Ben Wetherbee ⚓❄🐝

@wetherbeephd.bsky.social

214 Followers 167 Following

❄ English prof & WPA, Northern Michigan U ❄ rhetorical theory & history, writing, film ❄ review ed., enculturation ❄ aspiring Yooper ❄ union thug ❄ he/him #teamrhetoric

Endnote from an academic paper:

I recently heard a terrific explanation and example of this rhetorical tactic from the trans YouTuber and cultural critic Natalie Wynn (2018): “Intellectually, I don’t think [essential womanhood] makes any sense. I think it’s heartwarming gibberish. But there’s also, I think, a legitimate role in the discourse for heartwarming gibberish. Sometimes you have to explain what it means to be trans to a person who believes that dogs go to heaven. And, in most circumstances, saying, ‘I’m a female soul in a male body,’ gets the point across” (15:57–16:18). Exactly.

Fist page of my article "Toward Logological Skepticism: Kenneth Burke, Edward Said, and the Question of Atheism."

Paragraph of text from an essay about memes and topoi discussing the "This is fine" dog meme. Highlighted is the sentence "Aristotle’s list of koinoi topoi includes no entry on 'arguments from cartoons dogs.'"

Stick-in-spokes meme

a dumb bourgeois tweet telling us what we have to read to hold conversation

Title slide for "The Human Depths: James Baldwin's Counterimage of Burkean Logology," with images of Kenneth Burke and James Baldwin

Screencap of Google AI saying MDCCLXXV is 1625. It's 1775.

Cover of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain

Gordon Cole from Twin Peaks saying, "And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die."

Cover the The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Cover of The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin

Cover of Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey

NYRB cover of In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes.

NYRB cover of Stoner by John Williams

Snowy street in the moonlight, with the Superior Dome in the distance.