Rhetoric

As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third...

As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third...

Drawing ideas from the works of George Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and the American pragmaticism philosophers, Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions: Essays in Interactionist Sociology argues that the verbal interactions of human agents are...

Western culture is in a moment when wholly new kinds of personal transformations are possible, but authentic transformation requires both personal testimony and public recognition. In this book, Adam Ellwanger takes a distinctly rhetorical approach to...

Archival Impulses explores the intersection of Chicana/o/x studies, Latina/o/x studies, archival studies, and public memory by examining the archival homes of cultural critic Gloria Anzaldua. This book illustrates how her archive mirrors her philosophy...

Like every discipline, Rhetorical Studies relies on a technical vocabulary to convey specialized concepts, but few disciplines rely so deeply on a set of terms developed so long ago. Pathos, kairos, doxa, topos-these and others originate from so-called...

Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K-12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that...

What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how...

This classic, step-by-step approach emphasizes the fundamentals of great composition writing. Students develop writing skills to prepare them to make the transition from use of simple prose to more linguistically sophisticated and complex discourse.Book...

In The Writing of Where, Charles Lesh examines how graffiti writers in Boston remake various spaces within and across the city. The spaces readers will encounter in this book are not just meaningful venues of writing, but also outcomes of writing itself:...

A rhetorical exploration of an underexamined side of climate change-the ongoing research into and development of geoengineering strategies Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric exposes the deeply worrying state of...

College students are expected to master new genres in every course they take. Yet composition instructors can't possibly teach students every genre they will need for their college courses or careers. Instead of telling students how to write a genre,...

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,...

This new edition is substantially updated for a new era of rising populism, renewed racial tensions, new social movement forms, and one of the most rhetorical presidential campaigns in memory. Moreover, the prose has been significantly streamlined for...

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic...

Rhetoric in the Flesh is the first book-length ethnographic study of the gross anatomy lab to explain how rhetorical discourses, multimodal displays, and embodied practices facilitate learning and technical expertise and how they shape participants'...

This book focuses on the rhetoric of food and the power dimensions that intersect this most fundamental but increasingly popular area of ideology and practice, including politics, culture, lifestyle, identity, advertising, environment, and economy. The...

The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to both his general manner of speaking as well as to his preferred modality. Trump's manner, the authors argue, reflects an aesthetics of white rage, and it is...

This book analyzes the role that human forms play in visualizing practical information and in making that information understandable, accessible, inviting, and meaningful to readers-in short, "humanizing" it. Although human figures have long...

This book offers new insight into the ways rhetorical educators' religious motives influenced the shape of nineteenth-century rhetorical education and invites scholars of writing and rhetoric to consider what the study of religiously-animated pedagogies...

Democratic Vernaculars is a comprehensive, culturally inclusive, and thematically unified history of the communicative, audience-centered rhetorical vernacular that occupies the "middle range" of English, bounded on the one side by expressive...

Democratic Vernaculars is a comprehensive, culturally inclusive, and thematically unified history of the communicative, audience-centered rhetorical vernacular that occupies the "middle range" of English, bounded on the one side by expressive...

By 1893, the Supreme Court had officially declared women to be citizens, but most did not have the legal right to vote. In Practicing Citizenship, Kristy Maddux provides a glimpse at an unprecedented alternative act of citizenship by women of the time:...

In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated...

Rhetorics of choice have dominated the biosocial discourses surrounding BRCA risk for decades, telling women at genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancers that they are free to choose how (and whether) to deal with their risk. Critics argue that women...

For decades, journalists have called the winners of U.S. presidential elections-often in error-well before the closing of the polls. In Votes That Count and Voters Who Don't, Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han investigate what motivates journalists to call...

Techne's Paradox-a frequent theme in science fiction-is the commonplace belief that technology has both the potential to annihilate humanity and to preserve it. Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism looks at how this paradox applies to some of the most...

In today's diverse societies, museums are the primary institutions within the public sphere in which individuals can both engage critical thought and celebrate community. This volume uses the lens of rhetoric to explore the role these societal...

Much of the political polarization that grips the United States is rooted in the so-called culture wars, and no topic defines this conflict better than the often contentious and sometimes violent debate over abortion rights. In Sign of Pathology, Nathan...

In Authority Figures, Torrey Shanks uncovers the essential but largely unappreciated place of rhetoric in John Locke's political and philosophical thought. Locke's well-known hostility to rhetoric has obscured an important debt to figural and inventive...

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided...

Growing numbers of scholars, practitioners, politicians, and citizens recognize the value of deliberative civic engagement processes that enable citizens and governments to come together in public spaces and engage in constructive dialogue, informed...

It has become a common complaint among academics and community leaders that citizens today are not what they used to be. Nowhere is this decline seen to be more troubling than when the focus is on young Americans. Compared to the youth of past...

In Speaking Hatefully, David Boromisza-Habashi focuses on the use of the term "hate speech" as a window on the cultural logic of political and moral struggle in public deliberation. This empirical study of gyuloeletbeszed, or "hate...

Michael Kochin's radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence-to create a political movement out of a...

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most...

Philosophy and Rhetoric, one of Penn State Press's longest-running journals, was conceived at a time of immense philosophical upheaval: rhetoric as a field of study-first dismissed by Descartes-was being reexamined after decades of neglect. Now, nearly...

Since many legal disputes are battles over the meaning of a statute, contract, testimony, or the Constitution, judges must interpret language in order to decide why one proposed meaning overrides another. And in making their decisions about meaning...

We have only recently started to challenge the notion that "serious" inquiry can be free of rhetoric, that it can rely exclusively on "hard" fact and "cold" logic in support of its claims. Increasingly, scholars are shifting...

From high school cafeterias to the floor of Congress, from "The Daily Show" to every comments section on the internet, insult is a truly universal and ubiquitous cultural practice with a long and earthy history. And yet, this most human of...