Nathan Crick

Biography

Selected Publications

• Representative Publications

  • Crick, Nathan. “Fascism and the American Way of Life.” Dewey Studies 4 (1) 2020: 35-40. 
  • Crick, Nathan. “ Composing the Will to Power: John Dewey on Rhetorical Education for a Radical Democracy.”   Rhetoric Society Quarterly  46 (4) 2016: 287-307.
  • Gratch, Ariel and Nathan Crick. “ The Storyteller, Novelist, and Charlatan: Forms of Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction ,”  Text and Performance Quarterly , 35 (4) 2015: 305-322
  • Crick, Nathan and Joseph Rhodes. “ Death and Eloquence ,”  Rhetoric Review  33 (4) 2014: 327-343
  • Crick, Nathan. “ Rhetoric and Events .”  Philosophy and Rhetoric  47 (3) 2014: 251-272
  • Crick, Nathan. “ When We Can’t Wait on Truth: The Nature of Rhetoric in  The Rhetoric of Science .”  POROI  10 (2): 2014
  • Crick, Nathan. “ The Sophistical Attitude and the Invention of Rhetoric .”  Quarterly Journal of Speech   96 ( 1)  2010: 25 – 45
  • Crick, Nathan. “ The Search for a Purveyor of News: The Dewey/Lippmann Debate in an Internet Age.”   Critical Studies in Media Communication  26(5) 2009: 480-497
    
    

  Books

  Crick, Nathan. The Way to Hell: Machiavelli for Catastrophic Times. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2024.

  Catastrophe looms. Political, environmental, epidemic, and military crises arrive with increasing frequency. The Way to Hell argues that our perilous times call for the strongest medicine in the Western canon: Machiavelli. This book reminds contemporary readers about the Florentine master’s advice—that one must learn the road to Hell precisely to avoid taking it.

  Crick, Nathan, Editor. Routledge Handbook on Rhetoric and Power. New York: Routledge, 2024.

  The guiding principle of this handbook is that power represents a capacity for coordinated action grounded in specific historical, technological, political, and economic conditions. It suggests that rhetoric is an art that adapts to these conditions and finds ways to transform, create, or undermine these capacities in other people through self-conscious persuasion. Featuring contributions from key scholars, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication studies, political communication, and social justice.

  Crick, Nathan, Editor. The Rhetoric of Fascism. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2022.
  

  Fascism has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time. No longer just confined to the state regimes of the past, fascism thrives today as a globally self-augmenting, self-propagating rhetorical phenomena with a variety of faces and expressions. The Rhetoric of Fascism defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal.  By approaching fascism from a rhetorical perspective, this volume complements established political or sociological understandings of fascism as a movement or regime.

  Crick, Nathan, Editor. The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2020. 

  This collection provides an accessible yet rigorous survey of the rhetorical study of historical and contemporary social movements and promotes the study of relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social assemblage. Chapters address the rhetorical tactics that social movements use to gain attention and challenge power; the centrality of traditional and new media in social movements; the operations of power in movement organization, leadership, and local and global networking; and emerging contents and environments for social movements in the twenty-first century. 

  Crick, Nathan. Dewey for a New Age of Fascism: Teaching Democratic Habits. State College, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2019. During the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century, American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey argued that the greatest threat to democracy was not a political regime or even an aggressive foreign power but rather a set of dispositions or attitudes. Though not fascist in and of themselves, these habits of thought—rugged individualism and ideological nationalism—lay the foundation for fascism. In this study, Nathan Crick uses Dewey’s social thought and philosophy of education to provide insight into and resources for transforming our present-day politics.

  Crick, Nathan. The Keys of Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism. Columbia, SC. University of South Carolina Press, 2017.
  
  The Keys of Power crafts a new critical rhetorical history of American Transcendentalists that interprets a selection of their major works between the years 1821 and 1852 as political and ethical responses to the growing crises of their times In The Keys of Power, Crick argues that one of the most enduring legacies of the Transcendentalist movement is the multifaceted understanding of transcendental eloquence as a distinct rhetorical genre concerned primarily and self-consciously with questions of power.

  Crick, Nathan. Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Columbia, SC. University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Rhetoric and Power dramatizes the history of rhetoric by explaining its origin and development in classical Greece beginning with the oral displays of Homeric eloquence in a time of kings, following its ascent to power during the age of Pericles and the Sophists, and ending with its transformation into a rational discipline with Aristotle in a time of literacy and empire. Crick advances the thesis that rhetoric is primarily a medium and artistry of power, but that the relationship between rhetoric and power at any point in time is a produce of historical conditions, not the least of which is the development and availability of communication media.

  Crick, Nathan. Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Democracy and Rhetoric articulates from John Dewey’s body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey’s philosophy and finds it much more informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgement.

  Crick, Nathan. Rhetorical Public Speaking: Social Influence in the Digital Age. Routledge, 4th Edition. Rhetorical Public Speaking offers students an innovative approach to public speaking by employing the rhetorical canon as a means of constructing artful speech in a multi-mediated environment. It provides a foundation to guide students in understanding, constructing, and delivering messages that address matters of public concern. This edition features contemporary as well as historical examples to highlight key concepts and show how rhetoric works in practice. Each chapter includes speech excerpts, summaries, and exercises for review and retention. Students of public speaking are encouraged to employ their new skills as engaged citizens of society.