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A Rhetorical View of Captioning

Sean Zdenek

in Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture

This chapter introduces the book’s argument in terms of seven transformations of meaning that closed captioning enables: captions contextualize, clarify, formalize, equalize, linearize, time-shift, ... More

This chapter introduces the book’s argument in terms of seven transformations of meaning that closed captioning enables: captions contextualize, clarify, formalize, equalize, linearize, time-shift, and distill. In the context of accessible media, these seven interlocking transformations provide a way of accounting for the differences between sound and writing, listening and reading. The chapter also offers a critique of ableism in scholarship on multimodal composition and digital rhetorics, a brief history of closed captioning, and an overview of rhetorical analysis as the book’s primary method of analysis.Less

A Working Rhetorical World: Job’s Self-Witness in Chapters 29–31

Carol A. Newsom

in The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations

This chapter presents a rhetorical analysis of chapters 29–31, beginning with a look at Job’s self-presentation. Here in chapters 29–31, more than in any other rendering of Job in the book, he is ... More

This chapter presents a rhetorical analysis of chapters 29–31, beginning with a look at Job’s self-presentation. Here in chapters 29–31, more than in any other rendering of Job in the book, he is allowed to represent himself in terms of a highly specific social identity. Although calling Job the “richest man in the East” in the prose tale (1:3) has a certain function in terms of the dramatic action, it finally plays little role in the construction of value and character. As befits a didactic tale, the character transcends his particular description and functions as something of a universal or generic human. Similarly, although critics have analyzed various clues that suggest the social location and presuppositions of the wisdom dialogue, the dialogue itself makes little attempt to highlight these elements but rather seems to be unconscious of them. It scarcely tries to describe Job’s suffering in terms of his social identity. In this regard chapters 29–31 are radically different, for they articulate Job’s testimony precisely by constructing a social portrait. They represent the issues of moral concern in Job’s suffering as capable of examination only in relation to a lived social reality.Less

William as Exegete

Timothy Bellamah, O.P.

in The Biblical Interpretation of William of Alton

Chapter 3 considers William’s exegesis. Thirteenth-century biblical interpretation was marked by an increasing interest in the literal sense and a progressive tendency to identify it with the ... More

Chapter 3 considers William’s exegesis. Thirteenth-century biblical interpretation was marked by an increasing interest in the literal sense and a progressive tendency to identify it with the author’s intention. William designates this sense as the intention of the divine author, which he in turn identifies with that of the human author. Even by the norms of his period, he is particularly keen to grasp it. For doing so, he uses several procedures for textual, linguistic, and rhetorical analysis and also considers the individual verse’s context within its passage, its chapter, its book, and the Bible as a whole. Spiritual interpretation is also integral to his exegetical project. His allegorical and tropological expositions are particularly revealing of his purpose of preparing students for preaching. All of this is consistent with his view of biblical history as a continuing reality encompassing even the present.Less

Rhetoric of Motives

Christa Noel Robbins

in Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting

Chapter 3 looks at the continued significance of drawing in late-Modernist painting, analyzing Helen Frankenthaler’s analytic experiments in drawing, which she exploited as both a gestural and ... More

Chapter 3 looks at the continued significance of drawing in late-Modernist painting, analyzing Helen Frankenthaler’s analytic experiments in drawing, which she exploited as both a gestural and symbolic device. Frankenthaler, who is repeatedly discussed as the “bridge” that allowed younger artists to move beyond Abstract Expressionism, was a canny student of that school and its techniques. I show that through her early education in Modernist idioms, as well as her training in rhetorical analysis, Frankenthaler pursued a mode of painting that was an explicit exploration of what her one-time professor Kenneth Burke termed the “rhetoric of motives.” Most often discussed in the context of her “discovery” of stain painting, a technique that is celebrated for its removal of expressive authorship, I show that Frankenthaler’s work is better understood for its investigations into the viability of both gesture and symbolic representation as carriers of Modernist pictorial meaning. The paintings Frankenthaler produced in the 1950s and 1960s are best understood as critical analyses of the limits of expressive content in the wake of Abstract Expressionism’s institutional success.Less

. Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans

George A. Kennedy

in New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism

This chapter starts by looking at 1 Thessalonians from the New Testament of the Bible. Historians believe that Paul the Apostle wrote this letter from Corinth. The book consists of two main parts, ... More

This chapter starts by looking at 1 Thessalonians from the New Testament of the Bible. Historians believe that Paul the Apostle wrote this letter from Corinth. The book consists of two main parts, the first part contains chapters 1–3, which deal with the circumstance and general purpose of the letter and the second part contains chapters 4–5, which provide answers to specific questions. Another effective and powerful letter from Paul the Apostle is Galatians, which is the first of the New Testament books to include a rich and detailed rhetorical analysis. This chapter explores the final and longer epistle “Epistle to the Romans”, which is the sixth book of New Testament.Less

Learning to “Speak without Shame”: A Feminist Response to Gendered Violence in Priya’s Shakti

Valerie Wieskamp

in The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics

Though sexual violence is often cloaked in silence, the “Delhi bus rape” that led to the death of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey in 2012 incited an abundance of public discourse. One ... More

Though sexual violence is often cloaked in silence, the “Delhi bus rape” that led to the death of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey in 2012 incited an abundance of public discourse. One response was Priya’s Shakti, a comic created by Indian American documentarian Ram Devineni and a transnational team of producers and gender-based violence experts to expose and address gender discrimination and violence. Through a rhetorical analysis of Priya’s Shakti, contributor Valerie Wieskamp argues that the comic book models important feminist and postcolonial interventions in rape culture. Even as the international public depicts sexual violence as a consequence of Indian culture, the comic reverses the neocolonial tendency to privilege Western-centered responses by showcasing elements of Indian heritage as a solution to rape culture. Further, Priya’s Shakti begins to address publics excluded from international and Indian discourses by representing rural, lower class, and disadvantaged women.Less

Introduction to Studies in Romanticism (1979)

Martin McQuillan

in The Paul De Man Notebooks

In this introduction to Studies in Romanticism (1979), Paul de Man talks about the papers that make up the journal. According to de Man, the essays collected in Studies in Romanticism come as close ... More

In this introduction to Studies in Romanticism (1979), Paul de Man talks about the papers that make up the journal. According to de Man, the essays collected in Studies in Romanticism come as close as one can come to the format of what is referred to, in Germany, as an Arbeitsgruppe, an ongoing seminar oriented toward open research rather than directed by a single authoritative voice. Some of the papers originated in a year-long seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities conducted at Yale during the academic year of 1977–1978. It was entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Romanticism’. In these papers, techniques of rhetorical analysis, as opposed to thematic analysis, are used with remarkable ease. Tropes are taken apart with such casual elegance that the exegeses can traverse the entire field of tropological reversals and displacements with a virtuosity that borders on parody.Less

A Text Rhetorically Designed to Fuel Interdisciplinary Hostilities

in Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrodinger, and Wilson

A rhetorical analysis of Wilson's Consilience can offer a new way of understanding why his appeal for interdisciplinarity has not been as successful as he hoped it would be. It suggests that both ... More

A rhetorical analysis of Wilson's Consilience can offer a new way of understanding why his appeal for interdisciplinarity has not been as successful as he hoped it would be. It suggests that both opponents and supporters are right to a certain degree. This chapter argues that several rhetorical choices made by Wilson negatively influenced the outcome of his appeal for interdisciplinarity. First, Wilson's failure to inspire those who were not already in his camp was largely due to the fact that he employed rhetoric of conquest. Second, Wilson lost many of his readers because of the particular theory he chose to promote in his interdisciplinary appeal. Third, Wilson employed a form of polysemy that did more to damage his own ethos than to smooth tensions between disciplines. Even the biggest supporters of Wilson recognized his rhetorical error in treating the social sciences and the humanities as territories to be conquered, or entities to be cannibalized, by the intellectually superior culture of science.Less

Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity

in The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science

This chapter primarily deals with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’’ wherein passions are constituted as differences in power, and conditioned not by their ... More

This chapter primarily deals with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’’ wherein passions are constituted as differences in power, and conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity. Though the conclusions reached by Aristotle or Hobbes may be rejected, their rhetorical analysis of emotion allows the researchers to address important questions neutralized in the Cartesian paradigm. Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body and subject to the self-evidence of a descriptive science. According to Descartes, what we know is best established through introspection, and so is what we feel. Everyone has experience of the passions “within himself,’’ and therefore it is unnecessary to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover passion's nature.Less

Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right

Lee Bebout

in News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures

This chapter analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized victimhood” and its crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense of loss ... More

This chapter analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized victimhood” and its crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense of loss of power and esteem among social groups facing challenges to their traditionally privileged status positions. This expression of grievance takes on a hyperbolic form through assertions that groups such as whites, men, and Christians face great social oppression. These groups are portrayed as victims of such projected threats as a “War on Christmas” and “feminazi” activists. Such victimization narratives circulate across various types of conservative news and right-wing media—from Fox News to alt-right and men’s rights websites. A common rhetoric of victimization cultivates a shared affective sensibility among groups ranging from avowed white supremacists to anti-feminists to others reacting against a perceived challenge to their social power and standing.Less

NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics

Dawn R. Gilpin

in News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures

This chapter considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA ... More

This chapter considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, this chapter employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. It finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.Less

Taking Conservative News Seriously

A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler

in News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures

This introductory chapter advocates for a newly concerted interdisciplinary research agenda focused on right-wing or conservative news. It provides a brief history of right-wing media and ... More

This introductory chapter advocates for a newly concerted interdisciplinary research agenda focused on right-wing or conservative news. It provides a brief history of right-wing media and conservative news in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. It suggests that scholars of history, rhetoric, political communication, journalism studies, and media sociology ought to converge around the study of historical and contemporary “conservative news cultures,” defined as the consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. It notes that journalism studies scholars have a unique role to play in developing the burgeoning subfield of conservative news studies, and suggests that foregrounding conservative news will contribute to long-standing themes in journalism and political communication research, including shifting conceptions of journalistic professionalism, the cultural authority and legitimacy of the press, and the history of political polarization.Less

Name That Varmint: From Gregor to Josephine

Jay Geller

in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews

This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka ... More

This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka rendered any species determination of the stories’ protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Josephine (as well as her people), indefinite and how he thereby confronted his prospective readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism. These works are then seen as interventions, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal. It situates these stories over and against historical and literary associations of Jews with vermin (Ungeziefer) and mice as well as in relation to Kafka’s own encounters with such creatures recorded in his letters and in his posthumously published story “The Burrow.” The chapter also includes a discussion of how at the opening of Maus II Art Spiegelman subverted possible essentialist identification of Jews with mice by his readers.Less

Slow Revelations: James Joyce and the Rhetorics of Reading

Joseph Brooker

in Modernism and Close Reading

This chapter examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. It examines a small number of examples of the close reading of ... More

This chapter examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. It examines a small number of examples of the close reading of Joyce’s fiction, trying to identify what happens at the level of interpretation, and also to describe what happens in the language of the critic. A premise of this discussion is that what we think of as close reading, when communicated to us, also implies a practice of writing. As Hugh Kenner, one of the readers under discussion, once remarked: ‘Criticism is nothing but explicit reading, reading articulating its themes and processes in the presence of more minds than one.’ The chapter seeks to discern how the writing of the critic, in thus making reading ‘explicit’, inflects our sense of the literary work.Less