Description
Book SynopsisAmerican public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline - the worst seems always yet to come and already here.
Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them.Trade Review“Pierce’s approach to cultural analysis brings together rhetorical and critical theory in fresh ways while always attending to close reading and careful textual analysis of cultural events.” - Sharon J. Kirsch, author of
Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric"Lee M. Pierce integrates the disciplines of grammar and of rhetoric in this ground breaking new volume. And she uses that scholarly integration to show how some productive research may inform our current cultural and political crisis, in her book
Tense Times: Syntax and Suprise in American Crisis Culture. This book will be of value to scholars in English, Linguistics, Communication, Rhetoric, and Politics at the very least. Its readability will make it useful in the classroom as well."—Barry Brummett is the author of
A Rhetoric of Style,
Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture,
Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric,
Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics,
The World and How We Describe It, and
Rhetorical Homologies.
