Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life [Paperback]

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resources for succeeding generations. Several of the contributions show how rhetorical cultural forms can themselves create emergencies. The contributors bring expertise from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and communications studies, underlining the volumes wider relevance as a reflection on the human condition.

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Inventions of hyperbolic culture
Ralph Cintron

Chapter 2.Medical rhetoric in the US and Africa: the oncologist as Charon
Megan Biesele

Chapter 3.The diffuse in testimonies
Stevan Weine

Chapter 4.Internal rhetorics: Constituting selves in diaries and beyond
Jein Nienkamp

Chapter 5.Ordeals of language
Ellen Basso

Chapter 6.As if Goya was on hand as a marksman: Foot and mouth disease as a rhetorical and cultural phenomenon
Brigitte Nerlich

Chapter 7.Story seeds and the Inchoate
Michael Carrithers

Chapter 8.The palaestral aspect of rhetoric
F.G. Bailey

Chapter 9.Rhetoric in the moral order: a critique of tropological approaches to culture
James Fernandez

Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index

&a fine collection of essays illuminating situation uses of narratives, images and tropes that are not contemplated as explanations but as cultulÃ.