Sylvan Rhetorics:Roots and Branches of More-than-Human Publics

Abstract

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.