Still Life with Rhetoric
A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics
"Scholars of rhetoric and writing studies will find this collection useful, if at times bold in the claims it makes about the power of circulation."
—Rhetoric Review
While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research.
Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand.
As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric is a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing.
Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, James J. Brown Jr., Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey
