Iâve always been fascinated by the power of language to propel everything we thinkâfrom our values and beliefs, to political views, to what we take for absolute truth. Once I learned thereâs a whole field devoted to studying language called ârhetoricââthe field in which Iâm now an expertâthere was no turning back. Rhetoric has been around for more than 2,000 years, and since its inception, it has taught people to step back from language and appraise it with a more critical eye to identify how it works, why itâs persuasive, and what makes people prone to believe it. By studying rhetoric, we become less easily swayed and more comfortable with disagreement.
I wrote
The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times
This book blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems fresh when I revisit it now.Â
Our common assumption about language is that it represents the world, plain and simple. However, Ongâs book colorfully captures how differently language was experienced in the oral world before the rise of literacy.
Hearers empathized with speakers and participated in the scenes their words evoked. There was an immersive and tangible sense of commonality that spread through the shared experience of sound, which comes from within one personâs body and enters another personâs body. Language knitted the culture together more than it indexed the world.
Ongâs book made it much harder for me to blithely assume that referentiality is a natural or inherent property of language.Â
Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought.
This thirtieth anniversary edition - coinciding with Ong's centenary year - reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley.
Hartley provides:
A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong's work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies;
This book is a classic. It transformed my perspective on how metaphors imperceptibly guide the way we think.
Typically, we learn about metaphors in literature classes, where they are thought of as stylistic embellishments. This book turns that idea on its head, showing how metaphors guide the way we speak, think, and behave in response to pretty much everything.Â
Take the example of time. Almost all the ways we talk about it rely on the metaphor of money: I âbudget time,â âwaste time,â ârun out of time,â etc. Speaking this way makes me think of time as something that can be either spent or saved, even though it canât.
Not only time but a nearly endless number of concepts are structured metaphorically, influencing how we think and act without our noticing.Â
People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphorsâŠ
Do you freeze up when your characters drift into the bedroom? Are you puzzled about how much to say and how to say it? What to call the body parts that bring us so much pleasure and so much anguish?
If youâre writing a novel and thereâs a sexual encounterâŠ
Another classic. This book launched the intellectual movement known as structuralism, a theory that calls into question the idea of human autonomy and individual will. Even though I may feel like I am in conscious control of all my words, thoughts, and actions, structuralism says this is an illusion, especially where language is concerned.Â
Saussure introduced the radical idea that âlanguage eludes the control of our will.â The larger symbolic system of meaning predetermines what can be said and thought more than my individual intention does. That system developed slowly over time, and we never observed its long process of development, yet we are always constrained by it, like being caught in a web.
Saussure claims itâs not us but language thatâs in charge; weâre just along for the ride.Â
The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy.
I love Ted Chiangâs short stories. Chiangâs background is in computer science, and heâs drawn to questions concerning the relationship between language, technology, cognition, and the physical universe.Â
His stories are fascinating thought experiments: They depict how a change in the medium or format of language transforms meaning and opens new possibilities for what language can be and do, what humans can think and know, and what it means to be a thinking, speaking human against the backdrop of a vast, infinitely complex universe. His stories are often backed by years of detailed research.
When I read Chiang, I find myself entangled in a strong emotional bond with his characters even as I ruminate on larger questions about what it means to be a language-using human.Â
'Lean, relentless, and incandescent.' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate,' a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary 'Exhalation,' an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects,' a woman cares forâŠ
Do you freeze up when your characters drift into the bedroom? Are you puzzled about how much to say and how to say it? What to call the body parts that bring us so much pleasure and so much anguish?
If youâre writing a novel and thereâs a sexual encounterâŠ
I love tracing things back to their roots. Rhetoric was the first discipline devoted to the study of language, and this was the first book written on that subject. Although itâs over 2,000 years old, many of Aristotleâs insights floor me with their timely relevance.Â
Aristotle was the first to explain how language creates emotional effects and how negative emotions especially prompt us to act. Because it feels as though emotions well up inside our bodies, we feel that what stirs them must be real. Negative emotions are particularly persuasive in this regard because, Aristotle observed, we enjoy feeling them.
Itâs fascinating to me that Aristotle discovered what brain science has discovered only recently: Weâre negativity junkies, and the way we talk can change the way we feel.
Based on careful study of the Greek text and informed by the best modern scholarship, the second edition of this highly acclaimed translation offers the most faithful English version ever published of On Rhetoric. Updated in light of recent scholarship, the new edition features a revised introduction--with two new sections--and revised appendices that provide new and additional supplementary texts (relevant ancient works).
The discipline of rhetoricâthe art of persuasionâwas the keystone of Western education for over 2,000 years. Only recently has its perceived importance faded, just when we need its insights most.Â
In my book, I explain why, in todayâs polarized climate, everyone should care deeply about learning rhetoric: It can help us navigate our age of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and political acrimony. Drawing on examples ranging from the ancient Greek demagogue Alcibiades to modern-day conspiracists like Alex Jones, I pull back the curtain on how politicians, pundits, and âjournalistsâ convince us to believe what we believeâand talk, vote, and act accordingly. Learning rhetoric, I argue, doesnât teach us what to think but how to think, offering an antidote to our polarized, post-truth world.Â
