In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of material-semiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies—a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and “rogue” pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR—we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these “turnings” allow resilient material-semiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM.

For the first time in the history of the address, the 2011 State of the Union was accompanied online by an enhanced version, which gave viewers the option of experiencing the speech alongside a display providing images, charts, graphs, outlines, and data visualizations. This paper examines the visual rhetoric of President Barack Obama’s 2011 enhanced State of the Union, locating this rhetoric in an aesthetic regime of neoliberal temporality. I argue that the visual rhetoric of the Enhanced Address articulates between conservative and progressive temporalities in order to promise a future economic victory prefigured by the economic logics of the past. Working between Svetlana Boym’s understanding of a restorative nostalgia that seeks to return to a lost, mythic origin, and a reflective nostalgia which looks to the past to open up new possibilities for the future, I argue that the temporal rhetoric of neoliberalism stylizes the return to the past as modality of progression in the future. I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sarah Sharma to argue that the aesthetics of the enhanced State of the Union invite viewers into a recalibrative nostalgic temporality which works reciprocally between restoration and reflection, allowing viewers to adjust their relationship to a deflated political scene without fundamentally altering the political coordinates that produce the conditions of economic exchange.

Condit, Prelli, and Depew and Lyne offer useful taxonomies of scholarship in the rhetoric of science, technology and medicine (RSTM), and once again provoke questions about the distinctiveness of a rhetorical approach. Rhetorical studies examine the choices rhetors make at all levels of invention (e.g., lines of argument, arrangement, terminology, visuals). But rhetoricians have not been clear in defining the distinctive contribution of their approach, and scholars in related fields do not routinely access or acknowledge rhetorical studies. There are also impediments to framing rhetorical studies for scientists and practitioners: the term rhetoric still has negative connotations in science publications, and rhetorical concepts like cooperation and reputation are addressed by other fields, creating a competing discourse. Nevertheless, RSTM will expand, and new directions for scholarship include visual rhetoric and the new persuasive practices brought about by online publication.