James P. Zappen’s research while affiliated with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and other places

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Publications (35)


Kenneth Burke’s Counter-Spectacle and the Problem of Unity in Political Culture
  • Article
  • Full-text available

November 2020

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107 Reads

Literature of the Americas

James P. Zappen

The spectacle was prominent in public displays and mass meetings in midtwentieth-century Russia and Germany as a quest for unity in political culture. In Russia, it was countered by Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s novelistic dialogue, polyphony, heteroglossia, and carnival. In Germany, it appeared in its most grotesque form in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which proclaims Hitler’s quest for German national unity and celebrates his National Socialist mass meetings, which created the appearance of a false unity imposed by force of arms. In the United States, Hitler’s spectacle was critiqued in Kenneth Burke’s review of Mein Kampf and continually challenged throughout his life’s work. Burke’s review critiques Hitler’s strategy of attempting to unite Germany by dividing it from those who opposed him, in particular non-German ethnic groups. Burke was engaged in sociopolitical issues throughout his lifetime, and his work offers theories and principles aimed at diversity in unity in political culture and offered as a counterforce to Hitler’s spectacle of a false unity—a counter-spectacle in the form of identification, dramatism, dialectical and aesthetic transcendence, and a satiric mock portrait of a false unity.

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Burke, Kenneth

October 2016

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68 Reads

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1 Citation

Kenneth Burke's concept of communication spans multiple disciplines, ranging from rhetoric to literary theory to sociology to philosophy, but is focused on bridging multiple and competing points of view. Widely regarded as the most important rhetorician of the 20th century, Burke is equally a dialectician: a Socratic midwife who seeks to unsettle and then bridge partial and partisan perspectives. He captures these partial perspectives in creative concepts such as perspective by incongruity, frames of acceptance and rejection, dramatism, the pentad, the human barnyard, the parliamentary wrangle, and terministic screens and seeks to bridge them via identification—the concept for which he is most famous; the human drama of the unending conversation; and dialectical processes of transcendence.




Heuristics for Broader Assessment of Effectiveness and Usability in Technology-Mediated Technical Communication

February 2013

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247 Reads

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13 Citations

Technical Communication

Roger A Grice

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James P. Zappen

Purpose: To offer additional tools for the assessment of effectiveness and usability in technology-mediated communication based in established heuristics.Method: An interdisciplinary group of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute selected five disparate examples of technology-mediated communication, formally evaluated each using contemporary heuristics, and then engaged in an iterative design process to arrive at an expanded toolkit for in depth analyses.Results: A set of heuristics and operationalized metrics for the deeper analysis of a broader scope of contemporary technology-mediated communication.Conclusions: The continual evolution of communication, including the emergence of new, interactive media, provides a challenging opportunity to identify effective approaches and techniques. There are benefits to a renewed focus on relationships between people and between people and information, and we offer additional criteria and metrics to supplement established means of heuristic analysis.


US and Russian traditions in rhetoric, education and culture

December 2012

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21 Reads

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3 Citations

Pedagogy Culture and Society

Traditional rhetoric attempts to find the available means of persuasion in public assemblies, law courts and ceremonials and is grounded in cultural values and beliefs. Traditional rhetoric supports the development of social communities and posits education as a primary means of maintaining these communities. In contrast, contemporary alternatives to traditional rhetoric recognize multiple cultural values both within and between social communities and seek larger unities that encompass but do not eradicate individual and communal differences. US rhetorician Kenneth Burke seeks syntheses among multiple and potentially competing persuasive acts, promotes educational practices of mutual respect and reciprocal learning and advocates a rhetorical theory and practice with potentially global reach. Russian literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin envisions novelistic practices of polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival as modes of dialogue that embrace individual differences within larger, more complex unities. These complementary rhetorical and dialogical practices support US multiculturalism and Russian transculturalism, respectively, but they also and more significantly promote dialogue across cultural boundaries as the basis of an intercultural rhetoric and an intercultural approach to curricula across a range of disciplines.


Figure 1 ''Let us Merge Shock Groups Into Shock Brigades'' (1929–30?). Industrialization: The Shock Brigades. Authors' Collection of Soviet Posters.  
Figure 3 ''Come Join us, Comrade, in a Collective Farm!'' (1930). Farm Collectivization: The Prosperous Life. Authors' Collection of Soviet Posters.  
Figure 5 ''Beloved Stalin is the People's Happiness'' (1949). The Beloved Leader with His Happy People. Authors' Collection of Soviet Posters.  
Figure 6 ''Enemies of the Five-Year Plan.'' The Landowner is Staring Like an Evil Watch-Dog; The Kulak is Breathing Heavily Through His Crooked Nose; The Drunk is Like a Fish from Sorrow; the Priest is Howling with a Frenzied Howl; the Corrupt Journalist is Hissing; the Capitalist is Baring His Teeth; the Menshevik is in a Rage; the White Warrior is Cursing; Like Uncaged Dogs, All Those who Stand for the Old Ways; Damn Wickedly the Five-Year Plan and Proclaim War on it; they Threatened to Ruin it, Understanding that the Plan Means their Imminent Death!; Demian Bednyi (Damian the Poor). The Menshevik Herald (Title of Newspaper) (1929). Enemies versus Economic Progress. Triptych Soviet Posters No. 42 (Identifier scpcp0055).  
Figure 8 ''Peasant Woman, Join the Collective Farm.'' ''Road to the Collective Farm'' (Words on Sign) (1930). Collective Farmer Versus Drunkard, Kulak, Priest. Triptych Soviet Posters No. 93 (Identifier scpcp0110).  

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Totalitarian Visual “Monologue”: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin

July 2010

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10,778 Reads

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16 Citations

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.



Children's use of government information systems: design and usability.

January 2009

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23 Reads

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4 Citations

While generally not recognized by e-government researchers, children and teens are an audience for web sites featuring information about the activities, services, or missions of numerous federal government organizations, and perhaps should be viewed as an audience for community information presented by municipal and county governments. This paper describes our efforts to design a user interface for middle-school aged users of a government-sponsored community information system. We review the literature related to children's use of the Internet and children's use of online information systems. Following a review our past design efforts, we present our most recent design followed by data from usability and satisfaction tests with young users from various grade levels. The paper ends by presenting some observations and comments that might be helpful in future work by government designers of children's web pages and information systems.



Citations (19)


... It is the affair of dialectic to study substance, while it is the affair of rhetoric to study tactics for achieving identification (or consubstantiality). Zappen (2009) contends that the dialectical processes are in general the "processes of merger and division, which permit and enable the emergence of transcendent perspectives through linguistic abstractions and transformations" (pp. 286) and these dialectical processes "are reflected in the development from merger to division to a new merger that offers both the possibility of transcendence and the possibility of a new division" (pp. ...

Reference:

Pragma-dialectical perspective to intercultural discussion as communicative activity
Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical Transcendence
  • Citing Article
  • January 2009

Philosophy and Rhetoric

... To date, engaging various stakeholders remains a challenge, which goes beyond the technological limitations of digital government platforms [7]- [9]. In order to improve participation rates and enable co-creation, it is crucial to create services that are not only useful, but also creative and attractive for the citizens [10,11]. One way to achieve that is by introducing gamification elements. ...

A new paradigm for designing e-government: Web 2.0 and experience design
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

... Cabe concluir que la filosofía de la retórica burkeana se perfila como un rescate moderno de la retórica filosófica en que retórica y dialéctica se vinculan como diferentes funciones de la actividad simbólica: la transformación de los vocabularios y la distinción de términos resultan tan cruciales como la identificación retórica que permite la formación de nuestras identidades, la cooperación comunicativa y el mantenimiento de comunidades (Crusius, 1986). Así, la filosofía de la retórica de Burke puede interpretarse conjuntamente como una retórica y una dialéctica: la acción simbólica humana supone tanto la fuerza persuasiva e identificatoria de la retórica cuanto la trascendencia dialéctica de los vocabularios unilaterales y la identificación última (Zappen, 2016). En ese sentido, la influencia de la retórica aristotélica resulta decisiva; pero también es fundamental la deuda con la retórica ciceroniana, en la medida en que tanto Burke como Cicerón enfatizan el aspecto práctico de la comunicación simbólica, la unidad de forma y contenido en la escenificación del discurso elocuente, la función de la forma literaria como equipamiento para la vida, así como la reflexión irónica sobre los límites de los discursos abstractos y la trascendencia dialéctica de perspectivas opuestas (Leff, 1989). ...

Burke, Kenneth
  • Citing Chapter
  • October 2016

... Besides that, research has been primarily dominated by studies on the history of rhetorical education (e.g. Murphy, 2012;Walker, 2011;Zappen, 2012) and by discussions of the educational potential of rhetoric (e.g. Andrews, 2019;Bakken, 2019;Brummett, 2012;Fleming, 1998;Hogarth, 2019;Rutten & Soetaert, 2012). ...

US and Russian traditions in rhetoric, education and culture
  • Citing Article
  • December 2012

Pedagogy Culture and Society

... We focus on Spotify [29], which was chosen as a case study because it is a well known commercial application, and many users around the world use it. We construct the analysis based on the works by Andrade et al. [1], Grice et al. [7], and Schmettow et al. [28]. Spotify is a cross-platform application for playing music via streaming. ...

Heuristics for Broader Assessment of Effectiveness and Usability in Technology-Mediated Technical Communication

Technical Communication

... Illness narratives in online discussion forums, in comparison, have the potential of transforming individual experiences into collective experiences. Zappen, Gurak, and Doheny-Farina (1997) argued that in online discussion forums, "'voices' from different places all [speak] at once in the same 'place' in fragments rather than complete discourse" (p. 400). ...

Rhetoric, community, and cyberspace
  • Citing Article
  • March 1997

Rhetoric Review

... '5 Best Tips' or '3 Things You Need to Know'), clickbait headlines, infographics, and multimedia additions, which are ubiquitous and highly successful in digital communication. Consequently, researchers (Lind, 2012;Rossette-Crake, 2022;Zappen, 2005) have demanded a reconceptualization of rhetorical frameworks to account for the impact of digital technology on speech communication and to investigate the complex dynamics of online self-presentation and audience perception (Marwick & Boyd, 2011). ...

Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory
  • Citing Article
  • July 2005

Technical Communication Quarterly

... Freed and Broadhead (1987) suggest that this communication mechanism is governed by institutional norms generated by the discourse community. Zappen (1989) believes that institutional norms that govern rhetorical decisions should conform to acceptable practices within a profession or discipline. This issue implies that membership in a particular discourse community involves active interaction to achieve common goals. ...

The Discourse Community in Scientific and Technical Communication: Institutional and Social Views
  • Citing Article
  • January 1989

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

... I n the inaugural issue of Programmatic Perspectives, James Zappen and Cheryl Geisler (2009) identified the shift from delivering information to users to creating immersive user experiences. This shift requires not just a change in what we teach in technical and professional communication (TPC) programs, but how we teach. ...

Designing the Total User Experience Implications for Research and Program Development
  • Citing Article

... In this paper, the multi-layered analysis discloses how the digital monk works to align his intended audiences (i.e. millennial consumers) with his Buddhist movement via 'rhetoric of transcendence' (Bednarek, Paroutis, & Sillince, 2017;Zappen, 2009) closely tied to the practices of discipline, generosity, (self)compassion, non-attachment, right effort, meditation, and patience. Transcendence is understood in this current study as 'a discursive strategy in which a rhetor draws from a boundary-breaking accomplishment and utilizes the symbolic capital of that feat to persuasively delineate unconventional ways of communicating and behaving in society' (Jensen et al., 2010, p. 1). ...

Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical Transcendence
  • Citing Article
  • January 2009

Philosophy and Rhetoric