re:verb

*Content Warning* The article referenced in today’s episode includes vague to explicit misogyny and transphobic discourse, as well as references to sexual violence and assault.

*Irony Warning* The producers of this podcast disagree with and strongly condemn the argument set forth in the article referenced in this episode. Any intimations to the contrary are entirely a performance for the sake of comedic irony or parody.

Today, we introduce a new style of episode called re:joinder, in which we read an article of ~questionable~ merit dealing with academia, rhetoric, and/or politics and give you our real-time reactions to its problematic content. For our first re:joinder, Alex reads an article he picked out for Calvin and our special guest, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric Maggie Goss. The article in question: “Why Traditional Masculinity is Good for Academia” by Samuel Veissière.

Published in Areo - an online magazine from the progenitors of the “Sokal Squared” hoax - Veissière’s argument begins from the premise that it is men, not women, who are structurally disadvantaged in society in general, and academia in particular. The author (who is, ironically, a tenure-track faculty member at McGill University) also argues that “traditional masculinity” is not only unfairly maligned in contemporary academia, but also an untapped resource for reform of academia’s worst aspects — from the purported closing and coddling of young minds, all the way up to the very real problems of widespread sexual harassment and assault on campuses. Yes, Veissière actually argues that more masculinity could help reduce sexual violence against women. In response, Calvin, Maggie, and Alex discuss the article’s spurious reasoning, lack of evidence, and oddball assumptions before presenting their own ideas for how to address the downsides of hegemonic masculinity.

Works and Concepts Cited In This Episode

Burmila, E. (2018, 6 April). Scientific racism isn’t ‘back’--it never went away. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/scientific-racism-isnt-back-it-never-went-away/ [On the concept of “scientific racism” theories put forth by Charles Murray and others]

Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stan. L. Rev., 43, 1241.

Ruti, M. (2015). The age of scientific sexism: How evolutionary psychology promotes gender profiling and fans the battle of the sexes. Bloomsbury Academic. [This book analyzes and provides a strong critique for the worldview that Veissière is basing his argument upon]

Read these two works by Edward Said for more on why placing “Israel” and “Islam” in a dichotomous relationship is reductive and harmful:

Said, E. W. (1992). The question of Palestine. Vintage.

Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage.

On this week’s episode, Alex, Calvin, and Caitlan seek a formal definition of True Crime, identifying the strategies, rhetorical and otherwise, that have elevated the genre and its diverse sub-genres to the realm of cultural obsession. Our hosts discuss what distinguishes True Crime from “untrue” crime shows or other types of “true” content related to crime. They then explore how medium structure, genre features, and various narrative techniques are employed to captivate and motivate consumers of True Crime—particularly in new media that draw on audience participation to push their reporting forward.

Our hosts go on to analyze how “new” True Crime - like the podcast Serial or the docu-series Making a Murderer - takes its audience behind the curtain of the criminal justice system, and how these media combine a creative approach to storytelling with a journalistic search for truth when presenting cases of public interest. How does a sharp focus on evidence gathering raise public consciousness around the miscarriage of justice? Our hosts also begin to untangle the ethical implications for those producing and consuming True Crime. When popular series cash in on the public’s morbid fascination for sensational stories, does this decision serve to unethically commodify our consumption of tragic events?

As our hosts discuss their favorite True Crime productions—as well as those that they find more problematic—they probe the critical potential of the genre. Can rigorous reporting open up the dialogic space for alternative narratives in unsolved cases? Can certain genre tropes, like exposing coerced confessions, work in the service of social justice? Ultimately, what can True Crime do, and what is it currently doing, to affect our politics and public culture?

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Boudet, M. (Host). (2013). Sword and Scale [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://swordandscale.com/.

Buozis, M. (2017). Giving Voice to the Accused: Serial and the Critical Potential of True Crime. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(3), 254-270.

Dittrich, S. (Writer). (2018). Murder Mountain. [Television series]. Toronto, CA: Lightbox.

Kilgariff , K and Hardstark, G (Hosts). My Favorite Murder. [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.myfavoritemurder.com/about.

Koenig, S. (Host). (2014). Serial [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://serialpodcast.org/.

Mahdawi, A. (16 Oct. 2018). As Making a Murderer returns, is the obsession with true crime turning nasty? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/16/making-a-murderer-is-our-obsession-with-true-crime-turning-nasty-serial

Seltzer, M. (2008). Murder/media/modernity. Canadian Review of American Studies, 38(1), 11-41.

Zaillian, S. and Marsh, J.(Directors). (2016). The Night Of [Television Series.] New York, NY: HBO.

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you just had to say something -- where the words came to you so naturally, they almost felt like they were being dictated by your circumstances? Or, have you ever struggled over how to respond when people around you don’t quite see things the same way you do? In each of these instances, you might’ve been reckoning with a rhetorical situation.

In our latest re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Calvin, Alex, and Caitlan break down this core concept from rhetorical scholarship. We begin by discussing Lloyd Bitzer’s original framework, in which he lays out the three key components of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, we chart the ways in which Richard Vatz’s rejoinder to Bitzer’s model challenges its assumptions about the origin point of meaning, introducing the idea that speakers and their rhetorics control how we understand situations, and not the other way around. Then, we discuss two attempts to reconcile the Bitzer-Vatz disjunct: Barbara Biesecker’s integration of Derrida’s concept of différance and Jenny Rice’s “rhetorical ecologies” framework, both of which are designed to further problematize our assumptions about rhetoric, language, and communicative responses to exigent circumstances.

Finally, we put the concepts we’ve discussed into practice through an analysis of three different responses to the recent attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand: from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Australian Senator Fraser Anning. We show how each of these public figures frame the situation facing New Zealand (and the world) differently. In the case of the latter two speakers, we examine how an “affective ecology” of white nationalist and Islamophobic sentiments emboldened them to circulate discourse purporting to mourn the loss of life in Muslim and immigrant communities while also blaming them for other problems -- including, absurdly, the attack itself.

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Biesecker, B. A. (1989). Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of 'Différance'. Philosophy & rhetoric, 22(2), 110-130.

Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14.

Edbauer, J. [now Rice, J.] (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24.

Vatz, R. E. (1973). The myth of the rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 6(3), 154-161.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s initial statement on the Christchurch attack: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/one-of-new-zealands-darkest-days-jacinda-ardern-responds-to-christchurch-shooting

U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments on the Christchurch attack (both his tweets and his press conference) can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/mar/15/christchurch-shooting-injuries-reported-as-police-respond-to-critical-incident-live?page=with:block-5c8c218fe4b016d23425cef2

Fraser Anning’s official statement on the Christchurch attack can be found here: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-zealand-mosque-shooting-outrage-as-farright-australian-senator-fraser-anning-links-massacre-to-a4092421.html

Transcript of this episode

If you follow the news, you might have noticed a word coming up more and more frequently: “socialism.” Not only was it name-dropped by the president in his 2019 State of the Union address, but politicians aligning themselves with Democratic Socialism have been winning elections and making headlines, and grassroots socialist organizing has been experiencing a renaissance all over the country. As with many concepts that circulate in news discourse, socialism isn’t something that the media is great at defining in a concrete or unified way - conservative sources often use it as as a term roughly synonymous with pure evil, while more centrist or liberal-leaning outlets tend to portray its policies and purveyors as impractical and idealistic.

In this episode, Sophie Wodzak - re:verb co-producer and and co-chair of the Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America’s Socialist Feminism Committee - sits down with her DSA SocFem co-chair Crystal Grabowski to demystify the concept of socialism and link it to the battles for intersectional social and economic justice that encompass Socialist Feminism. Sophie and Crystal begin by breaking down the distinctions between Socialist Feminism and Liberal Feminism, before launching into conversation about the rhetorical know-how they draw upon when engaging other people in political dialogues about topics ranging from reproductive justice to economic and gender equality. Some of these efforts include the ongoing local campaign to #ExposeFakeClinics (https://www.exposefakeclinicspgh.com/) that work to obfuscate women’s healthcare options, as well as building a broad social movement through solidarity with women’s movements across the country and around the world during the International Women’s Strike (see links below).

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode

Dishman, L. (2015, Dec. 10). What Marissa Mayer’s maternity leave decision means for working parents at Yahoo. Fast Company. Retrieved from: https://www.fastcompany.com/3054512/what-marissa-mayers-maternity-leave-decision-means-for-working-parents-at-yahoo

Guynn, J. (2013, Feb. 26). Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer causes uproar with telecommuting ban. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/26/business/la-fi-yahoo-telecommuting-20130226

Pierson, C. (2018, May 26). Ireland votes to repeal the 8th amendment in historic abortion referendum - and marks a huge cultural shift. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/ireland-votes-to-repeal-the-8th-amendment-in-historic-abortion-referendum-and-marks-a-huge-cultural-shift-97297

Roberts, D. (2015). Reproductive justice, not just rights. Dissent. Retrieved from: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights

Smith, A. (2005). Beyond pro-choice versus pro-life: Women of color and reproductive justice. NWSA Journal, 17(1), pp. 119-140. [Available at: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/centers/crrj/zotero/loadfile.php?entity_key=RD3G3I35]

Whalen, A. (2019, Feb. 5). Medicare For All costs too much, Pelosi adviser assures health insurance executives. Newsweek. Retrieved from: https://www.newsweek.com/nancy-pelosi-medicare-all-single-payer-health-insurance-affordable-care-act-1318788

Bibliography of Useful Socialist Feminist Theory & Scholarship

Combahee River Collective (1983). The Combahee river collective statement. Home girls: A Black feminist anthology, 264-74. [Available at: http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html]

Davis, A. Y. (2011). Women, race, & class. Vintage.

Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.

Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Verso Books.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA journal, 1-32.

Hennessy, R. (2012). Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. Routledge.

Hennessy, R. (2017). Profit and pleasure: Sexual identities in late capitalism. Routledge.

Malachi, L.W. (2016). Police violence is a reproductive justice issue. Cosmopolitan. Retrieved from: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a61507/police-violence-reproductive-justice/

Taylor, K. Y. (Ed.). (2017). How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books.

Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Links & Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective

ROSA (Reproductive rights, against Oppression, Sexism, & Austerity)

Expose Fake Clinics PGH

Expose Fake Clinics Resource from Lady Parts Justice League

National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) Abortion Access Bowl-A-Thon

International Women’s Strike (Pittsburgh)

International Women’s Strike (USA)

On our last episode, Professor John Oddo cited Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in asserting: “When you speak you do not break the eternal silence of the universe. You are not the biblical Adam who is naming and categorizing reality in the virgin world. You are always taking words that taste of prior contexts.”

This approach to language as dialogical is the subject of today’s re:blurb. We break down what dialogicality means, how it’s distinct from other theories of language, and how we can use it to productively analyze texts for their incorporation and reshaping of other voices, as well as the confidence of their claims.

We offer an analysis of a strikingly dialogical political event: legendary actor-director (and proud conservative) Clint Eastwood’s speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention. In the speech, Eastwood constructs a dialogue with an empty chair intended to represent then-President Barack Obama. Eastwood’s usage of quotes, references, modality, bare assertions, and assumptions all suggest that he was supremely confident in his definition of the problem in America in 2012 -- Obama-style liberalism -- but remarkably reluctant about Mitt Romney as a particular solution. As we argue, this may have influenced conservative rhetoric up to the present day.

Text Analyzed:

Transcript: Clint Eastwood's Convention Remarks

Works / Concepts Referenced in This Episode:

De Saussure, F. (1989). Cours de linguistique générale: Édition critique (Vol. 1). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.

Bakhtin, M. (1934). Discourse in the Novel. Literary theory: An anthology, 2, 674-685.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Eastwood, C. (1983). Sudden Impact. Warner Bros. [“Make My Day” scene.]

On this week’s episode, Alex and Calvin chat with Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor of English Dr. John Oddo about his most recent work, The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In the book, Dr. Oddo uses discourse analysis techniques to study U.S. war propaganda. Today’s discussion centers around what makes Oddo’s definition of propaganda unique. He argues that propaganda can best be understood as an intertextual process, and that everyone in U.S. society is a potential propagandist -- not just “evil dictators” in totalitarian societies.

Dr. Oddo walks Alex and Calvin through one case study he conducts in his book: a historically-contextualized analysis of the U.S. military slogan “Support Our Troops.” In this analysis, Dr. Oddo discusses the genesis of the phrase as a reaction to anti-war sentiments in the U.S. during the war in Vietnam. He then dissects the linguistic aspects that make the phrase “detachable,” repeatable, and easily digestible, such as how personal pronouns like ‘our’ are used to forge common ground between the message and the audience. In doing so, Oddo suggests that propaganda slogans like “Support Our Troops” simultaneously make an argument justifying war, shape allowable identities for citizens, and become entrenched as “cultural presuppositions.” The conversation comes to a close with Dr. Oddo suggesting productive ways in which we can respond to propaganda critically, as well as the affordances and limitations of using propagandistic tactics for more just ends.

Check out John Oddo’s book, The Discourse of Propaganda, available now from Penn State University Press:

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08116-8.html

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (Vol. 1). Trans. Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press.

Chomsky, N. (1992, January). On Propaganda (interview on WBAI). Retrieved from: https://chomsky.info/199201__/

Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda: the formation of men's attitudes. New York: Vintage Books.

Hodges, A. (2011). The "War on terror" narrative: Discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Lembcke, J. (1998). The spitting image: Myth, memory, and the legacy of Vietnam. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Linell, P. (1998). Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 18(2), 143-158.

Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. University Park, PA, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Stahl, R. (2009). Why We “Support the Troops”: Rhetorical Evolutions. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 12(4), 533-570.

What is reality? According to whose version of reality does society function? This week, Alex and Calvin sit down to discuss these and other questions with Dr. Dana L. Cloud, Professor of Rhetoric & Communication and Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University, and author of Reality Bites: Assessing Truth Claims in the Time of Trump. In her book, Cloud argues that fact-checking and rational argumentation are not effective persuasion strategies, and she suggests other ways of responding to the rise of white nationalism in the Trump era. As a critic, Cloud adopts an approach called rhetorical realism: examining discourse from marginalized groups’ perspectives and experiences in order to introduce new realities and truths, legitimize them, and position them strategically in the public sphere.

The episode opens with a discussion of academic freedom, as we analyze a timely address given by conservative activist Ben Shapiro at the University of Pittsburgh the night prior to our recording. Shapiro’s speech exemplifies how the ideograph of is opportunistically used against university administrators by the far-right. Our conversation then moves to what Cloud calls “the Big 5” rhetorical strategies -- affect/emotion, embodiment, narrative, myth, and spectacle. In using these aspects of discourse, the Left can exhibit fidelity to the experiences of ordinary people and, potentially, build a mass movement for social justice. Finally, Cloud reminds us that while we have all of these ways and more to call audiences to action, we must be aware of the unavoidable ideological and material constraints of contemporary U.S. rhetorical situations.

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Brennan, T. (2014). The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press.

Butler, J. (2002). Gender Trouble. Routledge.

Cloud, D. L. (1996). Hegemony or concordance? The rhetoric of tokenism in “Oprah” Oprah rags‐to‐riches biography. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 13(2), 115-137.

Cloud, D. L., Macek, S., & Aune, J. A. (2006). "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 39(1), 72-84.

Cloud, D. L., & Thomas, R. K. (2011). We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Cloud, D. L., & Feyh, K. E. (2015). Reason in Revolt: Emotional Fidelity and Working Class Standpoint in the “Internationale”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45(4), 300-323.

Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. University of Chicago Press.

Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: In the beginning. Journal of communication, 35(4), 74-89.

Fisher, W. R. (1986). Judging the Quality of Audiences and Narrative Rationality. Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs, 85-103.

Foucault, M. (2013). Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Vol. 294). London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Greene, R. W. (1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 15(1), 21-40.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard University Press.

Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of illusion: The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. Knopf Canada.

Kelly, C. R., & Hoerl, K. E. (2012). Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum. Argumentation and Advocacy,48(3), 123-141.

McNally, M., & Schwarzmantel, J. J. (2009). Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance. London: Routledge.

Paine, T. (1792). Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America. Philadelphia: W. & T. Bradford. [Full text available online at: https://www.bartleby.com/133/]

What comes to mind when you hear words like “freedom,” “justice,” or “liberty”? Whether they conjure feelings of patriotism and pride or just sound like overused, empty buzzwords, rhetoricians call terms like these ideographs – words and phrases that serve as the building blocks of our ideologies and identities.

On today’s re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Alex, and Calvin break down the history of the ideograph in rhetorical scholarship and demonstrate how it can be a useful concept for analyzing buzzwords and slogans in political discourse.

Text Analyzed in this Episode

Bruni, F. (December 19, 2017). Democrats are the new Republicans. The New York Times.

Works Referenced

Cloud, D. L. (1998). The rhetoric of : Scapegoating, utopia, and the privatization of social responsibility. Western Journal of Communication, 62(4), 387-419.

Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the⟨ clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.

McGee, M. C. (2001). Ideograph. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (378-381). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Winkler, C. (2012). In the name of terrorism: Presidents on political violence in the post-World War II era. SUNY Press.

Recommended Readings

Condit, C. M., & Lucaites, J. L. (1993). Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word. University of Chicago Press.

Edwards, J. L., & Winkler, C. K. (1997). Representative form and the visual ideograph: The Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83(3), 289-310.

Farrell, T. B. (1995). Norms of rhetorical culture. Yale University Press. [Chapter 1 includes a discussion of the Joseph N. Welch / Joseph McCarthy interaction that Calvin references in his analysis of the ideograph in this episode.]

*CONTENT WARNING*

This episode contains graphic language depicting instances of rape and verbal imagery illustrating acts of sexual violence.

On today’s episode, Calvin and Ryan sit down with Dr. Stephanie Larson, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon, to discuss her recent publication in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (QJS), “‘Everything inside me was silenced’: (Re)defining rape through visceral counterpublicity.”

This article is part of Professor Larson’s larger body of work on contemporary rhetorics of rape culture. We discuss two of her case studies: a publicly delivered letter by Emily Doe and a multimodal art piece employed by Emma Sulkowicz, both crafted to call attention to the actions of the men who raped them. In her analysis, Stephanie aims to answer questions such as: How do women discuss acts of sexual violence committed against them after legal discourse fails to recognize these acts as criminal? She theorizes that victims use visceral language to call attention to their physical bodies, specifically their points of violation, thus inciting empathetic and emotional responses from the audience. She goes on to argue that this type of public performativity has the potential to shift public standards of judgment in cases of sexual violence.

The episode closes with Stephanie’s thoughts on feminist magnitude and how it has shaped the #MeToo movement in online discourse. She also offers her take on why Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh did not capture audiences in the same way, suggesting that the use of online platforms and collective sharing of personal testimonies facilitates more affective and effective engagement with audiences.

Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Emily Doe’s publicly-read letter to Brock Turner

Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) Overview

Wikipedia page for Emma Sulkowicz’s Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (“This is not a rape”) performance

*Content Warning*: This performance contains an explicit, performative depiction of a rape.

Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.

Aristotle. (1898). Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. Macmillan.

(discussion of megethos or “magnitude” can be found in Sec. 1, Part VII)

Berlant, L. (1999). “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns. University of Michigan Press.

Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Gilmore, L. (2017). Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. Columbia University Press.

Hawhee, D. (2015). Rhetoric’s Sensorium. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101(1), 2–17.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.

Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.

Larson, S. R. (2018). Survivors, Liars, and Unfit Minds: Rhetorical Impossibility and Rape Trauma Disclosure. Hypatia.

Scarry, E. (1987). The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford University Press pbk.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas Viscus : Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

On this week’s show, we change things up a bit and bring you the first in a new series of mini-episodes entitled re:blurb, where we break down concepts from rhetorical theory and history in practical terms and use contemporary examples to illustrate their usefulness in examining language in action.

For this first installment, Alex takes the mic to explain stasis theory: a set of concepts reiterated throughout rhetorical history that help speakers and writers both analyze and invent arguments. This theory holds that all arguments contain “stasis claims” about the facts at hand in an issue, the definition of key terms and elements in the debate, the evaluation of those elements, and prescriptions of action. Using the stases, we can see how arguers try to “get ahead of” different potential points of disagreement and address specific audiences. In addition, we can think about how we can make better arguments by predicting how others might view each stasis category of a particular issue. This is especially useful when analyzing why arguers choose to stay at a particular stasis level to reach a specific audience.

To illustrate how stasis theory can widen our understanding of an arguments and their audiences, Alex uses the stases to analyze Brett Kavanaugh’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge,” published in the wake of his and Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, prior to his confirmation and appointment to the Supreme Court.

Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.

Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kavanaugh, B. (2018, Oct. 4). I am an independent, impartial judge. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-am-an-independent-impartial-judge-1538695822

Further Reading on Stasis Theory:

Braet, A. (1987). The classical doctrine of status and the rhetorical theory of argumentation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 20, 79-93.

Heath, M. (1994). The substructure of stasis-theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes. The Classical Quarterly, 44(1), 114-129.

Jasinski, J. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001.

Liu, Y. (1991). Aristotle and the stasis theory: A reexamination. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 21(1), 53-59.

Nadeau, R. (1959). “Classical Systems of Stases in Greek: Hermagoras to Hermogenes.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2(1), 51–70.

Pullman, G. L. (1995). Deliberative rhetoric and forensic stasis: Reconsidering the scope and function of an ancient rhetorical heuristic in the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill controversy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 25(1-4), 223-230.

Thompson, W. N. (1972). Stasis in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58(2), 134-141.