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 ...

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of concise investigations into everyday artifacts that matter to writers and writing.With the collection’s 31 contributors and through the lens of material culture studies, the editors make a case that the study of writing is the study of artifacts. Each chapter centers on a distinct artifact, including an 1899 course notebook, the delete key, the graffiti spray can, Indigenous paper, the Ouija board, and a retirement home noticeboard, a...

The Material Culture of Writing opens up avenues for understanding writing through scholarship in material culture studies. Contributors to this volume each interrogate an object, set of objects, or writing environment to reveal the sociomaterial contexts from which writing emerges. The artifacts studied are both contemporary and historical, including ink, a Victorian hotel visitors’ book, Moleskine notebooks, museum conservators’ files, an early twentieth-century baby book, and a...