The Rhetoric of Manipulation : Unmasking Semantic Perversions - Robert Harvey

The Rhetoric of Manipulation

Unmasking Semantic Perversions

By: Robert Harvey

Paperback | 3 April 2025

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $44.99

$44.50

or 4 interest-free payments of $11.13 with

 or 

Available: 3rd April 2025

Preorder. Will ship when available.

A provocative and timely look at how language is used to manipulate the truth, how our gullibility leaves us susceptible to manipulation, and what we can do to reverse these trends.

The Rhetoric of Manipulation looks behind the curtain of political and social communications in the age of "fake news" and the "post-truth" to show how the perversely engineered semantics at work today shapes culture and undermines reality. While language has always been manipulated to direct or anesthetize thought, today's semantic perversions orient opinion and subdue political action to an alarming degree. Under such conditions, we are particularly susceptible to demagoguery.

Arguing that too many of us have let our critical faculties wither, Robert Harvey opens our ears and eyes to an insidious impediment to free thinking by unflinchingly examining five realms of semantic perversion: the contemporary vocabulary of war; the recently evolved language tool known as scare quotes; the terms used to peddle white supremacy; the phenomenon of so-called cancel culture; and the jargon deployed in the corporatization of higher education.

The wager of The Rhetoric of Manipulation is that a frank expose of bad faith discursive practices and our accompanying gullibility can contribute to reversing the trend, remedying the current situation in view of a far more ethical immediate future, and remediating some of the damage already done.

More in Literary Theory

Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary - Raymond D. Boisvert
The Subversive Edge of Psychoanalysis : History of Psychoanalysis - David James Fisher
The Subversive Edge of Psychoanalysis : History of Psychoanalysis - David James Fisher
Create Dangerously : Penguin Modern - Albert Camus
Art Monsters : Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art - Lauren Elkin

RRP $55.00

$39.90

27%
OFF
The Hundreds - Lauren Berlant

Paperback

RRP $48.95

$46.50

How Fiction Works - James Wood

RRP $22.99

$17.75

23%
OFF
An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory : 6th Edition - Andrew Bennett
The Limits of Autobiography : Trauma and Testimony - Leigh Gilmore
This Thing Called Literature : Reading, Thinking, Writing - Andrew Bennett
Shakespeare and Fun : The Birth of Entertainment Value - Donald Hedrick
Humanistic Narratives - Michel Serres

RRP $130.00

$97.75

25%
OFF
Humanistic Narratives - Michel Serres

RRP $44.99

$44.50

Translation Beyond Translation Studies - Kobus Marais

RRP $79.99

$63.95

20%
OFF
Island : Object Lessons - Julian Hanna

$19.99