Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they’re crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline’s history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our “partners in feeling,” other animals.
Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw
Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they’re crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline’s history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our “partners in feeling,” other animals.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they’re crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline’s history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our “partners in feeling,” other animals.
The Practice of Rhetoric
Author: Debra Hawhee
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321373
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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"--
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321373
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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
Author: Michael Bernard-Donals
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780271089560
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780271089560
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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
Author: Michele Kennerly
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091525
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091525
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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.
The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory
Author: Ira Allen
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to "truth" (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a "troubled freedom" that spring from rhetoric’s depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric’s other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to "truth" (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a "troubled freedom" that spring from rhetoric’s depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric’s other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.
Rhetorical Realism
Author: Scot Barnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317235371
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317235371
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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
Author: Kristian Bjørkdahl
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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.
Influential Machines
Author: Miles C. Coleman
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 164336460X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 112
Book Description
A new framework for understanding how algorithms influence Web applications offer us conclusions about science. Twitter bots generate art. Machine-learning systems satirize politicians. We live in an era where a substantial share of our private and public communication is machinic. Modern computing machines cannot yet speak for themselves—although the capacities of AI are rapidly expanding—but they generate rhetorical energies as they give advice, entertain, and proffer insight, speaking to human concerns in more-than-human ways and guiding human action. In Influential Machines Miles C. Coleman looks beyond human communication to interrogate the ways in which the machines and algorithms in our lives make meaning and the implications of their special modes of communication. Using the varied examples of an anti-vax "vaccine calculator," two Twitterbots, and the computational performances of virtual assistants, Coleman asks what machines mean to us as social agents and whether humans are the appropriate reference for designing machine communication. Coleman goes beyond the front and back ends of computing to describe the "deep end" of computing, a site of ambient rhetoric that is essential for understanding how machines move in today's digital world.
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 164336460X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 112
Book Description
A new framework for understanding how algorithms influence Web applications offer us conclusions about science. Twitter bots generate art. Machine-learning systems satirize politicians. We live in an era where a substantial share of our private and public communication is machinic. Modern computing machines cannot yet speak for themselves—although the capacities of AI are rapidly expanding—but they generate rhetorical energies as they give advice, entertain, and proffer insight, speaking to human concerns in more-than-human ways and guiding human action. In Influential Machines Miles C. Coleman looks beyond human communication to interrogate the ways in which the machines and algorithms in our lives make meaning and the implications of their special modes of communication. Using the varied examples of an anti-vax "vaccine calculator," two Twitterbots, and the computational performances of virtual assistants, Coleman asks what machines mean to us as social agents and whether humans are the appropriate reference for designing machine communication. Coleman goes beyond the front and back ends of computing to describe the "deep end" of computing, a site of ambient rhetoric that is essential for understanding how machines move in today's digital world.
Environmental Communication
Author: Anabela Carvalho
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110789558
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
This handbook reviews extant research and offers critical summaries of key topics and issues in the field, enriched by authoritative analyses of specific cases and examples. It displays pluralism across a number of axes: epistemological, theoretical, geographical, cultural, and thematic. The first part offers historical routes through the international development of the field and explores the epistemological grounds of multiple strands of environmental communication studies. In aiming to map the field broadly, as well as stimulating new thinking, the second part is organized along three core perspectives: arenas, voice, and place. It comprises chapters on various public spaces that are critical to the symbolic constitution of the environment, and sheds light on a range of aspects and social agents that have received insufficient attention, including research about – and carried out in – non-Western countries. Crucially, at a time of profound environmental crisis, the final part of this book discusses possibilities and constraints to social change, and the potential contributions of environmental communication research to ways of understanding and responding to the challenge.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110789558
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
This handbook reviews extant research and offers critical summaries of key topics and issues in the field, enriched by authoritative analyses of specific cases and examples. It displays pluralism across a number of axes: epistemological, theoretical, geographical, cultural, and thematic. The first part offers historical routes through the international development of the field and explores the epistemological grounds of multiple strands of environmental communication studies. In aiming to map the field broadly, as well as stimulating new thinking, the second part is organized along three core perspectives: arenas, voice, and place. It comprises chapters on various public spaces that are critical to the symbolic constitution of the environment, and sheds light on a range of aspects and social agents that have received insufficient attention, including research about – and carried out in – non-Western countries. Crucially, at a time of profound environmental crisis, the final part of this book discusses possibilities and constraints to social change, and the potential contributions of environmental communication research to ways of understanding and responding to the challenge.
Promiscuous Knowledge
Author: Kenneth Cmiel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661185X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661185X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.