American Literature and Rhetoric


Book Description

A book that’s built for you and your students. Flexible and innovative, American Literature & Rhetoric provides everything you need to teach your course. Combining reading and writing instruction to build essential skills in its four opening chapters and a unique anthology you need to keep students engaged in Chapters 5-10, this book makes it easy to teach chronologically, thematically, or by genre.




An American Rhetoric


Book Description




Conversations in American Literature


Book Description

Teachers have struggled for years to balance the competing demands of American Literature and AP English Language. Now, the team that brought you the bestselling Language of Composition is here to help. Conversations in American Literature: Language ∙ Rhetoric ∙ Culture is a new kind of American Literature anthology—putting nonfiction on equal footing with the traditional fiction and poetry, and emphasizing the skills of rhetoric, close reading, argument, and synthesis. To spark critical thinking, the book includes TalkBack pairings and synthesis Conversations that let students explore how issues and texts from the past continue to impact the present. Whether you’re teaching AP English Language, or gearing up for Common Core, Conversations in American Literature will help you revolutionize the way American literature is taught.




American Rhetoric


Book Description

Nine fresh views of the interconnections of historical, critical, and theoretical scholarship in the field of American rhetoric. Stephen T. Olsen addresses the question of how to determine the disputed authorship of Patrick Henry’s "Liberty or Death" speech of March 23, 1775. Stephen E. Lucas analyzes the Declaration of Independence as a rhetorical action, designed for its own time, and drawing on a long tradition of English rhetoric. Carroll C. Arnold examines the "communicative qualities of constitutional discourse" as revealed in a series of constitutional debates in Pennsylvania between 1776 and 1790. James R. Andrews traces the early days of political pamphleteering in the new American nation. Martin J. Medhurst discusses the generic and political exigencies that shaped the official prayer at Lyndon B. Johnson’s inauguration. In "Rhetoric as a Way of Being," Benson acknowledges the importance of everyday and transient rhetoric as an enactment of being and becoming. Gerard A. Hauser traces the Carter Administration’s attempt to manage public opinion during the Iranian hostage crisis. Richard B. Gregg ends the book by looking for "conceptual-metaphorical" patterns that may be emerging in political rhetoric in the 1980s.




Native American Rhetoric


Book Description

Native American Rhetoric is the first book to explore rhetorical traditions from within individual Native communities and Native languages. The essays set a new standard for how rhetoric is talked about, written about, and taught. The contributors argue that Native rhetorical practices have their own interior logic, which is grounded in the morality and religion of their given traditions. Once we understand the ways in which Native rhetorical practices are rooted in culture and tradition, the phenomenological expression of the speech patterns becomes clear. The value of Native communities and their languages is underlined throughout the essays. Lawrence W. Gross and the contributors successfully represent several, but not all, Native communities across the United States and Mexico, including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Choctaw, Nahua, Chickasaw and Chicana, Tohono O’odham, Navajo, Apache, Hupa, Lower Coast Salish, Koyukon, Tlingit, and Nez Perce. Native American Rhetoric will be an essential resource for continued discussions of Native American rhetorical practices in and beyond the discipline of rhetoric.




Sporting with the Gods


Book Description

"Sporting with the Gods examines the rhetoric of "game" and "play" and "sport" in American culture from the time of the Puritans to the 1980s. Focusing on writers and public figures who dominated public discourse, Oriard shows how the trope of game and play in fiction and in religious, social, and economic writings can be used to graph changes in the religious and social climate from the Puritans through the Transcendentalists to the Social Darwinists and from the Beats and hippies to the New Age spiritualists of the present decade. He also uses the trope to graph the shifting attitudes toward work (and play) in the game of business, as the United States moved to industrial capitalism and then to a postindustrial society of consumerism and leisure. The result is a history of this country from its inception, through the lens of a single trope, resonating with implications at every strata of American culture." --from back cover.




Representations


Book Description

Asian American rhetorics, produced through cultural contact between Asian traditions and US English, also comprise a dynamic influence on the cultural conditions and practices within which they move. Though always interesting to linguists and "contact language" scholars, in an increasingly globalized era, these subjects are of interest to scholars in a widening range of disciplines—especially those in rhetoric and writing studies. Mao, Young, and their contributors propose that Asian American discourse should be seen as a spacious form, one that deliberately and selectively incorporates Asian “foreign-ness” into the English of Asian Americans. These authors offer the concept of a dynamic “togetherness-in-difference” as a way to theorize the contact and mutual influence. Chapters here explore a rich diversity of histories, theories, literary texts, and rhetorical practices. Collectively, they move the scholarly discussion toward a more nuanced, better balanced, critically informed representation of the forms of Asian American rhetorics and the cultural work that they do.




The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric


Book Description

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.




Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature and Film


Book Description

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, the American Dream's seeming to suggest, falsely, that those who succeed economically are "winners," while the rest of us are "losers," puts it in dire conflict with our traditions of democracy and egalitarianism. In Bonfires of the American Dream, through close cultural studies of classic novels and films - Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street - Daniel Shaviro helps to provide a better understanding of what went wrong culturally in America.




Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900


Book Description

The first published edition of a previously circulated via microfilm and Xerox) campus classic, Kitzhaber's (English emeritus, U. of Oregon) 1953 dissertation, which identifies the murky origins of the freshman English course back in the 19th century, and traces the development of a distinctly American body of rhetorical theory--its sources, its rise, and its decline into a barren set of injunctions for linguistic etiquette (correct usage). Paper edition (unseen), $10.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR