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Richard Lewontin and the Argument from Ethos
Get PDFThis essay uses rhetorical analysis to defend the population geneticist Richard Lewontin from accusations made by E. O. Wilson and others that his Marxist social philosophy distorts his empirical science. I suggest that Lewontin’s appeal to his own authority as an experimental evolutionary biologist supports his claim that racism has no biological justification and that it is his opponents whose assumptions about society distort their scientific arguments
Technology, Hyperbole, and Irony
Get PDFExcept for metaphor, tropes are arguably irrelevant to the analysis of science and technology. Among tropes, moreover, hyperbole and irony seem particularly ill-suited as the former exaggerates, while the latter undermines, two strategies at odds with a language intent on closely following the contours of the world of experience. While neither hyperbole nor irony has a place in the professional discourses of science and technology, both play a role in their popular representations. Hyperbole expresses our sense that these achievements exemplify the sublime, a form of experience applied at first to feelings of awe generated by great literature, then in succession to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, triumphs of science like Newtonian physics, and such technological achievements as the computer and the Large Hadron Collider. While the Collider, the largest and most powerful experimental apparatus ever built, is an unalloyed technological triumph worthy of hyperbole, some of the alterations in social life that the computer has ushered in are open to skeptical debate. This is especially true to the extent that computer-facilitated communication has taken the place of the face-to face interaction that makes a robust social life possible. Irony is this skepticism’s vehicle
Paleomythologies: The Spiritual Persuasion of Evolution
Get PDFA current rise in so-called “caveman” diets, books, exercise regimes and other trends demonstrates a cultural attempt to reclaim idealized prehistoric conditions for the modern human. In a rhetorical analysis of texts from this modern paleo culture, we identify what we call a “paleomyth” and illustrate how such lifestyle trends not only offer truncated understandings of evolutionary science, but more importantly how they offer a mythological narrative for paleo believers
Towards a Rhetoric of Translation for the Postdramatic Text
Get PDFFor the literary translator, the question arises as to how she might approach the delicate task of migrating texts that resort largely to “a purely intensive usage of language,” while acknowledging that such texts share a mode of expression that transcends historical or critical periodization. If one is to focus on fidelity or equivalence, the aim should not be the production of a text that translates some underlying meaning or sense where signification and representation are fixed. Rather, the aim should be the meticulous rendering of its surface expression so that the text’s performative capacity can be realized anew in the target language and culture. The focus on what “might be” in language invites a parallel with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic genre in theatre and a rhetoric of translation that reflects the aporia of the source expression, in stark contrast to the centrality of the logos to traditional Western rhetoric. While ultimately unattainable, an approach to text as a Deleuzean “map” would seem an appropriate means for the translator to remain true the “intentio” of postdramatic texts
Skopos Theory as an Extension of Rhetoric
Get PDFThis essay, which pertains to translation studies, presents a reflection aiming at defining intersections between the areas covered respectively by rhetoric and by skopos theory, which, in the field of translation studies, is one of the most frequently used theoretical frameworks that structures practice, and therefore teaching. It aims to lay the foundations of a translatorial theoretical framework based on an extension of the skopos model including the stylistic elements of classical rhetoric, and perhaps also on an extension of the rhetorical model to embrace a wide range of text types
Introduction to the Symposium on Engaged Rhetoric of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine
Get PDFThis article argues for an engaged rhetoric of science, technology, engineering and medicine (RSTEM) that collaborates with science in the development and execution of research projects. It traces the emergence of an engaged RSTEM through recent disciplinary history and identifies Bruno Latour and Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ work as watershed moments that influence this commitment to collaboration. In reviewing the history of critique in the discipline, it argues that we have practical and political common ground with science that can supersede the necessity of critique. Finally, it addresses the difficult questions of why we as a discipline and as individual scholars would engage with science, what we have to contribute to scientific projects and where engaged scholars fit into interdisciplinary projects and into the credit cycle of the research university
Translation as a Rhetoric of Meaning
Get PDFFrom early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation and Rhetoric surpasses this ontological threshold of persuasion and metatextual transcendence in a far more sophisticated way, exceeding also the sheer plane of textual mechanics. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a systematic inclusion of rhetoric-centered approaches in Translation Studies, and vice versa, would cross-fertilize not just those two fields, but how it also would help to shed light on some areas where a monolingual focus has all too often imposed significant limitations to progress. It will also provide a quick overview of what I define as a “Rhetoric of Meaning in Translation Studies,” and will also explore how the study of rhetorical correspondence at the micro level in source and target languages and texts may be substantially hindered by significant structural disparities at the macro level that may have not been systematically or successfully incorporated in the wider theoretical framework of Translation Studies
Creative Engagements: Community Management Roles for RSTEM Praxis
Get PDFEstablished roles for praxis beyond teaching are often missing from discussions of RSTEM engagement with the science community. Although it is important to ground engagement in identifiable roles, it may be that these roles are still being conceived or need to be re-created contextually for every engagement situation. This paper grounds RSTEM engagement in one identifiable field of practice: scientific community management. RSTEM's specialized attention to and understanding of how science communities and genre systems interact can provide insight into the forming of these communities and their management
