Moving Bodies

Debra Hawhee's new book has just been published:


Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).


From the publisher:

Kenneth Burke may be best known for his theories of dramatism and of language as symbolic action, but few know him as one of the twentieth century's foremost theorists of the relationship between language and bodies. Moving Bodies presents him as a major transdisciplinary theorist of the body. Debra Hawhee focuses on Burke's studies from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s while illustrating that his interest in reading the body as a central force of communication began early in his career and continued to inform his work over more than six decades.

Burke examined the human body as a participant in thought rather than as the mind's binary Cartesian opposite, grappling with notions of physical form as a corporeal intellect, the mental and biological interwoven within one life. By exploring his extensive writings on the subject alongside revealing considerations of his life and his scholarship, Hawhee maps his recurring invocation of a variety of perspectives in order to theorize bodies and communication, including music, mysticism, endocrinology, evolution, speech-gesture theory, and speech-act theory, as well as his personal experiences with pain and illness. Hawhee shows that Burke's goal was to advance understanding of the body's relationship to identity, to the creation of meaning, and to the circulation of language.

Her study brings to the fore one of Burke's most important and understudied contributions to language theory, and she establishes Burke as a pioneer in a field where investigations into affect, movement, and sense perception broaden understanding of physical ways of knowing.

Debra Hawhee is an associate professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece and coauthor of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students.

Rhetoric, Science, and Magic

Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009).

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From the Amazon description provided by the publisher:

Rhetoric operated at the crux of seventeenth-century thought, from arguments between scientists and magicians to anxieties over witchcraft and disputes about theology. Writers on all sides of these crucial topics stressed rhetorical discernment, because to the astute observer the shape of one's eloquence was perhaps the most reliable indicator of the heart's piety or, alternatively, of demonry. To understand the period's tenor, we must understand the period's rhetorical thinking, which is the focus of this book.

Ryan J. Stark presents a spiritually sensitive, interdisciplinary, and original discussion of early modern English rhetoric. He shows specifically how experimental philosophers attempted to disenchant language. While rationalists and skeptics delighted in this disenchantment, mystics, wizards, and other practitioners of mysterious arts vehemently opposed the rhetorical precepts of modern science. These writers used tropes not as plain instruments but rather as numinous devices capable of transforming reality. On the contrary, the new philosophers perceived all esoteric language as a threat to learning's advancement, causing them to disavow both nefarious forms of occult spell casting and, unfortunately, edifying forms of wonderment and incantation. This fundamental conflict between scientists and mystics over the nature of rhetoric is the most significant linguistic happening in seventeenth-century England, and, as Stark argues, it ought profoundly to inform how we discuss the rise of modern English writing.

Ryan J. Stark is assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Debating Social Security

Robert Asen, Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009).

From the publisher:

This volume examines the rhetoric hiding beneath the debates over Social Security.

In Invoking the Invisible Hand Robert Asen scrutinizes contemporary debates over proposals to privatize Social Security. Asen argues that a rights-based rhetoric employed by Social Security's original supporters enabled advocates of privatization to align their proposals with the widely held belief that Social Security functions simply as a return on a worker's contributions and that it is not, in fact, a social insurance program.

By analyzing major debates over a preeminent American institution, Asen reveals the ways in which language is deployed to identify problems for public policy, craft policy solutions, and promote policies to the populace. He shows how debate participants seek to create favorable contexts for their preferred policies and how they connect these policies to idealized images of the nation. Robert Asen scrutinizes contemporary debates over proposals to privatize Social Security. Asen argues that a rights-based rhetoric employed by Social Security's original supporters enabled advocates of privatization to align their proposals with the widely held belief that Social Security functions simply as a return on a worker's contributions and that it is not, in fact, a social insurance program.

Burke, War, Words

M. Elizabeth Weiser, Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

From the publisher:

In Burke, War, Words, M. Elizabeth Weiser reinserts Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism into the social milieu from which it originated, fostering a new understanding of how this concept of motivation was itself motivated by war and criticism. Weiser's model of a new approach to historiography contextualizes

Dramatism was a direct response to the global crisis wrought by World War II and to Burke's then-ongoing debates with New Critics, sociolinguists, political activists, and government propagandists over the role of language and communication to affect the world. Central to Burke's germinal volume A Grammar of Motives, dramatism was a call to action advocating informed social dialogue at a time when an allied victory seemed dependent instead on rallying behind a single strong voice in a unity not unlike that mandated by fascism itself. Weiser contends that Burke conceived dramatism as an alternative to New Criticism and as a blueprint for a dialectical resolution that was an antifascist rhetorical response to war.

Weiser draws from published and unpublished communications between Burke and the diverse and divergent literati of his era as well as from Burke's scholarly, political, and even poetic writings of the time. From this context she is able to map the complex arc of formulating A Grammar of Motives in Burke's larger wartime discourse. For Weiser establishing the origins of dramatism offers a model for enhancing our understanding of other rhetorical theories as well as a specific renewal of purpose for dramatism as an action-oriented tool to engage intellectuals in our conflicted age as Burke had envisioned in his.

From the series Studies in Rhetoric / Communication, University of South Carolina Press, edited by Tom Benson