Ryan Leack (University of Southern California)
rlea@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
This panel will explore recent movements in rhetorical theory writ large, either in connection or not in connection with composition theory and practice.
Rhetoric, although productively imbricated with composition theory and practice, also intersects and resonates with numerous fields in sometimes unexpected yet critical ways. This panel welcomes proposals that delve deep into rhetorical theory itself (sophistic rhetoric, ambient rhetoric, new materialist rhetoric, and so forth). Proposals that engage rhetoric’s materiality are particularly welcome. However, the panel also welcomes proposals that braid rhetoric together with philosophy (Western and beyond), poetry, science (and physics and quantum mechanics in particular), language, literature, and the like.
In addition to expanding rhetoric’s disciplinary relations, this panel hopes to push rhetoric beyond persuasion—beyond rhetoric as purposeful action toward some given end, but also as reception, responsivity, relationality, resonance, aurality, and the like. In this way, the panel hopes to push rhetoric’s boundaries and find kinship in new frontiers beyond its disciplinary and historically sanctioned borders.