Rhetoric and Composition @ WSU

The Rhetoric & Composition program will be well represented at the 2010 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, fielding nine presentations during the conference:

• On Friday, May 28, PhD candidate Jill Morris will present a talk entitled “These Balls Taste Like Christmas: The Rhetoric of Memes in Classroom Community Building”
• On Saturday, May 29, PhD candidate Michael Ristich will present a talk entitled “Birthers, Partiers, and Anarchists: The Rhetoric of Anarchism in Contemporary Political Discourse”
•  Also on Saturday, faculty member Jeff Pruchnic will deliver the talk “‘To Give Back What is Given’: Isocrates and the Rhetoric of Appropriation”
• On Sunday, May 30, several PhD candidates will present talks as part of the panel “Scandalous!!! Reclaiming Controversy for Rhetorical Scholarship”: Michael McGinnis (”A Matter of Life and Death Panels: Carl Schmitt’s Anti-Rhetorical Politics”); Kim Lacey (”Forgetting to Remember: Keeping Tabs on Digital Memory”); and Derek Risse (”Navigating the Mundane: A Controversially Uncontroversial Approach to Digital Identity in the Twenty-First Century”)
• Also on Sunday, faculty members Ellen Barton and Richard Marback will co-present the talk “Clinical and Critical Imperatives, Impact, and Pragmatic Interdisciplinarity” and faculty member Jim Brown will deliver the talk “New Media and the Limits of Lanham’s ‘Cybernethics’”
• On Monday, May 31, PhD candidate Conor Shaw-Draves will present the talk “Writing in the Moment: Kairos and Performance in Composition”
•  Also on Monday, faculty member Richard Marback will deliver the talk “Wikus van der Merwe’s Body and the Fragility of Democratic Rhetoric”

This summer, the Rhet/Comp program will be represented at the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory by PhD Candidate (and GTA) Michael Ristich, who will be joining fellow WSU English grad Selmin Kara in attending the 2010 program.