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"Examines the relationship between rhetoric and debt, arguing that they are fundamentally entangled in producing and disciplining who is deemed worthy of credit and how debt materializes differentially: as a credit to some and condemnation of others."

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing.Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of "debt" indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency.A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world

Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Rhetoric in Neoliberalism -- Note -- References -- Accountable to Whom? The Rhetorical Circulation of Neoliberal Discourse and Its Ambient Effects on Higher Education -- Educational Accountability: From the Great Society to the Neoliberal Marketplace -- The Neoliberal Milieu: From CSU's Mandatory Early Start to SUNY's Seamless Transfer -- Reconstituting Ambient Rhetoric from Neoliberalism to the Common -- Notes -- References -- Warren Buffett's Celebrity, Epideictic Ethos, and Neoliberal Humanitarianism

"Rhetoric is among the most important and least understood elements of presidential leadership. Presidents have always wielded rhetoric as one tool of governance--and that rhetoric was always intended to facilitate political ends, such as image building, persuasion of the mass public, and inter-branch government persuasion. But as mass media has grown and then fragmented, as the federal bureaucracy has continued to both expand and calcify, and as partisanship has heightened tensions both within Congress and between Congress and the Executive, rhetoric is an increasingly important element of presidential governance.Scholars have derived ways to explain how these developments and the presidents' use of rhetoric have contributed to and detracted from the health of American democracy. This briefing book offers a succinct reflection on the ways in which historical developments have encouraged the use of political rhetoric. It explores strategies of "going public" to provide some leverage over the political system and the lessons one might derive from these choices.This essential analysis, written for lay readers, scholars, students, and future presidents, is the first in Transaction's innovative Presidential Briefings series. Mary E. Stuckey covers the scholarly literature with authority and offers examples of rhetoric that have lasting influence."--Provided by publisher.

This volume examines and applies classical and contemporary concepts of rhetorical theory and criticism to the context of late capitalism. Each contributor shows how discourse, its subjects, and power relations are irrevocably transformed by neoliberalism. The collection analyzes a range of discourses and phenomena in neoliberalism including: higher education reforms, computational culture, Occupy Wall Street protests, the activism of Warren Buffett, and the 9-11 Truth Movement. Together, these chapters explore the contemporary rhetorical production of homo economicus and the various ways in which neoliberalism has become a way of thinking, orienting, and organizing all aspects of life around economized metrics of individualized and individuated success. This book will be of use to students and scholars crossing the fields of media and communication, political science, and sociology.