EP2: Vorris Nunley: Incivility, AOC, and the Limits of Persuasion (?)
Manage episode 323391315 series 3270223
Vorris Nunley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, discusses with USC and UCI faculty a talk entitled “Re-Doing Rhetoric: Incivility, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the Limits of Persuasion (?).” Here, he discusses AOC’s response to Representative Ted Yoho referring to her as a b***h to think with and through trope, incivility, affect, and the neoliberal composition classroom. In conceiving of rhetoric beyond persuasion, he examines the ways in which tropes, in circulating preconsciously in cultures throughout various realms, use us just as much as we use them. In this way, tropes are not simple figures or metaphors individual rhetors deploy toward specific persuasive ends. Rather, that tropes permeate social fabrics as potentialities in the domains of (non)discursive rhetoric means that we “choose” tropes for a particular reason only insofar as they have already affected, shaped, and influenced us in definite ways. Vorris closes on the uses of his work in the multimodal composition classroom and on what he terms a “pedagogy of discomfort,” one which unsettles students in the pursuit of transformative education.
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