This article investigates how the public circulation of hype functions rhetorically in the context of emerging immersive technologies. Through an analysis of YouTube reviews of Apple's Vision Pro headset, we examine how rhetorical strategies operate at the intersection of wearable and embodied technology discourse, affect theory, and public circulation. The analysis focuses on four dominant rhetorical strategies that function to intensify anticipation while simultaneously constraining critical evaluation: excitement, exploration, exemplification, and exaggeration. These findings are supplemented with extended-use experiences from multiple sources, illustrating the tension between anticipatory rhetoric and lived experience. By theorizing the embodied and affective dimensions of VR discourse, this article contributes to our understanding of how rhetorical practices in digital environments reshape critical evaluation about technologies.
This essay theorizes venatic taste as a mode of rhetorical invention: phronesis exercised as perceptual acuity, situated judgment, and ecological responsiveness. Modern Industrial Agriculture preempts three topoi - place, edibility, and quantity - that any food system must address, foreclosing the situated judgments such questions invite. Against this molar foreclosure, we trace a genealogy of foraging molecularity through Epicurus, Cicero, Erasmus, and Carolyn Miller, illuminating taste as moderating, reflexive, discerning, and provisional. Alexis Nikole Nelson's "Black Forager" videos enact the phronimos/taster in (urban/civic) practice, weaving situated discovery, Black foodway reclamation, and phronetic restraint into a repeatable public pedagogy. This molecular disposition is what we call venatic taste.
In this essay, we critique the exceptionalist notion of European rhetoric and politics as egalitarian and unpolarized, particularly when it serves as an argument against US-based scholarship for being too activist and partisan. Using contributions from prominent rhetoricians in Scandinavia about the difference between doing rhetorical scholarship in this region and in the United States (Bj & oslash;rkdahl; Kjeldsen) as examples, we show how rhetorical regionalism risks attributing problems bound up in a geopolitical context, such as racism and colonialism, to a different region, thus blinding the "European" scholar to important struggles. We suggest combining regional rhetorics (Rice) with the field of critical geography can serve as a critical bulwark against Nordic and/or European exceptionalism in rhetorical thinking. A critical rhetorical geography approach enables scholars to shift perspectives and see similarities in oppressive rhetoric as it guards and bolsters territorial borders.
This article analyzes several longform articles by science journalist and former Atlantic contributor Ed Yong, published between March 2020 and June 2023, that examine the unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the rhetorical strategies in Yong's reporting offers an important case study in how journalism can represent the concerns of marginalized publics to a national audience. Yong's use of epideictic and metanoia in the context of longform journalism illustrates that these rhetorical strategies can attune audiences to temporal and affective experiences of the pandemic that need to be represented in articulations of public memory, and in current and future policy decisions. A close reading of Yong's pandemic reporting can extend rhetorical scholarship's understanding of how epideictic, long recognized as central to articulations of public memory, can take up Bjork's call to "imagine just temporalities" and challenge flattening historical narratives.
Contemporary right-wing populist discourse is often compared to trolling. This essay examines this comparison to determine precisely what resonates between these modes of discourse. Through investigation focused on notorious internet troll weev and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, I conclude that both rely on a similar "sincerity trap" on which targets must either push back or downplay provocations, with both choices serving the troll's agenda. The concluding section speculates on the implications of this rhetorical strategy for critics and potential methods to disrupt it.
In the first half of the twentieth century, modern architects and their antecedents enjoyed an elevated role in public discourse. The assertive yet visionary voices of figures like Marion Mahony Griffin, Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright revealed their ideas about the places they would imagine and others would inhabit. These architects were forceful persuaders who argued their designs would solve a range of social problems, and their rhetoric reveals an idealism that reaches beyond esthetic or structural concerns. While the look of mid-century modern is currently enjoying a popular revival, the discourse that accompanied the designs also had a permanent impact. This study examines the rhetorical tropes produced by architects to create the incongruous sense of space that legitimizes modernism.
Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005) frequently advocated for deliberative approaches to rhetoric that valorized listening, assent, and the pursuit of common ground. But toward the end of his life, Booth wrote five essays that recommended fellow progressive members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) pursue disagreements with the orthodox, not by deliberation, but by emphasizing their differences through dissent. This article documents those progressive Mormon essays and suggests they offer a rare glimpse at how Booth provided for the limitations of deliberative rhetoric. Moreover, then considering his personal journal entries about his faith, I show that Booth's dissent also offers insights about the politics of emergent ground. Ultimately, then, Booth's liberal Mormon dissent offers a look at the rhetorical options afforded to progressives mired within a conservative religious tradition, but also a primer on the limits of common ground and the affordances of emergent ground, generally.
This essay theorizes asexual rhetorics as archival traces of desire ateleologically oriented to expansive entanglements that do not build primarily toward sexual ends. We advance a methodology of reading for such asexual rhetorics through analysis of the archives of one of the most impactful environmental rhetors of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson. Specifically, we analyze her romantic correspondence with another (presumably cisgender) White woman, Dorothy Freeman, alongside Carson's published writing, with attention to asexual rhetorics of entanglements and intervals. We argue that expansive entanglements and natural intervals are concurrent rhetorical encounters for Carson and Freeman, whose romantic relationship is defined and deepened through these ateleological rhythms. This argument holds implications not only for studies of Carson, but also for asexual, queer, and archival rhetorics more broadly. We offer a methodological approach to reading for asexual rhetorics in the archives of any figure whose life and work resonate with expansively desirous asexual potential.
Rhetoricians of public memory are interested in materiality. Simultaneously, they seek to recover, promote, and commemorate historically marginalized populations. These twin objectives create a paradoxical challenge: How does one study public memory in contexts where material manifestations are limited or lost to history? What of peoples and cultures whose histories of erasure have left them with insufficient material to stock a traditional museum? I advance the term aurafact, then, to describe a specific rhetorical strategy-at least one way that marginalized communities use objects to overcome purported deficits in material culture. Where genuine, original artifacts are lacking, other objects often perform important rhetorical work by conjuring a certain commemorative aura. Attention to these aurafacts can further illuminate the various rhetorical effects of diverse kinds of museum objects.
This article analyzes rhetorical resistance in letters written by Gulag prisoners under Stalin, asking how rhetorical agency may persist under conditions designed to annihilate it. The article shows how prisoners used performative compliance and strategic omission to mask resistance and to enlarge the viable spaces of rhetorical agency. I argue these letters highlight collective resistance that counters state hegemony through the affirmation of a vernacular status quo. Turning to the wider significance of these discursive acts, I end by articulating the way the letters drew on everyday rhetorics to maintain a vision of normalcy that directly contrasts the Soviet project of the "new human," which sought to remake everyday life (byt) in ideological terms. Ultimately, I argue that, in reasserting everyday concerns, the letters enact a persistent rhetorical agency, maintaining the emergence of difference in the face of totalitarian control.
As disembodied, synthetic rhetoric increasingly supplants affective, intentional, and contingent rhetoric in circulating rhetorical capital, generating value, and distributing communicative labor, rhetorical economies are being redefined by what I call the banality of rhetoric: the normalization and invisibility of mechanized, indifferent, instrumental discourse- algorithmically optimized for velocity and virality yet stripped of accountability. I begin by examining how the operational logics of artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the intentionality and temporality of rhetorical production. I then turn to the technical dimensions of this transformation, including the datafication of affect, the exploitation and redistribution of communicative labor, and the concentration of rhetorical capital. Finally, I elaborate on what it means for rhetoric to become banal in AI-charged digital publics. Ultimately, I argue that ambient AI infrastructures do not merely mediate rhetorical circulation but actively create economies that enable already powerful actors to capitalize on banality and further extract rhetorical value.
This study examines Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's distinctive voice of judicial resistance. An examination of key touchpoints over her first year on the US Supreme Court-her confirmation hearings, her questioning at oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan, and her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, reveal how a rhetoric of progressive originalism animates her voice on the court. I argue that Justice Jackson challenges the traditional logics of conservative originalism by seizing historical interpretive ground, elevating the progressive aims of the Second Founding, and centering the ongoing struggle for race equality within the American ethos. Rhetorical analysis of this term provides key insight into Justice Jackson's effort to rework the aims of originalism, confront traditions of epistemic violence in the law, and challenge the conservative doctrine of race-neutrality.
