In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company’s movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people. This study of Ford’s corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford’s filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company’s early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs. Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.

This book is the edition of the Proceedings of the International Colloquium “Rhetoric and Argumentation in the Beginning of the XXIst Century” which was held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, in October 2-4, 2008, and was organized by Henrique Jales Ribeiro, Joaquim Neves Vicente and Rui Alexandre Grácio. The main purpose of the Colloquium was to commemorate the publication in 1958 of the books La nouvelle rhétorique: Traité de l’argumentation, and The Uses of Arguments, by, respectively, C. Perelman/L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and S. Toulmin. But another important goal was to take stock of the state of rhetoric and argumentation theory at the beginning of a new century. It was a unique event, without parallel in Portugal and worldwide - considering its theme and its aims -, which gathered some of the World’s most renowned rhetoric and argumentation theorists: Alan Gross, Douglas Walton, Erik Krabbe, Frans V. Eemeren, F. Snoeck Henkemans, Guy Haarscher, John Anthony Blair, Marianne Doury, Oswald Ducrot, Ruth Amossy. The book includes a variety of very important contributions to rhetoric and argumentation theory, ranging from those that naturally fall within the subject matter, to the areas of philosophy, linguistics, communication theory, education theory and law theory. The “art”, as it was called in the Medieval curricula, is no longer a discipline amongst others and has became, according to the view of some specialists and largely owing to Perelman and Toulmin influences, a “new paradigm” of rationality for our age, which auspiciously encompasses all fields of knowledge and culture. The book is divided into five parts: I- Historical and philosophical studies on the influences of Perelman and Toulmin; II- Studies in argumentation theory; III- Linguistic approaches to argumentation theory; IV- Rhetoric; and communication theory / education theory approaches to argumentation; and V- Law theory approaches to argumentation.

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

Includes Part 1, Number 1: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - June)

This work intervenes in debates about the future of English studies as business interests reach deeper into the domains of higher education. The essays address historical and theoretical questions about the relationships among management pressures, disciplinarity, and curricula reform.

*HA02, Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries, William A. Covino(University of Illinois at Chicago), David A. Jolliffe(University of Illinois at Chicago), U1581-0, 640 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 0-02-325321-5, paperbound, 1995, $22.50nk, August*/RHETORIC provides a comprehensive overview of the major concepts of rhetorical theory, developed throughout history to the present. The text is divided into four parts: an introduction, defining rhetoric conceptually and historically and interrogating the definitions it proposes; a glossary, providing explanations of important concepts, periods, and individuals; a selection of perspectives by major scholars; and a collection of 13 readings and related commentaries, focusing on the relationship of rhetoric to other fields.