The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture
The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture

Author: Deanna D. Sellnow

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1506315232

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Can television shows like Modern Family, popular music by performers like Taylor Swift, advertisements for products like Samuel Adams beer, and films such as The Hunger Games help us understand rhetorical theory and criticism? The Third Edition of The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture offers students a step-by-step introduction to rhetorical theory and criticism by focusing on the powerful role popular culture plays in persuading us as to what to believe and how to behave. In every chapter, students are introduced to rhetorical theories, presented with current examples from popular culture that relate to the theory, and guided through demonstrations about how to describe, interpret, and evaluate popular culture texts through rhetorical analysis. Author Deanna Sellnow also provides sample student essays in every chapter to demonstrate rhetorical criticism in practice. This edition’s easy-to-understand approach and range of popular culture examples help students apply rhetorical theory and criticism to their own lives and assigned work.

Rhetoric in Popular Culture
Rhetoric in Popular Culture

Author: Barry Brummett

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 150631564X

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Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Fifth Edition, shows readers how to apply growing and cutting-edge methods of critical studies to a full spectrum of contemporary issues seen in daily life. Exploring a wide range of mass media including current movies, magazines, advertisements, social networking sites, music videos, and television shows, Barry Brummett uses critical analysis to apply key rhetorical concepts to a variety of exciting examples drawn from popular culture. Readers are guided from theory to practice in an easy-to-understand manner, providing them with a foundational understanding of the definition and history of rhetoric as well as new approaches to the rhetorical tradition. Ideal for courses in rhetorical criticism, the highly anticipated Fifth Edition includes new critical essays and case studies that demonstrate for readers how the critical methods discussed can be used to study the hidden rhetoric of popular culture.

Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture
Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture

Author: Barry Brummett

Publisher: Studies in Rhetoric and Commun

Published: 2004-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780817351373

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Supports the argument that rhetoric needs to be conceptualized as the social function that influences and manages meaning Through history, rhetoric has been understood as the art of verbal influence. This art took various forms and was put to diverse uses. Rhetoric has usually been regarded as the kind of extended verbal dis­course found in the public speech, the essay, the letter, or belles lettres, a discourse often founded on reasoned argument in support of propositions. This conception of rhetoric as propositional, verbal text persisted through ages in which public controversy primarily took oral or written form: words spoken or committed to print. Issues were debated and decisions were formed verbally; the word was the agency for managing public business. But today the dominance of the extended text and the well-supported line of argument is fading. Public discourse may be embodied in as many words as it was in 1860, but the words take rather different forms. Presidential candidates speak more than they ever have, but campaigns depend increasingly on the twenty-second "sound bite" targeted for the evening news (Hart, 1987). A public that once read newspapers, listened to radios and to the Chautauqua speaker, or conversed on front porches is increasingly turning to various forms of video for information and entertainment. The place and time of rhetoric are moving inexorably from specific locales in which issues are debated, into the more general context of popular culture. In other words, rhetoric as a distinct social practice carried out during concentrated periods of speaking and listening, or reading and writing, is dissipating into a noisy environment teeming with messages. Rhetorical studies as an academic discipline is responding to these changes in rhetorical practice by augmenting its traditional concerns for extended verbal texts (e.g., Medhurst & Benson, 1984). Students of rhetoric have recently examined the "rhetoric" of the streets, cartoons, and popular music. This book joins those efforts by theorists to conceptualize a kind of rhetoric that is less verbal, or "textual," and more integrated into popular culture than is the rhetoric of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. The public as well as the academy needs a way to understand the rhetorical dimensions of popular culture.

Rhetoric in Popular Culture
Rhetoric in Popular Culture

Author: Barry Brummett

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1506315623

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Now in a fifth edition, Rhetoric in Popular Culture provides an in-depth insight into rhetorical theory and how this can be applied to a spectrum of contemporary issues in daily life, with updated examples, recent scholarship on pop culture and new application chapters.

Tropic Tendencies
Tropic Tendencies

Author: Kevin Adonis Browne

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 082297911X

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A legacy of slavery, abolition, colonialism, and class struggle has profoundly impacted the people and culture of the Caribbean. In Tropic Tendencies, Kevin Adonis Browne examines the development of an Anglophone Caribbean rhetorical tradition in response to the struggle to make meaning, maintain identity, negotiate across differences, and thrive in light of historical constraints and the need to participate in contemporary global culture. Browne bases his study on the concept of the "Caribbean carnivalesque" as the formative ethos driving cultural and rhetorical production in the region and beyond it. He finds that carnivalesque discourse operates as a "continuum of discursive substantiation" that increases the probability of achieving desired outcomes for both the rhetor and the audience. Browne also views the symbolic and material interplay of the masque and its widespread use to amplify efforts of resistance, assertion, and liberation. Browne analyzes rhetorical modes and strategies in a variety of forms, including music, dance, folklore, performance, sermons, fiction, poetry, photography, and digital media. He introduces chantwells, calypsonians, old talkers, jamettes, stickfighters, badjohns, and others as exemplary purveyors of Caribbean rhetoric and deconstructs their rhetorical displays. From novels by Earl Lovelace, he also extracts thematic references to kalinda, limbo, and dragon dances that demonstrate the author's claim of an active vernacular sensibility. He then investigates the re-creation and reinvention of the carnivalesque in cyber culture, demonstrating the ways participants both flaunt and defy normative ideas of "Caribbeanness" in online and macro environments.

Making Camp
Making Camp

Author: Helene A. Shugart

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0817316078

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The rhetorical power of camp in American popular culture Making Camp examines the rhetoric and conventions of “camp” in contemporary popular culture and the ways it both subverts and is co-opted by mainstream ideology and discourse, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and sexuality. Camp has long been aligned with gay male culture and performance. Helene Shugart and Catherine Waggoner contend that camp in the popular media—whether visual, dramatic, or musical—is equally pervasive. While aesthetic and performative in nature, the authors argue that camp—female camp in particular—is also highly political and that conventions of femininity and female sexuality are negotiated, if not always resisted, in female camp performances. The authors draw on a wide range of references and figures representative of camp, both historical and contemporary, in presenting the evolution of female camp and its negotiation of gender, political, and identity issues. Antecedents such as Joan Crawford, Wonder Woman, Marilyn Monroe, and Pam Grier are discussed as archetypes for contemporary popular culture figures—Macy Gray, Gwen Stefani, and the characters of Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess and Karen Walker from Will & Grace. Shugart and Waggoner find that these and other female camp performances are liminal, occupying a space between conformity and resistance. The result is a study that demonstrates the prevalence of camp as a historical and evolving phenomenon in popular culture, its role as a site for the rupture of conventional notions of gender and sexuality, and how camp is configured in mainstream culture and in ways that resist its being reduced to merely a style.

A Rhetoric of Style
A Rhetoric of Style

Author: Barry Brummett

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2008-07-07

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0809387263

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Exploring style in a global culture In A Rhetoric of Style, Barry Brummett illustrates how style is increasingly a global system of communication as people around the world understand what it means to dress a certain way, to dance a certain way, to decorate a certain way, to speak a certain way. He locates style at the heart of popular culture and asserts that it is the basis for social life and politics in the twenty-first century. Brummett sees style as a system of signification grounded largely in image, aesthetics, and extrarational modes of thinking. He discusses three important aspects of this system—its social and commercial structuring, its political consequences, and its role as the chief rhetorical system of the modern world. He argues that aesthetics and style are merging into a major engine of the global economy and that style is becoming a way to construct individual identity, as well as social and political structures of alliance and opposition. It is through style that we stereotype or make assumptions about others’ political identities, their sexuality, their culture, and their economic standing. To facilitate theoretical and critical analysis, Brummett develops a systematic rhetoric of style and then demonstrates its use through an in-depth exploration of gun culture in the United States. Armed with an understanding of how this rhetoric of style works methodologically, students and scholars alike will have the tools to do their own analyses. Written in clear and engaging prose, A Rhetoric of Style presents a novel discussion of the workings of style and sheds new light on a venerable and sometimes misunderstood rhetorical concept by illustrating how style is the key to constructing a rhetoric for the twenty-first century.

A Feeling of Wrongness
A Feeling of Wrongness

Author: Joseph Packer

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2018-11-28

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0271083174

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In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.

Rhetoric in Popular Culture
Rhetoric in Popular Culture

Author: Barry Brummett

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 141291437X

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Joins together two vital scholarly traditions: rhetorical criticism and critical studies. This title includes material on Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, media-centered, and culture-centered criticism. It also enables students to apply several methodologies of critical studies to the study of rhetoric.

Visual Rhetoric
Visual Rhetoric

Author: Lester C. Olson

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2008-03-20

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 141294919X

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Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon