The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

This book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing. In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century. This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.




Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.




Capital in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.




Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage


Book Description

Through a fusion of narrative and analysis, Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines how theater can enact critical discourse analysis, and how micro-instances of iniquitous language use have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to marginalized groups of people. Drawing from Aristophanes' rhetorical plays as a template for rhetoric in action, the author poses the stage as a rhetorical site whereby we can observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Using critical discourse analysis and Judith Butler’s theories of the performative body as a methodological and analytical lens, the book explores how a handful of American plays in the latter part of the 20th century – the works of Tony Kushner, Suzan Lori-Parks, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others – use rhetoric in order to perform and challenge marginalizing language about groups who are not offered center stage in public and political spheres. This innovative study initiates a conversation long overdue between scholars in rhetorical and performance studies; as such, it will be essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students in the areas of rhetorical studies, performance studies, theatre studies, and critical discourse analysis.




Constitutive Visions


Book Description

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.




Energy Politics


Book Description

Annotation. Energy Politics provides a broad introduction to the ways in which energy affects domestic and regional political developments.




Patients Making Meaning


Book Description

This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making. Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an existing condition or the progression of a natural process—can cause an individual to be thrust into a discourse community that was not of their own choosing. This study will interest students and scholars of health communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, women’s studies, public health, healthcare policy, philosophy of medicine, medical sociology, and medical humanities.




W.E.B. Du Bois and the Africana Rhetoric of Dealienation


Book Description

As the rich words from the African proverbs resonate into the twenty-first century regarding the importance of identity and telling the stories of people of African descent through the eyes of the people, the grand rhetorician and griot of the twentieth century Dr William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s infamous problem remains so today – “the problem of the colour-line.” After the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president of the United States; after the Civil Rights Movement; after Brown versus the Board of Education; after the students’ right to their own language; after Plessy versus Ferguson; and the murders of innocent, young African American males, including Emmett Till, Timothy Thomas, Trayvon Martin, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, people of African descent are still battling with being labelled a “problem in one’s own country” while the USA continues to strive for a post-racial era. W.E.B. Du Bois’s rhetoric and motives in general are more relevant today than ever in reassessing what he so eloquently describes and unveils through the phrase “double consciousness” in Souls of Black Folk (1903), through which he reveals the feeling of a problem. This ground-breaking volume, featuring contributions from W.E.B. Du Bois’s great-grandson, Arthur McFarlane II, among others, is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on the foundation of Du Bois’s Africana Rhetoric through the origins of Africana Studies, Pan Africanism, and Africana Critical Theory. Part II focuses on Du Bois’s rhetorical strategies and rhetorical analyses in his scholarship and life. Part III focuses on gender and sexuality in Du Bois’s selected works. This work, the first of its kind devoted exclusively to Du Bois’s rhetoric and motives—can serve as a blueprint for today as the struggle toward a post racial society continues.




China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature


Book Description

Shows how African writers grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in a multipolar world.




Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America


Book Description

This book offers new insight into the ways rhetorical educators’ religious motives influenced the shape of nineteenth-century rhetorical education and invites scholars of writing and rhetoric to consider what the study of religiously-animated pedagogies might reveal about rhetorical education itself. The author studies the rhetorical pedagogy of Austin Phelps, the prominent preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, and his theologically-motivated adaptation of rhetorical education to fit the exigencies of preachers at the first graduate seminary in the United States. In disclosing how Phelps was guided by his Christian motives, the book offers a thorough examination of how professional rhetoric was taught, learned, and practiced in nineteenth-century America. It also provides an enriched understanding of rhetorical theories and pedagogies in American seminaries, and contributes deepened awareness of the ways religious motives can function as resources that enable the reshaping of rhetorical theory and pedagogy in generative ways. Exploring the implications of Phelps’s rhetorical theory and pedagogy for future studies of religious rhetoric, histories of rhetorical education, and twenty-first century writing pedagogy,this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of rhetoric, education, American history, religious education, and writing studies.