Language Arts & Disciplines : Rhetoric

This collection presents theoretical, critical, applied and pedagogical questions and cases of publics and public spheres, examining these contexts as sources and sites of civic engagement and reflecting the current state of rhetorical theory and research. more...

Price: $100.00

A clear summary of contemporary rhetorical philosophy and its intersections with hermeneutics and critical theory. This book describes the significance of rhetorical knowledge for law through detailed discussions of some of the most difficult legal issues facing courts today, including affirmative action, gay rights, and assisted suicide. Francis J. Mootz responds to both extremes, those who argue that law is merely a rhetorical mask for the exercise of power and those who demonstrate an ideological faith in law’s autonomy, and he breaks new ground by returning to modern classics in the fields of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Drawing from Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric" and Hans-Georg Gadamer's "philosophical hermeneutics," Mootz argues that justice is a product of rhetorical knowledge. Drawing from Nietzsche, Mootz’s conception of rhetorical knowledge opens up the dynamic possibilities of critical legal theory. Francis J. Mootz III is Professor of Law at the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State University, editor of Gadamer and Law, andcoeditor with Peter Goodrich Nietzsche and Law (both forthcoming). more...

Price: $39.60

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, The Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. more...

Price: $18.00

Studies the relation between teller and listener in a set of French, English, and American short stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. more...

Price: $70.50

Terror and Its Discontents is a revealing look into the paradoxical embargo on free expression that underpinned the Robespierrists’ self-proclaimed “despotism of liberty” during the French Revolution. Caroline Weber provides a highly original—and timely—exposition of the political uses of rhetoric and of the links between language and power. more...

Price: $70.50