The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm

What distinguishes the study of rhetoric from other pursuits in the liberal arts? From what realms of human existence and expression, of human history, does such study draw its defining character? What, in the end, should be the purposes of rhetorical inquiry? And amid so many competing accounts of discourse, power, and judgment in the contemporary world, how might scholars achieve these purposes through the attitudes and strategies that animate their work? Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff offers answers to these questions by introducing the central insights of one of the most innovative and prolific rhetoricians of the twentieth century, Michael C. Leff. This volume charts Leff ’s decades-long development as a scholar, revealing both the variety of topics and the approach that marked his oeuvre, as well as his long-standing critique of the disciplinary assumptions of classical, Hellenistic, renaissance, modern, and postmodern rhetoric. Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy includes a synoptic introduction to the evolution of Leff ’s thought from his time as a graduate student in the late 1960s to his death in 2010, as well as specific commentary on twenty-four of his most illuminating essays and lectures.

Strangely Rhetorical establishes the groundwork for strangeness as a lens under the broader interdisciplinary umbrella of rhetoric and composition and shares a series of rhetorical devices for practically thinking about how compositions are made unique. Jimmy Butts explores how strange, novel, weird, and interesting texts work and offers insight into how and why these forms can be invented, created, and stylized to generate the effective delivery of rhetorical messages in fun, divergent ways. Using a new theoretical framework—that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful—Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways. Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.

Rhetorical Realism responds to the surging interest in nonhumans across the humanities by exploring how realist commitments have historically accompanied understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to the present. For a discipline that often defines itself according to human speech and writing, the nonhuman turn poses a number of challenges and opportunities for rhetoric. To date, many of the responses to the nonhuman turn in rhetoric have sought to address rhetoric’s compatibility with new conceptions of materiality. In Rhetorical Realism, Scot Barnett extends this work by transforming it into a new historiographic methodology attuned to the presence and occlusion of things in rhetorical history. Through investigations of rhetoric’s place in Aristotelian metaphysics, the language invention movement of the seventeenth century, and postmodern conceptions of rhetoric as an epistemic art, Barnett’s study expands the scope of rhetorical inquiry by showing how realist ideas have worked to frame rhetoric’s scope and meanings during key moments in its history. Ultimately, Barnett argues that all versions of rhetoric depend upon some realist assumptions about the world. Rather than conceive of the nonhuman as a dramatic turning point in rhetorical theory, Rhetorical Realism encourages rhetorical theorists to turn another eye toward what rhetoricians have always done—defining and configuring rhetoric within a broader ontology of things.

In the articles collected here Nancy Struever explores the basic assumption that rhetoric is not simply a bag of persuasive tricks, but functions, necessarily, as a mode of inquiry investigating not simply the mechanics of production and reception of discourse, but the psychological factors of reason and passion engaged by the assertion, modification, and contest of beliefs and dispositions of the civil communities. The first section looks both at contemporary historians employing rhetorical constructs and tactics and at contemporary accounts of the employment of rhetorical pedagogical material and theoretical texts in medieval and Renaissance cultural practices. The second set of articles considers change and continuity in the rhetorical exploitation's of genre forms in cultural programs, focuses on the strong reorientation of Classical forms of moral inquiry, on the ingenious use of the proverb, of etymology, of the exemplum, as well as on the changes in strategies in the theater, the novel, and art criticism. The final section deals with the strong historical interconnections of rhetoric with other disciplines: the motives and investigative tactics of medicine and rhetoric in the Renaissance and Early Modernity, and the shared interests and interwoven careers of rhetoric and law.

Intended for teachers of college composition, this history of major and minor developments in the teaching of writing in twentieth-century American colleges employs a taxonomy of theories based on the three epistemological categories (objective, subjective, and transactional) dominating rhetorical theory and practice. The first section of the book provides an overview of the three theories, specifically their assumptions and rhetorics. The main chapters cover the following topics: (1) the nineteenth-century background, on the formation of the English department and the subsequent relationship of rhetoric and poetic; (2) the growth of the discipline (1900-1920), including the formation of the National Council of Teachers of English, the appearance of the major schools of rhetoric, the efficiency movement, graduate education in rhetoric, undergraduate courses and the Great War; (3) the influence of progressive education (1920-1940), including the writing program and current-traditional rhetoric, liberal culture, and expressionistic and social rhetoric; (4) the communication emphasis (1940-1960), including the communications course, the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, literature and composition, linguistics and composition, and the revival of rhetoric; and (5) the renaissance of rhetoric and major rhetorical approaches (1960-1975), including contemporary theories based on the three epistemic categories. A final chapter briefly surveys developments through 1987. (JG)