Rhetoricians first saw “the digital” flickering on screens but now feel its effects transducing our most fundamental of social practices. This essay traces digital emergence on screens and through networks and further into everyday life through infrastructures and algorithms. We argue that while “the digital” may have once been but one more example of the available means of persuasion, “digital rhetoric” has become an ambient condition.

AbstractFollowing Derrida, who follows the animal, this article seeks to proliferate the figures that mark the limits of the space between the “machine” and the “human.” Drawing on Erasmus's De copia, I argue that rhetoricians have long been interested in robot-like procedures. Given these machinic roots, we can understand a rhetorical education as procedural and computational and as particularly well suited to a cultural moment in which we write with (alongside) machines. In addition, I describe a robot that enacts Erasmus's method of continually rewriting the sentence “Your letter pleased me greatly.” The article thus demonstrates two ways of addressing the robot rhetor. First, it suggests that a rereading of the machinic tradition within rhetoric opens up new ways of understanding all rhetorical action as robotic. Second, echoing Ian Bogost, it demonstrates how works of “carpentry” can offer a window (albeit, a cloudy one) onto extrahuman rhetorical relations.

This article describes a graduate seminar titled “Interfaces and Infrastructures” that took place at Wayne State University. The course engaged with new media scholarship while also taking a piece of software, Google Wave, as its central artifact. The seminar demonstrates a pedagogical approach in which new media objects act as both tools and objects of study in the English studies classroom.

Discussions of intellectual property are often the focus of rhetoric and composition research, and the question of textual origins grounds these discussions. Through an examination of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, this essay addresses disciplinary concerns about textual origins and intellectual property through a discussion of situated and constructed ethos.

Book Review| January 01 2009 Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectRickert, Thomas James J. Brown,, Jr.; James J. Brown,, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Joshua Gunn Joshua Gunn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (2): 183–190. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655349 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James J. Brown,, Joshua Gunn; Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (2): 183–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655349 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.