Tag: Rhetorical Theory

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Updated Edition of Reading Rhetorical Theory!

As folks prepare for a new semester, I wanted to encourage you to check out version 2.0 of Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power. This online textbook is the edited and expanded version of the undergraduate rhetorical theory resources first made available on the main page of The Rhetoric UnTextbook. The book does not need to be assigned as a whole; rather, the individual chapters are intended to be assigned as might fit the needs of rhetoric instructors’ preferred order and topics.

New Additions/Chapters

Reading Rhetorical Theory has been re-organized into three sections, with a new, brief introduction to each: (1) Speech, (2) Representation, and (3) Power. These also now contain four new chapters by guest authors!

  •  Chapter 4: Rhetoric and the Freedom of Expression by Emily Berg Paup examines the multifaceted nature of the right to freedom of speech and its development and connection to the rhetorical tradition. It will explore these ideas through their theoretical foundations, historical development, and the ongoing struggle to ensure their equitable application.
  • Chapter 9: The Public Sphere by Angela M. McGowan-Kirsch explores rhetoric and symbolic action in the context of civic engagement. It focuses on actions related to systems’ efforts on individuals and communities, individuals’ activities to participate in their communities, active citizenship, symbolic actions that have built stronger communities, and the advancement of social justice in democracy.
  • Chapter 10: Counterpublics by Carlos A. Flores and Sarah E. Jones focuses on the relationship between theories of the public sphere and rhetorical theory. The first part of this chapter presents a detailed history and foundational definitions of the public sphere, while the second explores critiques of the foundational concept of the public sphere vis-à-vis counterpublics and several contemporary case studies.
  • Chapter 15: Latine Rhetorical Theory by Robert Mejia and Diana I. Martínez discusses the emergence of Latine rhetorical theory and criticism in the field of communication. Latine scholars and non-Latine scholars have worked to bring Latine rhetoric, concepts, and topics into the field.  It offers the rhetorical concepts and methods of the prominent Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, the nepantla rhetorical methodology, the groundbreaking theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, and his framework of radical hope.

Future Updates

For folks who are more familiar with my Rhetoric UnTextbook blog site, please know that this resource is still up and running, and you can still access the original undergraduate-level rhetorical theory, graduate-level rhetorical theory, and upper-level undergraduate secrecy surveillance course resources. In future semesters, however, I intend to concentrate on updates to Reading Rhetorical Theory, including

  • AI policy guidance and resource glossary
  • Citation information for each chapter
  • A glossary and chapter keywords
  • Updates to “digital rhetoric” concerning AI/LLM technologies
  • Updates to “the rhetoric of secrecy and surveillance” related to the release of Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie

Additional Resources

As always, I am happy to share additional teaching resources related to this textbook with verified instructors. quiz and exam questions to this email. These include exam/quiz questions, recent syllabi, written assignment descriptions, a day-to-day agenda, and recently used slides. Additionally, I deeply appreciate correction notices for content and/or broken links and have set up a survey for instructors and students to provide their informal feedback about what is working and what could use further improvement. The book is also listed on the Open Textbook Library – I would greatly appreciate your review if you have used the resource!

Open for Submissions

Finally, should you and/or a coauthor wish to contribute chapters or content to Reading Rhetorical Theory, we are open for future submissions. Version 2.0 benefited from a PALM (Partnership for Affordable Learning Materials) grant awarded by the University of Minnesota Libraries, which enabled us to compensate contributors for their work. We would be glad to continue developing this model for equitable publication. We seek additional chapters on the intersections of rhetorical theory with disability, race, gender, activism, sound studies, and other related topics. Contributors would be listed as authors on the textbook and would be cited in the style of an edited volume. Please reach out if you are interested!

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“A Copious Void” Recieves Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from the National Communication Association

Convention logo for the 2025 National Communication Association Convention, which includes an image of clouds and bubbles assembled into the shape of a hot air balloon. The name of the convention theme is also included: "Communicate to Elevate."

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!

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Coming Soon! Sovereign, Settler, Leaker Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric

To be published by The Ohio State University Press in February 2026

Pre-orders available at the link below. This book will also be released as an open-access title. If you are interested in a desk copy once it becomes available, please reach out! I am happy to respond to requests given availability/demand. Stay tuned and I hope you check it out!

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216057.html

Book Jacket Description

In Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, Atilla Hallsby argues that secrets play a pivotal role in organizing political discourse in the United States. Hallsby takes up contemporary case studies—ranging from the Valerie Plame scandal during the George W. Bush presidency, to the use of Saul Alinsky’s name as a partisan codeword for politicizing Obama’s Blackness, to Chelsea Manning’s public naming and outing—to show how dramatic revelations increasingly fail to produce meaningful change and instead reproduce entrenched racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

The core feature of these interlinked moments of crisis is the secret: a rhetorical patterning of political life organized by specific forms, each one lending a familiar shape to the shadows of American empire. These forms, theorized here as tropes, connect decades of secrets, linking the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror to the Trump-era reemergence of “deep state” conspiracy theories. As an extension of secrecy and surveillance studies, and with the aim of attaining a more accountable and just form of US governmentality, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie explains how still-unfolding political realities in the United States emerged, transformed, and regenerate.

Reception

“Much work on the secret skirts over its rhetorical form and associated tropes, but Hallsby has written a rigorous, capacious, and highly engaging account that situates the secret historically and culturally. Essential reading for those interested in the politics and aesthetics of secrecy.” —Clare Birchall, author of Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America

“Presented from a psychoanalytic perspective that refuses to collapse into binaries of suspicion and faith, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie is both reassuring for its ability to ‘name’ contemporary rhetorical dynamics and sobering because, as Freud once put it, we are not masters of our own house.” —Joshua Gunn, author of Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering

“Smart, playful, and theoretically sophisticated, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie introduces us to the hard truths of secrecy in American politics. A one-of-a-kind book.” —Joshua Reeves, coauthor of The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital

“Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie generatively brings rhetorical studies into conversation with surveillance studies to offer important expansions and correctives to the study of secrecy. Drawing on a rich historical archive that includes figures like Alan Turing, Saul D. Alinsky, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Chelsea Manning, Hallsby powerfully illustrates how secrets are not just in but of discourse. In so doing, he importantly foregrounds the secret’s material impacts and entanglements with racial, sexual, colonial, and gendered violences.” —Mia Fischer, author of Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State

“This analytically sophisticated book offers a captivating exploration of the often-destructive role of political secrets in society. Whether found in conspiracy theories, national security leaks, or fabrications supporting war, Atilla Hallsby shows how secrets powerfully shape collective knowledge and legitimize forms of violence.” —Torin Monahan, author of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

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New In Print: “What is Rhetoric Enough? Forms IN and OF Rhetoric Scholarship”in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric

“What is Rhetoric Enough?” was initially presented as the keynote address for the 2024 Midwest Winter Workshop (MWW) hosted by the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although much remains the same, it has been edited from its original outline format for readability and to include citations that were not in the original due to time constraints.

ARTICLE @ Journal for the History of Rhetoric

PROOFS/Article Pre-Print (nearly identical to final version)

MWW VERSION: You can also find the original talk, delivered at the Midwest Winter Workshop in 2024 here.

ABSTRACT: This article poses the question, What is rhetoric enough? as a provocation about the hurdles emerging scholars must traverse. The first is fear that their scholarship is not “enough” to meet the topical, theoretical, and evidentiary standards of rhetoric studies, while the second is the criticism that there is “too much” rhetoric in communication scholarship. Together, these create a wicked polarity. This article answers this question by drawing on the strategy of prepositional criticism, which posits “both/and” answers as affirmative rejoinders to “either/or” framings of rhetoric’s grounding in either tradition or transformation. To that end, it offers five provisions that elaborate distinct forms in and of rhetoric scholarship: (1) rhetoric can be understood as a contained feature in and productive effect of discourse; (2) exigencies define the context in and purpose of scholarship; (3) theory is embedded in and an enactment of rhetorical criticism; (4) community is invoked in and a creation of academic discourse; and (5) citation can be thought of as a way to document scholars’ due diligence in their writing and as an active habit or practice of constituting a conversation.

I am presently at work co-editing a forum with Ariel Seay- Howard of North Carolina State University, assembling a number of other contributors who also responded to this same prompt. The forum is based on a featured panel held at the National Communication Association (NCA) convention in 2024.

About this Essay

My intended audience was graduate students, and my objective was less to provide a comprehensive view of rhetorical studies and more to capture a snapshot of the field based on the community gathered for the 2024 MWW.

One feature that is less apparent in this version is that the many citations – especially those in second section – are drawn primarily from the published scholarship of MWW workshop leaders, many of whom were in the audience for this speech.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Allyson Gross, Alicen Rushevics, Megan L. Zahay, and Ailea Merriam-Pigg for
their invitation to deliver this 2024 Midwest Winter Workshop (MWW) keynote address, aswell as to Rob Asen, Rob Howard, Jenell Johnson, and Allison Prasch, who are the most
generous interlocutors and incredible hosts.

At the MWW, Cara Finnegan, Rob Asen, and
Rachel Bloom-Pojar asked me important questions that have stuck with me as I edited this final version, and I am grateful to Emily Winderman for her suggestion to address each of the workshop’s faculty mentors. I’m also indebted to Ned O’Gorman for the opportunity to publish this keynote, the participants from the MWW whose encouragement nudged me
toward publishing this essay, and to Lauren Seitz for editorial guidance in bringing this to
print.

Finally, I wish to offer a special thanks to Ariel Seay-Howard, the “What is Rhetoric
Enough?” panelists at NCA 2024, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities for their time, labor, and support for this project.

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New Open-Access Publication: “Reconstructing Kairos and Chronos Across Trump’s Twitter/X Corpus: Computational Methods + Rhetorical Critique” in the Western Journal of Communication

Recently published in the Western Journal of Communication, this OA publication co-authored with Dan Faltesek of Oregon State University offers a hybrid computational-rhetorical take on Trump’s first term. It employs a MALLET (machine learning) topic model to periodize his (almost) full Twitter corpus (c. 2010-2020).

Our key finding is that in different periods of his twitter life distinct patterns can be identified in the post-to-post flow of Trump Twitter, and that these arguments are substantially more coherent and important than any particular tweet.

You can find the full abstract below the link

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10570314.2024.2396506

Abstract: The collective force of ex-U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweets/Xs is palpable in American public culture, political discourse, and academic rhetorical criticism. Adopting a critical and computational approach, this essay offers a novel method for the rhetorical analysis of social media-based public address by shifting emphasis from memorable exemplars of Trump’s social media discourse to the flow dynamics between those tweets/Xs. Focused on loops of Tweets as recursive argument systems, we use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Markov Chain analysis to offer insight into the kairotic and chronic patterning of Trump’s social media utterances to map more and less stable argument strategies across distinct periods of his first Twitter/X presidency.

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New Teaching Resources: (Fall 2024) Graduate Seminar in Rhetorical Theory

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.

Course Policies and Syllabus

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. 

Assignment Guidelines

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. 

Weekly Agendas

Contains the plan for discussion on a given day of our graduate seminar.  Actively updated week to week.

Handout and Resource Repository

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:

Primers (introductory materials)

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.

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Research Presentation for the Institute for Advanced Studies: “The Settler’s Secret: Analepsis, Paralipsis, Prolepsis”

On February 27th, 2024, I delivered a research presentation as part of a spring semester fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. The presentation draws on a recently completed chapter of my manuscript, which is likewise titled “The Settler’s Secret.”

I had previously presented a longer version of this presentation for the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin Madison on February 15, 2024, as part of their Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture Colloquium Series. My thanks go out to Drs. Allison Prasch, Rob Asen, Jennell Johnson, Rob Howard, Mary McCoy, and the graduate students of Communication Arts at UW Madison for extending this invitation and opportunity to share research.

Abstract/Synopsis: The presentation examines narrative tropes that characterize the psyche and worldview of the “settler subject”—the Western protagonist across stories of neocolonial conquest. Specifically, this settler subject adopts the role of detective, imagining themselves as a detector of atrocities while disavowing complicity in the systems of violence they discover. Rather than drawing on the detective’s substantive traits, this egoic position is triangulated by narrative tropes: analepsis (past), paralipsis (present), and prolepsis (future). Rhetorically, the prefixes ana-, para-, and pro- evoke forms of self-effacement that place the settler “in the middle of things,” as the main character in a story that is not about them. Analepsis establishes the settler’s narrative past by rewriting history, paralipsis enables the settler to acknowledge but disidentify with neocolonial acts, and prolepsis forecasts apocalyptic outcomes that perversely reinforce the settler’s need for continuous armament. Each trope also aligns with a psychoanalytic register – the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, respectively – which manage the absent center of settler subjectivity. The discussion of each trope is paired with a unique collection of texts to demonstrate the dispersion of these subject-constituting tropes across coverage of contemporary, high-tech war.

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DRPC Privacy Week Presentation: “We Live In Public”

On January 22, 2024, the Digital Rhetoric and Privacy Collective hosted an online session titled “Teaching About Privacy in an Age of Generative AI“ with Drs. Calvin Pollak of the University of Washington (who presented “Navigating Publicity and Privacy: Genre-Based Technical Communication Pedagogy With, For, and Against ChatGPT”) and Reed Hepler, a Digital Initiatives Librarian and Archivist at College of Southern Idaho (who presented “Deliberately Safeguarding Privacy and Confidentiality in the Era of Generative AI”) and myself. The title of my presentation was “We Live in Public: Teaching Publicity, Privacy, and Secrecy.” Links to both the DRPC and a video of the presentation(s) can be found below.

DRPC Privacy Week
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Keynote Speech from the 2024 Midwest Winter Workshop @ UW Madison

On February 16-17, the graduate students of the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison hosted the 14th annual Midwest Winter Workshop! It was an amazing event, consisting of 7 panel sessions on topics ranging from writing scholarship to the academic job market and 19 “pods” comprised of faculty and graduate student small groups. You can find more information about the event here.

For the keynote, I presented a talk titled “What is Rhetoric Enough? Forms in and of Rhetorical Scholarship.” You can find a written version of the presentation here. It was a great, generative conference and I am grateful just to have been part of it! Many thanks to Allyson Gross, Ali Rushevics, Megan Zahay, and Ailea Merriam-Pigg, who organized the event.

You can also access the recorded Keynote here.

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New In Print: “What is the Sound of One Hand Playing?” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Excited to share this new essay, “What is the Sound of One Hand Playing: Aural Body Rhetoric in the Music of Horace Parlan and Paul Wittgenstein,” co-authored with Bill Heinze in Rhetoric Society Quarterly!

Abstract: This essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.

Link to article: https://www.tandfonline.com/…/10…/02773945.2023.2232774

Free copies (while available):https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PDEKA4GKGRIINQFC5GDH/full?target=10.1080/02773945.2023.2232774