Abstract

This dissertation gives an account of and expands upon Stacy Alaimo’s term, “trans-corporeality,” in order to reconsider the rhetorical situation, through conceptualizations of how rhetorical bodies become embodied and traverse one another in various humanities. From “trans-corporeality,” what arises is a “trans-corporeal rhetoric,” which becomes an interdisciplinary rhetoric that speaks to the futures of rhetoric within the boundaries of various humanities, involving notions of embodiment, materiality, corporeality, and what Alaimo calls “bodily natures.” These futures of rhetoric not only wrestle with what embodiment is and can be for rhetorical bodies in various humanities, and what sort of ethics and aesthetics present themselves in rhetorical situations of “bodily natures,” but they also consider genres where trans-corporeal subjects reside. The triangularities of genre, ethics, and aesthetics are grounded on what is materially significant to various humanities, with this dissertation concerning itself with two: journalism and Christianity. As they respectively appear in Kenneth Burke’s The War of Words (2018) and Michel Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh (2021), Burke and Foucault provide for two post-factum studies of trans-corporeal rhetoric respectively in terms of the genres of journalism and Christianity, the ethics of news and the flesh, and the aesthetics of the body.