ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

ABSTRACT A major contribution to rhetorical theory and an important tool of rhetorical criticism, Perelman’s distinction between particular audiences and the universal audience has been misconstrued by his critics and even by Perelman himself. Properly construed, the universal audience is focused on facts and truths and consists of all human beings in so far as they are rational; consequently, discourse addressed to it eschews proofs from character and emotion. In contrast, addresses to particular audiences focus on values; they embrace not only proofs reason, but also those from character and emotion.

ABSTRACT This is an introduction to and translation of Chaïm Perelman’s “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” published in 1933 by Maurice Lambertin publishing house. De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance has important implications for an understanding of Perelman’s intellectual development generally and specifically for an understanding the evolution of his New Rhetoric Project.

ABSTRACT An analysis of Stokely Carmichael’s dissociation of “racism” attempted at UC Berkeley on October 29, 1966 extends the utility of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “dissociation of concepts” for those seeking racial justice. I offer a new term “subversive dissociations” to theorize the foundations of racist dominant narratives as what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call “linguistic common property.” This move reframes dissociative challenges to dominant narratives as attempts to counter other dissociations and thus makes available a set of tools outlined in The New Rhetoric for that purpose. Dissociation emerges as a dynamic anti-racist strategy.

ABSTRACT During China’s Republican Period, scholar and reformer Hu Shi advanced a rhetorical pragmatic project for democratic reform. In this essay, I argue that the dissertation Hu wrote under the advisement of John Dewey, “The Development of Logical Method in Ancient China,” was itself a groundbreaking piece of rhetorical invention that functioned as part of Hu’s project by reinterpreting ancient Chinese classics as the foundations for a model of rhetorical pragmatic argumentation.

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews and compares diverse rhetorical conceptualizations within Chinese rhetorical tradition during the fifth to third century B.C.E. Textual evidence shows that three schools of thoughts, namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Mohism, have contested with and challenged one another on the components and functions of rhetoric. Confucianism is more concerned with the moral character of the speaker while Mohism claims that rhetoric is used for mutual benefit and contains a rational element. Daoism, on the other hand, approaches rhetoric with a transcendental and dialectical outlook. This overview demonstrates the multi-faceted characteristics of ancient Chinese rhetoric.

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.

ABSTRACT This article posits that bringing diversity to histories of rhetoric may require not only revising canons but also “unwriting” the narratives of Western civilization in which canonical figures have been cast. Two conventions of these narratives are of special significance: fixed identities and narrative coherence. Focusing on the cultural contexts of Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” we suggest that these conventions obscure the cultural differences that were always there.

ABSTRACT The value of imitatio as a pedagogical tactic in rhetorical education has been attested to for millennia. But within the context of a culture of diversity, imitation becomes potentially problematic. This essay describes two attitudes toward imitatio that may contribute to modifying the practice in ways that enable it to be recovered for use in contemporary classrooms. The first entails reimagining the relationships between students and their model texts as multivalent conversations rather than dyadic exchanges; the second entails challenging the hierarchies that are implied when students are expected to model their work on texts that are considered superior. These two attitudes encourage the integration of imitatio into a rhetorical education that is essential for the cultivation of a just and engaged twenty-first century citizenship.

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the conversations on a more globalized and inclusive rhetorical praxis by focusing on how rhetoric was produced and understood by Turks – a group whose history spans centuries since their ancient origins in central Asia. We examine the ways in which Turkic/Turkish rhetoric was practiced and conceptualized in two seminal texts from the pre-Islamic and republican periods of the Turkish rhetorical tradition: the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927). The intertextuality of these texts allows us to explore their relationships across time and space as well as mediate rhetorical styles and performances in their discourse.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine two epideictic artifacts from the Roman Principate, The Res Gestae Divi Augusti and the summi viri, arguing Augustus used them to reshape the model of a good leader, in part, by emphasizing contributing to the built environment of the city. Additionally, the public and visual nature of these artifacts made them highly accessible to those outside of the Roman elite, who may have sought social mobility through the imperial bureaucracy allowing for more diverse participation in the Roman government. I close by considering the influence of classical exemplars on U.S. civic spaces.

ABSTRACT The Four Master Tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—are a significant theme in the history of rhetoric, but this grouping is wrong in fundamental ways—irony is not a trope at all properly understood, and the bulk of the arguments in this tradition suggest, along with a few new ones of my own, that the fourth Master Trope should be antithesis.

ABSTRACT This essay develops a reception history of the Communist Party of the USA’s (CPUSA) responses to Richard Wright’s Native Son. Drawing on what Fiona Paton calls “cultural stylistics,” I argue that the voices residing in Native Son itself participated in the broader interpretive politics surrounding the novel. Specifically, Wright’s primary character, Bigger Thomas, functioned as a disruptive performance of blackness that revealed the limitations of communist orthodoxy for bringing expression to black subjectivity. I conclude by reflecting on the ways cultural stylistics poses salient ethical challenges to all of us who engage in the labor of critique.

ABSTRACT Two disciplinary stories told in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland omit an important plotline. One story is that university teaching of rhetoric transformed into belletristic criticism; another is that ideology and culture transformed to reorient rhetorical theorizing toward everyday practices by non-elites. Untold is a story of how familiar protagonists, such as Hugh Blair, clashed with antagonists, such as John Witherspoon, in the Church of Scotland. Telling that story from the antagonists’ perspectives shows that they reflected on how rhetoric ought to be practiced to manage disagreement in a democratic institution and used what amounted to Kamesian belletrism as a foil.

ABSTRACT The Panathenaicus is often referred to as one of the weakest and most enigmatic of Isocrates’ orations. It has been criticized for lacking innovation, coherence, and rhetorical style. Furthermore, it concludes with a curious use of dialogue otherwise foreign to Isocrates. In this article, I read the dialogue alongside the apparently digressive proemium and argue not only for the speech’s internal unity, but for its creativity and intellectual complexity. I demonstrate how the Panthenaicus connects Isocrates’ Panhellenic project with his civic-minded paideia in a way that simultaneously identifies Academic philosophy and attempts to subordinate it to Isocratean philosophia.

ABSTRACT This essay examines the role of “rhetorical silence” as a part of the theorizing about character in the early American republic. The case study concerns James Madison’s deliberate and continuous rhetorical silences about the comprehensive notes he took at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. I argue that Madison’s rhetorical silences regarding his notes illustrate the shifting discourses of republican and liberal notions of virtue in the early-national period of the American republic.

ABSTRACT In 2010, thousands of Thai citizens from the Red Shirt Movement splashed seventy-nine gallons of their blood in Bangkok to revolt for democracy. I argue that their conduct exemplified kaya karma in the Thai culture: the intentional use of the body and physical actions to achieve an end. Drawing upon my interviews with protesters in Thailand, I show how the demonstration represented the Red Shirts’ intentions to construct a patriotic identity; build solidarity and consubstantiation; defame the prime minister; and invoke fear, intimidation, and discomfort in the government. Altogether, the protest aimed to bolster the movement’s authority and disparage the government. Examining the Red Shirts’ kaya karma, I contend, enables us to further engage “the facts of nonusage” to broaden the trajectory of comparative rhetorical studies beyond the focus on canonical texts of elite exemplars and complicate our ability to see the available means of persuasion in non-Western contexts.

ABSTRACT Intercultural contexts introduce unique sources of complexity into our theories of rhetoric and persuasion. This study examines one of the most successful cases of intercultural rhetoric concerning religion: the case of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India who came to the United States in 1893 for the World’s Parliament of Religions. He arrived as an unknown monk, but he left America years later as the nationally known face of Hinduism. Facing a tense scene in 1893 that featured a plurality of religions and American organizers and audiences who judged Hinduism as inferior to Christianity, Vivekananda enacted a unique rhetoric of pluralism to assert the value of his form of Hinduism while simultaneously respecting other religions. This study extracts from Vivekananda’s popular performance at the parliament a pluralistic style of rhetorical advocacy, one that builds upon his unique reading of Hindu religious-philosophical traditions. This pluralistic style can be used to unravel some of the theoretical issues created by invitational rhetoric’s reading of persuasion as inherently violent to disagreeing others.

ABSTRACT This study establishes the Holley School as an important site of African-American rhetorical education in the post–Civil War United States. Abolitionist Caroline F. Putnam was a white Northerner who, like countless other freedmen’s teachers, moved south after the war to teach formerly enslaved African Americans. Putnam’s educational work was remarkable, however, in that she taught rhetoric in service of racial justice and continued this work for almost fifty years. I argue that she was able to sustain the Holley School through epistolary relations cultivated to persuade others to join in educating freedmen as well as support the school through donations.

ABSTRACTIn this response essay, I engage three reviews written by Kent A. Ono, Lisa Flores, and Vincent N. Pham of my book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press, 2015). Building off of their analyses of my book, I offer speculation about the future(s) of decolonial rhetoric(s). Specifically, I examine how we can better cultivate senses of community, how we can begin decolonizing educational contexts, and I elaborate on the scope and direction of delinking and decoloniality in the future of rhetorical studies.

ABSTRACT Scholars of rhetoric have long held that there is such a thing as a “rhetorical tradition” and that that tradition began within the context of ancient Athenian democracy. Recently this tradition has been expanded to “traditions” that include “non-Western” approaches. Scholars of democracy have similarly dislodged the notion that democracy, broadly understood, developed only in ancient Greece. This essay expands our understanding of both rhetorical traditions and their relation to democracy by studying the interrelation of rhetorical and deliberative practices found in the history of India. Specifically, it explores how one highly influential school of Indian deliberation, Nyaya, grew alongside practices of public reasoning and self-rule in the gaṇa/saṁgha (so-called ancient Indian “republics”), revealing a similar, but unique, impulse to rhetoric beyond the Athenian/Western context. From this study we also gain insight into the current struggle for democracy worldwide.

ABSTRACT Incentives, economists remind us, are foundational to any economy: They include strategies to induce consumers to purchase products, motivate employees to work harder, or invite businesses to new localities. This textbook term, however, has not always been yoked to economic activity per se. This essay traces the history of the term “incentive” in two phases, first, from its origin in the Latin term “incentivum,” referring to “the thing that sets the tune,” and second, from its uptake and concretization by neoclassical economic thought through Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson. In neoclassical economics, incentives “set the tune” of behavior by compelling rational economic action through the postulates of methodological individualism, equilibration, and utility-maximization. The terminological shift of “incentive” from its poetic origins into economic thought entails that “incentives” become an objective, univocal “thing” that embeds an argument about the dangers of actions that contravene market logics.

ABSTRACT The first two decades of the eighteenth century saw the rapid growth of financial markets in Paris and London, growth due in large part to the appeal of newly available financial instruments. This essay examines that appeal in rhetorical terms and argues for the importance of conceiving finance rhetorically.

ABSTRACT Recently, rhetoricians have explored the potential of energeia to unfold new understandings of agency and highlight the mutability of rhetorical topoi. This article harnesses such potential to neoliberal rhetorical analysis, examining the “strategic default” debate that dominated the later foreclosure crisis. Tracing the constitution of a moralized binary distinction between intentional and forced default, I argue that the kinesthetic metaphor of “walking away” from underwater houses disciplines consumers while disclosing the latent potentiality for rational actors to abuse their power of choice. To counter this denial of agency, I draw possibilities for resistant practice from de Certeau’s theory of everyday life.

ABSTRACT In this essay, we provide a materialist analysis of Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short. We contend that while, on one level, the film appears to be a celebration of several idiosyncratic traders on Wall Street who use rhetorical invention to outwit the industry, on another level, the film can be read as a genealogically informed account of the biopolitical relationship between the oikos and the polis and Main Street and Wall Street. We conclude by advocating for an account of the 2008 financial crisis that is sensitive to the historically overdetermined relationship among rhetoric, politics, and economic power.

ABSTRACT This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract surplus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.

ABSTRACT This essay expands James Aune’s theory of the econo-rhetorical presidency to analyze how presidents define the U.S. fiscal situation. By “fiscal situation,” I refer to any rhetorical representation of the federal government’s ability to create and spend money, levy and collect taxes, and issue debt. Through historical analysis of the “balanced budget” topos in presidential discourse, I find that Presidents Carter through Obama tended to define the U.S. fiscal situation in austere terms, with balanced budgets figured as deontological goods unto themselves. I conclude by advocating for increased critical engagement with economic theory, generally, and theories of the U.S. fiscal situation, specifically.

ABSTRACT Our understanding of the origins and early development of Greek rhetoric can be enlarged and sharpened by attending to the specific historical, cultural, and material contexts in which it was embedded. We perceive the cultural meanings and physical challenges of Greek rhetorical practice only to the extent that we consider the actual places and spaces in which it unfolded. This study examines and assesses the bouleutêrion (council house) as a venue for oratorical performance in the ancient Greek world, surveying a range of such buildings and describing their historical contexts, physical settings and configurations, and suitability as oratorical venues.