About the Book
What is the relationship between cultural and rhetorical studies? What can the two fields learn from each other? This insightful volume is based on the premise that these fields address specific and parallel questions about culture, critical practice, and interpretation, and that opening up a dialogue between them can enhance both and provide a more complete understanding of society. Noted scholars across a variety of disciplines examine the overlaps and contradictions between these approaches, how they can contribute to each other, and the problems and questions that surface with this linkage. Exploring both critical and pedagogical practice, contributors address such questions as the relationship between images, representation, and ideology; influence and the struggle for power; how to blend theory and case study analysis effectively; and the goals of academic work.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Approaching the Intersection: Introduction to Issues of Identity, Politics, and Critical Practice, Thomas Rosteck
I. Reading the Popular and the Political: Converging Trajectories of Textuality, Method, Context
1. Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial, Carole Blair and Neil Michel
2. Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology, James Arnt Aune
3. Reading the Culture Wars: Ideology, Traveling Rhetoric and the Reception of Curricular Reform, Steven Mailloux
4. Subject Positions as a Site of Rhetorical Struggle: Representing African-Americans, Barry Brummett and Detine L. Bowers
5. American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude, Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling
6. The Character of History in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, Celeste Michelle Condit
7. The Ambassador's Body: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Gaze, Henry Krips
II. Visioning Alternatives: Beyond the Intersection
8. The Linguisticality of Cultural Studies: Rhetoric, Close Reading, and Contextualization, Cary M. Nelson
9. A Tradition of Culture in Rhetorical Studies, Thomas Rosteck
10. Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies, John M. Sloop and Mark Olson
11. The Triumph of Social Science: The Silent Language as Master Text in American Cultural Studies, Bruce E. Gronbeck
12. Anti-Theory and Its Antithesis: Rhetoric and Ideology, Patrick Brantlinger
13. Courting Community in Contemporary Culture, Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing
About the Author :
Thomas Rosteck, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR
Review :
This volume is of signal interest and importance to anyone concerned with the problems and possibilities of rhetorical and cultural criticism today. Situating their work at the 'intersection' of historical, theoretical, and methodological disciplinary concerns, the contributors critically engage with the interplay of the popular and the political in everyday life. --John Louis Lucaites, PhD, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University
'Culture,' Raymond Williams astutely remarked a number of years ago, is 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' Rhetoric, we have since come to recognize, is another. This timely volume takes up the pressing task of teasing out and analyzing the entailments of their fraught relation. From the Culture Wars to the Memo Wars, contemporary film to genetic medicine, sixteenth-century painting to contemporary political discourse, intellectual traditions to public memorials and theme parks, these critical essays are certain to move an already vital debate in new and productive directions. --Barbara Biesecker, PhD, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
At the Intersection catches cultural studies in a useful phase of uncertainty about its guiding aims and ideas--and rhetorical inquiry in a newly ambitious mood about its contemporary applications. The result puts some welcome fizz into cultural theory and illustrates what possibilities remain for cultural analysis. --John Corner, Professor, School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool
At the Intersection is the most important book to be published on cultural studies and rhetoric in the last decade. For students and others interested in the relationship between cultural practice, ideology critique, and the politics of representation, this is an indispensable book. It is also a book that takes seriously the relationship between strategies of understanding and strategies of critical engagement and transformation. A 'must read.' --Henry A. Giroux, DA, Waterbury Chair Professor, Pennsylvania State University
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