The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.

The eleven studies in this volume illustrate and advance the synthesis of discourse analysis with rhetorical studies. Rhetoric in Detail shows how a variety of techniques from discourse analysis can be useful in studying such concerns as agency, legitimation, controversy, and style, and how concepts from rhetoric including genre and figuration can enrich the work of discourse analysts. The authors' research sites range from government commissions, political speeches, newspaper reports and letters to interviews and conversations in beauty salons and online. Methodological overviews interspersed throughout survey critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, grounded theory, computer-aided corpus analysis, narrative analysis, and participant observation and provide suggestions for further reading. Rhetoric in Detail is an invaluable source for rhetoricians looking for systematic, grounded ways of approaching new, more vernacular sites for rhetorical discourse and for discourse analysts interested in seeing what they can learn from the tradition and practice of rhetorical analysis.

Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to "truth" (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a "troubled freedom" that spring from rhetoric’s depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric’s other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.

This book is neither biography nor a conventional film critique. Rather, the text explores aspects of Hitchcock’s work in relation to theories drawn from the social sciences and philosophy. The various chapters focus not on specific films, but on broader ideas central to Hitchcock’s work. There is, for instance, a chapter on his idea of the MacGuffin in which I use Ernesto Laclau’s theories of equivalent substitution to explain how the MacGuffin functions in Hitchcock’s works. There is also a chapter on his notion of ‘pure cinema’ which moves from the idea of purity as an anthropological concept to consider purity in relation to current debates regarding so-called hybrid media, and Hitchcock’s relevance to these issues in respect of his dissatisfaction with the advent of sound to the cinema world. Broadly speaking, the book uses Hitchcock’s films to illustrate ideas in the social sciences and philosophy and uses those same ideas to illustrate aspects of Hitchcock’s films.

Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing foregrounds the present in all activities of composing, offering a new perspective on the rhetorical situation and the writing process. A focus on the present casts light on standard writing components—audience, invention, and revision—while bringing forth often overlooked nuances of the writing experience—intrapersonal rhetoric, the preverbal, and preconception. This pedagogy of mindful writing can alleviate the suffering of writing blocks that comes from mindless, future-oriented rhetorics. Much is lost with a misplaced present moment because students forfeit rewarding writing experiences for stress, frustration, boredom, fear, and shortchanged invention. Writing becomes a very different experience if students think of it more consistently as part of a discrete now. Peary examines mindfulness as a metacognitive practice and turns to foundational Buddhist concepts of no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and detachment for methods for observing the moment in the writing classroom. This volume is a fantastic resource for future and current instructors and scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.

During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture. Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.