Rhetorical Animals
Rhetorical Animals

Author: Kristian Bjørkdahl

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-11-30

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1498558461

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For this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.

Impersonating Animals
Impersonating Animals

Author: S. Marek Muller

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2020-08-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1628954027

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In 2011, in one sign of a burgeoning interest in the morality of human interactions with nonhuman animals, a panel hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science declared that dolphins and orcas should be legally regarded as persons. Multiple law schools now offer classes in animal law and have animal law clinics, placing their students with a growing range of animal rights and animal welfare advocacy organizations. But is legal personhood the best means to achieving total interspecies liberation? To answer that question, Impersonating Animals evaluates the rhetoric of animal rights activists Steven Wise and Gary Francione, as well as the Earth jurisprudence paradigm. Deploying a critical ecofeminist stance sensitive to the interweaving of ideas about race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and species, author S. Marek Muller places animal rights rhetoric in the context of discourses in which some humans have been deemed more animal than others and some animals have been deemed more human than others. In bringing rhetoric and animal studies together, she shows that how we communicate about nonhuman beings necessarily affects relationships across species boundaries and among people. This book also highlights how animal studies scholars and activists can and should use ideological rhetorical criticism to investigate the implications of their tactics and strategies, emphasizing a critical vegan rhetoric as the best means of achieving liberation for human and nonhuman animals alike.

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw
Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw

Author: Debra Hawhee

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 022670677X

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We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they’re crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline’s history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our “partners in feeling,” other animals.

Meatsplaining
Meatsplaining

Author: Jason Hannan

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1743327080

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The animal agriculture industry, like other profit-driven industries, aggressively seeks to shield itself from public scrutiny. To that end, it uses a distinct set of rhetorical strategies to deflect criticism. These tactics are fundamental to modern animal agriculture but have long evaded critical analysis. In this collection, academic and activist contributors investigate the many forms of denialism perpetuated by the animal agriculture industry. What strategies does the industry use to avoid questions about its inhumane treatment of animals and its impact on the environment and public health? What narratives, myths and fantasies does it promote to sustain its image in the public imagination? ‘powerful, timely and essential’ – David Nibert, author of Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict ‘Meatsplaining equips us to identify the lies at the heart of animal agriculture. It’s an excellent and timely compilation on an exceedingly vexing problem.’ – Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and Burger ‘Meatsplaining is the first book to give an apt name to the animal agriculture industry’s relentless campaign of disinformation and denialism ... Written in a clear, lively, and accessible style, Meatsplaining will surely educate the public about the horrors of animal agriculture.’ – Marc Bekoff, author of The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age ‘Cruelty thrives in secrecy, and the meat industry is highly skilled at concealing the routine abuse and misery that flourishes on modern farms. Meatsplaining cuts through the spin, and exposes the meat industry's massive PR machine. It explores how Big Meat uses language, obfuscation, and denial to misdirect the public's attention away from its commodification of sentient animals, environmental devastation, and the looming health crisis caused by eating animals. This book is a must-read for animal advocates, and anyone else who no longer wants to be lied to.’ – Camille Labchuk, Executive Director, Animal Justice ‘This book ... provides a necessary corrective to the fantasy world created by meat industry propaganda. As we grapple with a global zoonotic pandemic and biodiversity crisis, it is urgent for us to ... start thinking clearly about who and what is on our plates.’ – John Sorenson, Brock University

Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

Author: Krishanu Maiti

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-11

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 3030761592

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This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the “animal turn” in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics. Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts: Contestation over Species Hierarchy and CategorizationAnimal (Re)constructionsInterspecies RelationalitiesIntersectionality- Animal and Gender This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies.

Reading Literary Animals
Reading Literary Animals

Author: Karen L. Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-29

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1351603914

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Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.

Electric Animal
Electric Animal

Author: Akira Mizuta Lippit

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780816634859

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Differentiation from animals helped to establish the notion of a human being, but the disappearance of animals now threatens that identity. This is the argument underlying Electric Animal, a probing exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows us the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity -- essential to developments in the natural sciences and technology, radical transformations in modern philosophy and literature, and the advent of psychoanalysis and the cinema. Moving beyond the dialectical framework that has traditionally bound animal and human being, Electric Animal raises a series of questions regarding the idea of animality in Western thought. Can animals communicate? Do they have consciousness? Are they aware of death? By tracing questions such as these through a wide range of texts by writers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud to Vicki Heame, Lewis Carroll to Franz Kafka, and Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze, Lippit arrives at a remarkable thesis, revealing an extraordinary logical consensus in Western thought: animals do not have language and hence cannot die. The animal has, accordingly, haunted thought as a form of spectral and undead being. Lippit demonstrates how, in the late nineteenth century; this phantasmic concept of animal being reached the proportions of an epistemological crisis, engendering the disciplines and media of psychoanalysis, modern literature, and cinema, among others. Against the prohibitive logic of Western philosophy, these fields opened a space for rethinking animality. Technology, usually thought of in opposition to nature, came to serve as therepository for an unmournable animality -- a kind of vast wildlife museum. A highly original work that charts new territory in current debates over language and mortality, subjectivity and technology, Electric Animal brings to light fundamental questions about the status of representation -- of the animal and of ourselves -- in the age of biomechanical reproduction.

Rhetorical Speculations
Rhetorical Speculations

Author: Scott Sundvall

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1607328313

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The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing
Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing

Author: Andrew Billing

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1003812481

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Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.