Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

As a member of several fan cultures, I have an interest in the processes that fan audiences use to construct and reconstruct the texts they consume. Additionally, I think of the way (written, oral, and musical) texts construct the individuals who constitute their audiences. Examining Master of Kung Fu provided the perfect combination of these two interests.
—David

My fascination with representations of Asians in the media began with The Destroyer book series that I read as a teen. While the character Remo at first resisted his fate, he quickly embraced his identity as the next Master of Sinanju. As a Vietnamese American growing up in a small Midwestern town, I have slowly come to my identity as an Asian American. I owe a lot of that to my current life as a Ph.D. student. My research has centered around cultural identity and representations in comics, children's literature, and Asian American magazines. These have fueled my desire to learn more about my own identity.
—Kate

The two of us created “Who Are You What Are You Why?” together, as an experiment predicated on Wittgenstein’s statement: “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” We began this experiment by separately composing a series of non-contiguous questions and then “mashing” them together to form a virtual dialogue that provides only questions, never answers. What are the effects of composing using recognizable language in unrecognizable configurations? Where is the demarcation between sense and nonsense? How can we form meaning from seeming meaninglessness? These are a few of the questions we hope to raise with this experiment.

I wrote this essay for readers, hoping to provoke, inspire, enrage and enjoy. Death and violence have been painful and productive forces in my life, and specifically in my writing. In this essay I share some of these experiences and relate them directly to writing, as well as public, political, rhetorical, and historical topics. My desire is to affect personal and public reflection, and to display rhetorical agency in both spheres, thus demonstrating that such divisions, and most if not all binaries, are social constructs that beg for challenge.

This short essay compares the war-time rhetoric of George W. Bush with the rhetoric of Barack Obama. The eerie similarities between the two lead me to question Obama’s promise of change.

This is a response to the Obama interview with Al Arabiya on January 26. I highlight the contrast between Obama's rhetoric now and the war talk that characterized the Bush years.

For this piece, I wanted to share some observations about Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster given the timeliness of the text, not only in the wake of the 2008 presidential campaign, but also because of the still-pending Fair Use lawsuit against the Associated Press, the recent installation of the poster in the Smithsonian, and the debut of Fairey’s “Supply and Demand” exhibition currently on display at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Additionally, I wanted to comment on the piece in a way that was not only visually interesting—thus the annotated break-out commentary—but also in a way that packaged rhetorical analysis in a more accessible manner for a general readership.

Pundits in the mainstream media have a tendency to chastise Internet users for making their private lives public and for putting the most intimate or mundane details of their personal experiences into digital files for all to gawk at online. As a scholar of rhetoric, my fear is that these practices won’t be public enough now that so many people rely on corporate cloud computing to store and share photos, videos, and journal entries, and social network sites often function as the Internet equivalent of gated communities. At the same time corporate copyright regimes are claiming intellectual property rights to materials that might otherwise enter the public domain. The recent inauguration of Barack Obama represents an aggregate of rhetorical occasions involving political crowds and online communities who have commemorated the event. Without public digital archives in which to store our collective memories of the digital files from that historic day, the record of the inauguration is remarkably fragile.