Title: Associate Professor of English
University: Case Western Research University
Email: tkenny.fountain@case.edu
Twitter: TKennyFountain
Website: http://tkennyfountain.typepad.com/
Description of Work:
In 2014, I published Rhetoric in the Flesh, an ethnographic study of the gross anatomy lab, which examined how rhetorical discourses, multimodal displays, and embodied practices facilitate learning and technical expertise, while shaping participants’ perceptions of the human body.
Currently, I am working on two larger projects. The first is an analysis of the visual and verbal rhetoric of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabric (1543, 1555) in light of the classical rhetorical tradition that informed early modern European education, with a specific focus on the ways Vesalius negotiates the tension between tradition and innovation through the incorporation of praeteritio or paralepsis as a kind of deep rhetorical impulse.
My next book project – “To See What is Persuasive: Politics, Affect, and the Rhetorical Imagination“ – is only partially related to medical rhetoric. In it, I examine how political discourse moves us by shaping our emotional and imaginative responses to the world. I do this by reading contemporary political texts in light of the Roman rhetorical concept of enargeia, or the quality of vivid description that seeks to “bring before the eyes” some absent or non-existent object, person, or event. According to Cicero, Quintilian, and Longinus, words most powerfully shape belief and action not through reasoned arguments, but through a kind of verbal vivacity that brings to mind the memories, cultural knowledge, and even prejudices we use to make sense of the world. Each chapter combines explications of classical concepts with analysis of such texts as (1) Wendy Davis’s 11-hour filibuster (2013) of a Texas anti-abortion bill, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015), the Human Rights Campaign’s “Stop the Hate” video honoring the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting (2016), and a constellation of texts involved in PizzaGate, a fraudulent online conspiracy suggesting that a D.C.-area pizza shop with ties to Hilary Clinton was a front for a pedophilia ring. In this project, I hope to demonstrate how compelling and sometimes troubling forms of political persuasion are enacted when rhetors invite us to see and feel through processes of imaginative and affective engagement.
Symposium Submission: