Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, "Ulysses" has the aging hero say, "I am a part of all that I have met". To this the poet might have added: and of all that I have thought.Storytellers find their stories among the broken fragments of their lives, things they have done, seen, or heard. They also find them among the scattered figments of their minds, things that they have deduced, dreamed or imagined. Their tales are crafted of these fragments and figments, with the mix varying widel...

A fascinating addition to rhetoric scholarship, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things expands the scope of rhetorical situations beyond the familiar humanist triad of speaker-audience-purpose to an inclusive study of inanimate objects.The fifteen essays in Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things persuasively overturn the stubborn assumption that objects are passive tools in the hands of objective human agents. Rhetoric has proved that forms of communication such as digital ...