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The Rhetoric of Manipulation by Prof Robert Harvey
£21.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9798765100813
Published:
06 Mar 2025
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
208 pages
Dimensions:
228.6x152.4x25mm
Weight:
0.454kgs
Author:
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 k
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.
About the Author: 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 Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras (Paris: Gallimard, 2011, 2014). Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, 2001-2007.
| Number of pages | 208 |
|---|
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