Mere Rhetoric

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas people and movements who have shaped rehtorical history. Before we get started, big announcement: Rerecordings are over! We’ve re-recorded over 80 episodes here in the studio thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas. That’s an incredible feat and now that we’re done, there’s no more reruns, at least for a while. We’ve had new ones interspersed yeah, but now it’s all new from here on out. The other news is that having defended my dissertation and finished my time here at the University of Texas --boo!--I’m headed to the University of Houston Clear Lake --yippie! That means this might we one of the last episodes we record here at the booth at the University of Texas. Well, I hope it’s a good one!   Today we’re talking about LuMing Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie. This book is not, as you might suspect, a treatise on how to decipher phrases like “Your smile is your best asset” or “Defeat your enemies by