Through the lenses of comparative and critical rhetoric, this book theorizes how alternative approaches to communication can transform legal meanings and legal outcomes, infusing them with more inclusive participation, equity and justice. Viewing legal language through a radical lens, the book sets aside longstanding norms that derive from White and Euro-centric approaches in order to re-situate legal methods as products of new rhetorical models that come from diasporic and non-Western cultures. The book urges readers to re-consider how they think about logic and rhetoric and to consider other ways of building knowledge that can heal the law’s current structures that often perpetuate and reinforce systems of privilege and power.

Through the lenses of comparative and critical rhetoric, this book theorizes how alternative approaches to communication can transform legal meanings and legal outcomes, infusing them with more inclusive participation, equity and justice. Viewing legal language through a radical lens, the book sets aside longstanding norms that derive from White and Euro-centric approaches in order to re-situate legal methods as products of new rhetorical models that come from diasporic and non-Western cultures. The book urges readers to re-consider how they think about logic and rhetoric and to consider other ways of building knowledge that can heal the law’s current structures that often perpetuate and reinforce systems of privilege and power.

Rhetoric and Communication scholars have recently made notable advances in discovering and/or recovering rhetorical practices of various under-represented and under-recognized cultures. Building on this growing body of scholarship, this book initiates a new line of interdisciplinary inquiry. By turning attention to how histories of cross-border and cross-cultural contacts mobilize different conditions of possibility and engagement, this collection of essays by established and emergent scholars develops a range of new approaches to comparative rhetorical studies in our age of globalization. Using Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, and Japanese rhetorical practices as examples, these essays both challenge current assumptions and methodological perspectives about comparative rhetoric and illustrate how to navigate between the native's point of view and a critical vantage point outside the native tradition and between the meanings of the past and the exigencies of the present. To promote critical reflection on the challenges, opportunities, and implications of traversing rhetorical times, places, and spaces, the collection concludes with a response essay that takes the reader on a "Tao Trek," revisiting some of the earliest Eastern and Western rhetorical encounters and further illuminating the complexities of comparative engagement in the present moment. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

In the first part of the book, George Kennedy explores analogies to human rhetoric in animal communication, possible rhetorical factors in the origin of human speech, and rhetorical conventions in traditionally oral societies in Australia, the South Pacific, Africa, and the Americas. Topics discussed include forms of reasoning, the function of metaphor, and the forms and uses of formal language. The second part of the book provides an account of rhetoric as understood and practiced in early literate societies in the Near East, China, India, Greece, and Rome, identifying unique or unusual features of Western discourse in comparison to uses elsewhere.

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree," then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

Rhetorical critics have long had a troubled relationship with method, viewing it as at times opening up provocative avenues of inquiry, and at other times as closing off paths toward meaningful engagement with texts. Text + Field shifts scholarly attention from this conflicted history, looking instead to the growing number of scholars who are supplementing text-based scholarship by venturing out into the field, where rhetoric is produced, enacted, and consumed. These field-based practices involve observation, ethnographic interviews, and performance. They are not intended to displace text-based approaches; rather, they expand the idea of method by helping rhetorical scholars arrive at new and complementary answers to long-standing disciplinary questions about text, context, audience, judgment, and ethics. The first volume in rhetoric and communication to directly address the relevance, processes, and implications of using field methods to augment traditional scholarship, Text + Field provides a framework for adapting these new tools to traditional rhetorical inquiry. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Roberta Chevrette, Kathleen M. de Onís, Danielle Endres, Joshua P. Ewalt, Alina Haliliuc, Aaron Hess, Jamie Landau, Michael Middleton, Tiara R. Na’puti, Jessy J. Ohl, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Damien Smith Pfister, Samantha Senda-Cook, Lisa Silvestri, and Valerie Thatcher.

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