Kenneth Burke at the Moma: a viewer’s theory, co-authored with Megan Poole
When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition—important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual—photographic, even—and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed.
Keywords: museum rhetoric, visual rhetoric, Museum of Modern Art, Kenneth Burke, circulation
Bestiaries, Past and future
This afterword concludes the 2017 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly titled "A Rhetorical Bestiary." In it, I use a seventeenth century homemade bestiary as a way to reflect on the history of the genre, its limits, and its potential.
Rhetoric's Sensorium
This essay reflects on the last 100 years of sensation in the journal to figure out where and when scholars in the field have concerned themselves with sensuous activity, how that activity is seen to interact with language, knowledge, and speech. The past can serve to some extent as a “rough guide,” showing gaps and leaps as well as modeling specific approaches.
Keywords: sensorium, rhetoric, sensation, feeling, affect, emotion
Looking into Aristotle's Eyes: Towards a Theory of Rhetorical Vision
This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.
Keywords: aisthēsis, phantasia, Demosthenes, rhetorical vision, sensation, visual imagery, Aristotle, rhetoric
Case Studies in Material Rhetoric: Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Austin
This essay offers "material rhetoric" as a new addition to the usual list of categories used to describe rhetoric in the eighteenth century (neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, epistemological/psychological) by examining the material elements of treatises written by Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Austin. These material elements—namely heat, passion, and impression—are tracked through Priestly and Austin's scientific writings, thereby positioning their particular strains of material rhetoric as legacies of philosophical chemistry.
Keywords: rhetorical elocution, materials, science, literary rhetoric, rhetorical delivery, gestures, oratory, rhetorical criticism, classical rhetoric, passion, scientific discourse
Kenneth Burke’s Jungle Book
Keywords: Permanence and Change, critical animal studies, Philosophy of Literary Form, behaviorism, Kenneth Burke, Darwinism
Language as Sensuous Action: Kenneth Burke, Sir Richard Paget, and Gesture-Speech Theory
Keywords: rhetoric, performance, Kenneth Burke, gesture, Sir Richard Paget, body
Rhetoric, Bodies, and Everyday Life
Keywords: art museums, classical rhetoric, rhetoric, written composition, rhetorical argument, Aristotelian rhetoric, spoken communication, discourse, visual rhetoric, political rhetoric
Burke on Drugs
Keywords: political rhetoric, musical rhythm, gastrointestinal agents, piety, opium, permanence, crime prevention, police, fleas, poetry
Virtual Alterity and the Reformatting of Ethics
Keywords: posthumanism, information technology, ethics, innovations, virtual reality
Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists’ Three Rs
Keywords: Greek civilization, sports, rhetoric, culture
Agonism and Aretê
Keywords: olympic games, rhetorical dialogue, wrestling, classical rhetoric, Aristotelian rhetoric, conflict, political rhetoric, sophistry
Emergent Flesh: Phusiopoesis and Arts of Training
Keywords: human nature, rhetoric, ancient Greek philosophy, phusiopoiesis, philosophy, training, human body, physical fitness, sports training
Burke and Nietzsche
Keywords: Permanence and Change, Friedrich Nietzsche, metaphor, rhetoric, Kenneth Burke
Composition History and the Harbrace College Handbook
Keywords: writing teachers, literature, writing instruction, authors, textbooks, teachers, written composition, handbooks, freshman composition, manuals
BOOK CHAPTERS
Propaganda among the Ruins
From The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies
Keywords: "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle, rhetoric, "Boring from Within," propaganda, Kenneth Burke, art, socialism
Pan-historiography: The Challenges of Writing History across Time and Space
From Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric
Keywords: Ecuador, historiography, archive, animal rhetoric, rhetorical methodologies, Kenneth Burke, pan-historiography, motion
Historiography by Incongruity
Keywords: Kenneth Burke,methods and methodologies, body biography, the "Beauty Clinic," archival research
Kairotic Encounters
From Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention
Keywords: kairos, dunamis, rhetorical invention, rhetoric, subjectivity, logos, postmodernism, Gorgias
REVIEWS AND SHORT ARTICLES
Bestiaries, Past and Future
A reflection on the rhetorical work of bestiaries that concludes a special issue on animal rhetoric in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
Keywords: commonplace books, bestiaries, rhetoric, phantasia, Lady Anne Southwell, memory work
Review of Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion
Book review in Rhetorica of Vessela Valiavitcharska's Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion.
Keywords: sound, rhetoric, rhythm, persuasion
Deliberation in the Midst of Crisis
Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies article. Co-authored with Heather Adams, Jeremy Engels, Michael Faris, and Mark Hlavacik.
Keywords: outreach, crisis, crisis communication, democratic deliberation, pedagogy
Video Parlor: Action and Motion
From the Kenneth Burke Journal, a video conversation with Bryan Crable. Edited by Nathaniel Rivers and Paul Lynch.
The New Hackers: Historiography through Disconnection
Keywords: rhetoric, material rhetorics, non-western rhetoric, actor network theory, historiography
Toward a Bestial Rhetoric
Keywords: animals, zoology, treatises, dogs, analogies, language, epideictic, rhetoric, humans, Aristotelian rhetoric, deliberative rhetoric
Kenneth Burke and American Studies: A Response to Giorgio Mariani
Keywords: political rhetoric, grammar, peacetime, paradoxes, pacifism, literary rhetoric, rhetoric, American studies, classical rhetoric, world wars
The Squirm
Keywords: dramatism, identification, dramatistic pentad, hermeneutics, Kenneth Burke, pedagogy, composition studies
Somatography
Keywords: nature, disability, rhetoric, performance, rhetorical bodies, politeness
Review of Modern Occult Rhetoric by Joshua Gunn
Keywords: poetics, rhetoric, obscurity, occultism, G. I. Gurdjieff, Aleistar Crowley, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, speech and writing
Performing Ancient Rhetorics: A Symposium
Keywords: identity, symposium, ancient rhetoric, performativity
Review of The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication by Wayne Booth
Keywords: debate, history of rhetoric, Wayne Booth, argument, understanding, rhetrickery, political rhetoric
"Gymnastics"
in The Oxford Companion to the Body
"Acrobatics"
in The Oxford Companion to the Body
Toward Posthuman Rhetorics: ‘It’s the Future, Pikul.’
Keywords: posthumanism, discourse, humanism, weapons, rhetoric, machinery, subjectivity, capital, mobility, political rhetoric, computer hacking
Regarding History
Keywords: literature, anniversaries, written composition, handbooks, textbooks, history, history instruction, writing teachers