Adaptive Rhetoric

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric’s Change features selected essays, multimedia texts, and audio pieces from the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference, which spotlighted the theme “Rhetoric and Change.” The pieces are broadly focused around eight different lines of thought: Aural Rhetorics; Rhetoric and Science; Embodiment; Digital Rhetorics; Languages and Publics; Apologia, Revolution, Reflection; and Intersectionality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Future of Feminist Rhetoric. Simultaneously familiar yet new, the value of this collection can be found in the range of its modes and voices.

This book explores the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication, focusing on narrative as its distinctive dimension. Within a framework of continuity with both the communication of our hominin predecessors and that of non-human animals, the book is about a twofold proposal. It includes the idea that (human and animal) communication has an intrinsically persuasive nature along with the hypothesis that humans developed narrative forms of communication in order to enhance their persuasive abilities. In this view, narrative persuasion becomes the feature that distinguishes human communication from animal communication. The study of the transition from animal communication to language addresses both the selective pressures that led communication for persuasive purposes to take a narrative form and the cognitive architectures and expressive systems that enabled our ancestors to cope with the selective pressures of persuasive/narrative-based communication. Language evolution is interdisciplinary, even from the specific perspective of evolutionary pragmatics chosen here. Therefore, this book is intended for researchers working in fields such as cognitive sciences, philosophy, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and primatology. It also represents a valuable resource for advanced students in cognitive sciences, linguistics, and philosophy.

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory. Alex C. Parrish explores the science of animal signaling that shows human and nonhuman animals share similar rhetorical strategies—such as communicating to manipulate or persuade—which suggests the vast impact sensory modalities have on communication in nature. The book demonstrates new ways of seeing humans and how we have separated ourselves from, and subjectified, the animal rhetor. This type of cross-species study allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing a deeper and more inclusive history of rhetoric than ever before.

A detailed comparative analysis of speaker-audience interactions in Greek historiography, Josephus, and Acts that examines historians’ use of speeches as a means of instructing/persuading their readers and highlights Luke’s distinctive depiction of the apostles as adaptable yet frequently alienating orators.

From film and television theory to intertextuality, poststructuralism to queer theory, postcolonialism to meme theory, a host of contemporary theories in the humanities have engaged with adaptation studies. Yet theorizing adaptation has been deemed problematic in the humanities' theoretical and disciplinary wars, been charged with political incorrectness by both conservative and radical scholars, and declared outdated and painfully behind the times compared to other disciplines. And even separate from these problems of theorization is adaptation's subject matter - with many film adaptations of literature widely and simply declared "bad." In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to detail and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation. She offers the first cross-disciplinary history of theorizing adaptation in the humanities, extending back in time to the sixteenth century - revealing that before the late eighteenth century, adaptation was valued and even celebrated for its contributions to cultural progress before its eventual - and ongoing - marginalization. Elliott also presents a discussion of humanities theorization as a process, arguing the need to rethink how theorization functions within humanities disciplines and configure a new relationship between theorization and adaptation, and then examines how rhetoric may work to repair this difficult relationship. Ultimately, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to find shared ground upon which adaptation scholars can dialogue and debate productively across disciplinary, cultural, and theoretical borders, without requiring theoretical assent or uniformity.

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.

Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse seeks to address the current gap in American public discourse between secular liberals and religiously committed citizens by focusing on the academic and public writing of millennial evangelical Christian students. Analysis of such writing reveals that the evangelical Christian faith of contemporary college students—and the rhetorical practice motivated by it—is marked by an openness to social context and pluralism that offers possibilities for civil discourse. Based on case studies of evangelical Christian student writers, contextualized within nationally-representative trends as reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion, and grounded in scholarship from rhetorical theory, composition studies, folklore studies, and sociology of religion, this book offers rhetorical educators a new terministic screen that reveals the complex processes at work within our students’ vernacular constructions of religious faith.