Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Aaron A. Toscano, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Resources and Daily Activities

  • Conference Presentations
    • Critical Theory/MRG 2023 Presentation
    • PCA/ACA Conference Presentation 2022
    • PCAS/ACAS Presentation 2021
    • SEACS 2021 Presentation
    • SEACS 2022 Presentation
    • SEACS 2023 Presentation
    • South Atlantic MLA Conference 2022
  • Dr. Toscano’s Homepage
  • ENGL 2116-014: Introduction to Technical Communication
    • April 10th: Analyzing Ethics
      • Ethical Dilemmas for Homework
      • Ethical Dilemmas to Ponder
      • Mapping Our Personal Ethics
    • April 12th: Writing Ethically
    • April 17th: Ethics Continued
    • April 19th: More on Ethics in Writing and Professional Contexts
    • April 24th: Mastering Oral Presentations
    • April 3rd: Research Fun
    • April 5th: More Research Fun
      • Epistemology and Other Fun Research Ideas
      • Research
    • February 13th: Introduction to User Design
    • February 15th: Instructions for Users
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters More Effective
    • February 1st: Reflection on Workplace Messages
    • February 20th: The Rhetoric of Technology
    • February 22nd: Social Constructions of Technology
    • February 6th: Plain Language
    • January 11th: More Introduction to Class
    • January 18th: Audience & Purpose
    • January 23rd: Résumés and Cover Letters
      • Duty Format for Résumés
      • Peter Profit’s Cover Letter
    • January 25th: More on Résumés and Cover Letters
    • January 30th: Achieving a Readable Style
      • Euphemisms
      • Prose Practice for Next Class
      • Prose Revision Assignment
      • Revising Prose: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Good
      • Sentence Clarity
    • January 9th: Introduction to the Class
    • Major Assignments
    • March 13th: Introduction to Information Design
    • March 15th: More on Information Design
    • March 20th: Reporting Technical Information
    • March 27th: The Great I, Robot Analysis
    • May 1st: Final Portfolio Requirements
  • ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing
    • August 21st: Introduction to the Course
      • Rhetorical Principles of Information Design
    • August 28th: Introduction to Information Design
      • Prejudice and Rhetoric
      • Robin Williams’s Principles of Design
    • Classmates Webpages (Fall 2017)
    • December 4th: Presentations
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4182/5182 (Fall 2017)
    • November 13th: More on Color
      • Designing with Color
      • Important Images
    • November 20th: Extra-Textual Elements
    • November 27th: Presentation/Portfolio Workshop
    • November 6th: In Living Color
    • October 16th: Type Fever
      • Typography
    • October 23rd: More on Type
    • October 2nd: MIDTERM FUN!!!
    • October 30th: Working with Graphics
      • Beerknurd Calendar 2018
    • September 11th: Talking about Design without Using “Thingy”
      • Theory, theory, practice
    • September 18th: The Whole Document
    • September 25th: Page Design
  • ENGL 4183/5183: Editing with Digital Technologies
    • August 23rd: Introduction to the Class
    • August 30th: Rhetoric, Words, and Composing
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4183/5183 (Fall 2023)
    • September 13th: Verb is the Word!
    • September 27th: Coordination and Subordination
      • Parallelism
    • September 6th: Sentence Patterns
  • ENGL 4275: Rhetoric of Technology
    • April 13th: Authorities in Science and Technology
    • April 15th: Articles on Violence in Video Games
    • April 20th: Presentations
    • April 6th: Technology in the home
    • April 8th: Writing Discussion
    • Assignments for ENGL 4275
    • February 10th: Religion of Technology Part 3 of 3
    • February 12th: Is Love a Technology?
    • February 17th: Technology and Gender
    • February 19th: Technology and Expediency
    • February 24th: Semester Review
    • February 3rd: Religion of Technology Part 1 of 3
    • February 5th: Religion of Technology Part 2 of 3
    • January 13th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective
    • January 15th: Technology and Democracy
    • January 22nd: The Politics of Technology
    • January 27th: Discussion on Writing as Thinking
    • January 29th: Technology and Postmodernism
    • January 8th: Introduction to the Course
    • March 11th: Writing and Other Fun
    • March 16th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 1 of 2
    • March 18th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 2 of 2
    • March 23rd: Inception (2010)
    • March 25th: Writing and Reflecting Discussion
    • March 30th & April 1st: Count Zero
    • March 9th: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
  • ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory
    • April 12th: Knoblauch. Ch. 4 and Ch. 5
    • April 19th: Jacques Derrida’s Positions
    • April 26th:  Feminisms and Rhetorics
    • April 5th: Knoblauch. Ch. 3 and More Constitutive Rhetoric
    • February 15th: Isocrates (Part 2)
    • February 1st: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Books 2 & 3
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 2
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 3
    • February 22nd: St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine [Rhetoric]
    • February 8th: Isocrates (Part 1)-2nd Half of Class
    • January 11th: Introduction to Class
    • January 18th: Plato’s Phaedrus
    • January 25th: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Book 1
    • March 15th: Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method
    • March 1st: Knoblauch. Ch. 1 and 2
    • March 22nd: Mary Wollstonecraft
    • March 29th: Second Wave Feminist Rhetoric
    • May 3rd: Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”
    • Rhetorical Theory Assignments
  • ENGL/COMM/WRDS: The Rhetoric of Fear
    • April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1
    • April 18th: McCarthyism Part 2
    • April 25th: The Satanic Panic
    • April 4th: Suspense/Horror/Fear in Film
    • February 14th: Fascism and Other Valentine’s Day Atrocities
    • February 21st: Fascism Part 2
    • February 7th: Fallacies Part 3 and American Politics Part 2
    • January 10th: Introduction to the Class
    • January 17th: Scapegoats & Conspiracies
    • January 24th: The Rhetoric of Fear and Fallacies Part 1
    • January 31st: Fallacies Part 2 and American Politics Part 1
    • Major Assignments
    • March 28th: Nineteen Eighty-Four
    • March 7th: Fascism Part 3
    • May 2nd: The Satanic Panic Part II
      • Rhetoric of Fear and Job Losses
  • Intercultural Communication on the Amalfi Coast
    • Pedagogical Theory for Study Abroad
  • LBST 2213-110: Science, Technology, and Society
    • August 22nd: Science and Technology from a Humanistic Perspective
    • August 24th: Science and Technology, a Humanistic Approach
    • August 29th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 2
    • August 31st: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4
    • December 5th: Video Games and Violence, a more nuanced view
    • November 14th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 27-end
    • November 16th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Preface-Ch. 8
    • November 21st: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ch. 9-Ch. 16
    • November 28th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ch. 17-Ch. 24
    • November 30th: Violence in Video Games
    • November 7th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes Ch. 1-17
    • November 9th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes, Ch. 18-26
    • October 12th: Lies Economics Tells
    • October 17th: Brief Histories of Medicine, Salerno, and Galen
    • October 19th: Politicizing Science and Medicine
    • October 24th: COVID-19 Facial Covering Rhetoric
    • October 26th: Wells, H. G. Time Machine. Ch. 1-5
    • October 31st: Wells, H. G. The Time Machine Ch. 6-The End
    • October 3rd: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • September 12th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • September 19th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Prefaces and Ch. 1
    • September 26th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 2
    • September 28th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 5 and 6
    • September 7th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 5 and 6
  • New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021)
    • April 13th: Virtually ‘Real’ Environments
    • April 20th: Rhetoric/Composition Defines New Media
    • April 27th: Sub/Cultural Politics, Hegemony, and Agency
    • April 6th: Capitalist Realism
    • February 16: Misunderstanding the Internet
    • February 23rd: Our Public Sphere and the Media
    • February 2nd: Introduction to Cultural Studies
    • January 26th: Introduction to New Media
    • Major Assignments for New Media (Spring 2021)
    • March 16th: Identity Politics
    • March 23rd: Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality
    • March 2nd: Foundational Thinkers in Cultural Studies
    • March 30th: Hyperreality
    • March 9th: Globalization & Postmodernism
    • May 4th: Wrapping Up The Semester
      • Jodi Dean “The The Illusion of Democracy” & “Communicative Capitalism”
      • Social Construction of Sexuality
  • Science Fiction and American Culture
    • Assignments for Science Fiction and American Culture
    • August 21: Introduction to to “Science Fiction and American Culture”
    • August 23: More Introduction
    • August 28: Gender Studies and Science Fiction
    • August 30th: Robots and Zombies
    • September 11th: William Gibson, Part I
    • September 13th: William Gibson, Part II
    • September 18: The Matrix (1999)
    • September 20: Hackers (1995)
    • September 25: Firefly and Black Mirror
    • September 27th: All Systems Red
    • September 6th: Alien Other and Worlds Beyond
  • Teaching Portfolio
  • Topics for Analysis
    • A Practical Editing Situation
    • American Culture, an Introduction
    • Cultural Studies and Science Fiction Films
    • Efficiency in Writing Reviews
    • Feminism, An Introduction
    • Fordism/Taylorism
    • Frankenstein Part I
    • Frankenstein Part II
    • Futurism Introduction
    • How to Lie with Statistics
    • Isaac Asimov’s “A Cult of Ignorance”
    • Langdon Winner Summary: The Politics of Technology
    • Marxist Theory (cultural analysis)
    • Oral Presentations
    • Oratory and Argument Analysis
    • Our Public Sphere
    • Postmodernism Introduction
    • Protesting Confederate Place
    • Punctuation Refresher
    • QT, the Existential Robot
    • Religion of Technology Discussion
    • Rhetoric, an Introduction
      • Analyzing the Culture of Technical Writer Ads
      • Rhetoric of Technology
      • Visual Culture
      • Visual Perception
      • Visual Perception, Culture, and Rhetoric
      • Visual Rhetoric
      • Visuals for Technical Communication
      • World War I Propaganda
    • The Great I, Robot Discussion
      • I, Robot Short Essay Topics
    • The Rhetoric of Video Games: A Cultural Perspective
      • Civilization, an Analysis
    • The Sopranos
    • Why Science Fiction?
    • Zombies and Consumption Satire
  • Video Games & American Culture
    • April 14th: Phallocentrism
    • April 21st: Video Games and Neoliberalism
    • April 7th: Video Games and Conquest
    • Assignments for Video Games & American Culture
    • February 10th: Aesthetics and Culture
    • February 17th: Narrative and Catharsis
    • February 24th: Serious Games
    • February 3rd: More History of Video Games
    • January 13th: Introduction to the course
    • January 20th: Introduction to Video Game Studies
    • January 27th: Games & Culture
      • Marxism for Video Game Analysis
      • Postmodernism for Video Game Analysis
    • March 24th: Realism, Interpretation(s), and Meaning Making
    • March 31st: Feminist Perspectives and Politics
    • March 3rd: Risky Business?

Contact Me

Office: Fretwell 255F
Email: atoscano@uncc.edu
ENGL/COMM/WRDS: The Rhetoric of Fear » April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1

April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1

Plan for the Day

  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers Leftovers (Notice the lead actor’s name)
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Brief Discussion of the First Red Scare
  • Post-Revolution Soviet-USA Relations
  • Second Red Scare (McCarthy’s Witch-hunt)
  • Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
  • Jesse Walker on Conspiracy Theories (not assigned reading)
  • PBS American Experience “McCarthy”
    • Tracking Roy Cohn’s Legacy
    • More on Roy Cohn

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

Don Siegel, who directed Dirty Harry, turns a pseudo-B film into an A film.

Siegel’s film surfaces the fear of loss of identity and then locates the threat to that identity, not in some stock Martian menace, but in our own souls.

Kevin Jack Hagopian

I wanted to repeat this from last week because it’s important to recognize one of the critiques of McCarthyism is that it reflects the internal fears of Americans. McCarthy gets (and deserves) plenty of blame, but he was tolerated by his Party and, as shown by his funeral, loved be many constituents. This is an example of the give-and-take between a politician and the masses: they may lead, but we allow them to lead.

Psychoanalysis

We briefly touched on this last week, and I wanted to make sure you understood why it’s important. We’d need a few semesters to just get through Freud completely, so this isn’t a definitive discussion. However, there is a Freudo-Marxist critique that materializes (no pun intended) through members of the Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) and those adjacent or following that attempts to reconcile Marx’s focus on class struggle with the internal psychological struggles of the masses fighting repression. You might have encountered discussion of Freud where one’s desires are in conflict with assumed moral behavior, and these discussion often jump to the conclusion that EVERYTHING is sexual repression and fear of castration. Or, as Freud famously describe in his 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams, all dreams have definitive real world references.

Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, has undergone revisions, so, to attack Karl Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism to stand in for the entirety of (neo-)Marxist critique is shortsighted. It would be like attacking Darwin’s late-19th century beliefs to refute the past 150 years of evolutionary science…who would attempt such a fallacious approach?

Three Important Terms to Consider

  • Id: the unconscious, unorganized part of one’s personality; often accessible through dreams.*
  • Ego: (overly simplified definition) the conscious part of one’s personality. From Freud: “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (p. 25).
  • Super-ego: the mainly conscious conscience of one’s personality that embodies ideals, goals, and confidence; it also prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions; is an internalization of culture and cultural norms.

The above three Freudian terms have a rather complex relationship to one another and their supposed development is also quite difficult to describe. However, for our purposes, what do the three suggest about a person’s relationship to others? What is the cultural significance of these personality components? What do they have to offer for analysis on fear appeals?

The “Freud on Seuss” video is a good gateway to psychoanalysis.

Terms for Discussion (probably beyond our scope)

  • Compensation: taking up one behavior [may be embodied in an object] because one cannot accomplish another behavior [often a behavior considered normal].
  • Confabulation: in psychology it means to replace fact with fantasy unconsciously in memory.
  • Displacement: An unconscious defense mechanism, whereby the mind redirects emotion from a ‘dangerous’ object to a ‘safe’ object. In psychoanalytic theory, displacement is a defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion (or, perhaps, action) to a safer outlet.
  • Identification: the act of seeing oneself as similar to or (rarely) identical to another person or object. Often the process of identification completes a subject as when one sees himself or herself represented in another figure (a parent, friend, celebrity, avatar, etc.).
  • Manque à être: (via Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) literally, “the want to be”; we’re born into the experience of lack, and our history consists of a series of attempts to figure and overcome this lack, a project doomed to failure” (Lapsley and Westlake 67).
  • Scopophilia: “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, 1975, II. A. para. 1; p. 8). Similar to voyeurism.
  • Transference: unconscious redirection of feelings for one person to another.

If there’s a lull in the conversation, we can return to Laura Mulvey. (from Video Games and American Culture)

Neo-Marxism & Lacanian Psychoanalysis

I think these critical theorists and psychoanalysts still have something to tell us and offer us tools for analyzing mass motivations that cannot be empirically enumerated. Remember, the so-called American psyche has a right to its own truth and can’t be bothered with the facts, and, as Asimov explains, rejecting expert opinion is important to this group. The anxieties of a group appear in the discourse and what’s between the lines of their discourse: it’s not just what’s said but how, when, where, and to whom it’s said that matters. A linguist will interpret (via discourse analysis) interactions between speakers and audiences in usually close observations. This method can be traced to Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on semiotics. Although there is much overlap between the science of linguistics and rhetorical theory, a major difference is that rhetoric has traditionally been concerned with public address. One can do a discourse analysis of a politician (c.f. the PBS McCarthy documentary on McCarthy’s demeanor during the Army-McCarthy hearings) and will probably be able to identify rhetorical moves, especially because there is no communication situation devoid of rhetoric. A rhetorical analysis of a politician or public address (written or spoken) seeks to identify that attempt(s) at persuasion and the way a speaker/text conveys meaning–often contested–and seeks to identify the probable meaning(s) and influence(s) on an audience. Both rhetoric and linguistics will be concerned with the cultural construction of meaning.

Rise of Right-Wing Anxiety

Since the rise of MAGA-Trumpism, Lacanian psychoanalysis has been employed to understand both Trump and his followers. Something about Trump’s style and content speaks to this group. One theory is that this group feels incomplete and is desperate for a fantasy that completes them. Claudia Leeb’s “Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan” analyzes this through a Marxist-Lacanian lens, and a synopsis of her article (article cited below) claims,

“White, male working-class Americans…embrace the ideology of the far right to fulfil the unconscious yearning to be whole again. This ideology provides them with fantasies that compensate for feeling non-whole or inadequate, such as achieving the American Dream of economic success, finding fulfillment in an afterlife through religion, hatred of ethnic minorities and disdain for women.”

“Understanding the current rise of the far right using Marx and Lacan”

Recently, losing UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal praised Donald Trump after his fight (4/08/2023). Trump and DeSantis were in attendance at UFC 287 in Miami. UFC and MMA, in general, are hugely popular sports along with the NFL. What comment can be made about the praise in relation to the material from this class?

  • Trumpism and the deflection of criticism
  • Ron DeSantis as Top Gov
  • An anti-racist film set in Florida about banning Shakespeare

Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”

This is THE text people read, point to, write against when addressing conspiracy theories and demagoguery in American politics. We should discuss the context of the article–Cold War, post-McCarthyism, post-JFK assassination–but it still speaks to the American psyche in ways similar to Asimov. In fact, the year before this article came out, Hofstadter published the Pulitzer Prize winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

  • p. 77: “It is the use of the paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
  • “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.”
    • {Truth isn’t relevant to these believers}
  • p. 78: Past conspiracies “of international bankers [and] in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I…”
  • p. 79: “It attracted the support of several reputable statesmen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it.”
    • Doesn’t sound familiar…glad that doesn’t happen anymore.
  • “Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.”
  • pp. 79-80: “The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal.”
    • Think of this as some people hold their nose and vote…
  • p. 80: “…the Christian millennium might come in the American states.”
    • projected fantasies
  • p. 81: “…the modern right wing…feels dispossessed: America has largely been taken away from them and their kind…”
    • “The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers…”
    • “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence…many point of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
  • p. 82: “…Communist agents…the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.”
    • “The paranoid…traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.”
    • Apocalyptic terms.
    • “…what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.”
  • p. 85: “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal…”
    • “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts a projection of the self…”
  • p. 86: “The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.”
    • “…the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”
    • “Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests…not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”
      • “A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.”

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Freud, The Ego and the Id. 1923.

Lapsley, Robert and Westlake, Michael. Film Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006 (1st edition published in 1998).

Leeb, Claudia. “Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, pp. 236-248. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0022

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

“https://www.cc.com/video/p4wwfh/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-summer”

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