Description
Book SynopsisOccupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one's life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric's indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival.
Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory in question and receptive to alternative
Trade ReviewThis book is a valuable contribution to an under-studied aspect of the rhetorical canon: 'memory.' The theorization and case studies are very useful, and scholars of rhetoric and composition, as well as those interested in trauma theory, memory, and mourning, will find this book useful to their own thinking. -- Matthew B. Morris, Texas State University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Seize the Fire
1. Memorials: The Living and the Dead
2. Trauma: Starless Night, Blinding Sun
3. Writing: Inscribing the Impossible
4. Death: Rioting Finitude
5. Mourning: The Maelstrom of Sorrow
6. Haunting: Ghosts of Memory
Afterword: Into Darkness
Appendix: Declaration of the Occupation of Memory
Bibliography
About the Author
