Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism Technological and Rhetorical Paradox
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Ian E. J. Hill is Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Rhetoric at the University of British Columbia and an affiliate faculty member of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies.
<p>“This is an impressive first book: well researched, carefully argued, and engagingly written. Hill posits ‘technological rhetoric’ as an original, interdisciplinary perspective on Technē’s Paradox. Grounded in thorough readings of rhetorical critique as well as science and technology studies, his longitudinal study of ‘machine rhetoric’ warrants attention both for the cases examined—from Malthus to the Unabomber—and for the individual and collective insights the analysis yields.”</p><p>—David Henry, Sanford Berman Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas</p>
<p>“Merging insights from rhetoric, science, and technology studies, Ian Hill analyzes how weapons are simultaneously cast as harbingers of extermination and preservers of peace, revealing novelty and innovation in words about weapons across two centuries. <i>Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism</i> is crisply written, thought-provoking, and hauntingly important.”</p><p>—Lisa Keränen, author of <i>Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research</i></p>
Technē’s Paradox—a frequent theme in science fiction—is the commonplace belief that technology has both the potential to annihilate humanity and to preserve it. Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism looks at how this paradox applies to some of the most dangerous of technologies: population bombs, dynamite bombs, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and improvised explosive devices.
Hill’s study analyzes the rhetoric used to promote such weapons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining Thomas R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, the courtroom address of accused Haymarket bomber August Spies, the army textbook Chemical Warfare by Major General Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, the life and letters of Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard, and the writings of Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, Hill shows how contemporary societies are equipped with abundant rhetorical means to describe and debate the extreme capacities of weapons to both destroy and protect. The book takes a middle-way approach between language and materialism that combines traditional rhetorical criticism of texts with analyses of the persuasive force of weapons themselves, as objects, irrespective of human intervention.
Advocating Weapons, War, and Terrorism is the first study of its kind, revealing how the combination of weapons and rhetoric facilitated the magnitude of killing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and illuminating how humanity understands and acts upon its propensity for violence. This book will be invaluable for scholars of rhetoric, scholars of science and technology, and the study of warfare.
Examines commonplace conflicting beliefs that technology will either annihilate humanity or preserve humanity from annihilation. Argues that the paradoxical capacities of weapons influence how humanity understands violent conflict.
Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Technē’s Paradox and Weapons Rhetoric1. Thomas Malthus’s Population Bomb as a Pre-Text for Technē’s Paradox2. Preaching Dynamite: August Spies at the Haymarket Trial3. Humane, All Too Humane: The Chemical-Weapons Advocacyof Major General Amos A. Fries4. Toward a Peaceful Bomb: Leo Szilard’s Paradoxical Life5. Industrial Antipathy: Irreparability and Ted Kaczynski’s IEDsConclusion: In the Presence of Weapons and RhetoricNotesBibliographyIndex
The RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric (STR) publishes books that move between rhetoric and other emerging or established disciplines, taking seriously both what makes them strange to one another and how they can be brought together to build space for new conversations, shed light on overlooked areas of inquiry, or even create new ways of doing scholarship. Books in the series speak not only to the disciplines in which rhetoric finds a comfortable home but also to disciplines that are less familiar with it, recognizing that rhetoric will itself be changed—methodologically, conceptually, substantively—in any such transdisciplinary relationship. We’re looking for projects whose case studies stem from disciplines beyond rhetoric, projects that stake out new theoretical ground, and/or projects that grapple with the unfamiliar, odd, or uncommon. Such transdisciplinary exchanges include, but are not limited to, rhetoric and: science, technology, or mathematics; the law or legal studies; digital or visual culture; health and medicine; disability studies; Indigenous studies; economics; environmental studies; gender studies; and religion. We also welcome work that foregrounds transnational perspectives, decolonial approaches, and/or queer of color critique.
Books in the series are well written and accessible to a broad range of students and scholars in rhetoric and other fields. They should be innovative and rigorously argued, combining theoretical sophistication with smart case analysis.
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Ian E. J. Hill is Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Rhetoric at the University of British Columbia and an affiliate faculty member of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies.