Strangely Rhetorical: Composing Differently with Novelty Devices

Strangely Rhetorical establishes the groundwork for strangeness as a lens under the broader interdisciplinary umbrella of rhetoric and composition and shares a series of rhetorical devices for practically thinking about how compositions are made unique. Jimmy Butts explores how strange, novel, weird, and interesting texts work and offers insight into how and why these forms can be invented, created, and stylized to generate the effective delivery of rhetorical messages in fun, divergent ways.

Using a new theoretical framework--that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful--Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways.

Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.

Jimmy Butts has enjoyed thinking differently with students from the various places he has taught writing, including Louisiana State University, Wake Forest, Clemson, Winthrop, and Charleston County High Schools. He is interested in postmodern writing styles and the future of composition and rhetoric, and has published in Communication Design Quarterly, Textshop Experiments, Pre-Text, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter at jimmy_butts.