Rhetorical Listening in Action - Krista Ratcliffe

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

Edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan

RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION: A CONCEPT-TACTIC APPROACH aims to cultivate writers who can listen across differences in preparation for thinking critically, communicating, and acting across those differences. Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen offer a rhetorical education centered on rhetorical listening as it inflects other rhetorical concepts, such as agency, rhetorical situation, identification, myth, and rhetorical devices. 

RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION spans classical and contemporary rhetoric, reading key concepts through rhetorical listening and supported by scholarship in rhetoric and composition, feminist studies, critical race studies, and intersectionality theory. The book expands on how we think about and negotiate difference and the factors that mediate social relations and competing cultural logics. Along the way, Ratcliffe and Jensen associate creative and heuristic tactics with clearly defined concepts to give all writers methods for listening rhetorically to and understanding alternative viewpoints.

For writers new to the concepts of rhetorical listening, four appendices show how these concepts illuminate rhetoric, language, discourse, argument, writing processes, research, and style. 

KRISTA RATCLIFFE is Foundation Professor and Chair in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on intersections of rhetoric, feminist theory, and critical race studies. Her book Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (2006) won the 2007 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, and the 2007 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has served as President of the Rhetoric Society of America and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. She is a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America. 

KYLE JENSEN is Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Arizona State University. He is the author or co-editor of five previous books, including Reimagining Process: Online Writing Archives and the Future of Writing Studies (2015), The War of Words by Kenneth Burke (2018), and Kenneth Burke's Weed Garden: Refiguring the Grounds of Modern Rhetoric (2022).