We conduct an analysis of the American television drama Breaking Bad as a show that resists the label of 'science fiction', while its use of scientific imagery and discourse create what we call a 'scientific ethos'. This essay explores the use of science as an appeal to intelligence and credibility in Breaking Bad. We include a theoretical discussion of how ethos emerges in serial television narratives, an analysis of the show's textual construction of its ethos, and a discussion of the intertexual and social effects of that ethos. Finally, we recommend the adoption of a rhetorical perspective in analysing how images of science circulate in fictional texts.
and Arts of Oklahoma B renda Glascott's "Constricting Keywords: Rhetoric and Literacy in our History Writing, " one of six feature articles that headlined Literacy in Composition Studies' inaugural 2013 issue, strikes me as an important essay-specifically, as one of those rare disciplinary metacommentaries that brings once unstated terminological tension into sharp relief. This sort of work matters now especially because, amid the growing push to integrate literacy studies further into the disciplinary fold of rhetoric and composition, scholars in the field will have to reckon with the opportunities and limitations that our evolving constellation of keywords entails. Glascott does this with candor. Rhetoric, for Glascott, constitutes a "constricting keyword" insofar as its predominance across composition histories "privileg[es] an audience-driven. .. approach" above any more "self-exploratory" approach that she associates with the keyword literacy (23). Literacy, by contrast, allows for Glascott the bidirectional analysis of language as both other-directed and self-directed. Apart from remarks by symposium respondents to LiCS' first issue (see Bizzell; Goldblatt; Kynard; Qualley; Salvatori), there has been little commentary on Glascott's terminological distinction of rhetoric as other-directed and literacy as bidirectional but emphasizing the self. This distinction is provocative and potentially useful. It is also, I suspect, likely to grate against the convictions of many avowed rhetoricians (present company included). But I don't say this dismissively. In this symposium essay, I take Glascott's literacy-rhetoric division as a point of departure. I first address Glascott's charges against rhetoric in order to revise the sense of the term her essay provides. I then specifically revisit Glascott's commentary on Jaqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream and, finally, offer several ideas toward refiguring literacy and rhetoric as complementary keywords, perhaps to the detriment of composition. While I disagree with Glascott on several important points, my purpose is less to refute her position than to extend the conversation she introduces in a new direction. Above all, I appreciate that Glascott has broached the issue of rhetoric and literacy's mutual relationship. The modest defense of rhetoric I wish to mount here stresses the conceptual elasticity necessary for rhetoric and literacy to become mutually complementary rather than oppositional ideas. I pursue this goal by responding specifically to three of Glascott's charges against rhetoric. Each of Glascott's theses, in my view, entails some truth and some oversimplification.
Motivated by Wayne C. Booth’s notion of “methodological pluralism,” this essay compares Fredric Jameson and Kenneth Burke’s writings on Henry James in order to shed new light on disagreements voiced by these theorists in a 1978 exchange from Critical Inquiry . The essay builds on Burke’s brief commentary on James’s The Spoils of Poynton , as well as Jameson’s scattered writings on James’s psychologized modernism, to demonstrate how Spoils reflects the incongruous but finally complementary positions of Jameson the historical ideologist and Burke the rhetorician.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.