new edition includes new and updated sample critical essays and case studies that demonstrate for readers how the critical methods discussed can be used to study the hidden rhetoric of popular culture.

This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

In the first in-depth study of Moore's feature-length documentary films, editors Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee have gathered leading rhetoric scholars to examine the production, rhetorical appeals, and audience reception of these films. Contributors critique the films primarily as modes of public argument and political art. Each essay is devoted to one of Moore's films and traces in detail how each film invites specific audience responses.

Greek and Roman traditions dominate classical rhetoric. Conventional historical accounts characterize Roman rhetoric as an appropriation and modification of Greek rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric that flourished in fifth and fourth centuries BCE Athens. However, the origins, nature and endurance of this Greco-Roman relationship have not been thoroughly explained. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence reveals that while Romans did benefit from Athenian rhetoric, their own rhetoric was also influenced by later Greek and non-Hellenic cultures, particularly the Etruscan civilization that held hegemony over all of Italy for hundreds of years before Rome came to power.

For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric introduces the reader to the wide-ranging importance of rhetoric in Roman culture. A guide to Roman rhetoric from its origins to the Renaissance and beyond Comprises 32 original essays by leading international scholars Explores major figures Cicero and Quintilian in-depth Covers a broad range of topics such as rhetoric and politics, gender, status, self-identity, education, and literature Provides suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter Includes a glossary of technical terms and an index of proper names and rhetorical concepts

The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe is the first study to address the rhetorical dimensions of Poe’s textual and discursive practices. It argues that Poe is a figure and figurer of the emergence of the modern understanding of literature in the early nineteenth century that resulted from the birth of the romantic author and the so-called ‘death of rhetoric’. Building on accounts of Poe as a skilled navigator of American antebellum print culture, Gero Guttzeit reinterprets Poe as representative of the vital role that transatlantic rhetoric played in antebellum literature. He investigates rhetorical figures of the author in Poe’s critical writings, tales, poems, and lectures to give a new account of Poe’s significance for antebellum literary culture. In so doing, he also proposes a general rhetorical theory of theoretical, poetical, and performative figures of the author. Beyond Poe studies, the book intervenes in current debates on the romantic origins of the modern author and demonstrates that rhetorical theory offers new ways of exploring authorship beyond the nineteenth century.

"The author of Hebrews is arguing that God himself has brought about the fulfillment of these institutions through his Son's priesthood, his once-for-all sacrifice, and the new covenant he inaugurated in the last days. These new institutions are never denied the Jews. In fact, the context of the epistle presumes that these are primarily for the Jews, considering that the author was speaking to a Jewish-Christian community. The author is not arguing for the abandonment by God of the Jewish people, but rather for the abandonment of the shadowy means by which God's people drew near to him. It is here we can speak of a qualified supersessionism. According to the author of Hebrews, the Levitical priesthood, the Mosaic covenant, and the Levitical sacrifices have been superseded by Jesus' priesthood, the new covenant, and Jesus' once-for-all sacrifice. "However, we conclude that the polemical passages in Hebrews do not promote hatred of the Jews, nor do they advocate the destruction of the Jewish people. Rather, the author of Hebrews stresses the fulfillment of specific Jewish institutions for the benefit of the Jews. It is this idea of fulfillment that rules out the charge that the epistle promotes the supercession of the Jewish people. Because of God's great love for his people, he has provided a superior way by which his people can draw near to him." --from the Conclusion

Ableism, a form of discrimination that elevates “able” bodies over those perceived as less capable, remains one of the most widespread areas of systematic and explicit discrimination in Western culture. Yet in contrast to the substantial body of scholarly work on racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism remains undertheorized and underexposed. In this book, James L. Cherney takes a rhetorical approach to the study of ableism to reveal how it has worked its way into our everyday understanding of disability. Ableist Rhetoric argues that ableism is learned and transmitted through the ways we speak about those with disabilities. Through a series of textual case studies, Cherney identifies three rhetorical norms that help illustrate the widespread influence of ableist ideas in society. He explores the notion that “deviance is evil” by analyzing the possession narratives of Cotton Mather and the modern horror touchstone The Exorcist. He then considers whether “normal is natural” in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and in the cultural debate over cochlear implants. Finally, he shows how the norm “body is able” operates in Alexander Graham Bell’s writings on eugenics and in the legal cases brought by disabled athletes Casey Martin and Oscar Pistorius. These three simple equivalencies play complex roles within the social institutions of religion, medicine, law, and sport. Cherney concludes by calling for a rhetorical model of disability, which, he argues, will provide a shift in orientation to challenge ableism’s epistemic, ideological, and visual components. Accessible and compelling, this groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of disability studies as well as to disability rights advocates.