Review: Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (original) (raw)

2017, Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosophy for the rhetorical analysis of what she terms " visual things. " For scholars and students who are looking for a grounded introduction to new materialism and rhetoric, I recommend Still Life with Rhetoric. For those who are more familiar with the literature but looking for direction on what this body of thought can do for them analytically, I recommend the book highly. Gries introduces an approach and provides a nuanced example of its application that will appeal to many. One may or may not embrace all of what Gries suggests, but regardless she provides a valuable set of principles and practices that may help others focus their own projects. The last several years have witnessed an eruption of scholarship within rhetoric informed by the overlapping literatures of actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, among other names. " New materialism " has been adopted as the uncomfortable, contested term of art among rhetoricians for this complicated nest of ideas (others outside the field use it similarly but it is hardly agreed on as a catch-all term, nor should it be). One of the refreshing things about Gries's book is that she does not attempt to parse the various schools of thought too closely or join the turf battles that often mark the literature. Although such discussions are important and can be productive, they are readily available elsewhere. Instead, she accepts the general moniker but clarifies her thinking by focusing on specific concepts in relation to an extended case study filled with images of the red, white, and blue Obama Hope image that Shepard Fairey produced for the 2008 presidential cycle and that has since become a staple in our visual field. Gries joins a growing number of rhetoric scholars influenced by some vein of new materialist thinking to focus on methodology, which is understandable and welcome. Given that new materialism problematizes basic premises of humanism and agency, it is unsurprising that scholars would want to re-format the methods of analysis to align with new premises. What sets Still Life with Rhetoric apart is the precision with which Gries defines and enacts these revised premises as guidelines for rhetorical analysis.

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