Inventing Place

Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics offers a sustained but varying examination of the spatial-temporal dynamics that compose place. Bringing together methods and scholars from rhetoric and related disciplines, essays blend personal and scholarly accounts of Texas sites, examining place as an embodied poeisis, a creation formed through the collaboration of a body with a particular space. Divided into five sections corresponding to Texas regions, essays consider a wide range of subjects, including aesthetics, buildings, environment, food and alcohol, private and public memory, and race and class. Among the topics covered by contributors are the Imagine Austin urban planning initiative; the terroir of Texas barbecue; the racist past of Grand Saline, Texas; Denton, Texas, and authenticity as rhetorical; negative views of Texas and how the state (or any place) is subject to reinvention; social, historical, and economic networks of place and their relationship to the food we eat; and Texas gun culture and working-class character. Spanning the wide geography of Texas, essays model methods for examining place in ways that are not reducible to common physical or geographic attributes. Although focused on Texas, Inventing Place offers universal concepts for the study of place, culture, and rhetoric by bringing in the personal alongside the scholarly and demonstrating new approaches to writing.