1st Edition

Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies Networks, Affect, Electracy

By Sean Morey Copyright 2016
    266 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    278 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.

    Introduction: The Rebirth of Delivery  Part 1: What is Delivery?  1. Declassifying Delivery  2. Reclassifying Delivery  Part 2: Who Delivers?  3. Becoming Delivery-Machine—Emotion, Feeling, Affect  4. Becoming Shaman—Delivering the Invisible  Part 3: How to Deliver?  5. Delivery-Networks  6. Posthuman Gestures and Electrate Attunements  Postscript: The Death of Delivery (and Other Transitions)

    Biography

    Sean Morey is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.

    "Like delivery itself, Sean Morey’s book offers more than it suggests at first glance. Beneath its insightful readings of delivery/hyprokrisis in the classical tradition and its examinations of delivery’s many meanings and possibilities in new media contexts, it delivers something else as well: a new style of reading and writing—indeed, a new method for rhetorical inquiry—specifically attuned to the medial logics of the digital age." -- Scot Barnett, Indiana University, USA