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Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption ��

Jeremy Tirrell

Department of English

University of North Carolina Wilmington

Kate Maddalena

Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology�University of Toronto Mississauga

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Agenda

The book: some context
The Chapters

Quantification, Hybridity, Abjection, Optimization, Regulation

Some implications (spoiler alert: it has to do with the news feed)

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Our book posits a rhetorical gothic that permeates the material-discursive networks that we describe. (And the text Dracula makes a few appearances, as well.)

We borrow from a rich scholarship of the gothic in literary studies

The rhetorical gothic is an institutional mode through which cultures manifest anxieties about the thing-machines, matter, informatics replacing the human. It induces individuals toward a contradictory desire to assert exceptionalist control over their own health by romancing destruction.

So it’s fitting that I’m giving this talk at the tail end of Spooky Season. But it’s also kind of uncannily fitting that I am giving this talk while the polls are closing in the East coast of the US and we are facing the possibility of another Trump presidency. Because we frame the book with the question

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Quantification

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Hybridity

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Abjection

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Optimization

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Regulation

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Conclusion

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some implications

Rhetoric (academic stakes)

equivocation and shared spaces: the inadequacy of “stance” and argumentation as a theoretical tool
the (rhetorical) production of identities as a production of bodies

Politics (larger, real-world stakes)

the bodies being produced are bodies that reduce friction for capitalist production
the bodies being produced are “exceptional” bodies with an exceptionalist ethos, and as such they are isolated from other bodies, and a (socialist) system isn’t responsible for them (see the bullet above)
the constant co-production of a popular rhetorical space that validates all of the above

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Thank you! We’d love to chat more.

Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption

(forthcoming from University of Alabama Press)

Jeremy Tirrell

tirrellj@uncw.edu

Kate Maddalena�kate.maddalena@utoronto.ca