Culture and Rhetoric

✍ Scribed by Ivo Strecker (editor); Stephen Tyler (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 268
• Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture; 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

While some scholars have said that there is no such thing as culture and have urged to abandon the concept altogether, the contributors to this volume overcome this impasse by understanding cultures and their representations for what they ultimately are – rhetorical constructs. These senior, international scholars explore the complex relationships between culture and rhetoric arguing that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric. This intersection constitutes the central theme of the first part of the book, while the second is dedicated to the study of figuration as a common ground of rhetoric and anthropology. The book offers a compelling range of theoretical reflections, historical vistas, and empirical investigations, which aim to show how people talk themselves and others into particular modalities of thought and action, and how rhetoric and culture, in this way, are co-emergent. It thus turns a new page in the history of academic discourse by bringing two disciplines – anthropology and rhetoric – together in a way that has never been done before.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I The Chiasm of Rhetoric and Culture
CHAPTER 1 The Rhetoric Culture Project
CHAPTER 2 Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory
CHAPTER 3 Homo Rhetoricus
CHAPTER 4 Listening Culture
CHAPTER 5 Practice of Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Practice
CHAPTER 6 Chiastic Thought and Culture A Reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss
CHAPTER 7 When Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair Lessons from Macbeth
Part II Figuration—The Persuasive Power of Deeds and Tropes
CHAPTER 8 Rhetoric, Truth, and the Work of Trope
CHAPTER 9 Figuration—a Common Ground of Rhetoric and Anthropology
CHAPTER 10 Tropical Foundations and Foundational Tropes of Culture
CHAPTER 11 Convictions: Embodied Rhetorics of Earnest Belief
CHAPTER 12 An Epistemological Query
CHAPTER 13 Beyond the Unsaid Transcending Language through Language
CHAPTER 14 Future Imperfect Imagining Rhetorical Culture Theory
Contributors
Index