James Wynn | Carnegie Mellon University (original) (raw)

Papers by James Wynn

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2020

propaganda to spread further. Woods and Hahner leave the reader on a cynical note: several years ... more propaganda to spread further. Woods and Hahner leave the reader on a cynical note: several years after the rise of the Alt-right, we still do not adequately understand how to alleviate these divisions or avoid external interference. In their conclusion, Woods and Hahner try to synthesize these observations and offer strategies or tactics to change our circumstances. First, political and social campaigns must incorporate memes into their strategy. Leftist institutional actors are still ill-equipped to grasp and incorporate memes rhetorically. Memes remain suasory, and the left must adapt to these rhetorical tactics to eschew their humorless ethos. Additionally, scholars must analyze networked publics and demystify the rhetorical nature of memetic discourse, especially in disassembling Alt-right structures. On a broader scale, Woods and Hahner implore educators to emphasize media literacy, allowing social media users to discern disinformation more effectively. Policy changes could limit malicious content online, further curtailing Alt-right circulation. Finally, the authors proffer journalistic guidelines to educate the public about these messages without amplification. The reader must test these strategies and enter these networked cultures to engender a cultural shift to preserve democracy. Make America Meme Again serves as a necessary investigation of memetic discourse and the rhetorics of the Alt-right. We are ill-equipped to engage in effective democratic deliberation with the Alt-right. Memes are not trivial—their banality is the foundation to their success. Woods and Hahner never allow the reader to feel as if memetic discourse is a distraction to politics. The book has an undercurrent of urgency that compels the reader to act. Woods and Hahner are committed to meme literacy, as they offer free teaching resources and workshops at makeamericameme.com. With these tools in hand, Make America Meme Again is designed for a wide variety of audiences. Memetic discourse and Alt-right rhetoric are genres worthy of continued scholarly pursuit, especially by scholars of political, visual, and digital rhetorics. Most importantly, since Alt-right rhetorics affect everyone, Make America Meme Again is accessible to public audiences interested in political and digital discourse. In an educational setting, this book is a great fit for upper-division undergraduate classes, as well as graduate seminars. Future analyses might extend the conversation by investigating whether these discourses have adapted since 2016. It would also be worth exploring if similar strategies are prevalent in other democratic countries. For now, Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie A. Hahner offer a foundational introduction that will remain indispensable for years to come.

Arguing with Numbers, 2021

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2014

By emphasizing these three themes, Watts gives distinct cultural interpretations and social actio... more By emphasizing these three themes, Watts gives distinct cultural interpretations and social actions that spawned from the unfolding of the New Negro. His work clearly conveys the rhetorical use each would have in challenging old pieties and calling forth new habits. In this text, Watts emphasizes the necessity of the New Negro’s rhetorical voice to articulate “new forms of aesthetic and artistic practices” (100). From this we learn that these were not monolithic expressions, but distinct styles that would encourage “insubordination” and embolden dissenters (196). Yet they were needed to “breathe life into human action and thought” to construct an image of someone with power, purpose, and value (196). Rhetorically, Hearing the Hurt gathers the varied threads from this cultural tapestry and shows how they are woven together. It is clear that Watts wants the reader to understand the rhetorical use of symbols through artistic means and aesthetic experiences to create shared meanings. This cultural movement sprang from the hope of constructing new identities, attitudes, and actions. Watts reveals that the New Negro rhetoric would call forth contrasting visions to ultimately promote a cultural revolution. As Hearing the Hurt acknowledges, no one voice could articulate the essence of the New Negro; instead a chorus of youthful and stately, iconoclastic and traditionalist, artist and writers would prepare the path to sing the praises of America’s newest citizen. Watts has written a book essential to appreciating the complexities of articulating voice in the Harlem Renaissance and understanding the rhetorical role it played in crafting a new image and constructing a new story.

Written Communication, 2007

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a... more From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel’s arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several tactics for rhetorical analysis including historical, textual, and audience analyses. These analyses suggest that Mendel’s argument resembles 20th century biological arguments in its use of mathematical principles and formulae to both inform the design of experiments and support the law-like regularity of conclusions. These procedures, however, were not regarded by his audience of hybridists, botanists, cytologists, and naturalists as sufficiently persuasive or necessarily even legitimate. I will argue that had he taken a more rhetorical tact and considered the position of his audience on the legitimacy of the scope of his conclusions, his met...

Rhetorica, 2009

Historians of science resist recognizing a role for mathematics in The Origin of Species on the g... more Historians of science resist recognizing a role for mathematics in The Origin of Species on the grounds that Darwin's arguments are inductive and mathematics is deductive, while rhetoricians seem to oppose the idea that deductive mathematical arguments fall within the jurisdiction of rhetorical analysis. A close textual analysis of the arguments in The Origin and a careful examination of the methodological/philosophical context in which Darwin is doing science, however, challenges these objections against and assumptions about the role of mathematical warrants in Darwin's arguments and their importance to his rhetorical efforts in the text.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2008

Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross’s The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour undertakes an ambitious q... more Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross’s The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour undertakes an ambitious qualitative exploration of scientific communication and argument from the earliest days of the scientific journal in the seventeenth-century to recent developments in twenty-first-century science. Intended as an introduction for the non-specialist to the copia of scientific literature, the book includes short excerpts from over one hundred scientific texts with commentaries. The excerpts cover scientific writings from journals, papers, and books in German, French, and English. The commentaries explore a range of issues including, but not limited to, the role of rhetorical strategies in science, the importance of visuals in science, and the varieties of scientific communication. The focus of this text on particular linguistic, stylistic, and argumentative features of individual examples makes it complementary to and different from the earlier work of Gross, Harmon, and Reidy in Communicating Science, which offers a general description of the variation in scientific communication by statistically analyzing style, presentation, and argument in hundreds of texts across the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-centuries (Gross, Harmon, and Reidy 10–11). In the first four chapters of the book, the authors survey classic scientific texts from the seventeenthto the nineteenth-century. The first two chapters examine the dawn of scientific journal writing in France and England illuminating the eclecticism and creativity of early scientific writing ranging from Robert Hooke’s magnificent drawings and verbal descriptions of the microscopic world in Micrographia to Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertius’s dramatic account of his reindeer expedition up mount Avasaxa in Lapland on his quest to measure the girth of the globe. Chapter three focuses on the specialization and internationalization of science. The authors’ exploration of specialized science provides a glimpse of the range of genres developed including eighteenth-century garden journals for knowledgeable but non-professional gardeners and nineteenth-century satirical polemics delivered in professional journals. Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 38, No. 2, April 2008, pp. 234–237

Isis, 2007

... '. Page 26. The Case for the Rhetorical Analysis of Science Science Itself: The Seco... more ... '. Page 26. The Case for the Rhetorical Analysis of Science Science Itself: The Second Generation In 1997, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar's long essay "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science" appeared in my and William M. Keith's collection Rhetori-cal Hermeneutics. ...

Authors: Carolyn R. Miller North Carolina State University, Raleigh emerita Lynda Walsh Universit... more Authors:
Carolyn R. Miller
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
emerita
Lynda Walsh
University of Nevada, Reno
James Wynn
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
Ashley Rose Kelly
University of Waterloo, Ontario
Kenneth C. Walker
University of Arizona, Tucson
William J. White
Pennsylvania State University, Altoona
Emily Winderman
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Contributing Authors:
Contributing Authors:
Oren Abeles, Nathan H. Bedsole, Maryn Belling, Matthew P.
Brigham, Danny Card, Danielle DeVasto, Jean Goodwin, S.
Scott Graham, Chris Ingraham, Molly Hartzog, Chad Iwertz,
Meredith Johnson, Nathan Johnson, Sean Kamperman, Molly
Kessler, Candice Lanius, Zoltan Majdik, Jennifer Malkowski,
Sara Parks, Alex C. Parrish, Pamela Pietrucci, Aimée Kendall
Roundtree, Dawn Shepherd, Karen Taylor, Bonnie Tucker, Ron
Von Burg, Greg Wilson

Poroi 12,1 (May 2016)

Keywords: rhetorical agency, rhetoric of science, science
communication, automation, biopolitics, publics theory, risk
Abstract:
This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four topoi that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned topos: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their topos. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.