Dave Tell
Biographic Data
| ID | 828615 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dave Tell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dave |
| FAMILY NAME | Tell |
| SIGNATURE | TELL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5737-0673 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Fate of Old Signs
This article uses the fate of four signs to reflect on the power of irony-assisted recall. Between 2008 and 2019, the four signs were erected sequentially on the same spot: the eastern bank of the Tallahatchie River, two hundred miles south of Memphis, where the body of Emmett Till was recovered from the water. The first three signs were vandalized; the fourth is bulletproof. All of them demonstrate with striking clarity the power of irony as a r…
C laire W hitlinger . Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. We have not recovered. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-documented visit to Philadelphia in 1966, to the installation of a memorial stone at Mt. Nebo Baptist Church in 1972, to the quiet but consistent ceremonies at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, to Mississippi Burning (1988), to the celebrated commemorations…
Critique and Investigation
Pluralism in the history of rhetoric requires that the critic be replaced by the investigator. As a methodological stance, criticism explains a common text with resources borrowed from a rhetorical tradition. The operative conceit of the critic is that the histories of rhetoric function as resources that bestow a unique capacity to make sense of the world. The critical tools of rhetoric generate, as it were, a “hot take,” a novel insight about a …
Measurement and Modernity
The Modulor was a tape measure–style tool created by Le Corbusier in the 1940s to govern the distribution of objects in space. When he first conceived of the Modulor, Le Corbusier was a bureaucrat working in the fascist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Six years later, the same tool played a role in the construction of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. In this essay, I recall the eight-year production history of the Modulor and …
Remembering Emmett Till
Darryl Mace. In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle
The 1955 murder of Emmett Till was a worldwide affair. The London Daily Express sent reporter Ronald Singleton across the Atlantic to cover the story and newspapers the world over carried news of the trial. Within the United States, newspapers from coast to coast ensured that every literate American had the details of the Till affair always at their fingertips. It goes without saying, of course, that the details were hotly contested. Consensus pr…
American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History
We have been asking the wrong questions about lobotomy. This, at least, is Jenell Johnson’s first claim. Did they really use an ice pick? Were criminals lobotomized? Were black people, or women, or
The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric, or, What Grain Elevators Teach us About Postmodernism
I use the one-hundred-year, transatlantic circulation of Le Corbusier's grain elevator photographs to tell the story of the short but vibrant life of a mechanized rhetoric. From 1913 to 1969, these photographs were understood in the context of a mechanized rhetoric, and they starred in the iconography of modernity. From 1971 to 2010, the same photographs were contextualized by a symbolic vision of rhetoric. So contextualized, the photographs lost…
Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity
Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), x + 158 pp. $35.00 (cloth), $7.00–$30.00 (e-book). Nancy S. Struever's Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity i
Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency
Book Review| September 01 2011 Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency. Antonio de Velasco. Dave Tell Dave Tell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (3): 581–584. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940564 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Ma…
Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession
Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession Dave Tell On October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practice…
The “Shocking Story” of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession
In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till's killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi,” Huie's tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till's murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is…
The “Shocking Story” of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession
In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till's killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi,” Huie's tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till's murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is…
Measurement and Modernity
The Modulor was a tape measure–style tool created by Le Corbusier in the 1940s to govern the distribution of objects in space. When he first conceived of the Modulor, Le Corbusier was a bureaucrat working in the fascist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Six years later, the same tool played a role in the construction of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. In this essay, I recall the eight-year production history of the Modulor and …
The “Shocking Story” of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession
In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till's killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi,” Huie's tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till's murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is…
Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession
Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession Dave Tell On October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practice…
Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency
Book Review| September 01 2011 Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency. Antonio de Velasco. Dave Tell Dave Tell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (3): 581–584. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940564 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Ma…
Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity
Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), x + 158 pp. $35.00 (cloth), $7.00–$30.00 (e-book). Nancy S. Struever's Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity i
The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric, or, What Grain Elevators Teach us About Postmodernism
I use the one-hundred-year, transatlantic circulation of Le Corbusier's grain elevator photographs to tell the story of the short but vibrant life of a mechanized rhetoric. From 1913 to 1969, these photographs were understood in the context of a mechanized rhetoric, and they starred in the iconography of modernity. From 1971 to 2010, the same photographs were contextualized by a symbolic vision of rhetoric. So contextualized, the photographs lost…
Darryl Mace. In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle
The 1955 murder of Emmett Till was a worldwide affair. The London Daily Express sent reporter Ronald Singleton across the Atlantic to cover the story and newspapers the world over carried news of the trial. Within the United States, newspapers from coast to coast ensured that every literate American had the details of the Till affair always at their fingertips. It goes without saying, of course, that the details were hotly contested. Consensus pr…
American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History
We have been asking the wrong questions about lobotomy. This, at least, is Jenell Johnson’s first claim. Did they really use an ice pick? Were criminals lobotomized? Were black people, or women, or
Remembering Emmett Till
Measurement and Modernity
The Modulor was a tape measure–style tool created by Le Corbusier in the 1940s to govern the distribution of objects in space. When he first conceived of the Modulor, Le Corbusier was a bureaucrat working in the fascist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Six years later, the same tool played a role in the construction of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. In this essay, I recall the eight-year production history of the Modulor and …
Critique and Investigation
Pluralism in the history of rhetoric requires that the critic be replaced by the investigator. As a methodological stance, criticism explains a common text with resources borrowed from a rhetorical tradition. The operative conceit of the critic is that the histories of rhetoric function as resources that bestow a unique capacity to make sense of the world. The critical tools of rhetoric generate, as it were, a “hot take,” a novel insight about a …
C laire W hitlinger . Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. We have not recovered. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-documented visit to Philadelphia in 1966, to the installation of a memorial stone at Mt. Nebo Baptist Church in 1972, to the quiet but consistent ceremonies at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, to Mississippi Burning (1988), to the celebrated commemorations…
The Fate of Old Signs
This article uses the fate of four signs to reflect on the power of irony-assisted recall. Between 2008 and 2019, the four signs were erected sequentially on the same spot: the eastern bank of the Tallahatchie River, two hundred miles south of Memphis, where the body of Emmett Till was recovered from the water. The first three signs were vandalized; the fourth is bulletproof. All of them demonstrate with striking clarity the power of irony as a r…
Philosophy (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Rhetoric (5 works) · Literature (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (4 works)