Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric

Edited by Lynda Walsh & Casey Boyle, this collection pursues the following questions: Given our current entanglement in global relations mediated through complex logics of technoscience, how do we solve problems together? How can we include and incorporate that which has been excluded and objectified? How can we reshape our present toward equitable futures? In short: How do we move beyond intervention to invention in the wicked discourses that entangle us in our common life? These questions prompt us to recognize that entangled discourses require new techniques that can work through (rather than around or above) the modern dichotomies of nature/culture, human/nonhuman and text/context to create inclusive accounts of dire political dynamics. We propose that the practice of topology offers those techniques. Topology combines the classical rhetorical strategy of topos with nonlinear logic to yield a new model of discourse. Each chapter engages an aspect of rhetorical studies to explore, examine, and elaborate the possibilities of topological engagement; and, each treats a concrete case in order to display their methods, for the purposes of adoption and adaptation, all with the purpose of advancing rhetorical practice from intervention to invention.

 

Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric

Edited by Lynda Walsh & Casey Boyle

 

Chapter One – From Intervention to Invention: Introducing Topological Techniques

Lynda Walsh and Casey Boyle

 

Chapter Two – Aristotle’s topoi and idia as a map of discourse

Sara Rubinelli

 

Chapter Three – Topoi and Tekmēria: Rhetorical Fluidity among Aristotle, Isocrates, and Alcidamas

A.W. Cody and Rosa A. Eberly

 

Chapter Four – The Shape of Labor to Come

Casey Boyle

 

Chapter Five – Inventing Mosquitoes: Tracing The Topology Of Vectors For Human Disease

Molly Hartzog

 

Chapter Six – Genre Signals in Textual Topologies

William Hart-Davidson and Ryan Omizo

 

Chapter Seven – Mapping Rhetorical Topologies in Cognitive Neuroscience

Jordynn Jack, L. Gregory Appelbaum, Elizabeth Beam, James Moody,

and Scott A. Huettel

 

Chapter Eight – Topology and Psychoanalysis: Rhe-torically Restructuring the Subject

Jake Cowan

 

Chapter Nine – A Year Of Deliberating Danger(ously): A Network Topology Of The Loaded Climate Dice

Kenneth C. Walker

 

Chapter Ten – Getting Down in the Weeds to Get a God’s-Eye View: The Synoptic Topology of Early American Ecology

Lynda Walsh and Lawrence J. Prelli

 

Chapter Eleven – Enthymematic Elasticity in the Biomedical Backstage

Christa Teston