Rhetoric, Culture, Things

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Notes

[1] Thomas Rosteck, “Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 386–403; Bonnie Dow, “Feminism, Cultural Studies, and Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (1997): 90–106. See also Rosteck, ed., At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies (New York: Guilford, 1998). On the founding of Critical and Cultural Studies, see Ronald W. Greene, “Rhetoric (Dis)Appearing,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 259–64.

[2] Lawrence Grossberg, “James W. Carey and the Conversation of Culture,” Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, eds. Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 74.

[3] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford, 1977), 116.

[4] Christian Meyer, “Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory,” in Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, eds., Culture & Rhetoric (New York: Berghann, 2009), 31–48; Peter Simonson, “The First Cultural Turn in Rhetorical Studies, 1920s–1940s,” paper presented at the NCA convention, Orlando, 16 November 2012.

[5] Douglas Ehninger et al., “Report of the Committee on the Scope of Rhetoric and the Place of Rhetorical Education in Higher Education,” in Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, eds., The Prospect of Rhetoric (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 203.

[6] Carole Blair, “‘We Are All Just Prisoners Here Of Our Own Device’: Rhetoric in Speech Communication After Wingspread,” in Theresa Enos and Richard McNabb, eds, Making and Unmaking the Prospects for Rhetoric (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 29–36.

[7] Peter Simonson, “A Cultural Sociology of Rhetoric: Hugh Duncan's Forgotten Corpus,” in Mark Porrovecchio, ed., Revisiting The Prospect of Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2010), 112–31.

[8] Michal Mokrzan, “The Rhetorical Turn in Anthropology,” MS, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Wroclaw, Poland; J. David Sapir and Jon Christopher Crocker, The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); Gary A. Olson, “The Social Scientist as Author: Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction,” Journal of Advanced Composition 11, no. 2 (1991): 245–68.

[9] See Dell H. Hymes, “The Ethnography of Speaking,” Anthropology and Human Behavior, eds., Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1962), 13–53; and “Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 6, Part 2 (1964): 1–34, which argues, “It ought to be the part of anthropology to contribute to a truly comparative poetics, logic, and rhetoric” (26). For a brief genealogy, see Donal Carbaugh, “Ethnography of Communication,” Oxford Bibliographies Online (2011), http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0015.xml

[10] For instance, Robert T. Oliver, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971); Edna Sorber, “The Noble Eloquent Savage,” Ethnohistory 19, no. 3 (1972): 227–36; Gerry Philipsen, “Navajo World View and Culture Patterns of Speech: A Case Study in Ethnorhetoric,” Speech Monographs 39, no. 2 (1972): 132–9.

[11] George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For reviews and consolidations of recent work, see Sue Hum and Arabella Lyon, “Recent Advances in Comparative Rhetoric,” in Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly, eds., The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009), 153–66; Jan Swearingen, “Rhetoric in Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” and Susan Romano, “Rhetoric in Latin America,” both in Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig, and John P. Jackson, eds., Handbook of Communication History (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109–21, 397–411; and LuMing Mao, ed., “Comparative Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2013).

[12] Rosteck, “A Cultural Tradition in Rhetorical Studies,” At the Intersection, 226–47.

[13] Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980): 1–16; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111. For helpful retrospectives, see McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric: A Glance at our Recent Past, Present, and Potential Future,” Review of Communication 10, no. 3 (2010): 197–210; Dana Cloud and Joshua Gunn, “W(h)ither Ideology?” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 407–20; and Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites’ Introduction to their edited Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 1–16.

[14] Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites, eds., Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).

[15] Biesecker and Lucaites,’ Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, which also reprints McGee's 1982 essay; Marita Gronnvoll, “Material Rhetorics Meet Material Feminisms,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 98–113.

[16] See Diana Coole, and Samantha Frost Bennett, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007); William E. Connolly “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium-Journal of International Studies 41, no. 3 (2013): 399–412; and the recent forum in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012), particularly Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” 95–100.

[17] George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 13, 6.

[18] Debra Hawhee, “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 81–87; Jeanne Fahnestock, “The Rhetorical Arts of Cooperation,” Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences 62, no. 1 (2013): 11–27.

[19] Meghan Morris, “On the Power of Exhilaration,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013): 449.

[20] See the special issues of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 and 2–3 (2013); Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 5 (2013); and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013); as well as Graeme Turner, What's Become of Cultural Studies? (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012).

[21] Ien Ang, “Cultural Studies Matters (Does It?): Engaging Inter/Disciplinarity,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013): 433.

[22] Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams, “Culture in the Transitions to Modernity: Seven Pillars of a New Research Agenda,” Theory and Society 40, no. 3 (2011): 247–72.

[23] Tony Bennett, “The Multiplication of Cultural Studies’ Utility,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2013): 438–41.

[24] Most recently in Stephen John Hartnett, “On Postmodern Intellectuals, Implied Obligations, and Political Constituencies,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 5 (2013): 523–8.

[25] Dow, “Feminism,” 101.

[26] See for instance Jacqueline Jones Royster Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” College Composition and Communication 47, no. 1 (February 1996): 29–40; and “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, no. 2 (2003): 148–67; and Gesa Kirsch, Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993); Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Kirsch and Liz Rohan, eds., Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).

[27] Michaela Meyer, “Women Speak(ing): Forty Years of Feminist Contributions to Rhetoric and an Agenda for Feminist Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2007): 1–17.

[28] See Daniel M. Gross's book review of recent work on the subject in Rhetorica 24 (2006), 436–40; and his “Listening Culture,” in Ivo A. Strecker and Stephen A. Tyler, eds., Culture & Rhetoric (New York: Berghahn, 2009), esp. 60–3.

[29] Tyler and Strecker, “The Rhetoric Culture Project,” in Culture & Rhetoric, 21. See in general the Project's self-description and list of published volumes on its website, http://www.rhetoricculture.org; see also Michael Carrithers, “Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 3 (2005): 577–83; and his excellent Preface and Introduction to Volume Two of the RCP series, Rhetoric, Culture, and the Vicissitudes of Life (New York: Berghahn, 2009).

[30] Carried out more fully in Meyer's excellent “Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory,” op cit.

[31] Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, Thinking Through Things, 3.

[32] See also Ingold, “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 427–42; “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials,” World 44 (2010): 1–25; and Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, Thinking Through Things, 1–10.

[33] Thanks to Brad Vivian, Devon Bouffard, and Lisa Flores for insightful comments and encouragement on drafts of this essay.