Responding to the Sacred: An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric

Synopsis

With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations to rhetoric.Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred.This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780271089713

Related ISBNs:

9780271089577

Publisher:

Penn State University Press

Date of Addition:

04/29/22

Copyrighted By:

The Pennsylvania State University

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Religion and Spirituality, Language Arts, Communication, Philosophy

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.

Edited by:

Kyle Jensen

Edited by:

Michael Bernard-Donals