Ambient Rhetoric

In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act. Rickert develops the concept of ambience to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist. Winner, 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

Thomas Rickert is associate professor of English at Purdue University and author of Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject, winner of the 2007 JAC Gary A. Olson Award.