Turntables and Tropes

A Rhetoric of Remix

Scott Haden Church

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781611864083
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628954500
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The creative practice of remix is essential to contemporary culture, as the proliferation of song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even streaming television shows like Stranger Things demonstrates. Yet remix is not an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one, as there is evidence of remix in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes is the first book to address remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Through identifying, recontextualizing, mashing up, and applying rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices, this groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary that scholars and students can use to analyze remix. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers such as Isocrates, Quintilian, N?g?rjuna, and Cicero and contemporary luminaries like Kenneth Burke, Richard Lanham, and Eduardo Navas, Scott Haden Church shows that an understanding of rhetoric offers innovative ways to make sense of remix culture.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Remix throughout History
• Chapter 2. Isocrates and Kairos: Remix in Ancient Greece
• Chapter 3. Give Me a Beat: Girl Talk, Kenneth Burke, and Remix Aesthetics
• Chapter 4. Epaesthetic Rhetoric: Remix and Auto-Tune on YouTube
• Chapter 5. Projecting Voice in the Digital Age: Remix, Śūnyatā, and Prosōpopoeia
• Chapter 6. From Allegory to Anthology: Stranger Things and Nostalgia
• Conclusion
• Appendix. A New Dictionary of Pivotal Terms
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index