John Louis Lucaites

Celeste Michelle Condit

Sally Caudill

This indispensable text brings together important essays on the themes, issues, and controversies that have shaped the development of rhetorical theory since the late 1960s. An extensive introduction and epilogue by the editors thoughtfully examine the current state of the field and its future directions, focusing in particular on how theorists are negotiating the tensions between modernist and postmodernist considerations. Each of the volume's eight main sections comprises a brief explanatory introduction, four to six essays selected for their enduring significance, and suggestions for further reading. Topics addressed include problems of defining rhetoric, the relationship between rhetoric and epistemology, the rhetorical situation, reason and public morality, the nature of the audience, the role of discourse in social change, rhetoric in the mass media, and challenges to rhetorical theory from the margins. An extensive subject index facilitates comparison of key concepts and principles across all of the essays featured.

A Reader

Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

Roxanne Louiselle Parrott

The increased attention currently being paid to women's reproductive health issues has produced a corresponding interest in the role that communication plays in promoting better health care. Groundbreaking and comprehensive, this book is the first systematic examination of the major types and forms of messages about women's reproductive health - medical, social scientific and public - and the degree to which these messages compare with and contradict each other. Within the broad framework of communication, a range of women's health issues are examined in this book from political, historical, technological and feminist perspectives. The issues examined include: abortion; infertility; drug and alcohol use in pregnancy; childbirth; AIDS; menst

Evaluating Women's Health Messages

Looks at changing public attitudes toward the abortion issue, and analyzes the rhetoric used to support both positions

Communicating Social Change

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric

The Meanings of the Gene is a compelling look at societal hopes and fears about genetics in the course of the twentieth century. The work of scientists and doctors in advancing genetic research and its applications has been accompanied by plenty of discussion in the popular press—from Good Housekeeping and Forbes to Ms. and the Congressional Record—about such topics as eugenics, sterilization, DNA, genetic counseling, and sex selection. By demonstrating the role of rhetoric and ideology in public discussions about genetics, Condit raises the controversial question, Who shapes decisions about genetic research and its consequences for humans—scientists, or the public? Analyzing hundreds of stories from American magazines—and, later, television news—from the 1910s to the 1990s, Condit identifies three central and enduring public worries about genetics: that genes are deterministic arbiters of human fate; that genetics research can be used for discriminatory ends; and that advances in genetics encourage perfectionistic thinking about our children. Other key public concerns that Condit highlights are the complexity of genetic decision-making and potential for invasion of privacy; conflict over the human genetic code and experimentation with DNA; and family genetics and reproductive decisions. Her analysis reveals a persistent debate in the popular media between themes of genetic determinism (such as eugenics) and more egalitarian views that place genes within the complexity of biological and social life. The Meanings of the Gene offers an insightful view of our continuing efforts to grapple with our biological natures and to define what it means, and will mean in the future, to be human.

Celeste Michelle Condit

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