Cultural Rhetorics

Mother tongue rhetoric transfer is unavoidable in ESL writings, especially for Iranian ESL learners, since Persian and English language is quite different. The paper discusses the negative transfer of mother tongue rhetoric in Iranian undergraduate ESL learners' writings from the perspectives of choosing rhetorical structure in English and Persian writing. In this regard, 50 intermediate undergraduate Iranian students who are a bachelor in engineering fields at two private higher education institutions located in Malaysia, are selected as participants to give their opinion about which style they prefer to use for both English and Persian writing. Statistical analysis of the participants' performance indicates that Iranian undergraduate students use the same rhetorical pattern for their both Persian and English writing and there is no consideration regarding the knowledge of L1 and L2 differences. The results also state that above 70% of the participants prefer to give a general comment about the topic and encourage readers at the end of the writing in their English and Persian essays.

Life in a Saamaka village is surrounded by rules, from trivial activities such as harvesting fruits to the most formal of public meetings, everything has to be done in the right way, “the way we are used to”. However, these rules seem to be constantly under discussion, there are frequent arguments about which are the rules and how to apply them to each situation. This chapter takes a look at Saamaka politics, trying to understand how deadlocks concerning rules are overcome and how consensus is reached. The main ethnographic are from funerary rituals, activities in which a proper conduct is most important, and thus rules are taken particularly seriously. Brief descriptions of the hierarchy of political offices in Saamaka and the rhetorics in the kuutu (council meetings) will be necessary, in order to understand how authority is conceived and performed, and how rules are established by transforming relationships with the past. The closing arguments contest the recurring description of Maroon polities as “states within a state” and present an alternative approach that takes further into account both Saamaka political philosophy and its inherent relationship with their own style of life.

This essay centers on what I refer to as “multimodal orientalism,” a term that names how music, sound effects, voice, accent, and so on interact with and across visual, textual, and contextual modes to reinscribe Orientalist tropes of the Asian “Other” as foreign, exotic, and threatening. To explain the workings of multimodal orientalism, I focus on two sonic strategies: aural stereotyping and aural othering as demonstrated in the case of YouTube videos about Asian cosmetic eyelid surgery.

Full text: http://enculturation.net/sounding-Asian-America

Building on studies of alternative rhetorics, this article envisions personal writing pedagogy as a relational endeavor that fosters rhetorical alliances among disparate communities. I detail a particular course design through which "personal reflection" becomes a means of enacting more radical forms of belonging. Fifteen years ago, Christopher L. Schroeder et al.'s ALT DIS: Alternative Discourses and the Academy examined the emergence of "hybrid," "mixed," and "alternative" discourses within scholarly and student writing. These texts, wide-ranging and diverse, blend nonstandard discursive forms with academic conventions to explore new methods and reach broader publics (Bizzell, "Hybrid" 12). In Bizzell's words, they "have combined elements of The mandate is to search for classroom practices that use, build upon, and enhance experiences and that permit the re-definition and reconfiguration of acceptable forms of expression, representation, and presentation.

This paper is a rhetorical analysis and critique of the epistemological lens of the RSA's (Rhetoric Society of America's) cfp (call for papers) for their 2018 biennial conference. In this piece, I argue that in order to address the challenges of the present moment, building toward a better invention and celebrating the past, as the conference calls us to do, then we must resist the need to begin conversations firmly situated with western traditions of rhetoric. We must be epistemically disobedient (Mignolo) to this zero-point epistemology and turn to non-western rhetorics and cultural rhetorics to help us truly invent and reshape our discipline. I further highlight the role that settlers and westerners must play in these efforts.

En este trabajo, abordaremos el filme Relatos Salvajes (Szifron, 2014) con el objetivo de observar cómo la metáfora de lo salvaje da cuenta de una fuerte intervención donde se modeliza (se vuelve a pensar) el comportamiento humano en clave animal. Como configuración metafórica dominante, hipotetizamos que la agresividad en los cortos pone de manifiesto que existe “algo” atávico en el comportamiento del hombre que no puede ser explicado a través de los lenguajes que el ser humano maneja. Para dar cuenta de ello, recurrimos al campo metodológico de la retórica de la cultura, vertiente que entiende a la metáfora como tropo privilegiado que logra captar matices que en los conceptos definidos canónicamente se pierden, mostrando los límites de un lenguaje que no termina de expresar la complejidad de los mecanismos que atraviesan los confines entre lo biológico y lo social. Sostendremos que, en este filme, la retórica animalísitica construye protagonistas que tensionan lo animal que, en este caso, determinan una idea de “lo salvaje” en el ser humano. En este sentido, los seis cortos que componen Relatos Salvajes devienen como una suerte de polifonía que no pierde de vista la violencia en la cotidianeidad argentina, corporizando una naturaleza animal que problematiza cuestiones acuciantes de nuestra contemporaneidad nacional.

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access.

NB: Through no fault of the editor, Steven J. Thompson, and despite his heroic efforts to address the problem with the publisher, several of the poems in the published Foreword were not formatted correctly, which affects lines breaks, rhyme schemes, symmetry, stanzaic and other forms, and thus ultimately the rhetorical meaning and experience of the poems themselves. The poems not properly formatted are presented below in manuscript form with the proper formatting.

https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222

This essay sets out an approach to parallelism in verbal art as a semiotic phenomenon that can operate at multiple orders (or levels) of signification. It examines parallelism in the sounds through which words are communicated, in language communicated by those sounds, in symbols or minimal units of narration communicated through language, and then in more complex units of narration communicated through those symbols or units. Attention is given to how these different levels of parallelism interrelate and may diverge, while revealing that parallelism at all of these levels reflects a coherent semiotic phenomenon.

"Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance: An Introduction" (in collaboration with Lotte Tarkka), "Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)" and "Multimedial Parallelism in Ritual Performance (Parallelism Dynamics II)" can be read together as a monograph-length study.

La présente contribution invite à mettre au défi nos réflexes sociaux et à regarder le supplément de signification mais surtout d’efficacité qu’il peut y avoir à reconnaître la précarité et à l’assumer. L’intention est, d’une part, de signaler la qualité supérieure que le « sens du précaire » confère aux valeurs, aux arguments, aux notions, aux actions et aux choix, d’autre part, de pointer les moyens disponibles pour convertir le « moins » en « plus ».

Typography reflects and expresses culture, and the limits we place on the use of type may reflect the limits we intend to place on our culture, including who is allowed to participate in it and in what way. An examination of typography critiques of “bad” typefaces often reveals the cultural biases and beliefs of the critic. Descriptions of type “character” tend to reflect the character of the critic, audience, or user, rather than the type itself. The use of “bad” type may also be a tactical form of resistance to power (de Certeau, 1984), visually conveying its intended audience or speaking back to assumptions about the message or author. Examples of “bad” type as tactical resistance include church bulletins; Comic Sans printed “I Can’t Breathe” shirts protesting police brutality against communities of color; and the website for a family-owned medical body donation service.

"Rural drag" is the appropriation, arrangement, and deployment of rural fashion, objects, practices, and aesthetics in order to assert membership in and support for white, settler heteropatriarchy. This rhetorical practice draws from a cultural repository of rural symbols and tropes called the "rural imaginary" to establish a rhetorical link between rural space and the privileges of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

Rhetoric is cultural and culture is rhetorical. In this course, we will explore, practice, and question the “arts of persuasion” by learning about frameworks for both analyzing and producing arguments for different media, audiences, and cultures. Through assigned readings and “real world” examples, the course will provide students with a rhetorical vocabulary as well as the skills needed to analyze, practice, and produce persuasive artifacts. Students will produce a final critical-creative project on a topic of their choice in consultation with the instructor.

As Kate Theimer postulates, there is a plasticity of archives. Over time, our conceptualizations of the archive have expanded due to technological innovations. With the advent of virtual reality (VR) headsets, we must consider the ways in which this new technology will shift our comprehension of the archive. What if the archive is not physical nor is it, strictly, digital? What if the archive was wearable? What if the archive was a virtual exhibit which enables us to witness historical events “live” and experience the sheer emotions the subject felt in the captured moment?  The Digital Humanities has much to offer to help us make sense of the affordances VR technology has to offer regarding our ever expanding notions of the archive.