Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix

MSU Press Podcast

Remixing is essential to contemporary culture. We see it in song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even on streaming television shows like Stranger Things. But remixing isn’t an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one. Evidence of remixing even appears in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix, by my guest Scott Haden Church, is the first book to address the remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Church identifies, recontextualizes, mashes up, and applies rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices. This groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary for scholars and students to use as they analyze remix culture. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers, such as Isocrates, Quintilian, Nāgārjuna, and Cicero, as well as 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.

SCOTT HADEN CHURCH teaches courses in media studies, communication theory, and popular culture at Brigham Young University, where he is an associate professor in the School of Communications. He has been awarded the Phyllis Japp Scholar award from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Ruth S. Silver Research Fellowship in Mass Media Ethics from Brigham Young University.

Scott Haden Church’s Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about the book at scotthadenchurch.com and Scott is on Twitter @scotthchurch. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

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