Department of English

My work is about the relationship of hermeneutics, which is a theory of understanding modeled on the experience of reading a text, and rhetoric, which I think about as the art of discourse in the broadest sense. Although rhetoric can be understood narrowly as the art of public speech, the ancient rhetorical canons have continued to feed our imagination as a treasure house of discursive resources for poetry, architecture, music, painting, philosophy, argumentation, politics, ethics, religion, history, literature, and on and on. As a repository of adaptable inventional tools for speaking to the contingent exigencies of our lives or in moments of great public need, rhetoric as a performative practice needs a theoretical foundation, and I have found this foundation in hermeneutics. As a theory of interpretation, hermeneutics cultivates a reflective awareness of the effects of discourse on us as readers and audiences, and so also of our responsibility for these effects as speakers, writers and creators. I am trying to let more people know about this wonderful collaboration, to understand it better myself, and to teach all the ways it can be applied to our creative and ethical lives. In recent years, my theoretical interests have widened to include articulation and assemblage theories, which are destabilizing, enriching, and transforming my conceptions of rhetoric and hermeneutics as foundational logics of understanding and communication.