Neurorhetoric, Race, and the Law: Toxic Neural Pathways and Healing Alternatives

Neurorhetoric is the study of how rhetoric shapes the human brain. At the forefront of science and communication studies, neurorhetoric challenges many preconceptions about how humans respond to persuasive stimuli. Neurorhetoric can be applied to a multiplicity of relevant legal issues, including the topic of this Maryland Law Review Symposium Issue: race and advocacy. After detailing the neuroscientific and cognitive theories that underlie neurorhetoric, this Essay theorizes ways in which neurorhetoric intersects with the law, advocacy, and race. This Essay explores how toxic racial stereotypes and categories become embedded in the human brain and what can be done about it

Radial Categories and the Central Romance

Past studies of the genre of romance have disagreed on what the essential features of romance are, and using essential features to draw boundaries around the genre has provoked frustration. Following the work of George Lakoff on radial categories, this study instead seeks for a medieval understanding of the central romance. The category of romances will be larger than merely the central ones through the principle of chaining, and no single characteristic needs to be shared by all romances, but central romances establish the domains of experience that are the concern of other members of the genre. The medieval rhetorical trope of cataloguing offers a way of establishing the central members of the genre for readers of the fourteenth century

The metaphorical understanding of power and authority

No abstract available

Women are not dangerous things: Gender and categorization

Linguistic

Penguins Can\u27t Fly and Women Don\u27t Count: Language and Thought

Many people object to sexist and racist language partly because they assume that language not only reflects, but somehow affects attitudes. A one-to-one relationship between language and thought seems obvious to those who never question it, but the issue of whether language influences thought and behavior has been a matter of debate in philosophy even before Berkeley and Wittgenstein. Literary critics, particularly those who call themselves deconstructionists, are still debating to what extent language constructs reality