And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring / Edition 1

by Craig Waddell, Paul Brooks, Linda Lear

Overview

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson’s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson’s life and outlines the attention that Carson’s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson’s life and work.

Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris,  M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring’s effectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809322190
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2000
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Craig Waddell is an associate professor of rhetoric at Michigan Technological University. He is also editor of Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment.  

Table of Contents

	Foreword: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring	xi
	Acknowledgments	xix
1	The Reception of Silent Spring: An Introduction	1
2	Chemical Fallout: Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement	17
3	An Inventional Archaeology of "A Fable for Tomorrow"	42
4	A Topical Analysis of "The Obligation to Endure"	60
5	Ecology According to Silent Spring's Vision of Progress	73
6	When Science Writing Becomes Literary Art: The Success of Silent Spring	103
7	Other-Words in Silent Spring	126
8	Cold War, Silent Spring: The Trope of War in Modern Environmentalism	157
9	Silent Spring and Science Fiction: An Essay in the History and Rhetoric of Narrative	174
	Afterword: Searching for Rachel Carson	205
	Contributors	221
	Index	225

Editorial Reviews

“This collection of original critical and contexting essays, And No Birds Sing, provides rhetorical analyses and additional materials aiding further analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, one of the most significant public documents in setting citizen and policy agendas in this half century. As the first volume of rhetorical analysis on this important work, Waddell’s collection makes a major contribution to contemporary rhetoric, rhetoric of the environment, history of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson studies, and contemporary American culture.”—Charles Bazerman, author of Constructing Experience

From the Publisher

This collection of original critical and contexting essays, And No Birds Sing, provides rhetorical analyses and additional materials aiding further analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, one of the most significant public documents in setting citizen and policy agendas in this half century. As the first volume of rhetorical analysis on this important work, Waddell’s collection makes a major contribution to contemporary rhetoric, rhetoric of the environment, history of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson studies, and contemporary American culture.
—author of Constructing Experience

Charles Bazerman