Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their own interests. Further, universities can claim that student activists threaten academic freedom. In Sensitive Rhetorics, Kendall Gerdes puts these claims and common beliefs into conversation with rhetorical theory to argue that critiques of sensitivity reveal a deep societal discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action. Gerdes poses important questions: What kind of harm can language and representation actually do, and how? What responsibilities do college and university teachers bear toward their students? Sensitive Rhetorics explores the answers by surfacing submerged assumptions about higher education, the role of instructors and faculty, and the needs of an increasingly diverse student body.

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health ” physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.

From two leading scholars in the field comes this landmark assessment of the shifting terrain of feminist rhetorical practices in recent decades. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch contend the field of rhetorical studies is being transformed through the work of feminist rhetoricians who have brought about notable changes in who the subjects of rhetorical study can be, how their practices can be critiqued, and how the effectiveness and value of the inquiry frameworks can be articulated. To contextualize a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric, Royster and Kirsch present four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—as the foundation for a new analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical inquiry and the study and teaching of rhetoric in general. This model draws directly on the wealth of knowledge and understanding gained from feminist rhetorical practices, especially sensitivity toward meaningfully and respectfully rendering the work, lives, cultures, and traditions of historical and contemporary women in rhetorical scholarship. Proposing ambitious new standards for viewing and valuing excellence in feminist rhetorical practice, Royster and Kirsch advocate an ethos of respect and humility in the analysis of communities and specific rhetorical performances neglected in rhetorical history, recasting rhetorical studies as a global phenomenon rather than a western one. They also reflect on their own personal and professional development as researchers as they highlight innovative feminist research over the past thirty years to articulate how feminist work is changing the field and pointing to the active participation of women in various discourse arenas and to the practices and genres they use. Valuable to new and established scholars of rhetoric, Feminist Rhetorical Practice: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is essential for understanding the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impacts of feminist rhetorical studies on the wider field. Winner, 2014 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award

The Perfect Response offers a framework for assessing the nature of fluency, and explaining the personal attributes that account for why some communicators excel more than most in connecting with others.

Humility, Trauma, and Solidarity: The Rhetoric of Sensitivity enters a conversation in rhetorical studies about the agency, effectivity, and conditions of possibility for the rhetorical subject. This project is an exploration in several registers of the preoriginary affectability that Diane Davis has called "rhetoricity." Rhetoricity exposes existents to affection from outside in a structure of addressivity that is fundamentally rhetorical. Prior to individuation as a subject, rhetoricity implies that beings are differentiated first through response to an address or call. This extra-symbolic affection brings one into being as the subject of a rhetorical relation. This project aims to inscribe the valences of rhetoricity: its traumatic force, and even violence, but also its generation of the possibility for becoming otherwise. These valences are charted through chapters on reading and addiction, sensitivity, and identification in hypertext video games. In "Addiction, Humility, and Rhetoricity," I explore the uncontrollable relationality of addiction through a reading of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. I argue that an addictive habit, even reading habits, indicate the radical affectability of the subject. Rhetorical exposedness is a route of access to one's interiority that cannot be totally blocked off. The next chapter examines the public controversy over the use of trigger warnings in college classes. "Sensitive Students" argues that students' experiences of trauma mark an exposition to affection that makes teaching possible. In the final chapter, "Twisted Together: Twine Games and Solidarity," I argue that a set of hypertext video games made by transgender women are contesting the dominant values of gamer culture. By confronting players with an alterity internal to identification, these games erode the centrality of identification to rhetoric and forward solidarity as a shared relation to difference instead. This project traces the ways that gender marks and even constitutes the rhetorical structure of address. Sensitivity, receptivity, and exposedness are sites of gendering marks that persist and reverberate into the very formation of the rhetorical subject. This project opens a way for rhetoricians to frame exposedness as a rhetorical moment of ethicity: as being outside oneself, being beside oneself, and being for others.

With this volume, the field of rhetoric of science joins its sister disciplines in history and philosophy in challenging the dominance of Euro-American science as a global epistemology. The discipline of rhetoric understands world-making and community-building as interdependent activities: that is, if we practice science differently, we do politics differently, and vice versa. This wider aperture seems crucial at a time when we are confronted with the limitations of Euro-American science and politics in managing global risks such as pandemics and climate change—particularly in our most vulnerable communities. The contributors to this volume draw on their familiarity with a wide range of global scientific traditions—from Australian Aboriginal ecology to West African medicine to Polynesian navigation science—to suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between science and politics to better manage global risks. These possibilities should not only inspire scholars in rhetoric and technical communication but should also introduce readers from science and technology studies to some useful new approaches to the problem of decolonizing scenes of scientific practice around the world.

Rhetorical invention--the discursive art of inquiry and discovery--has great significance in the history of spoken and written communication, dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet invention has received relatively little attention in recent discussions of rhetoric, writing, and communication. This collection of essays is the first book in years to focus on current research in rhetorical invention. The contributors include many well-established scholars, as well as new voices in the field. They reflect a variety of approaches and perspectives: theory, history, culture, politics, institutions, pedagogy, and community service. Several of the essays address the relationship between invention and postmodernism--some by refiguring invention, others by challenging postmodernism. Still other essays explore multicultural conceptions of invention, the civic function of invention and rhetoric, and the role of rhetorical invention in institutions and in comunity problem solving. Taken together, these essays provide a much-needed forum for ongoing study of rhetorical invention within the framework of recent developments in both scholarship and the culture at large. "If inventional research is to continue and flourish," notes Janice Lauer in her foreword, "it must remain sensitive to shifts in epistemology, ethics, and politics. The essays in this volume undertake this effort.." The Editors: Janet M. Atwill is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee. The author of Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition and coauthor of Four Worlds of Writing: Inquiry and Action in Context and Writing: A College Handbook, she has published articles in Rhetoric Review, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, and the Journal of Advanced Composition. Janice M. Lauer is Reece McGee Distinguished Professor of English at Purdue University, where she founded, directed, and teaches in the graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition. She is coauthor of Four Worlds of Writing and Composition Research: Empirical Designs and has published numerous articles on rhetoric and composition. Contributors: Frederick J. Antczak, Janet M. Atwill, Julia Deems, Richard Leo Enos, Theresa Enos, Linda Flower, Debra Hawhee, Janice M. Lauer, Donald Lazere, Yameng Liu, Arabella Lyon, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Jay Satterfield, Haixia Wang, Mark T. Williams.