1st Gent.: Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. 2d Gent.: Ay, truly: but I think it is the world that brings the iron. R. L. Scott once explained that the “environment is experienced as being rhetorical,” meaning anything within the milieu can participate in addressivity, that who or what addresses what and whom is variable and multiple. He stressed that human valuing determined participation, but he nonetheless anticipated a more robust, posthuman ecological view when he contended that “one (...) must not think of rhetorical attributes as exclusively the property of speakers, writers, or other message-senders”. Scott claimed an “enlarged concept of rhetoric” was necessary... (shrink)

Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nathan Stormer's work moves beyond general histories of medicine, science, and women; it provides specific insight into how the earliest medical writings on abortion served to create cultural memory. Nineteenth-century medical texts presented the act of abortion as a threat to the carefully circumscribed concepts of nation and race. Stormer analyzes a wealth of literature from the period to explore the rhetorical techniques that led early (...) Americans to presume that abortion put the integrity of all of American culture at risk. The book's first part provides a layered context for understanding medical practices within the rhetoric of memory formation and sets early antiabortion efforts within the wider framework of nineteenth-century biopolitics and racism. In Part II of the study, Stormer examines the substance of the memory constituted by these early medical practices. Making a major contribution to the study of rhetoric, Articulating Life's Memory will be invaluable to scholars researching reproductive rights and feminist and cultural histories of medicine. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. (...) Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan. The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric. (shrink)

The contemporary moment in rhetoric studies is complex, marked by a number of powerful currents pulling scholarship in new directions. One of those currents is the deepening engagement with science and technology studies through rhetorical investigations of medicine, environmental policy, and science. Another is the increasing experimentation with qualitative methodologies, often called “rhetorical ethnography.” A third is the rapidly developing encounter with interwoven philosophies of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism. If you are interested in any of these, you (...) should absolutely read Scott Graham’s The Politics of Pain Medicine. The title is overly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West by E. CramNathan StormerViolent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. By E. Cram. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 292 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $34.95. ISBN: 0520379470.E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram (...) states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations [End Page 199] of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place.... As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy... (shrink)