Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship: Fifty Years of the Rhetoric Society of America

Edited by Roxanne Mountford, Dave Tell, and David Blakesley Information and Pricing 978-1-64317-098-5 (paperback, $29.99); 978-1-64317-099-2 (PDF, $0); 978-1-64317-100-5 (EPUB, $0) © 2020 by the Rhetoric Society of America and the individual authors. 236 pages, with notes, illustrations, and bibliography. Parlor Press donates all proceeds from sale of the paperback edition to the Rhetoric Society of America. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. About This Book Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship: Fifty Years of the Rhetoric Society of America collects essays reflecting on the history of the Rhetoric Society of America and the organization’s 18th Biennial Conference theme, “Reinventing Rhetoric: Celebrating the Past, Building the Future,” on the occasion of the Society’s 50th anniversary. The opening section, “Looking Back: RSA at Fifty” describes the establishment of the organization and includes remembrances from some of the founders. These historical essays consider the transdisciplinary nature of RSA scholarship and pedagogy and offer critical reviews of trends in some of its subfields. The essays in the second section, “Reinventing the Field: Looking Forward,” focus on the future of scholarship and pedagogy in the field, from reinventing scholarship on major figures such as Vico, Burke, and Toulmin, to reconsidering future work on rhetoric and democracy, rhetoric and religion, and rhetoric from both sides of the Atlantic. The authors in the last section, “Rhetorical Interventions,” offer critical interventions on contemporary issues, including food justice, fat studies, indigenous protest, biopolitics, Chinese feminism, and anti-establishment ethos. Together, the essays in Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship offer a Janus-faced portrait of a discipline on the occasion of its golden anniversary: a loving and critical remembrance as well as a robust exploration of possible futures. Contributors include Kristian Bjørkdahl, David Blakesley, Leah Ceccarelli, Catherine Chaput, Rachel Chapman Daugherty, Richard Leo Enos, Joseph Good, Heidi Hamilton, Michelle Iten, Jacob W. Justice, Zornitsa Keremidchieva, Jens E. Kjeldsen, Abby Knoblauch, Laura Leavitt, Andrea A. Lunsford, Paul Lynch, Carolyn R. Miller, James J. Murphy, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Jack Selzer, Shelley Sizemore, Ryan Skinnell, David Stock, Joonna Smitherman Trapp, Victor J. Vitanza, Ron Von Burg, Scott Welsh, Ben Wetherbee, Elizabethada A. Wright, Hui Wu, Richard E. Young, and David Zarefsky. About the Editors Roxanne Mountford is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where she serves as chair and writing program administrator and teaches courses in the teaching of writing and in rhetorical criticism. Her books include The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces, Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (with Michelle Ballif and Diane Davis) and Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century: Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics (edited with Cheryl Glenn). Dave Tell is Professor of Communication Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and a founding director of the “Emmett Till Memory Project.” He is the inaugural Public Humanities Officer for the Rhetoric Society of America. David Blakesley is the Campbell Chair in Technical Communication and Professor of English at Clemson University, as well as a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America. He is also the founder and CEO of Parlor Press, a leading publisher in rhetoric, composition, and digital culture, and the editor of KB Journal.