This text is a representative sample of my research focus in contemporary rhetoric since the mid-1970s. It highlights work that explores themes expressed in the text’s title. While not an exhaustive account of the themes, the text provides easy access to theoretical issues in rhetorical studies. These include topics such as the role of culture, citizenship, how space and time interact to affect the words we use, and the impulse to use language in critiquing the expressions of others. The collection is designed to be used by faculty teaching upper-level undergraduate to doctoral level courses in rhetoric at colleges and universities in the USA. It also will be a resource at universities across the globe. The goal is to stimulate thought and provoke critical responses to the ideas and arguments contained in the essays. Thus, this is a text to be used to assist scholars and students as they engage in their own work.

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.

The Age of Information has spawned a critical focus on human communication in a multimedia world, particularly on theories and practices of writing. With the worldwide web impacting increasingly on academic and business communication, the need has never been greater for advanced study in writing, communication, and critical thinking across all genres, sectors, and cultures. In recent decades, the definitions of 'new rhetoric' have expanded to encompass a variety of theories and movements, raising the question of how rhetoric is understood and employed in the twenty-first century. The essays collected here represent variations on these themes, with each attempting to answer the title?s deliberately provocative question, addressing particularly: -How the classical art of rhetoric is still relevant today; -How it is directly related to modern technologies and the new modes of communication they have generated; -How rhetorical practice is informing research methodologies and teaching and learning practices in the contemporary academy.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What exactly is happening when politicians evoke a center space beyond partisan politics to advance what are unmistakably political arguments? Drawing from an analysis of pivotal speeches surrounding Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and first term in office, Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency takes an extended look at this question by showing how the possibility of political transcendence takes form in the rhetoric of the political center. Faced with a divided and shrinking party, and later with a pitched battle against a resurgent conservative movement, Clinton used the image of a political center, a 'third way' beyond liberal and conservative orthodoxies, to advance his strategic goals, define his adversaries, and overcome key political challenges. As appeals to the center helped Clinton to achieve these advantages in specific cases, however, they also served to define the means, ends, and very essence of democracy in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Touching on controversies from the early 1990s over the future of the Democratic Party, racial identity in American politics, the threat of rightwing extremism, and the role of government, Antonio de Velasco show how centrist rhetoric's call to transcendence weaved together forms of identification and division, insight and blindness, so as to defy the conventional assessments of both Clinton's supporters and his detractors. Centrist Rhetoric thus offers general insight into the workings of political rhetoric, and a specific appreciation of Clinton's attempts to define and adjust to the political exigencies of a critical period in history of the Democratic Party and politics in the United States.

This book critically examines the ways that collective pasts are commemorated and contested in a wide variety of national locations, media and genres. Collective remembering is a dynamic process, through which narratives about the past, about ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as beliefs, values and affective conditions contained in these stories, are produced and reproduced. This facilitates room for not only the creation of unity but also the potential for contestation and conflict, given that different interpretations of the past are often vehicles for opposing political interests. This book reflects the geographical breadth and empirical depth of the field of collective remembering. Foregrounding the idea that collective remembering always entails contestation, individual chapters explore the field of remembrance and its various genres – including murals, memorials, museums, newspaper reports, speeches, textbooks, tourist tours and the work of community activists – in countries as diverse as Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, the UK and the USA. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in Critical Discourse Studies, Memory Studies, Rhetoric and Communications. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Discourse Studies.

An innovative approach to Dewey's view of rhetoric as art, revealing an "ontology of becoming" In Democracy and Rhetoric, Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy. In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication. Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic "ontology of becoming" in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming—of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress—gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.

Concerned with both the nature and the practice of discourse, the eighteen essays collected here treat rhetoric as a dynamic enterprise of inquiry, exploration, and application, and in doing so reflect James L. Kinneavy’s firm belief in the vital relationship between theory and practice, his commitment to a spirit of accommodation and assimilation that promotes the development of ever more powerful theories and ever more useful practices. A thorough introduction provides the reader with clear summaries of the essays by leading-edge theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing and rhetoric. A "field context" for the ideas presented in this book is provided through the division of the various chapters into four major sections that focus on classical rhetoric and rhetorical theory in historical contexts; on dimensions of discourse theory, aspects of discourse communities, and the sorts of knowledge people access and use in producing written texts; on writing in school-related contexts; and on several dimensions of nonacademic writing. A fifth section contains a bibliographic survey and an appreciation of James Kinneavy’s work. The exceptional range of these essays makes A Rhetoric of Doing an ecumenical examination of the current state of mind in rhetoric and written communication, a survey and description of what discourse and those in the field of discourse are, in fact, doing.

This book examines the Digital Divide in light of America's larger racial divide, in an attempt to figure out what meaningful access for African American to technologies and the larger American society can or should mean.

RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION: A CONCEPT-TACTIC APPROACH aims to cultivate writers who can listen across differences in preparation for thinking critically, communicating, and acting across those differences. Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen offer a rhetorical education centered on rhetorical listening as it inflects other rhetorical concepts, such as agency, rhetorical situation, identification, myth, and rhetorical devices. RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION spans classical and contemporary rhetoric, reading key concepts through rhetorical listening and supported by scholarship in rhetoric and composition, feminist studies, critical race studies, and intersectionality theory. The book expands on how we think about and negotiate difference and the factors that mediate social relations and competing cultural logics. Along the way, Ratcliffe and Jensen associate creative and heuristic tactics with clearly defined concepts to give all writers methods for listening rhetorically to and understanding alternative viewpoints. For writers new to the concepts of rhetorical listening, four appendices show how these concepts illuminate rhetoric, language, discourse, argument, writing processes, research, and style.