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This book looks at the representation of viruses in rhetoric, politics, and popular culture. In utilizing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of virality, it examines what it means to use viruses as a metaphor. For instance, what is the effect of saying that a video has gone viral? Does this use of biology to explain culture mean that our societies are determined by biological forces? Moreover, does the rhetoric of viral culture display a fundamental insensitivity towards people who are actually suffering from viruses? A key defining aspect of this mode of persuasion is the notion that due to the open nature of our social and cerebral networks, we are prone to being infected by uncontrollable external forces. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Laclau, Baudrillard, and Zizek, it examines the representation of viruses in politics, psychology, media studies, and medical discourse. The book will help readers understand the potentially destructive nature of how viruses are represented in popular media and politics, how this can contribute to conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and how to combat such misinterpretations.
Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts. In doing so, they demonstrate how experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging, scientific research, news articles and advertising. Through a series of case studies of Covid-related texts, the authors consider aspects of language instruction, information and innovation, showcasing the breadth of topics that can be studied as part of health communication. Furthermore, each case study provides practical guidance on how to carry out investigations using social media texts, how to analyse metaphor, how to track language innovation and how to work with text and images. Viral Language is critical reading for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students of applied linguistics and health communication.
Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.
Readings in Rhetorical Fieldwork compiles foundational articles highlighting the development of fieldwork in rhetorical criticism. Presenting a wide variety of approaches, the volume begins with a section establishing the starting points for the development of fieldwork in rhetorical criticism and then examines five topics: Space & Place; Public Memory; Publics and Counterpublics; Advocacy and Activism; and Science, Technology, and Medicine. Within these sections, readers evaluate a full spectrum of methods, from interviews, to oral histories, to participant observation. This volume is invaluable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of rhetorical criticism, rhetorical fieldwork, and qualitative methods looking for a comprehensive overview of the development of rhetorical fieldwork.
Moving beyond ecocomposition, this book galvanizes conversations in ecology and writing not with an eye toward homogenization, but with an agenda of firmly establishing the significance of writing research that intersects with ecology. It looks to establish ecological writing studies not just as a legitimate or important form of writing research, but as paramount to the future of writing studies and writing theory. Complex ecologies, writing studies, and new-media/post-media converge to highlight network theories, systems theories, and posthumanist theories as central in the shaping of writing theory, and this study embraces work in these areas as essential to the development of ecological theories of writing. Contributors address ecological theories of writing by way of diverse and promising avenues, united by the underlying commitment to better understand how ecological methodologies might help better inform our understanding of writing and might provoke new theories of writing. Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media fuels future theoretical conversations about ecology and writing and will be of interest to those who are interested in theories of writing and the function of writing.
The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field. The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality. More important, chapters also attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory has to work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists, inside and outside the academy. The first book of its kind, the handbook traces and documents the emergence of this subfield within rhetorical studies while also pointing the way toward new lines of inquiry, new trajectories in scholarship, and new modalities and methods of analysis, critique, intervention, and speculation. This handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students studying rhetoric, communication, cultural studies, and queer studies.
Outbreak narratives have proliferated for the past quarter century, and now they have reached epidemic proportions. From 28 Days Later to 24 to The Walking Dead, movies, TV shows, and books are filled with zombie viruses, bioengineered plagues, and disease-ravaged bands of survivors. Even news reports indulge in thrilling scenarios about potential global pandemics like SARS and Ebola. Why have outbreak narratives infected our public discourse, and how have they affected the way Americans view the world? In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions. Looking at everything from I Am Legend to The X Files to World War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others. Going Viral thus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it. Supplemental Study Materials for "Going Viral": https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzer Dahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow
The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda unpacks the ever-present and exciting topic of propaganda to explain how it invades the human psyche, in what ways it does so, and in what contexts. As a beguiling tool of political persuasion in times of war, peace, and uncertainty, propaganda incites people to take, often violent, action, consciously or unconsciously. This pervasive influence is particularly prevalent in world politics and international relations today. In this interdisciplinary Handbook, the editors have gathered together a group of world-class scholars from Europe, America, Asia, and the Middle East, to discuss leadership propaganda, war propaganda, propaganda for peace marketing, propaganda as a psychological tool, terror-enhanced propaganda, and the contemporary topics of internet-mediated propaganda. Unlike previous publications on the subject, this book brings to the forefront current manifestations and processes of propaganda such as Islamist, and Far Right propaganda, from interdisciplinary perspectives. In its four parts, the Handbook offers researchers and academics of propaganda studies, peace and conflict studies, media and communication studies, political science and governance marketing, as well as intelligence and law enforcement communities, a comprehensive overview of the tools and context of the development and evolution of propaganda from the twentieth century to the present: Part One: Concepts, Precepts and Techniques in Propaganda Research Part Two: Methodological Approaches in Propaganda Research Part Three: Tools and Techniques in Counter-Propaganda Research Part Four: Propaganda in Context
What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of “unruliness” in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical, political, and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression – embodied, print, digital, and sonic – Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness, more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity, is constitutive of the political itself.
This 2005 book examines the formation of scientific knowledge about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and shows the broader cultural assumptions which grounded this knowledge. Alex Preda highlights the metaphors, narratives, and classifications which framed scientific hypotheses about the nature of the infectious agent and its transmission ways and compares these arguments with those used in the scientific knowledge about SARS. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of biomedical publications, the author shows how knowledge about epidemics is shaped by cultural narratives and categories of social thought. Preda situates his analysis in the broader frame of the world risk society, where scientific knowledge is called upon to support and shape public policies about prevention and health maintenance, among others. But can these policies avoid the influence of cultural narratives and of social classifications? The book shows how culture matters for prevention and health policies, as well as with respect to how scientific research is organized and funded.