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While rhetoric as a discipline is firmly planted in humanism and anthropology, posthumanism seeks to leave the human behind. This highly original examination of Kenneth Burke's thought grapples with these ostensibly contradictory concepts as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge making. Rather than simply mapping posthumanist rhetorics onto Burke's scholarship, Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman focuses on the multiplicity of ideas found both in his work and in the idea of posthumanism. Taking varied approaches organized within a framework of boundaries and futures, the contributors show that studying the humanist theories of Burke in this way creates a satisfyingly chaotic web of interconnections. The essays look at how Burke's writing on the human mind and technology, from his earliest works to his very latest revisions, interrelates with current concepts such as new materiality and coevolution. Throughout, the contributors pay close attention to the fluidity, concerns, and contradictions inherent in language, symbolism, and subjectivity. A unique, illuminating exploration of the contested relationship between bodies and language, this inherently transdisciplinary book will propel important future inquiry by scholars of rhetoric, Burke, and posthumanism. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Casey Boyle, Kristie Fleckenstein, Nathan Gale, Julie Jung, Steven B. Katz, Steven LeMieux, Jodie Nicotra, Jeff Pruchnic, Timothy Richardson, Thomas Rickert, and Robert Wess.

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.

In this dissertation I argue that rhetoric and composition studies' ethos is predicated on a commitment to the Good, which hails members to identify as Good lest risk their identification and identity in the field. This Good ethos is managed by terms that circulate and signify in the field without question or critique and which enable and constrain the field's disciplinary imagination as well as its discursive and affective formations. In the context of this Good ethos coupled with rhetoric and composition studies' capacity to intervene in epistemological certainty, I argue that we need methodologies and methods capable of leveraging perspective on this terministic management of the field. This dissertation theorizes one such methodology—intrinsic appeal ratios—and applies the ratios as a method leverage perspective on the terministic work of three specific terms that I argue are \"stuck\" in the field's disciplinary imagination and thus stick the field in place: students, teachers, and practice. The ratios that I theorize bring together contemporary and specific conceptualizations of ethos, pathos, and logos and arrange them into relationships such that I posit one in terms of the other. I then position the field's sticky terms in terms of the ratios themselves to leverage perspective on how those terms manage the field's conceptualizations of the relationships among language and bodies. Leveraging perceptive, I continue, allows the field to account for its terministic debts—those terms that authorize and constrain our imagination of what it means to do good work in the field, including what counts and who counts in rhetoric and composition studies.

By some accounts of the interdisciplinary relationship between rhetoric and posthumanism, the focus on the future emphasized by the latter participates in a well-established trajectory of rhetoric (see, for example, Hawk; Muckelbauer and Hawhee; Rickert). Indeed, rhetoric itself is a future-thinking enterprise, the art of anticipating future contexts and building effective arguments for them. The oft-cited renaissance figure of the open hand representing rhetoric suggests that it is a field open to invention, connection, change. Thus, although much rhetorical activity centers on description, explanation, and analysis (ostensibly focused on extant arguments), this activity serves the project of the future, motivated

Posthumanism first appears as antithetical, nearly impossible, for rhetoric. In place of the polis and politics, it offers microbes and machines; instead of symbol-using animals, it foregrounds cells and cybernetics. Rhetoric concerns itself with human affairs; posthumanism seems concerned with leaving the human behind. The prospect of a posthuman rhetoric thus seems to signify, at best, a paradox, a contradiction in terms. At its worst, it suggests the end of our discipline. And yet, in the past decade, as scholars (re)map and (re)imagine previously taken-for-granted categories that organize rhetorical inquiry—language, bodies, materiality, agency, responsibility, ethics—they increasingly draw on

According to this narrative, English language learning and use was taboo under communism but almost immediately became a necessity following the revolution; Slovakians embraced both the English language and English lessons as the price of admission to the promises of capitalism. [...] we, like Prendergast, must begin to question the narratives that posit English as outside of the global marketplace and insist that composition, as a language-centered activity and field, is always already bound to it.