The Rhetoric of Manipulation: Unmasking Semantic Perversions - Couverture souple

Harvey, Prof Robert

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798765100813

Editeur : Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

Synopsis

A provocative and timely look at how language is used to manipulate the truth, how our gullibility leaves us susceptible to manipulation, and what we can do to reverse these trends.

The Rhetoric of Manipulation looks behind the curtain of political and social communications in the age of "fake news" and the "post-truth" to show how the perversely engineered semantics at work today shapes culture and undermines reality. While language has always been manipulated to direct or anesthetize thought, today's semantic perversions orient opinion and subdue political action to an alarming degree. Under such conditions, we are particularly susceptible to demagoguery.

Arguing that too many of us have let our critical faculties wither, Robert Harvey opens our ears and eyes to an insidious impediment to free thinking by unflinchingly examining five realms of semantic perversion: the contemporary vocabulary of war; the recently evolved language tool known as scare quotes; the terms used to peddle white supremacy; the phenomenon of so-called cancel culture; and the jargon deployed in the corporatization of higher education.

The wager of The Rhetoric of Manipulation is that a frank exposé of bad faith discursive practices and our accompanying gullibility can contribute to reversing the trend, remedying the current situation in view of a far more ethical immediate future, and remediating some of the damage already done.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, USA. His teaching ranges from literary and film theories to modern and contemporary literatures and the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse. His 2010 book published by Continuum/Bloomsbury, Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics appeared in French as Témoignabilité (Geneva: MetisPresses, 2015). He is a major co-editor of the Ouvres complètes of Marguerite Duras (Paris: Gallimard, 2011, 2014). Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, 2001-2007.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798765100813
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 216
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible