Breaking Up (at) Totality: A Rhetoric of LaughterRhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such "postphilosophers" as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous, and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux. As D. Diane Davis traces today’s theoretical interest to those countertraditions, she also sets her sights beyond them.
Davis takes a “third sophistics” approach, one that focuses on the play of language that perpetually disrupts the “either/or” binary construction of dialectic. She concentrates on the nonsequential third—excess—that overflows language’s dichotomies. In this work, laughter operates as a trope for disruption or breaking up, which is, from Davis’s perspective, a joyfully destructive shattering of our confining conceptual frameworks.
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Contents
A Prefatory PostScript on Where We Will | 1 |
The Subject Convulsed | 21 |
Composition Convulsed | 69 |
The Hail Breaks DownUp Or Adding a Para to | 81 |
Breaking Up with Language Or Toward an Ethics | 104 |
Deciding forwith LaughterA Posthumanist Ethics | 112 |
A Rhetoric of Laughter for Feminist Politics | 136 |
A Thinking of Futurity | 162 |
A Rhetoric of Laughter for Composition Pedagogy | 209 |
Another PostScript on Laughter and Futurity | 254 |
Notes | 261 |
| 291 | |
| 307 | |