Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw PDF Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639817X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Bringing together classical rhetoric and the study of animals is not a trick for the faint-of-heart. Hawhee s ambition and skill here are astonishingcombining illumination of major texts of the rhetorical tradition with attention to the way animals show up in these great books of Aristotle, Demetrius, Longinus, Erasmus, and others, to show that nonhuman animals have made themselves indispensable to theories of language and communication, to inquiry, and to arts of memory and philosophies of mind. Speech or reason (logos) has traditionally been the focus of rhetoric (the art of effective language use), but sensation, feeling, and emotion are just as importantand this is where animals enter in. In fact they enter in very frequently when discussion centers on the extra-rational, or nonrational, aspects of communication. Nonhuman animals serve in these texts at times as sensible objects, but in large part they enter rhetoric s theories and treatises as moving, sensing creatures, as what Hawhee calls partners in feeling to their human counterparts. She meanwhile explores the use rhetoricians have made of references to animals in beast fables, ecphrases (vivid descriptions), discussions of memory, and mock encomia. Animals may emerge through Hawhee s account as partners in feeling, but they also function as emblems, and her attention to Renaissance emblems and its partner art, stylistic depiction, plays out some often intricate rhetorical resonances. This history of nonhuman animals in rhetoric retells that story, thus, as one animated by energy, force, liveliness, wondrous diversity, and astounding and often bloody violence, all at the behest of humans animal partners in feeling."

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw PDF Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639817X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Bringing together classical rhetoric and the study of animals is not a trick for the faint-of-heart. Hawhee s ambition and skill here are astonishingcombining illumination of major texts of the rhetorical tradition with attention to the way animals show up in these great books of Aristotle, Demetrius, Longinus, Erasmus, and others, to show that nonhuman animals have made themselves indispensable to theories of language and communication, to inquiry, and to arts of memory and philosophies of mind. Speech or reason (logos) has traditionally been the focus of rhetoric (the art of effective language use), but sensation, feeling, and emotion are just as importantand this is where animals enter in. In fact they enter in very frequently when discussion centers on the extra-rational, or nonrational, aspects of communication. Nonhuman animals serve in these texts at times as sensible objects, but in large part they enter rhetoric s theories and treatises as moving, sensing creatures, as what Hawhee calls partners in feeling to their human counterparts. She meanwhile explores the use rhetoricians have made of references to animals in beast fables, ecphrases (vivid descriptions), discussions of memory, and mock encomia. Animals may emerge through Hawhee s account as partners in feeling, but they also function as emblems, and her attention to Renaissance emblems and its partner art, stylistic depiction, plays out some often intricate rhetorical resonances. This history of nonhuman animals in rhetoric retells that story, thus, as one animated by energy, force, liveliness, wondrous diversity, and astounding and often bloody violence, all at the behest of humans animal partners in feeling."

The Practice of Rhetoric

The Practice of Rhetoric PDF Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321373
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
"Rhetoric, broadly conceived as the art of making things matter, is both a practice and theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a "practical art." By practical art, they mean methods tested in practice, by trial and error, with a goal of offering something useful and teachable. This volume presents just such an account of rhetoric. The account here does not turn away from theory, but rather presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The approaches ventured in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric's educational mission and its contributions to civic life. The Practice of Rhetoric is organized into three sections designed to spotlight, in turn, the importance of poetics, performance, and philosophy in rhetorical practice. The volume begins with poetics, stressing the world-making properties of that word, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the mid-twentieth century. Susan C. Jarratt, for instance, probes the art of ekphrasis, or vivid description, and its capacity for rendering alternative futures. Michele Kennerly explores a little-studied linguistic predecessor to prose-logos psilos, or naked speech-exposing the early rumblings of a separation between poetic and rhetorical texts even as it historicizes the idea of clothed or ornamented speech. In an essay on the almost magical properties of writing, Debra Hawhee considers the curious practice of people writing letters to animals in order to banish or punish them, thereby casting the epistolary arts in a new light. Part 2 moves to performance. Vessela Valiavitcharska examines the intertwining of poetic rhythm and performance in Byzantine rhetorical education, and how such practices underlie the very foundations of oratory. Dale Martin Smith draws on the ancient stylistic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus along with the activist work of contemporary poets Amiri Baraka and Harmony Holiday to show how performance and persuasion unify rhetoric and poetics. Most treatments of philosophy and rhetoric begin within a philosophical framework, and remain there, focusing on old tools like stasis and disputation. Essays in part 3 break out of that mold by focusing on the utility and teachability of rhetorical principles in education. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor update stasis, a classical framework that encourages aspiring rhetors to ask after the nature of things, their facts and their qualities, as a way of locating an argument's position. Mark Garrett Longaker probes the medieval practice of disputation in order to marshal a new argument about why, exactly, John Locke detested rhetoric, and the longstanding opposition between science and rhetoric as modes of proof that has lasting implications for the way argument works today. Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the co-operation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. The volume promises to rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission"--

Responding to the Sacred

Responding to the Sacred PDF Author: Michael Bernard-Donals
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780271089560
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A collection of essays examining the extent to which rhetoric's relation to the sacred is one of ineffability and how our response to the sacred integrates the divine (or the altogether other) into the human order.

A New Handbook of Rhetoric

A New Handbook of Rhetoric PDF Author: Michele Kennerly
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091533
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
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 the so-called classical world, which has conferred on them excessive authority. Without jettisoning these rhetorical terms altogether, this handbook addresses critiques of their ongoing relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects. A New Handbook of Rhetoric inverts the terms of classical rhetoric by applying to them the alpha privative, a prefix that expresses absence. Adding the prefix α- to more than a dozen of the most important terms in the field, the contributors to this volume build a new vocabulary for rhetorical inquiry. Essays on apathy, akairos, adoxa, and atopos, among others, explore long-standing disciplinary habits, reveal the denials and privileges inherent in traditional rhetorical inquiry, and theorize new problems and methods. Using this vocabulary in an analysis of current politics, media, and technology, the essays illuminate aspects of contemporary culture that traditional rhetorical theory often overlooks. Innovative and groundbreaking, A New Handbook of Rhetoric at once draws on and unsettles ancient Greek rhetorical terms, opening new avenues for studying values, norms, and phenomena often stymied by the tradition. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Caddie Alford, Benjamin Firgens, Cory Geraths, Anthony J. Irizarry, Mari Lee Mifsud, John Muckelbauer, Bess R. H. Myers, Damien Smith Pfister, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Alessandra Von Burg.

Complacency

Complacency PDF Author: John T. Hamilton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818624
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
"This short book examines the history of complacency in Classics with implications for our contemporary moment. It responds to a published piece by the philosopher Simon Blackburn ["The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy," Times Higher Education (2009)] who presented "complacency" as a vice that impairs university study at its core. If today this sin is most discernible among scientists who feel that their rigorous training and verifiable results authorize them to assume omniscience in all areas of learning, this book points out that, from the nineteenth to early twentieth century, this presumption fell instead to Classicists. The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were treated as the foundation of learning; everything else devolving from them. What, Hamilton wants to know, might this model of superiority derived from the golden age of the Classical Tradition share with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences? How can the qualitative methods of Classics relate to the quantitative methods of big data, statistical reasoning, and numerical abstraction, which currently characterize academic complacency? And how did the discipline of Classics lose its prominent standing in the university, yielding its position to more empirical modes of research? Finally, how does this particular strain of scholarly smugness inflect the personal, ethical, and political complacency we encounter today?"--

Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things

Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things PDF Author: Scot Barnett
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319190
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things is the first book-length collection of essays that explore the vibrant materiality of everyday objects in rhetorical theory, practice, and writing. It examines how things such as food, bicycles, and typewriters can influence history and sociality.

Rhetorical Realism

Rhetorical Realism PDF Author: Scot Barnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317235371
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Rhetorical Realism responds to the surging interest in nonhumans across the humanities by exploring how realist commitments have historically accompanied understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to the present. For a discipline that often defines itself according to human speech and writing, the nonhuman turn poses a number of challenges and opportunities for rhetoric. To date, many of the responses to the nonhuman turn in rhetoric have sought to address rhetoric’s compatibility with new conceptions of materiality. In Rhetorical Realism, Scot Barnett extends this work by transforming it into a new historiographic methodology attuned to the presence and occlusion of things in rhetorical history. Through investigations of rhetoric’s place in Aristotelian metaphysics, the language invention movement of the seventeenth century, and postmodern conceptions of rhetoric as an epistemic art, Barnett’s study expands the scope of rhetorical inquiry by showing how realist ideas have worked to frame rhetoric’s scope and meanings during key moments in its history. Ultimately, Barnett argues that all versions of rhetoric depend upon some realist assumptions about the world. Rather than conceive of the nonhuman as a dramatic turning point in rhetorical theory, Rhetorical Realism encourages rhetorical theorists to turn another eye toward what rhetoricians have always done—defining and configuring rhetoric within a broader ontology of things.

Rhetorical Animals

Rhetorical Animals PDF Author: Kristian Bjørkdahl
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
For this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.

Bodily Arts

Bodily Arts PDF Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292757026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production. Bodily Arts examines this intriguing intersection, offering an important context for understanding the attitudes of ancient Greeks toward themselves and their environment. In classical society, rhetoric was an activity, one that was in essence "performed." Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of learning and performance, Bodily Arts draws on diverse orators and philosophers such as Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Plato, as well as medical treatises and a wealth of artifacts from the time, including statues and vases. Debra Hawhee's insightful study spotlights the notion of a classical gymnasium as the location for a habitual "mingling" of athletic and rhetorical performances, and the use of ancient athletic instruction to create rhetorical training based on rhythm, repetition, and response. Presenting her data against the backdrop of a broad cultural perspective rather than a narrow disciplinary one, Hawhee presents a pioneering interpretation of Greek civilization from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE by observing its citizens in action.

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies PDF Author: Andrea Alden
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328933
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects original scholarship that takes up and extends the practices of inventive theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. Including sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars and an interview with Crowley, the book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion. For Crowley, theory is a basic building block of rhetoric “produced by and within specific times and locations as a means of opening other ways of believing or acting.” Doing theory, in this sense, is the practice of surveying the common sense of the community (doxa) and discovering the available means of persuasion (invention). The ultimate goal of doing theory is not to prescribe certain actions but to ascertain what options exist for rhetors to see the world differently, to discover new possibilities for thought and action, and thereby to effect change in the world. The scholarship collected in Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies takes Crowley’s notion of theory as an invitation to develop new avenues for believing and acting. By reinventing the understanding of theory and its role in the field, this collection makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetorical studies and writing studies. It will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in diverse theoretical directions in rhetoric and writing studies as well as in race, gender, and disability theories, religious rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric. Publication supported in part by the Texas Tech University Humanities Center. Contributors: Jason Barrett-Fox, Geoffrey Clegg, Kirsti Cole, Joshua Daniel-Wariya, Diane Davis, Rebecca Disrud, Bre Garrett, Catherine C. Gouge, Debra Hawhee, Matthew Heard, Joshua C. Hilst, David G. Holmes, Bruce Horner, William B. Lalicker, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, James C. McDonald, Timothy Oleksiak, Dawn Penich-Thacker, J. Blake Scott, Victor J. Vitanza, Susan Wyche