John Wesley’s famous account of his heart being “strangely warmed” is often considered a conversion. However, his change is less about identity as a Christian, and is more about manner of being. Wesley’s change is best understood as an affective encounter. It is affective in being about bodily experience and initially pre-rational. However, that affective moment was possible due to previous encounters and intentional designs that prepared the possibilities for affective experiences. It is an encounter, following Louis Althusser’s theorization of the term, as a moment of change that might not have happened. Chance is taken seriously with the encounter, and combined with intentional design. Wesley might not have interacted with the Moravian sect in ways that set him up for his affective experience; rhetorical studies can use the encounter and affect to consider probability and chance more, and to think about rhetoric as the design of possible encounters.
I might give a variety of logical reasons to help my daughter sleep: being tired from swimming, that a sore leg will feel better, or that she will need lots of energy to play with friends. Consequences can be an argument too, like the loss of a stuffed animal if there are any more non-emergency calls for parents before morning. I might even pull out some sort of shameless (and ineffective) ethos-based plea about being the parent and knowing what is best for her. Rhetorical persuasion is a concatenation of moments and forces that are experienced as a unit – a unit with a persuasive quality to it or that creates new directions for speech and action. Similarly, rhetoric can also be understood as the production or design of those experiences. The design is always partial, as no one can control an experience, but the addition, removal, arrangement, and use of elements for the purpose of creating a particular quality of experience is an important rhetorical act. This design-oriented production of rhetorical experiences is a way of focusing on the human agents within a material rhetoric context that avoids relegating the non-human and the non-linguistic to the background. This paper brings design further into the discussion of rhetoric, adds a design-based angle to new materialism, theorizes rhetoric as an experience, considers John Dewey’s notion of experience and Brian Massumi’s work on affect in light of design and material rhetoric, and (of course) to help parents set up their children for a wonderful night’s rest. Article received: April 20, 2020; Article accepted: July 1, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper
This article argues for using rhetorical quandaries as a basis for composition courses. Following work in composition that considers the notion of “problem,” the article explores constraints as a way to determine main difficulties in writing situations. Course examples indicate connections between difficult writing moments and larger societal dilemmas.
While hurricanes are weather events that may become human/ecological tragedies, they might help create stylized moments too. Hurricanes can be distinctive from each other in message and in the tools they use as their material aspects (wind speed or storm surge) interact with cities, social structures, and popular media messages. One way to explore hurricane styles is through forms of affective mapping. This exploration analyzes features of several hurricanes that made landfall in 21st-century North America in combination with considerations of affect around hurricanes. The combination of material and affective elements of hurricanes might allow rhetorical style to serve as a way of rethinking hurricanes and their connections, from the individual level to global climate change.
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