Material Rhetorics Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article defends the “rhetorical chorus” as a useful method for
recovering women’s voices in the history of rhetoric. As distinct
from the more amorphous term “collaboration,” which designates
any act of cooperation in the production of rhetorical texts, the
“chorus” offers a more nuanced way to identify and map the
recording, preservation, appropriation, and alteration of works
originally dictated by women rhetors. Using The Book of Margery
Kempe as an example, the study traces both homophonic and polyphonic relationships between the lead voice of Margery and the voices of her scribes and annotators.

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- History of Rhetoric, Feminist Rhetorics, Material Rhetorics

The National September 11 Memorial Museum (also called the 9/11 Memorial Museum) produces a rhetoric of resilience that provides visitors with a dominant and constitutive frame for public memory without necessarily overcoming contestations, perspectives, and mnemonic partialities that have shaped Ground Zero’s rhetorical meaning. Resilience can politicize mourning by breeding nationalism and overlooking political responsibilities, but it can also provide structures of representation for making sense of overwhelming tragic events. This article observes this dialectical tension between vulnerability and resilience by attending to the way objects visually orient visitors within a context of collective identity at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

- by Nicholas Paliewicz
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- American Studies, Rhetoric, Resilience, Material Rhetoric

An array of new technologies has made it much easier for non-specialists to fabricate three-dimensional products ranging from clothes to plastic prototypes. This article explores the implications of these new developments for composition and rhetoric using a heuristic derived from earlier discussions of visual and multimodal rhetoric. Analysis of these discussions suggests that at least four kinds of arguments are made for new rhetorical modes: arguments from infrastructural accessibility, from rhetorical effectiveness, from cultural status, and from (de)specialization. Applying this schema to three-dimensional fabricated rhetoric reveals that three-dimensional rhetoric is increasingly available as an option to ordinary citizens, offers distinctive rhetorical opportunities, is valued by the broader culture outside the academy, and can be usefully understood through analytical frameworks regularly used by the field of composition and rhetoric. This article concludes that when placed in the hands of ordinary rhetors, three-dimensional rhetoric is potentially transformative and offers important cultural and political opportunities. By appropriating the rhetoric of fabricated objects, we can more effectively achieve the goals of equality and social justice.

- by david sheridan
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- Digital Fabrication, Material Rhetoric, Visual And Material Rhetoric, 3D printing

Keeling, a rhetorical scholar, and Prairie, a marine ecologist, investigate the entanglement of two foundational concepts of their requisite fields that share etymological features: trope (τροπη), to turn, and trophe (τροφη), to nourish. They discuss ways that trophic dynamics in ecology, including symbiotic relationships, demonstrate troping’s interactive and polymorphic qualities. They engage troping as a social, biological, and physical activity that composes ecosystems with and without humans. This project historicizes the interdisciplinary emergence of rhetoric and ecology—and trope and trophe—in the mythopoeic tradition of archaic Greece, while also encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration to address problematic distillations of tropes in academic research and public decision making. An ecological perspective of rhetoric contends that tropes are dynamic and polymorphic modes of environmental expression.

- by Diane Marie Keeling
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- Rhetoric, Interdisciplinarity, Resilience, Marine Ecology