Making Sense: Rhetoric, Perception, and Materiality

This dissertation dwells on the intersections of language-use and perception. The premise is that language makes literal sense and this reality has profound implications for those Burke called symbol-using/mis-using animals. Communication scholars have long accepted a model of communication that positions language as constitutive articulate contact as opposed to a discrete means of transmission (Stewart, 1994), but a great deal of work remains to be done in terms of developing the implications for individuals and their language-use. Chapter One explores the stances embraced by rhetorical materialists struggling to describe how language matters. The first chapter fields a series of critiques that essentially argue that a grounding logic is needed to organize our understanding of the processes of linguistic sense making. Embodied-embedded cognition serves as that guiding logic. Chapter Two explores Embodied-embedded cognition, a counter-perspective to cognitivism - the approach that positions sense-making in a dualistic environment where the sense-able stuff of the real world and the sense-maker considering that world are different. Embodied-embedded cognition suggests an enactive view of worlding that recruits that attitudes and actions of the sense-maker in determining what ultimately becomes real. Chapter Three ties these two conversations together through the use of metaphor, arguing that metaphors make sense. Metaphors can be looked at metaphorically, as a form of grasping at the world that is remarkably creative as well as abundant. This perspective on metaphors vindicates the stances of embodied embedded thinkers and rhetorical materialists alike that argue that language matters. Chapters Four and Five speculate on some implications for public speaking pedagogy and ethics. Teaching language as a form of grasping changes fundamentally the kind of practice that is necessary to improve. Likewise, noting that the language that we employ has a literal effect on perception transforms the ethical implications of our speaking. Chapter Five concludes by suggesting a logic of non-violence as a practical and productive response to the ethical demands placed on symbol-users

Emotions in Late Modernity

This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating ‘emotional sharing’ and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the ‘politics of fear’ around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands. The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human, and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behaviour. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, refraction and indeed creation of these theories and practices in literature, life-writing and other discourses and media. Contributors bring to bear perspectives from literary studies, film studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. Thus, this collection is historical in the most expansive sense, for it debates not only what historical accounts bring to our understanding of this topic. It encompasses too investigation of life-writing, documentary, and theory and literary works to bring to light elusive, paradoxical, underexplored – yet vital – issues in history and culture