ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

Book Review| September 01 2016 Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. By Sue Curry Jansen. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.pp. xi + 169. $131.00 cloth; $38.95 paper. Peter Simonson Peter Simonson University of Colorado, Boulder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (3): 521–524. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.3.0521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Peter Simonson; Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2016; 19 (3): 521–524. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.3.0521 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 CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| June 01 2016 Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. By Sue Curry Jansen. New York: Peter Lang, 2012; pp. xiv + 169. $38.95 paper. Peter Simonson Peter Simonson University of Colorado Boulder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (2): 346–349. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0346 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Peter Simonson; Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2016; 19 (2): 346–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0346 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 CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

Since the 1960s, invention theory has reinvented itself. This essay aims to map and advance that process. It provides a window into the recent intellectual history of rhetorical studies and advocates continued development of sociologically informed rhetorical theories open to culture, materiality, and post-humanist understandings. I argue that invention theory has productively organized itself around two sets of dialectical tensions but remains constrained by two longstanding prejudices. The productive tensions revolve around (a) breaking with and affirming inherited rhetorical traditions and (b) conceiving invention as emplaced or dispersed. The prejudices consist of a continued logophilia and normative privileging of creativity and newness. I map the dialectics and prejudices across modern, premodern, and postmodern orientations. I then provide a revised definition and heuristic framework revolving around a concept, inventional media, which aims to capture invention’s simultaneous emplacement and dispersal across processes of discovery, creativity, and rhetorical reproduction.