I’m honored to have received the National Communication Association’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award for my essay, “A Copious Void: Rhetoric as Artificial Intelligence 1.0”!
I’m floored in particular that folks have found the essay to be useful as ai development has intensified in dire, dangerous, and ever more death-centred ways since 2024. I’m so grateful to S. Scott Graham and Zoltan Majdik for their support for this piece and their willingness to include it in their special issue. I am also indebted to Joshua Trey Barnett’s editorial guidance. Truly, this essay would not have turned out as it did had it not been for them and the anonymous reviewers, all of whom made the product immeasurably better.
To that end, please check out the entire “Rhetoric of/with AI” special issue. It is excellent and deserves your attention if you are engaged with this particular topic. There is an amazing introduction from S. Scott Graham & Zoltan Majdik, incredible work on reproductive surveillance from Kem-Laurin L. & Randy Allen Harris, incisive, care-driven criticism on ai as a form of time-traveling memory from Emma Bedor Hiland, genre-based methods from Ryan Omizo & Bill Hart-Davidson, timely reflections on #WallStreetBets from Misti Yang & Zoltan Majdik, and a spicy conclusion from Casey Boyle. Please check it out!
Some changes will be coming to the UnTextbook and Reading Rhetorical Theory in 2025!
The main chapters of the UnTextbook were published as an online textbook with the University of Minnesota Libraries in 2022 (https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/). Publishing this as an online textbook gave this resource an ISBN and allowed it to circulate more widely in online libraries like the OER Commons. As of September 2024, Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power (RRT) has been adopted by more than 60 universities and colleges. The upcoming changes have to do with modifications to Reading Rhetorical Theory and to the front-page design of this website.
If you have been using the UnTextbook or Reading Rhetorical Theory, I would love to have your feedback! I’m collecting testimonials from folks who have found these resources useful. I’ve set up this survey for folks, or you can send me a message at rhetoricaltheoryuntextbook-at-gmail-dot-com. Either would be greatly appreciated!
So, what’s changing?
Updates for Spring-Summer 2025
The UnTextbook is staying open, and you will still be able to access the course content posted there. By June-August 2025, however, some links may change, requiring updates to course syllabi before the Fall.
UPDATE #1: The UnTextbook of Rhetorical Theory
My plan is to replace the chapters on the main UnTextbook page with icons for the textbook and other course offerings:
Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power (this would direct you to the OER site).
The (Undergraduate) UnTextbook Rhetorical Theory (you would be able to access the chapters currently posted on the main page).
The largest change to RRT is four new chapters from invited authors to Reading Rhetorical Theory in Spring 2025. This has required reorganizing the chapter order of that book. The new chapters include:
“The Public Sphere” by Angela McGowan Kirsch
“Counterpublics” by Carlos A. Flores and Sarah E. Jones
“Latine Rhetorical Theory” by Robert Mejia and Diana I. Martinez
“Rhetoric and the First Amendment” by Emily Berg Paup
Some things to note:
(1) the new chapters will not appear on the UnTextbook site.
(2) Although the order of the chapters is slightly changed as compared to what appears on this site, the content is identical (save for some new images).
(3) As always, there is no chapter 13.
(4) The links to “The Public Sphere” and “Counterpublics” will be ready in January 2025; the links to “Latinx Rhetoric(s)” and “Rhetoric and the First Amendment” will go live later.
(5) Finally, if you are considering switching from the UnTextbook to Reading Rhetorical Theory, know that the latter is more recently updated andhas been copy-edited, meaning the content you’ll find there is likely more grammatically correct and up-to-date.
You can find updated links for the textbook below if you are looking to adjust your syllabus for an upcoming semester. The guest-authored chapters will go ‘live’ in early Spring semester 2025, but the links should stay consistent.
With the approaching Fall 2024 semester, I’m posting some of the course resources I’ve assembled for my upcoming graduate seminar! I typically divide my course materials into several resource documents that allow students to access the course schedule/readings, assignment descriptions, day-to-day agendas, and handouts for my class.
This document contains course policies and the course schedule. Each topic heading of the syllabus (Race, Affect, Secrecy, Radicalization, Context, Canon, Form, Algorithm, Space, Time, Matter) includes an iceberg-like extended resource bibliography for papers, projects, and exams.
This document contains writing advice as well as detailed instructions for presentations, responses, short papers, exams, and paper-length projects. Not all of the assignments described in this document will be assigned in a given semester.
An index for the course. It contains items that I intend to distribute to the class (see below) and hyperlinks to the documents provided above. So far, my handouts for the semester include:
I use my UnTextbook site to post the course notes generated in previous semesters, which function as introductory resources for each unit in subsequent semesters.
I’m happy to share my newly published, open access article on the secrecy of rhetoric’s canon, just published in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric! “Recanonizing Rhetoric: The Secret in and of Discourse” takes stock of current scholarly conversations about rhetoric’s ancient Greek canon and why we should and should not make a “return” to these commonplaces. My hope is that it will be useful for folks who teach the ancient Greek canon as a problematic point of departure for rhetoric; that is, a beginning that cannot be accepted at face value, but demands relentless scrutiny.
It also offers two examples of why it is productive to imagine of this canon as a twofold secret. On the one hand, this secret may be understood as a history of acts of violence that have been deeply buried, repressed and concealed (in discourse). On the other hand, this secret is a retroactive realization (of discourse) in which concepts and terminology transform to reflect theorists’ investments in empire and conquest.
Here is the abstract from the publication:
Challenges to rhetoric’s canon often occur under the rubric of revising that canon and its foundational, shared meaning. Read through the strategies of deconstruction, the secret offers a common ground for recanonizing approaches by centering either a concealed quantity in ancient rhetoric’s granular archive (the secret in discourse) or an unfolding idea whose transformation has rendered it unrecognizable to its original version (the secret of discourse). This article draws on Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1974) and A Taste for the Secret (2001) before addressing how the secret’s registers in and of discourse animate de- and recanonizing readings of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. Its implications address scholars distressed by the durable forms of oppression ensconced in rhetoric’s ancient canon.
As part of UMN Libraries’ “Give to the Max” campaign, Mark Engebretson, Shane Nackerud, and former students Rory King and Anna Larson (and yours truly) collaborated to produce this short video. Please check it out! Open access materials like Reading Rhetorical Theorycan save students a significant amount of money, and ensure that course materials remain accessible across a range of modalities.
“COMM Students Save Money on Textbooks Thanks to the Libraries”
If you are teaching a class where this textbook might be useful and are seeking additional course materials, please reach out to rhetoricaltheoryuntextbook@gmail.com! I’m happy to answer your questions and share additional resources.
Atilla Hallsby 