Herman Melville’s classic short story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ is about a New Yorks City lawyer who hires a new clerk who to his employer’s great frustration repeatedly avoids performing his duties by saying “I would prefer not to”. The enigmatic nature of the character Bartleby has caused this story to be the subject of countless literary readings finding it to be themed on topics ranging from anorexia to Marxism. In her talk, Lisa Villadsen asks how rhetoric is at play in the narrative and what the story can tell us about rhetoric. Drawing primarily on theory of rhetorical agency and affect she analyses the story as a study in resistance, a story that speaks to contemporary social anxieties and theoretical concerns about agency and identification.