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"Holcomb, Chris"
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Understanding language through humor
\"Students often struggle to understand linguistic concepts through examples of language data provided in class or in texts. Presented with ambiguous information, students frequently respond that they do not 'get it'. The solution is to find an example of humour that relies on the targeted ambiguity. Once they laugh at the joke, they have tacitly understood the concept, and then it is only a matter of explaining why they found it funny. Utilizing cartoons and jokes illustrating linguistic concepts, this book makes it easy to understand these concepts, while keeping the reader's attention and interest. Organized like a course textbook in linguistics, it covers all the major topics in a typical linguistics survey course, including communication systems, phonetics and phonology, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, language use, discourses, child language acquisition and language variation, while avoiding technical terminology\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Performing Prose
Performing Prose equips readers with the tools to analyze style in relation to subject and rhetorical situation. The authors draw from a range of writers and genres to illustrate concepts and strategies. Topics include grammar, convention and deviation, voice, tropes, schemes, images, and rituals of language.
eBook
\The crown of all our study\;: Improvisation in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria
All but ignored by historians of rhetoric, Quintilian 's meditations on improvisation not only allow us to situate the Institutio Oratoria more firmly in its historical context but also require us to confront issues of performance, issues which (again) have been largely overlooked in historical studies of rhetoric. Quintilian's many references to extemporaneous speech participate in a broader argument the author advances against what he sees as the unscrupulous activities of the delatores (informers working in the service of the Emperors) and the theory of oratory implicit in their oratorical practices. In particular, Quintilian uses the topic of improvisation as an argumentative vehicle to reject the dependence of the delatores on natural ability, to parody their artless attempts at extemporization, and to promote his own educational program based on study, training, and art. Quintilian's discussion of improvisation also invites consideration of oratorical performance: the occasions upon which an orator should switch from a scripted to an improvised mode of performance, the psychological and affective experience of the orator who speaks extemporaneously, and the response of listeners who (according to Quintilian) regard the extemporized oration as more credible, more engaging, and more authentic than the one prepared in advance. For Quintilian, improvisation is the mode of performance to which all oratory should aspire.
Journal Article
\Anyone Can Be President\: Figures of Speech, Cultural Forms, and Performance
This article argues that figures of speech are cultural forms that serve performative ends. After introducing this claim through an analysis of a Daily Show segment, the article reexamines treatments of the figures in Aristotle, Quintilian, and Peacham, claiming that these verbal devices are rituals of language that organize social experience while shaping relationships among communicative participants. The article then examines George W. Bush's address to Congress shortly after 9/11, and an article by John Edgar Wideman. Although Bush uses the figures in conventional ways, Wideman challenges the use of such rituals of language to shape public opinion in the wake of 9/11.
Journal Article
Performative Stylistics and the Question of Academic Prose
This essay examines style as a vehicle for performance: Patterns of language are rituals of language that participate in broader social rituals and behaviors. It then turns to recent debates over academic prose, focusing on Judith Butler who claims that radical thought demands radical forms of expression. In the case of her own writing, however, her style isn't radical. Instead, it's conservative in form, a souped-up version of technobureaucratic writing. The essay ends with an analysis of Butler's \"Burning Acts, Injurious Speech\" and argues that while it does fulfill one of the aesthetic goals Butler has outlined elsewhere, the stylistic performance it delivers is like that of a shaman, hovering ambiguously between mysticism and trickery.
Journal Article