Faculty Member, English
Director, Ph.D. program, Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design
Architecture, Arts, and Humanities
About
My areas of special interests are histories and theories of rhetorics (Pre-Platonic, Greco-Roman, Early Modern, Modern, Postmodern); historiographies of rhetorics; contemporary writing theories and pedagogies; rhetorical invention; technology and writing (electracy, new media, digital studies); architecture, photography, film, and video; contemporary philosophy (German, French, Italian), and the failures of cultural critique.
Recent Publications:
My first book of a trilogy--Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY P 1997, 400 pages)--examines three contemporary historians of the Sophists and how these historians as well as others represent Sophists and, in particular, Isocrates and Gorgias under the signs of negativity and sub-jectivity (ab-jectivity). The second book--Chaste Rape (now submitted, 465 pages)--examines how Western rhetorics and cultures are represented under the signs of negativity and sexual violence. The third book--Design as Dasein (in progress)--will examine how philosophical and architectural attitudes are represented under the signs of negativity and death.
Additionally, I am working on two other books: The Coming Peculiar Pedagogies: A User's Guide , in progress (includes samplings unmixed of beta versions of texts and videos on performing peculiar pedagogies), is part of a larger project on peculiar pedagogies developed for and by a community of post-pedagogues. And James A. Berlin and Cultural Studies (a sampling and remix of a seminar on Berlin).
Other Sample Publications
Writing Histories of Rhetoric (SIUP, 1993).
PRE/TEXT: The First Decade (U of Pittsburgh P, 1993).
CyberReader (Longman/Pearson. 1st, 2nd, and abridged editions).
"Love, Lust, Rhetorics (from Double Binds to Intensities)." Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline . Ed. Duane Roen, Stewart Brown, and Theresa Enos. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. 143-58.
"The Hermeneutics of Abandonment." Parallax 4.4 (1998): 123-39.
"From Heuristic to Aleatory Procedures; or, Towards 'Writing the Accident'." Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young , Ed. Maureen Daly Goggin. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000. 185-206.
"Abandoned to Writing: Notes Toward Several Provocations." Enculturation 5.1 (Fall 2003): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/5_1/vitanza.html (A continuation of "The Hermeneutics of Abandonment")
"Favorinus." In Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources . West Port, Conn, and London: Praeger, 2005. 148-52.
"Adieu Derrida," in Poiesis 7 (Toronto, EGS Press, 2005): 64-65.
"Some Meditations-Ruminations on Cheryl Glenn's Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence." JAC 34 (2008): 793-818.
Contact Information
http://people.clemson.edu/~SOPHIST/index.html
