Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks

Edited by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister; Preface by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister; Introduction by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister

SERIES: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique

University of Alabama Press

An examination of two seemingly incongruous areas of study: classical models of argumentation and modern modes of digital communication

What can ancient rhetorical theory possibly tell us about the role of new digital media technologies in contemporary public culture? Some central issues we currently deal with—making sense of information abundance, persuading others in our social network, navigating new media ecologies, and shaping broader cultural currents—also pressed upon the ancients.

Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks makes this connection explicit, reexamining key figures, texts, concepts, and sensibilities from ancient rhetoric in light of the glow of digital networks, or, ordered conversely, surveying the angles and tangles of digital networks from viewpoints afforded by ancient rhetoric. By providing an orientation grounded in ancient rhetorics, this collection simultaneously historicizes contemporary developments and reenergizes ancient rhetorical vocabularies.

Contributors engage with a variety of digital phenomena including remix, big data, identity and anonymity, memes and virals, visual images, decorum, and networking. Taken together, the essays in Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks help us to understand and navigate some of the fundamental communicative issues we deal with today.

Reviews
Editor

In this edited volume, Kennerly and Smith explore how ancient rhetorical theory and ancient artifacts dealt with the same fundamental communication issues people face today, such as persuasion, media, technology, and intercultural communication. Essays are organized into five categories when reading the ancient and the digital together: antecedent relations, analogical relations, heuristic relations, convention relations, and renewal relations. Readers should have a background in rhetorical theory. Highly recommended.’
—CHOICE

Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks is a strong edited collection that makes a unique contribution to two different areas within the field of rhetoric that are merging quickly into a tight intersection.’
—Jenny Rice, author of Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis

Michele Kennerly is assistant professor and the director of effective speech at Penn State University. She is author of Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics.

Damien Smith Pfister is associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. He is author of Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere.

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