Recent and ongoing "new materialisms" scholarship seeks to fundamentally reshape the humanities and their relationship with the sciences. While this work comprises multiple and varied currents, one of the most important, yet whose distinctive merits are arguably often underappreciated, is that influenced by the theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad. The first volume devoted to bringing Barad's work into conversation with the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, this collection organizes that conversation primarily around her notion of "entanglement" and its radical disruption of the meaning/matter dualism at the heart of the dominant Western tradition. In doing so, the essays in this collection variously approach rhetoric as a "figure of entanglement" that enables a rethinking of meaning as itself performative, material, and ecological. Contributors thereby broaden and enrich the scope, at once, of both rhetoric and Barad's theorizing through entangled reworkings of topics ranging from politics to breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns," Marx's notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence of human consciousness. With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016 'Figures of Entanglement' special issue of the journal Review of Communication.

Book Information
ISBN 9780367903794
Author Christopher N. Gamble
Format Hardback
Page Count 138
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 174g