Animal Rhetorics Workshop at RSA 2017 (original) (raw)

Review: Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2018

Diane Keeling, Nathan Stormer, and Jason Kalin reviewers: In Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Hawhee extends and synthesizes many of her signature concerns into a novel reading of rhetorical history from Aristotle to Erasmus. She models her pan-historiographic method, which she has previously elaborated on (Hawhee & Olsen), to study how sensation organizes rhetoric not only as a bodily art, but also as a theory of feeling with much to say about nonrational forms of interaction. Delicately, with inspiring ease, she traces the way in which animals, indeed animality, subtend rhetorical theories of perception and affect from Aristotle forward.

Can You Hear Me (Yet)?-Rhetorical Horses, Trans-species Communication, and Interpersonal Attunement

The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves, 2022

Despite ongoing interdisciplinary calls to level the playing field toward a more symmetrical view of human-nonhuman animal relationships, frameworks and formats that serve to border human and animal lifeworlds into separate categories of experience and study continue to stymie such efforts. This interdisciplinary essay focuses on several aspects of language and communication concerning horse-human interactions. These include the limits and possibilities of the theory and methods through which scholars frame and describe such communication, and the means by which horses attempt to communicate rhetorically with humans. I review recent applied ethology studies concerning equine communicative abilities, and relationships. Then, using models and theory from the fields of communication studies and psychology, I consider the implications of these findings for interspecies power dynamics, specifically in instances where humans do not allow for the types of communication and levels of interpersonal attunement of which horses are capable. Pulling from interdisciplinary theory and method, this case study introduces a model for “trans-species communication” that provides a means for studying and speaking about human-equine relationships.

Feral Rhetoric: Common Sense Animals and Metaphorical Beasts

Rhetoric Society Quarterly , 2017

The humanist tradition of rhetoric has historically emphasized differences rather than similarities between humans and nonhuman animals. Attending to similarities between humans and other species is considered anthropomorphic; however, avoiding similarities is anthropocentric. Using case studies of feral children, this essay attends to the way similarities may be constituted across differences, particularly in cases where wolves domesticate human children. Domestication is the constitution of common sense. Aristotle theorizes common sense as an interspecies capacity, while Cicero contends it is innately human. The humanist tradition has favored Cicero’s rendering. This essay works through the consequences of this adoption and concludes by speculating on Aristotle’s notion of common sense as zoomorphism, a form of animal troping.

Cultivating Rhetorics: Exploring and Exploiting the Emergent Boundaries of Nature and Culture

ETD Collection for Purdue University, 2009

Working to extend the realm of rhetoric by incorporating cognitive science, biology, and anthropology, this dissertation argues for a revised definition of rhetoric as the cultivation of human nature. It takes rhetoric to be the means of social, biological, and environmental persuasion by which we cobble together both ourselves as a species and the places we inhabit. What we know as “human nature” continually emerges by virtue of rhetorical cultivation within social, biological, and environmental dramas. As long as theorizers, teachers, and practitioners of rhetoric (in all its disciplinary manifestations) hold “nature” (in all of its social, biological, and environmental complexity) to be stable and/or a priori, as well as distinct and thus cut-off from rhetorical agency, they will continue to reinscribe the weak defense of rhetoric (as described by Richard Lanham) and the Platonism upon which it is predicated. It is for two reasons, the hope of sustainable human practices and the institutional credit needed to promote them, that rhetoric must respond, fully armed, to disciplinary challenges. Lanham’s strong defense of rhetoric, wedded to a model of human physiology espoused by recent cognitive scientists provides just such fully armed arguments. As humans live on the strength of their relationships, so too must the field of rhetoric.