Advanced Topics in Rhetoric

Select from these five specialized tracks to deepen your analytical depth and applied rhetorical craft:

Advanced Rhetorical Theory & Critical Traditions

Investigates ideological, cultural, and philosophical expansions of rhetoric beyond classical persuasion into power dynamics, subjectivity, and symbolic action.

Burkean Dramatism and Motives: A Grammar of Motives (Kenneth Burke / University of California Press) - Introduces the dramatistic pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) and terministic screens to analyze underlying human motives and division.

Critical Rhetoric and Discursive Formations: The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault / Vintage Books) - Establishes the theoretical framework for examining how institutional power regimes dictate what can be articulated, known, and accepted as truth.

Cultural and Feminist Rhetorics: Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Krista Ratcliffe / Southern Illinois University Press) - Expands classical rhetorical invention by theorizing listening as an active, conscious tactic for negotiating cross-cultural differences and power asymmetries.

Publics and Counterpublics: Publics and Counterpublics (Michael Warner / Zone Books) - Demonstrates how texts circulate to generate self-organized publics and how marginalized counterpublics contest dominant civic spheres.

Rhetorical Criticism & Qualitative Methodologies

Provides advanced research frameworks and qualitative methods for deconstructing symbolic artifacts, material environments, institutional genres, and archival records.

Metaphoric Criticism and Cognitive Rhetoric: Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson / University of Chicago Press) - Unpacks the conceptual metaphors that subconsciously structure human cognition, public discourse, and social argumentation.

Rhetorical Genre Studies: Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Charles Bazerman / The WAC Clearinghouse) - A seminal open-access study showing how textual genres evolve as typified rhetorical responses to recurring institutional and social situations.

Material and Spatial Rhetorics: Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Thomas Rickert / University of Pittsburgh Press) - Expands rhetorical analysis beyond human symbols to evaluate how physical spaces, material geography, and sensory environments exert persuasive force.

Archival and Historiographic Methods: Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (Gesa E. Kirsch & Liz Rohan, Eds. / Southern Illinois University Press) - Explores the methodological, reflexive, and ethical practices involved in retrieving historical voices and reconstructing lost rhetorical traditions.

Visual, Digital, and Procedural Rhetorics

Investigates how persuasive and communicative power operates across visual artifacts, user interfaces, procedural code, and computational corpora.

Visual Semiotics and Multimodality: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen / Routledge) - Provides a systematic semiotic grammar to analyze visual composition, spatial vectors, and viewer positioning in multimodal artifacts.

Digital Rhetorical Theory: Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (Douglas Eyman / University of Michigan Press) - Synthesizes classical rhetorical principles with digital media scholarship to analyze circulation, digital delivery, and networked interactivity in an open-access format.

Procedural Rhetoric and Software Systems: Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Ian Bogost / MIT Press) - Defines procedural rhetoric, examining how rule-based computations, game mechanics, and software processes mount arguments about the real world.

Computational Corpus Rhetoric: Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (Derek N. Mueller / The WAC Clearinghouse) - An open-access guide demonstrating how to use distant reading, text-mining, and network visualizations to identify macro-level patterns across rhetorical corpora.

Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Examines how scientific consensus, clinical authority, environmental crises, and technological artifacts are rhetorically negotiated and established.

Epistemic Rhetoric and Scientific Argumentation: Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson (Leah Ceccarelli / University of Chicago Press) - Analyzes how scientific pioneers deployed interdisciplinary rhetorical strategies to forge paradigm shifts and build consensus across conflicting scientific fields.

Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine: Diagnostic Realities (Judy Z. Segal / Southern Illinois University Press) - Investigates how diagnostic criteria, clinical authority, and illness narratives function as persuasive interactions between patients and healthcare systems.

Environmental and Climate Rhetoric: Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Phaedra C. Pezzullo / University of Alabama Press) - Explores how community advocates deploy participatory rhetorical strategies and toxic tours to expose environmental racism and influence public policy.

Rhetoric of Technology and Technical Communication: User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts (Robert R. Johnson / State University of New York Press) - Connects classical techne with modern usability to examine how technological tools, system documentation, and interface designs mediate power between makers and users.

Applies rhetorical frameworks to examine democratic deliberation, grassroots mobilization, legal jurisprudence, and institutional public affairs.

Deliberative Democracy and Vernacular Publics: Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Gerard A. Hauser / University of South Carolina Press) - Examines how everyday citizen exchanges form an associative public sphere that shapes public opinion independently of state institutions.

Social Movement Rhetoric and Activist Mobilization: Persuasion and Social Movements (Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith & Robert E. Denton, Jr. / Waveland Press) - Outlines the rhetorical tactics, lifecycle stages, and expressive strategies that grassroots coalitions use to disrupt institutions and achieve policy change.

Legal Rhetoric and Constitutive Jurisprudence: The Legal Imagination (James Boyd White / University of Chicago Press) - Analyzes the law as a constitutive rhetorical culture where legal actors construct community, interpret statutory narrative, and establish moral meaning.