We particularly welcome proposals which speak to the conference theme of Rhetorics of Unity and Division. As Kenneth Burke showed us, rhetoric has the capacity to generate ‘identification’ between people, forging and affirming community. It also has the capacity to create divisions, distinctions and differences – as a way of creating new communities but also as a way of maintaining hierarchies and exclusions or of promoting and prolonging hostility. This is not only a social or political effect of rhetoric. It goes to the core of what rhetoric is: a practice which involves inventive ‘division’ - persuading people by breaking up issues and phenomena in particular ways, connecting some ideas while constituting others as antithetical.

It is possible to see the present day as marked by a rise in rhetorics of division – between ‘them’ and ‘us’, nations and regions, religions and classes. What forms does such rhetoric take? Does it repeat old and well-known rhetorical strategies or are there new forms of divisive rhetoric? To what extent is such rhetoric merely reflecting deep social divisions and to what extent does it create them? How are changes in the modes and means of communication enabling or disabling such division? Are these best conceived of as private or public, everyday and vernacular or exceptional and elite forms of rhetoric?

It is also possible to see the present as marked by a rise in new kinds of rhetoric of unity. There are many examples of new claims about identity and community (sometimes made against ‘traditional’ identifications) and contemporary means of communication are enabling people to form new rhetorics of unity across once impermeable borders (and with new kinds of intensity). How can we best understand these new kinds of rhetorical identity? What kinds of distinct strategies do we find in contemporary rhetorics of unity? What sorts of division, or unity, can be identified as outcomes of rhetorical strategies and actions? 

We welcome proposals for papers or panels that address these themes and issues in any way.