Wayne Booth died October 10, 2005. I remember the pang at seeing the announcement. As The New York Times reported, he was “one of the pre-eminent literary critics of the second half of the 20th cen...

Green Culture is about an idea the environment and how we talk about it. Is the environment something simply out there in the world to be found? Or is it, as this book suggests, a concept and a set of cultural values constructed by our use of language? That language, in its many forms, comes under scrutiny here, as distinguished authors writing from a variety of perspectives consider how our idea and our discussion of the environment evolve together, and how this process results in action or inaction. Listen to politicians, social scientists, naturalists, and economists talk about the environment, and a problem becomes clear: dramatic differences on environmental issues are embedded in dramatically different discourses. This book explores these differences and shows how an understanding of rhetoric might lead to their resolution. The authors examine specific environmental debates over the Great Lakes and Yellowstone, a toxic waste dump in North Carolina and an episode in Red Lodge, Montana. They look at how genres such as nature writing and specific works such as Rachel Carson s Silent Spring have influenced environmental discourse. And they investigate the impact of cultural traditions, from the landscape painting of the Hudson River School to the rhetoric of the John Birch Society, on our discussions and positions on the Most of the scholars gathered here are also hikers, canoeists, climbers, or bird watchers, and their work reflects a deep, personal interest in the natural world in connection with the human community. Concerned throughout to make the methods of rhetorical analysis perfectly clear, they offer readers a rare chance to see what, precisely, we are talking about when we talk about the environment.

Introduction. I. THE NEW RHETORICS: OVERVIEW AND THEORY. Ferdinand de Saussure, Nature of the Linguistic Sign. I. A. Richards, From How to Read a Page and Speculative Instruments. Kenneth Burke, Definition of Man. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences. Richard Weaver, The Cultural Role of Rhetoric. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric and Philosophy. Stephen Toulmin, The Layout of Arguments. Richard McKeon, The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts. Chaam Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? Michael Polyani, Scientific Controversy. JUrgen Habermas, Intermediate Reflections: Social Action, Purposive Activity, and Communication. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Wayne Booth, The Idea of a University-as Seen by a Rhetorician. Bibliography I: Overviews and Theories. II. THE NEW RHETORICS: COMMENTARY AND APPLICATION. Donald C. Bryant, Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope. Richard Ohmann, In Lieu of a New Rhetoric. Robert L. Scott, On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic. Douglas Ehninger, On Systems of Rhetoric. S. Michael Halloran, On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern. Terry Eagleton, Conclusion: Political Criticism. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy. Walter R. Fisher, Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument. Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric. Jim W. Corder, Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, The Illiteracy of Literacy in the United States. Patricia Bizzell, Arguing about Literacy. James A. Berlin, Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theory in Practice. Bibliography II: Commentary and Application. Index.

(1995). Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 1-4, pp. 237-246.