Research
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I received my Ph.D in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona in 2009, and am a professor in the Writing Arts department here at Rowan University.
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OverviewI pursue two intersecting trajectories within the field of rhetoric and writing studies. One trajectory explores the practices of rhetorical/ontological inquiry, its implementation in the development of curricula in higher education, and the role such inquiry plays in transforming understanding of the self and the world, as well as the impact of such transformations on what it means to be in the world rhetorically.
Another trajectory explores the history of the intersections of rhetoric and philosophy, and in particular, Nietzsche’s rhetorical appropriation of Schopenhauer, and the uses and abuses to which the younger subjects the elder philosopher’s corpus. Where both trajectories intersect is in the domain of rhetorical figures of speech and thought, including tropes and schemes, and the degree to which language as figural and performative (that is, constitutive) disrupts the Cartesian subject by calling into question the dominant set of practices that reinforce language as transparent (whether abstract or concrete). Scholarship"De Figuris: Rediscovering Publius Rutilius Lupus." The Journal for the History of Rhetoric. 27.3 (2024): 277-361.
“Ontological Inquiry: The Absent Heart of the University.” Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education. 1.1 (2023): Article 2, 1-20. “Schopenhauer’s Telescope: Tracing the Mind of a Clever Animal.” Intraspection: a Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style. 3 (2020). Bruce Hyde and Drew Kopp. Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, August 6th 2019. “Nietzsche’s Teacher: The Invisible Rhetor.” Rhetoric Review. 32.4 (2013). “Cutting the Edge of the Will to Truth; Or How Post-Process Pedagogy is Biting its Own Tail.” JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics. 32. 1-2 (2012): 145-184. “The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry: Practical Conditions for a Disruptive Pedagogy.” In Disrupting Pedagogies and Teaching the Knowledge Society: Countering Conservative Norms with Creative Approaches. Ed. Julie Faulkner. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. 2011. “Re-articulating the Mission and Work of Writing Programs with Digital Video.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (15.1) fall 2010. With Sharon Stevens. “Computer Gameplay as Grunt and Reflection.” Works and Days 43-44 (spring-fall 2004): 167-83. TrajectoryMy first publication, "Computer Gameplay as Grunt and Reflection," came out in the journal Works and Days (43/44, Vol 23) in 2004, the special issue Capitalizing on Play: the Politics of Computer Gaming. In this article I examine how computer game players undergo a sequence of transformations through encountering the spaces a computer game arranges. I argue that games provide a useful site of inquiry because they act as a mirror to the player who seeks to meet the procedural requirements of the virtual world.
My second publication is a co-written article (with Sharon McKenzie Stevens) that appears in the online journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, issue 15.1 (fall 2010). In "Re-articulating the Mission and Work of Writing Programs with Digital Video," Stevens and I examine how using digital video to help students identify themselves as college writers may also serve to effectively represent the work of writing programs to the university community.
The following two pieces of writing are companion pieces. I aim to revise these into a book-length manuscript that will concern the possibility of articulating the value of rhetorical education within general education, as well as within standalone writing programs.
In "The Risk of Rhetorical Inquiry: Practical Conditions for a Disruptive Pedagogy," in the book Disrupting Pedagogies and Teaching the Knowledge Society: Countering Conservative Norms with Creative Approaches (Ed. Julie Faulkner. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2011: 225-241), I provide a theoretical outline for a practice of rhetorical inquiry in the college writing classroom, and focus on three conditions that permit this inquiry to enact what Megan Boler calls a “pedagogy of discomfort." The first condition calls for pedagogues to amplify the performative dimension of language to disrupt what Dewey terms the “quest for certainty.” Second, students and teachers work to reconfigure their current perspectives through undergoing dialogic encounters between incongruous perspectives. Third, these performative and dialogic encounters must reiterate with increasing complexity and within increasingly unfamiliar and complex contexts.
In "Cutting the Edge of the Will to Truth; Or How Post-Process Pedagogy is Biting its Own Tail" (JAC: Rhetoric, Writing, Culture, Politics, 32.1-22012: 145-184), I work to distinguish a common value historically operative within both process and post-process composition pedagogies, namely, the pedagogic commitment to cultivate rhetorically intelligent subjectivities, that is, subjectivities willing to risk participating in the making of history in various social domains, including the personal, professional, academic, and civic. Central to the argument is distinguishing the will to truth as a dominant drive that relentlessly seeks to reduce the irreducible into transmissible content. I argue that the performative dimension of language games may serve to include the will to truth in order to move beyond it, while at the same time avoiding the trap of falling into interminable critiques of power that preclude active participation in historical development.
In "Nietzsche's Teacher; the Invisible Rhetor" (Rhetoric Review. 32.4. 2013), I take Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconic stature within the field of rhetoric and writing studies as a starting point, and from there I work to reveal how a few key scholars, in overlooking Arthur Schopenhauer as an important figure in Nietzsche’s rhetorical education, failed to account for Nietzsche’s so-called “original” insights into the rhetoricity of language expressed within the oft-cited fragmentary essay “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I argue that beyond the more obvious appropriations, Nietzsche ultimately appropriated Schopenhauer’s central philosophical theory as the rhetorical maneuver in the essay “Truth and Lies.”
As a follow up to "Nietzsche's Teacher: the Invisible Rhetor," and serving as the second part of a trilogy examining the complex rhetorical relationship between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer's Telescope: Tracing the Mind of a Clever Animal," was published in Issue 3 (2020) of the online journal Intraspection. Here I attempt a close reading of Schopenhauer's rhetorical maneuvers as they appear in Nietzsche's unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense," which itself serves as both a stylistic homage to the elder philosopher and an effort to escape from the debt Nietzsche owed to his educator. Reading both together interrogates the rhetorical role philosophical discourse plays in bringing its addressee into “illumination,” while also permitting subtle rhetorical cues to emerge that spell the impossibility of any such illumination--despite cogently argued declarations to the contrary.
Written with Bruce Hyde, Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human (August 2019) provides an unprecedented study of the ideas and methodology originally developed by the thinker Werner Erhard, and presented in a course called The Forum, a course that has since evolved further and is offered today by Landmark Worldwide. The book is a comparative analysis that demonstrates how Erhard’s rhetorical project and the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger each illuminate the other. The central claim is that the dialogue of The Forum—presented here in the form of a transcript of an actual course that took place in San Francisco in December of 1989—functions to generate a language which speaks Being, that is, The Forum is an instance of what is called ontological rhetoric: a technology of communicating the unspoken realm of language that allows its listeners to create a new possibility of being human in the world. The purpose of this book is to show that this is actually accomplished in The Forum, and to demonstrate—with Heidegger’s thinking presented in a series of “Sidebars” and “Intervals” alongside The Forum transcript —how Erhard did it in 1989.
In summer 2023, I published an article entitled "Ontological Inquiry: The Absent Heart of the University," in Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education. After defining and outlining the three movements of ontological inquiry, I make the case that ontological inquiry is rhetorical education at its best, concluding that making such inquiry central to the mission of the university may contribute to responding effectively to the complex of crises that academia and the world currently faces.
In Volume 27.3 (2024) of The Journal for the History of Rhetoric, I published, together with Hans-Friedrich Mueller of Union College "De Figuris: Rediscovering Publius Rutilius Lupus." We present a Latin text—with a facing English translation—of the first-century-CE rhetorician Publius Rutilius Lupus’s De figuris sententiarum et elocutionis based on David Ruhnken’s 1768 edition as revised by C. H. Frotscher (1831) and collated with variant readings adopted by others, especially Karl Halm’s 1863 edition. This first-ever English translation begins with an introduction that presents two stages of the text’s reception history: its impact on the profusion of rhetorical compendiums in the sixteenth century and the treatment that it received in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, which led twentieth-century scholars to marginalize the treatise as missing the figures of thought promised by its title. We challenge this uncharitable interpretation, concluding that this early example of the genre of the compendium of rhetorical figures indeed includes figures of both speech and thought (the latter being topical in nature). Understanding De figuris as primarily a pedagogical text in the spirit of late Hellenistic rhetorical educational practices that employed both Attic and Asianist models, we suggest that we should also read the text as protreptic, as urging students to study this sequence of figures under the expert guidance of Rutilius and his school and in the process become both wise and eloquent.
In DevelopmentMy current book-length project is entitled A Rhetoric of Transformation, wherein I will present a case study of a particular pedagogical expression of ontological inquiry, the content of which is composed of what I term topical figures of transformation: maneuvers in language that “make history,” that shape how the world occurs and who we are in the world. Ontological inquiry brings those engaged to discover for themselves what it means to be a human being, i.e., to discover the inherited and taken for granted “being” of human being (our customary ways of being and acting in the world). With such discovery a new possibility of being (human) is disclosed, and in being empowered to bring this possibility into language, participants make history in their everyday lives. I argue that ontological inquiry is essential to fulfilling the promise of rhetorical and general education within the university.
Recent presentations“More than Just a Turn of Phrase: Ontological Inquiry and Rhetorical Figures of Transformation.” Rhetoric Society of America Conference, May 2024.
“Turning Toward Nothing: What is the Possibility of Speaking Being?” Invited talk. Conference for Global Transformation. May 19, 2023. |
