Participatory critical rhetoric : theoretical and methodological foundations for studying rhetoric in situ / Michael Middleton [and three others].

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, methodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies. This book addresses how participatory critical rhetoric furthers understanding of the significant role that rhetoric plays in everyday life through expanding the archive of rhetorical practices and texts, emplacing rhetorical critics in direct conversation with rhetors and audiences at the moment of rhetorical invention, and highlighting marginalized voices that might otherwise go unnoticed. This book organizes the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory critical rhetoric through four vectors that enhance conventional rhetorical approaches: 1) the political commitments of the critic; 2) rhetorical reflexivity and the role of the embodied critic; 3) emplaced rhetoric and the interplay between the field, text, and context; and 4) multiperspectival judgment that is informed by direct participation with rhetors and audiences. In addition to laying the groundwork and advocating for the approach, Participatory Critical Rhetoric also offers significant contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism more broadly by revisiting the field's understanding of core topics such as role of the critic, text/context, audience, rhetorical effect, and the purpose of criticism. Further, it enhances theoretical conversations about material rhetoric, place/space, affect, intersectional rhetoric, embodiment, and rhetorical reflexivity.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Since its inception in ancient Greece, rhetoric has been inseparable from public life. Born of the polis, where orality had not yet ceded its eminence to literacy, rhetoric developed as a verbal art in response to exigencies inevitable in urban communal affairs ruled by citizens through more or less deliberative processes. Little wonder then that one finds Aristotle's formulation of rhetoric as one of technique (techne), in contradistinction to poetics, which is concerned with pure making (poiesis) as reflected in the Attic drama or tragedy. Participatory Critical Rhetoric is a timely addition to the time-honored tradition of Western rhetorical scholarship. Reflective of a time when rhetorical perspective is proving to be as salutary as any discipline in the humanities and social sciences, this book brings the study of rhetoric to the cusp of 21st-century social theories and criticism in general. It does so--and this is the collection's most distinguishing feature--by updating rhetorical studies with such research tools as participatory observation, interview, and related qualitative methods. Well organized, clearly written, and rich in ethnographic insights, this book will be a useful guide for scholars interested in recapturing the rhetors' voices, unavoidably muffled by dominant media and conventional documentation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts