[PDF] Toward A Deweyan Theory Of Rhetoric And Affect eBook

Author : Justin Morrius Pehoski
Publisher :
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 27,48 MB
Release : 2020
Category :
ISBN :

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Rhetorical scholars are drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey to construct a pragmatist theory of rhetoric. That scholarship has primarily used Dewey’s philosophy of communication, democracy, and aesthetics to develop a distinctively Deweyan rhetorical theory. However, while these scholars have made some explicit and implicit connections between rhetoric and emotion, I argue these are not to the extent warranted by the importance Dewey gave to emotion-affect in all human affairs, especially communication and democratic life. Furthermore, in the field of rhetoric at large, there has been increasing interest in affect, partly as a return to rhetoric’s historic interest in emotion, feeling, and pathos; and partly in response to an overall “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences. I argue that Deweyan pragmatist rhetorical theory, enhanced by the theory of affect developed in my thesis, can engage productively with current affect theory in two ways. First, I use my enhanced Deweyan theory to clarify conceptual difficulties in current affect theory and to resolve a problematic dualism in one of the leading theories about affect and emotion, which has greatly influenced rhetorical studies. This dualism causes ruptures in what I argue, drawing on Dewey, are the basic continuities between the body, emotion, thought, language, social interaction, and community building that comprise rhetoric. Second, the engagement between pragmatist and affect theories in my thesis also yields better articulations of a Deweyan theory of rhetoric. In particular, there is in Dewey’s philosophy an implicit notion of affective rhetorical ecologies. This concept has also been developing in the field of rhetoric at large, and putting the two lines of scholarship together extends both. Extending a pragmatic, affective, ecological view of rhetoric has the potential to help scholars better theorize and citizens better practice rhetoric(s) that meet the demands of an increasingly complex world challenged by globalism and pluralism, as well as large-scale technological and environmental change

Author : Jaishikha Nautiyal
Publisher :
Page : 556 pages
File Size : 50,53 MB
Release : 2018
Category :
ISBN :

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My work is an exploration of quotidian rhetoric which I argue involves the examination of mundane experiential contexts of communicative exchanges among bodies and ecologies in a democracy. Instead of just focusing on language use which has traditionally been the realm of rhetoric, this study focuses on those extra-cognitive refrains, i.e. largely underexplored routines, habits, means, and bodily rhythms that affect and are affected by how we interact with the sentient processes of living. Such experiences range from but are not limited to ordinary conversations at a get together, the same old commute to work, a walk to a coffee shop, an unarticulated glance shared with a pet, a nervous darting of eyes in front of someone familiar, a punctuating nostalgic feeling about a past technology/gadget, a moment of intense attachment shared with a pet or plant or an uncertain moment shared between two strangers on a bus. The point behind quotidian rhetoric is that it champions an embodied attention to the cognitive and somatic/extra-cognitive encounters of communication in the democratic commonplace that I discuss under the respective frameworks of American pragmatist John Dewey's work on aesthetic experience and affect theory. My work provides the communicative bridge to bring the diverse disciplines of affect studies and pragmatism in conversation since both fields return to the body to build sensate theories of everyday experiences. Through the study of quotidian rhetoric, I flesh out the rhetorical implications of somatic experiences underlying aesthetics and affects.

Author : Scott Michael Welsh
Publisher :
Page : 668 pages
File Size : 36,63 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Oral communication
ISBN :

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This dissertation explores the relationship between rhetoric and democracy. More specifically, it examines the theoretical demeaning of the rhetorical pursuit of political advantage that pervades normative theories of public deliberation in democracy, including both liberal and discourse theories. The main argument of the dissertation is that such theories wrongly oppose the idea of authentically democratic speech to strategic, tactical, or rhetorical modes of address. In contrast with the aversion to rhetoric found in normative theories of public deliberation, particularly those variously inspired by John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, I advance an argument for an essential and productive relationship between rhetoric and democracy as suggested by Kenneth Burke and Michel de Certeau. Since currently marginalized citizens must, by necessity, deploy hegemonic discourses strategically in pursuit of a measure of political power or representation, theories of public deliberation in democracy that deny the general democratic legitimacy of the rhetorical pursuit of political advantage ideologically undermine democratic challengers. Instead of encouraging citizens to seriously attend to, and value, the essential democratic struggle for political advantage, prominent theories of public deliberation in democracy denigrate it. While the rhetorical pursuit of political advantage is susceptible to anti-democratic excesses, particularly of the sort that jeopardize peaceful association and truthful politics, theorists and citizens should not imagine an end to such excesses in visions of understanding or justification-oriented communication, but should look instead to effective counter-rhetorics. Peaceful association and epistemically accountable political speech should be regarded as situated, rhetorical-political achievements against the aims of the militant and the deceptive. Hence, this dissertation recommends that, rather than opposing democracy to rhetorical politics, citizens and theorists alike should recognize democracy in the broad proliferation of an effective ability, among diversely motivated people and groups, to win a share of political power rhetorically.

Author : Andrea Alden
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 46,59 MB
Release : 2019-10-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1607328933

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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

Author : Theresa Enos
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 828 pages
File Size : 41,60 MB
Release : 2013-10-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1135816069

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First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author : Scott R. Stroud
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 18,38 MB
Release : 2015-09-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0271056878

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Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Author : John Dewey
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 23,86 MB
Release : 1916
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN :

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. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

Author : Paul Jay
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 42,45 MB
Release : 1997-04-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0299154130

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From Emerson to Rorty, American criticism has grappled in one way or another with the problem of modernity—specifically, how to determine critical and cultural standards in a world where every position seems the product of an interpretation. Part intellectual history, part cultural critique, this provocative book is an effort to shake American thought out of the grip of the nineteenth century—and out of its contingency blues. Paul Jay focuses his analysis on two strands of American criticism. The first, which includes Richard Poirier and Giles Gunn, has attempted to revive what Jay insists is an anachronistic pragmatism derived from Emerson, James, and Dewey. The second, represented most forcefully by Richard Rorty, tends to reduce American criticism to a metadiscourse about the contingent grounds of knowledge. In chapters on Emerson, Whitman, Santayana, Van Wyck Brooks, Dewey, and Kenneth Burke, Jay examines the historical roots of these two positions, which he argues are marked by recurrent attempts to reconcile transcendentalism and pragmatism. A forceful rejection of both kinds of revisionism, Contingency Blues locates an alternative in the work of the “border studies” critics, those who give our interest in contingency a new, more concrete form by taking a more historical, cultural, and anthropological approach to the invention of literature, subjectivity, community, and culture in a pan-American context.

Author : Mark Lawrence McPhail
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 28,83 MB
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780791428030

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Explores relationships between classical and contemporary approaches to rhetoric and their connection to the underlying assumptions at work in Zen Buddhism.