Sense of Urgency - How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric

"Unchecked climate change affects nearly everything on Earth, including the way humans communicate. In A Sense of Urgency, Debra Hawhee focuses our attention on new communication strategies that are emerging around the global climate crisis. At the heart of the story Hawhee tells are the challenges that our ecological future poses to rhetoric, and how those challenges demand that we learn to privilege more than our pasts and ourselves. The challenges of imagining futures under dramatically different climate conditions, of communicating climate science, and of offsetting human privilege all expose the limits of rhetoric as conceived by ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. The most glaring limit is the prominence those thinkers granted to precedent. When it comes to the climate crisis, precedent is not up to the task of addressing the problem at hand. Climate activists, scientists, artists, and scholars are trying to overcome this limitation, and A Sense of Urgency examines four departures from rhetoric's playbook that can be helpful in this struggle. Each of these departures presents new resources and different means of intensification in response to situations with few to no precedents. For Hawhee, thinking with these departures, and the attendant rhetorical strategies, can help people fathom both what is happening and what will happen if action is not taken. In this way, A Sense of Urgency is an indispensable guide in our search for new imaginative pathways"--

About the author

Debra Hawhee is the McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation and professor of English and communication arts and sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author or editor of four books, including Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

• Authors: Debra Hawhee, Hawhee Debra
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.05.2023
• EAN: 9780226826714
• ISBN: 978-0-226-82671-4
• No. of pages: 272
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; SCIENCE / Global Warming & Climate Change, Climate Change, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics, SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Social Aspects, Impact of science & technology on society, Impact of science and technology on society, Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies, Semantics, discourse analysis, etc