Entertaining Fear: Rhetoric and the Political Economy of Social Control

Throughout the political spectrum, successful arguments often rely on fear appeals, whether implicit or explicit. Dominant arguments prey on people’s fears – of economic failure, cultural backwardness, or lack of personal safety. Counterarguments feed on other fears, suggesting that audiences are being duped by emotional smokescreens. With chapters on the political, institutional, and cultural manifestations of fear, this book offers diverse investigations into how insecurity and the search for certainty shape contemporary political economic decisions, and explores how the rhetorical manipulation of such fears illuminates a larger struggle for social control.

The Editors: Catherine Chaput is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches courses in rhetoric and critical theory. Her research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and political economy as it manifests within particular social, cultural, and political texts. She recently published Inside the Teaching Machine.
M. J. Braun is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Her most recent research is in rhetoric and political economy, and how they interpenetrate in the rhetoric of propaganda. She has published in JAC and WPA and is currently working on a textbook on the rhetoric of propaganda.
Danika M. Brown is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Pan American, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. She researches primarily in the areas of critical pedagogy and critical theories of rhetoric and has published in JAC as well as WPA. Her current project is an analysis of the discourses of crime solving and crime prevention in contemporary United States society.