Rhetorical Questions
The 2nd South Carolina Conference on
Rhetorical Theory
15-17 October 2009
The University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
Working Groups
Addressing Animality
Coordinator: Christine Garlough (Wisconsin)
Christine Garlough’s interests revolve around the areas of rhetorical theory, feminist theory, and critical social theory. Most broadly, her research program explores grassroots political performances that draw from vernacular cultural traditions and make claims about issues of social justice and human rights. Within this domain, she has taken up such questions as how to theorize the concepts of recognition and acknowledgment in order to better explore their role in feminist testimony and witnessing. Her research has been published in outlets such asQuarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of American Folklore, and Women’s Studies in Communication. She recently completed a book manuscript entitled Performance, Play, and Politics: Acknowledgment and Advocacy through Grassroots Rhetoric in which she explores how South Asian American activists use performance to testify about experiences of violence, from hate crimes to sexual abuse, and enact calls for acknowledgment.
Diane Davis (Texas)
Diane Davis is Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing, English, and Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Kenneth Burke Chair of Rhetoric at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. She is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (2000), co-author ofWomen’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (with Michelle Ballif and Roxanne Mountford, 2008), and editor of both The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (2008) and Reading Ronell (2009). Her articles have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy and Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, Postmodern Culture, Rhetoric Review, and JAC. Her forthcoming book, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric & Foreign(er) Relations, focuses on the intersections of rhetoric and sociality.
Gerard Hauser (Colorado)
Gerard A. Hauser is College Professor of Distinction in Communication and a member of the participating faculty in Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is Editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric. His publications include Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, 2nd ed (2002) and Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (1999), recipient of the National Communication Association’s Hochmuth-Nichols Book Award. He is past president of the Rhetoric Society of America and recipient of its George Yoos Distinguished Service Award. He is an RSA Fellow and an NCA Distinguished Scholar. He has written on topics in the history of rhetoric, rhetoric and democracy, and vernacular rhetoric. Since publication of Vernacular Voices, he and his students have been examining vernacular exchanges as a rhetorical means by which ordinary citizens perform political relations through an ongoing negotiation over how we shall act and interact. Currently, his research focuses on vernacular means of resistance, such as disguised talk, samizdat writings, and bodily displays of non-compliance by political prisoners.
John Muckelbauer (South Carolina )
Lenore Langsdorf is the William & Galia Minor Professor of the Philosophy of Communication in the Speech Communication Department at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes and is co-editor and contributor to Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication (with Andrew Smith) and The Critical Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Contemporary Discourse (with Ian Angus). She is the editor of Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences and the SUNY Press series in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Her research uses hermeneutic phenomenology and process philosophy to analyze constitutive processes of everyday rhetorical interaction, with particular attention to sociopolitical and cultural components.
Crisis and Confidence
Coordinator: Steven Mailloux (California – Irvine)
Steven Mailloux is currently President’s Professor of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University. Previously, he taught rhetoric, critical theory, and nineteenth-century U.S. cultural studies at the University of California, Irvine . His books include Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989), Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (1998), andDisciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006).
Carole Blair ( North Carolina )
Carole Blair (B.A., M.A. Iowa. Ph.D., Penn State) is Professor of Communication Studies and Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina. She studies U.S. national commemorative places and practices, focusing especially on their advocacy of different versions of nation and citizenship. Her interests are in how national commemorative art and building changed over the course of the twentieth century, in terms of content (who or what was commemorated?), form (by what design formulae, cultural resources, institutional supports?), and contexts (political, geographic, cultural). Blair is co-editor, with Greg Dickinson and Brian L. Ott, of an anthology on rhetorics of museums and memorials, to be published by the University of Alabama Press. She, Bill Balthrop and Neil Michel have just finished a critical essay on the World War II Memorial in Washington, to be published in 2010 in Western Journal of Communication.
Stuart J. Murray (Ryerson)
Stuart J. Murray is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. (2004) in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, after which he held a 2-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work is concerned with the ways that “life” is produced as a rhetorical and political production, including the relation between biopolitics and bioethics. He has a collected volume edited with Dave Holmes, titled, Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (Ashgate Publishing, 2009). Current research includes a three year SSHRC-funded study titled, “Ethics and Mental Health Care: An Analysis of Professional Practices in Correctional Institutions,” and a book-length project on the rhetorical dimensions of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, tentatively titled, The Living From the Dead. Website: http://www.ryerson.ca/sjmurray
C. Jan Swearingen (Texas A&M)
C. Jan Swearingen is professor of English at Texas A&M University, and a Past President of the Rhetoric Society of America (1998-2000). Her work concentrates on the history and theory of rhetoric, rhetoric and religion, cross-cultural rhetorical studies, and feminist approaches to rhetoric. Her books include Rhetoric and Irony, Western Literacy and Western Lies (Oxford, 1991; Chinese translation, Jianxi, 1998) and an edition, Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village Erlbaum, 2000). An NEH Fellowship (2008-09) is funding her current book project: From Church to State: Rhetoric, Religion, and the Transformation of Liberty in Colonial Virginia, 1740-1776. With LuMing Mao, she is co-editor of a special issue of College Composition and Communication on Chinese rhetorical studies (June 2009).
Critique’s Possibility
Coordinator: Michael Leff (Memphis)
Michael Leff is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. He has held previous appointments at the University of California-Davis, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Northwestern University. His main research and teaching interests are the history of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, and argumentation. He has published widely in these areas and has been designated as a distinguished scholar by the National Communication Association and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. He is President-Elect of the Rhetoric Society of America.
Maurice Charland ( Concordia University)
Maurice Charland is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1983 and is the author of a number of oft-reprinted articles, including “Technological Nationalism” (CJPST 1986) and the award-winning “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois ” (QJS 1987). He is co-author with Michael Dorland of Law, Rhetoric, Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2002), which won the Robinson Prize for the year’s best Canadian book in Communication. He is currently formally studying music and exploring the relationship between rhetorical and musical performance.
Mindy Fenske (South Carolina)
Mindy Fenske’s scholarship explores the connections between performance, cultural, and visual rhetorical studies. Her recent book, Tattoos in American Visual Culture, pursues this interest through its analyses of how the tattooed body holds the potential for human and social agency. Closely related, her work on performance ethics and critical method has appeared in a number of leading journals, including Text and Performance Quarterly andCommunication and Critical/Cultural Studies. In 2005, Professor Fenske received the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph Award for her essay, “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance.” Currently, she is editing a collection of essays on performance criticism and working on a book that explores the representation of sports and athletes.
Kelly Pender (Virginia Tech)
Kelly Pender is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where she teaches courses in classical rhetoric, critical theory, medical rhetoric, and editing. Her work has appeared in Postmodern Culture, Composition Studies, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Her current projects include two studies, one about the debates that have surrounded the concept of techne in rhetoric and composition since the mid-twentieth century and the other about the rhetoric and genre of pathography.
In Cruelty's Name
Coordinator: Philippe-Joseph Salazar(Cape Town)
A graduate in philosophy, politics and literature from Ecole normale supérieure and the Sorbonne (Paris), where he studied under Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes and Marc Fumaroli, and had Louis Althusser as tutor, Philippe-Joseph Salazar is Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies. He is a former Director in Rhetoric and Democracy at Jacques Derrida's foundation, College international de Philosophie, Paris. He is the 2008 laureate of the Harry Oppenheimer prize, and is a visiting scholar at George Washington University (2008-2009).He is editor-in-chief of “Pouvoirs de Persuasion”, a series devoted to rhetoric and politics at France’s oldest publisher in the Social Sciences, Klincksieck (http://www.klincksieck.com/collections/pouvoirs-de-persuasion/).
Barbara A. Biesecker (Georgia)
Barbara A. Biesecker teaches and writes at the intersections of rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist theory and criticism, and cultural studies. As always, she continues to study the relation of rhetoric and social change, with particular interest now in the conditions of possibility for radical rhetorical action.
Christopher Swift (Texas A&M)
Christopher Swift earned his doctorate at Northwestern University in 2006 and has since held the position of assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. He studies the history of rhetoric with a focus on German and French theory since the nineteenth century. His current work focuses on the ethical relationship between philosophical and oratorical discourses. In his book project, Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Style of Friedrich Nietzsche, Swift maintains that Nietzsche, following Plato, pursued a philosophical orientation toward rhetoric; he sought to compose discourse that would not subjugate its auditors. Given the Romantic theory that language as such subjugates us, however, Nietzsche found himself compelled to ceaselessly expose this subjugation in order to share its power with those auditors capable of grasping it. He regarded any discourse that pretended to appeal to everyone as oratorical and reserved the name of philosophy for those discourses addressed to an audience that sought to contribute to the development of thought. Swift has also written on the responses of J. Derrida, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, and B. Pautrat to M. Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche and the dispute over student activism between T. W. Adorno and H. Marcuse.
Institutional Life
Coordinators: Thomas Rickert (Purdue)
Thomas Rickert is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Purdue University. His areas of interest include the usual suspects: histories and theories of rhetoric, critical theory, composition, cultural studies, music, and digital culture. His book, Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject, has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Recent work includes an essay on the chōra in Philosophy and Rhetoric, a chapter onkairos and place in the edited collection The Locations of Composition, and several co-authored pieces on music, new media, and Heidegger. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Ambient Rhetoric."
Ronald Greene (Minnesota)
Ronald Walter Greene is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies affiliated with Writing Studies, American Studies and French Studies at the University of Minnesota. His primary research projects include philosophical and historical studies about the material dimensions of rhetoric and ethical-political forms of rhetorical subjectivity.
Byron Hawk (George Mason)
Byron Hawk is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. His research interests are histories and theories of composition, rhetorical theory and technology, and rhetorics of popular music. He is the author of A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), which won JAC's W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2007 and received honorable mention for MLA's Mina Shaughnessy Prize in 2008.
Victor J. Vitanza (Clemson University)
Professor of English and Founding Director of the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D. Program at Clemson University in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities. … Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy and The Jean-François Lyotard Professor in the Philosophy of Media and Communication Program at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. … Editor, PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. … Sample publications: Writing Histories of Rhetoric (SIUP), and Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY P). http://people.clemson.edu/~SOPHIST/index.html
Materiality v. Language
Christine Harold (Washington)
Christine Harold is assistant professor of Communication at the University of Washington. Her work explores commercial rhetoric and consumer practices in an era of globalized Capitalism. She is currently at work on a book about the intersections between product design, mass production, and environmental sustainability tentatively titled De-signing Discourse. She is also author of OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture(University of Minnesota Press). Harold serves on the editorial boards of Quarterly Journal of Speech,Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Western Journal of Communication.
Samuel McCormick (Purdue)
Samuel McCormick is Assistant Professor of Communication at Purdue University. He is interested in communication and social theory, the rhetoric of everyday life, ideologies of the aesthetic, and the cultural history of ideas. His work has appeared in theQuarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and several edited volumes.He is currently finishing a book-length study of the rhetoric and political thought of Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard. Sam was recently awarded the Pamela J. Cooper Teaching Award, the Douglas H. Ehninger Teaching Award, and the Donald C. Bryant Rhetorical Studies Award.
Carolyn R. Miller (North Carolina State)
Carolyn R. Miller is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University. Her research interests are in digital rhetoric, rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science and technology, and genre studies. Her work has appeared in Argumentation, Argumentation & Advocacy,College English, Configurations, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, as well as in many edited volumes. She has lectured and taught in North America, Europe, and South America. She is a past president of the Rhetoric Society of America and current editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
John M. Sloop (Vanderbilt)
John M. Sloop is Professor of Communication Studies and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. He is the author and editor of several scholarly essays and books, including Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture, for which he was awarded the Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He has also been awarded the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Classroom Teaching, the Karl Wallace Award for scholarship in public address studies, and the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award. Sloop is currently outgoing editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Sloop’s work investigates cultural “discussions” about matters of public interest, such as prisoners, immigration issues, and cases of gender transgression. He is working on a project involving the intersections of transportation, communication and public regulation.
Rhetoric’s Justice, Or the Rhetorical Rule(s) of Law
Coordinator: Sarah Burgess (San Francisco)
Sarah Burgess is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Standing Before the Law: Recognition, Power, and the Limits of Identity, a project that investigates how we might perform a critique of the practices of power in and through which legal recognition takes place.
Thomas Crocker (South Carolina)
Thomas Crocker joined the USC law faculty in the fall of 2005. Professor Crocker graduated from Yale Law School, where he was Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After graduating from law school, Professor Crocker clerked for Judge Carlos F. Lucero of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to following his interest in law, he taught philosophy, graduating with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Wales (U.K.). His current research focuses on constitutional principles of free speech and equality as well as theoretical issues at the intersection of law and philosophy.
John Lucaites (Indiana)
John Louis Lucaites is professor of rhetoric and public culture in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. He is also an adjunct professor in American Studies and a member of the Honors College Faculty. His most recent work focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and contemporary visual culture, and in particular on the role that photojournalism plays as a mode of public art that functions to underwrite liberal-democratic public culture. He is the co-author (with Celeste Michelle Condit) of Crafting Equality: America’w Anglo-African Word (U. of Chicago, 1993) and (with Robert Hariman) of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (U. of Chicago, 2007), as well as several edited collections. He is the current editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2008-2010) and the senior editor for the University of Alabama’s book series on “Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique.”
James Martel (San Francisco State)
James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University. Prior to this he has taught at UC Berkeley, Amherst College and Wellesley College. He is the author of two books: Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as Radical Democrat (Columbia, 2007) and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001). He has a new book which he is preparing for publication entitled Textual Conspiracies: Retrieving Strategies for a Radical Left Politics, as well as an edited volume (co-edited with Jimmy Casas Klausen), entitled How not to be governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Post-anarchist Left, that is currently under contract with Lexington Press. His field of study includes sovereignty, the intersection between theology and politics, anarchism and the works and ideas of Walter Benjamin.
Brooke Rollins (Louisiana State)
Brooke Rollins is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University, where she teaches courses on the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, critical theory and writing. Her work has appeared in College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and The Velvet Light Trap, and she is the co-author of Present Tense: Contemporary Themes for Writers(Cengage 2010). She is currently completing a book manuscript that uses the work of Jacques Derrida to highlight the violent ethics of classical rhetoric.
Speaking of Eros
Coordinator: Chris Lundberg (North Carolina)
I am an Assistant Professor in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My work revolves around rhetorical theory, including questions of the public, trope, affect and violence, with specific attention to the constitution of evangelical Christian publics. I also maintain a substantial investment in thinking through the relationships between rhetoric, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and contemporary critical theory.
Erik Doxtader (South Carolina)
Erik Doxtader is a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina (USA) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town (ZA). Addressed to both the rhetorical theory and practice of reconciliation, much of his current work reflects on the relationship between speech, violence, and the invention of (democratic) politics. He has authored, edited, and co-edited a number of books and essays on the history and dynamics of reconciliation in South Africa, including The Provocations of Amnesty (2003), To Repair the Irreparable: Reparation and Reconstruction in South Africa (2004), and Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa – The Fundamental Documents (2007).His most recent book is entitled With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985-1995,(David Philip/Michigan State UP, 2009).
Bradford Vivian (Syracuse) bjvivian@syr.edu
Bradford Vivian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His research specialties include the study of rhetoric and subjectivity, public memory, and cultural politics. He is the author of Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation (SUNY Press, 2004). His work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, JAC, the Western Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. His forthcoming book,Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again, will be published by Pennsylvania State University Press.