Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, "Ulysses" has the aging hero say, "I am a part of all that I have met". To this the poet might have added: and of all that I have thought.Storytellers find their stories among the broken fragments of their lives, things they have done, seen, or heard. They also find them among the scattered figments of their minds, things that they have deduced, dreamed or imagined. Their tales are crafted of these fragments and figments, with the mix varying widel...

Best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, Bruno Latour has inspired scholarship across many disciplines. In the past few years, the fields of rhetoric and composition have witnessed an explosion of interest in Latour’s work. Editors Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers have assembled leading and emerging scholars in order to focus the debate on what Latour means for the study of persuasion and written communication.

A fascinating addition to rhetoric scholarship, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things expands the scope of rhetorical situations beyond the familiar humanist triad of speaker-audience-purpose to an inclusive study of inanimate objects.The fifteen essays in Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things persuasively overturn the stubborn assumption that objects are passive tools in the hands of objective human agents. Rhetoric has proved that forms of communication such as digital ...

In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act.Rickert develops the concept of ambience in order to engage all of the elements that c...

In this highly readable and well-arranged compilation-including his much-celebrated "The Practice of Reading Good Books" and award-winning "Playing with Bateson"-Corey Anton brings together some of his most accessible and well-received essays. The collection, in addition to advancing and integrating the fields of media ecology and general semantics, will be of great interest to people who are concerned over the changing role of reading and literacy in contemporary life. A stimulating and p...

Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology."Working out Durkheim's Aphorism," the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues-and that ...

In Dialectical Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey argues that the historical conflict between rhetoric and dialectic can be overcome in ways useful to both composition theory and the composition classroom.Historically, dialectic has taken two forms in relation to rhetoric. First, it has been the logical development of linear propositions leading to necessary conclusions, a one-dimensional form that was the counterpart of rhetorics in which philosophical, metaphysical, and scientif...

In this new edition of Foundations for Moral Relativism a distinguished moral philosopher tames a bugbear of current debate about cultural difference. J. David Velleman shows that different communities can indeed be subject to incompatible moralities, because their local mores are rationally binding. At the same time, he explains why the mores of different communities, even when incompatible, are still variations on the same moral themes. The book thus maps out a universe of many moral wor...

Humanesis critically examines central strains of posthumanism, searching out biases in the ways that human–technology coupling is explained. Specifically, it interrogates three approaches taken by posthumanist discourse: scientific, humanist, and organismic. David Cecchetto’s investigations reveal how each perspective continues to hold on to elements of the humanist tradition that it is ostensibly mobilized against. His study frontally desublimates the previously unseen presumptio...

Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or ...

This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology.

This book takes a close look at places of learning located outside of schools, yet deeply concerned with the experience of the learning self. It explores what it might mean to think of pedagogy not in relation to knowledge as a "thing made," but to knowledge in the making.