The creative practice of remix is essential to contemporary culture, as the proliferation of song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even streaming television shows like Stranger Things demonstrates. Yet remix is not an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one, as there is evidence of remix in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes is the first book to address remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Through identifying, recontextualizing, mashing up, and applying rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices, this groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary that scholars and students can use to analyze remix. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers such as Isocrates, Quintilian, Nāgārjuna, and Cicero and contemporary luminaries like Kenneth Burke, Richard Lanham, and Eduardo Navas, Scott Haden Church shows that an understanding of rhetoric offers innovative ways to make sense of remix culture.
ContentsAcknowledgmentsPrologueIntroductionChapter 1. The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Remix throughout HistoryChapter 2. Isocrates and Kairos: Remix in Ancient GreeceChapter 3. Give Me a Beat: Girl Talk, Kenneth Burke, and Remix AestheticsChapter 4. Epaesthetic Rhetoric: Remix and Auto-Tune on YouTubeChapter 5. Projecting Voice in the Digital Age: Remix, Śūnyatā, and ProsōpopoeiaChapter 6. From Allegory to Anthology: Stranger Things and NostalgiaConclusionAppendix. A New Dictionary of Pivotal TermsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex