This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Victor Vitanza, the Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair at the European Graduate School and a Professor of English and Rhetoric at Clemson University. The interview was conducted at the 2014 Rhetoric Society of America conference in San Antonio, Texas, and originally published as part of the Zeugma podcast's 2014 summer interview series.
Dr. Vitanza founded the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson, has written such books as Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing, and serves as editor of Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. He's currently working on a film and companion book entitled The Returns of Philology: This Time, Anachronistics. In this interview, Vitanza discusses Kenneth Burke and Geoffrey Sirc, rhetorics and media old and new, and Immanuel Kant and Internet cats. There's also, I should promise and advise listeners, quite a bit of talk about scatology.
Since this interview is a little longer than other Rhetoricity episodes, I've split it in two. You can find the second half, during which we turn our attention to cats, Sirc, and the RCID program, here.
This episode cites the following sources:
- Kenneth Burke's "Rhetoric--Old and New"
- Diane Davis's Inessential Solidarity
- Jacques Derrida's "Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties"
- Immanuel Kant's "Conflict of the Faculties"
- George A. Kennedy's "A Hoot in the Dark"
- Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
- Geoffrey Sirc's "Writing Classroom as A&P Parking Lot"
It also includes sound clips from
- Johann Sebastian Bach's "Italienisches Konzert, BWV 971, Movement 1,"
- the Community episode "Biology 101,"
- and "Who You Gonna Call?"
All other music and sound clips are from GarageBand's loop library and the website freesound.org.