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.

Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.

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.

This book draws in the reader with its scope, its humor, its brio, and its learning. In many ways, it is a collage, as the writer, Laurent Pernot, openly suggests when he says that he is classifying a fleeting domain (82) in this study of the “sous-entendu.” Not until the reader reaches the end of the text do many of the kaleidoscopic elements find even a temporary pattern. The opening chapter is filled primarily with modern and contemporary examples of what is understood from what is “not said” in political, social, literary, mediated, and everyday communication. But chapter two, “La Rhétorique du discours figuré,” turns out not to be simply a history of parallel classical examples, but at the core of the discussion. When the reader arrives at the “Catalogue Additionnel” with which the book ends, we have learned to appreciate the apparently random list of strategies that is listed in the context of this “discours figuré.”In Chapter 2, Pernot lays out the difficulty of placing the sous-entendu in a classical rhetorical system – although he finds many examples of it, and gives a foundation for its classical significance, in the works of Hermogenes and Quintilian. The discours figuré is a problem because rhetorical systems are intended to help clarify persuasion, while much language speaks to us through what is understood rather than explicitly said. For contemporary people studying the history of rhetoric, it is often taken as a given that rhetoric is a fluid and sociohistorically contextualized way of thinking about communication. Pernot reminds us that the discourse figuré was a slippery concept for classical rhetoricians. Its double meanings do not seem to have fit the concepts of either scheme or trope, and this discourse emerged in response to the need to talk about and comprehend how the unstated, or unsaid – yet understood – significance of words, the sous-entendu, was conveyed and received. He calls the discours figuré “un corps rhétorique flotant” (47). What this book does is remind us not so much that rhetoric attempts to make language “adequate” to reality, but that it never can be. Language is a material medium. We have to learn to work with it in our own particular socioverbal ecologies.The chapter titles are themselves a categorization of the sous-entendu, from the discours figuré, to (among others) herméneutiques du soupçon, faux-semblants, un boeuf sur la langue, and le franc-parler. Within each of them, Pernot gives a huge range of examples, each usually generating a strategy of double meaning appropriate to their sociohistorical context: from Verlaine, he derives the chanson gris, from Barthes the texte oeuf, and so on. One of this book’s own sous-entendus runs throughout these categories: it is clear that listeners to and readers of words develop their own strategies for engaging with the sous-entendu. This he explores through concepts of paratext (pacts with writers), context (interpretive communities), and textual criteria (internal elements particular to the audience member) – all of which create conditions for “devining” and “deducing” rather than “explaining,” such that the rhetor and the audience member cooperate over the “sense.” This allows one to distinguish the double meaning working through realization (connivance, or complicity), from that working by preventing realization (manipulation).The author, who is really quite funny and conversationally direct in an inviting and appealing manner, seems to come into his voice in chapters 5 to 8. Chapter 5 is a sustained study of Greek rhetoric/oratory/writing in the first two centuries CE during which the Roman Empire included “Greece.” The question here is: how to sustain Greek identity in the face of Roman power, and the chapter becomes a study of activism that insists on difference and alternatives in Greek culture, rather than change of the Roman. The study of faux-semblants in the work of Dion Chrisostome and Aelius Aristide is a textbook example of positive activism from which many could learn today, and is written by a scholar as familiar with the rhetoric of classical Rome and Greece, as with that of seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries.It is telling that the examples of Dion and Aristide as activists eschew irony, sarcasm, and satire, to develop other strategies. Each expects the particular community for whom they write, to understand the “other” meaning, and yet each is skillful enough to ensure that the dominant community will not be able to “prove” or even notice that “other” meaning is there. Pernot throws in Molière’s comment on satire not working as effective critique because it keeps you on the same grounds as the person/group/institution you are critiquing. Instead, we have a catalog of alternatives, including Aristide’s use of omission: for example, an entire eulogy about the Roman Empire that manages never to use the word “Rome.” What is significant is the way Pernot’s study continually segues from the classical to the modern, here to Valéry on Anatole France. It goes on to perform a political flip, as it moves to Genet’s critique of what is no longer an intentional silencing that speaks loudly, but a sociopolitical silencing that hides, evades, and manipulates – that of postcolonial institutions that erase the cultural reality of the invaded.Pernot also takes on the difficult terrain of France in World War II and the co-existence of the Resistance with the Nazi occupation. He circles around the work of Louis Aragon and the concept of “contrabande” – again with contextually important terms such as “mots croisés” and the field of “un boeuf sur la langue.” The writer’s focus on Aragon encompasses many other writers of the period and shifts into a commentary on censorship and on the “sur entendu” of manipulation in the silencing of peoples in, for example, India under British rule, or China under early Communist rule. The commentary is infused here, as with so many other places in the book, with some life history of the central orators/writers. A reader is drawn into the contextual field of these kinds of sous-entendu through an intimacy with the people being discussed. This particular chapter comes back to World War II through Lenin and then Brecht, listing Brecht’s “five ruses” for double meaning, before returning to France. The sous-entendu is a voluntary, skilled, silencing that speaks volumes to an informed listening audience and engages them in making significance. The “sur-entendu” is an imposed silencing that contains and limits.The study underlines the way the language of dissidence is too often linked to the power it critiques, leaving it weakened in the face of the propaganda that follows on from censorship. The terrain of totalitarian political rhetoric, and the strategies of sous-entendu developed by Klemperer, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, formulate distinct responses to the actualities of their sociohistorical time and place. Political correctness is introduced as a contemporary device that is both challenging the “sur-entendu” of normative language about, for example, sexuality, and generating a sous-entendu critique. It would perhaps have been interesting to listen to an analysis of the one becoming weighted into the other, but Pernot persists in a conversational style that insists on familiarity, creating contexts for its own sous-entendus. For example, in the book’s chapter on sexual “ellipsis,” the author leads us through a gallery of writers from Molière, Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, to Dante, Manzoni, and the film “Gone with the Wind.” Here, one of the book’s implications indicates that the readers’ responses to the ellipses in the sexual narratives tells us as much about their own social and sexual mores as those they interpret.Moving on to “plain-speaking” or franc parler, and an assessment of critical responses to the whole project of the sous-entendu, Pernot turns to a fascinating study of how “truth” can be weaponized. The book’s own sous-entendu of today’s “fake news” is set in the classical context of Quintilian’s concerns with the rhetorical figure of “sincerity” and then in the contemporary context of Foucault’s parrhesia. I found this commentary particularly helpful for its presentation of the cynic as “autosuffisant,” and the ethical dimension of the way the sous-entendu casts truth, power and subjectivity into mutability and out of anything “sufficient.” Truth, like the sous-entendu, is embedded in the ethics, contexts, and perspectives of the sociohistorical time.The introduction of Foucault allows Pernot to get to what, for this reader at least, is a highly significant sous-entendu for this book: that Foucault, as many another person today, takes rhetoric as manipulative to distinguish it from parrhesia – almost as if rhetoric is inevitably a “sur-entendu.” Yet rhetoric encompasses both sides of the coin – Dion Chrysostom is an example of the sous-entendu for Pernot, and of parrhesia for Foucault. At this point, the extensive discussion of classical discours figuré falls into place. In many ways this book is a justification of rhetoric as an important field for today, by looking at what the classical world did when treating it as fluid rather than narrowly systematic – speaking truth to power, producing generative activism, engaging people in particular social change.The “Mot à la Fin” re-states that the book is not trying to provide a “guide,” or a global vision for the concept of sous-entendu. This is a collage of different ways that European verbal cultures communicate through what they do not say, and a reminder that this is a long and vibrant tradition. To conclude, Pernot uses the image of a game of billiards. This attempt to talk about what is not-said, or not-yet-said, or not-able-to-be-said, or not-even-culturally-recognized is like a game of billiards in which the writer sends the examples bouncing off the sides of the table, perhaps into pockets for a short time, until another game in another place, at another time. It is thoroughly entertaining, and one of its more humorous sous-entendus is that it invites critical play.

I am grateful and honored to have served as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric for four years (2016–2019). A valedictory is an occasion for expressing gratitude, here to all who have made my four-year stint as editor meaningful to me.First, I express gratitude to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) and its Board. During Katya Haskins tenure as editor, the ASHR board voted to devote one issue of the journal to the best papers presented at the ASHR symposium. This policy ensures that the journal represents the interests of ASHR members. In the absence of such a policy, the contents of journal would depend entirely on what came in willy-nilly through the Taylor and Francis portal. If the editor was one who, let us charitably say, was not famous for stretching the boundaries of the discipline, the journal might soon reflect only an editor’s narrow interests. During my tenure, the ASHR policy generated special issues “Rhetoric In Situ,” curated by Kassie Lamp, and “Diversity in and Among Rhetorical Traditions,” curated by Scott Stroud, thus ensuring that Advances documented current interests in visual and material rhetoric and in rhetoric outside of the Western tradition. This policy and Kassie and Scott’s good work helped me to meet my pledge on assuming the editorship to continue Katya Haskins effort to expand the journal’s purview. I should also thank the editors of the other special issues published during my tenure, one on Quintilian, edited by Jerry Murphy, on the occasion of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the discovery in St. Gall, Switzerland by Poggio Bracciolini of the first complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; and a most interesting special issue on Rhetoric and Economics edited by Mark Longaker.Under my tenure, Advances also inaugurated the policy of publishing book review forums – three – and book reviews – sixteen – over the four years. The forums enabled me to ensure that the journal continued, in a tradition begun by Robert Gaines in his tenure as editor, to be a place for debate and focused discussion. For the book review forums, I owe special thanks to Heather Hayes, who helped organize them. A forum on a critical edition of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 Address at Carnegie Hall by Tiffany Lewis and the publication in this issue of a translation of work by Chaim Perelman by Michelle Bolduc and David Frank ensured that Advances remained a depository for primary material, as Robert Gaines hoped it would. For help with this focused issue on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, I thank Andreea Ritivoi for work on the introduction and for her critical eye and good advice.From its beginning under the editorship of the journal’s founder Rich Enos, Advances has taken seriously its commitment to publishing the work of emerging scholars. Sometimes what that means in practical terms is issuing a “revise and re-submit” for manuscripts that the editor knows will require two, three, four revisions on its way to meeting the journal’s expectations. When I committed to such manuscripts I pledged not only my own time but the time of reviewers as well. Reviewing even the most polished of manuscripts requires critical intelligence and tact and takes hours of uncompensated time. We could not continue as a scholarly community without the commitment of talented, conscientious reviewers. I am most grateful to all who served as reviewers for manuscripts I sent them. I don’t feel I can thank all here (though I considered it) but I will single out Glen McClish, Dave Tell, James Fredal, Michele Kennerly, Brandon Inabinet, and James Kasterly for their help and, especially in Glen’s case, sage advice.I certainly would be remiss if I did not thank those who readied manuscripts for production: my three editorial assistants, Allison Prasch, Tara Wambach, and Brittany Knutson, and the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota, embodied in its Chair, Ron Greene, who paid for their help. I thank Taylor and Francis for supportive collegiality and the Press’s Megan Cimini, who, in response to queries, was always helpful, always professional, and always immediate.

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.

The history of Chaim Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s “new rhetoric” and its arrival on American shores tells an interesting story even when in its most condensed and basic form. The product of a philosopher who had discovered rhetoric relatively late in his career working closely with a scholar who was well-versed in literature, the new rhetoric was brought to the United States by another philosopher turned rhetoric enthusiast (Henry Johnstone). The story is well known and its main point, no matter how obvious, deserves to he stressed: rhetoric and philosophy have a history of not only repudiation but also discovery and embracing. This relationship is significant for this special issue because the essays we feature appropriately focus on some of the deepest and, often, most difficult aspects of the new rhetoric, including, particularly, the sometimes easy to miss or underestimate philosophical assumptions behind some of its main concepts (such as the arbitrary from an epistemological perspective or the universal in the context of logic). Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca pursued a theory of, specifically, argumentation, as the main title in the French original of their book signaled, but one embedded in a theory of knowledge that was quite ahead of its time in certain aspects – one might say even post-structuralist avant la lettre in its emphasis on community, truthfulness, and the individual subject.Many scholars in our discipline have complained that the work of the two Belgians is insufficiently studied, even though their status is as high as that of thinkers who receive far more attention, such as Kenneth Burke. The reason for this relative neglect, comparatively speaking, might be in part connected to the simple fact that they were not American. We take this possibility seriously: we recognize the need for more translations from Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s rhetorical corpus that would make an expanded corpus more accessible and for more work situating their rhetoric in its historical context. Thus, this special issue consists of a translation; an essay that examines the role of translation in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s own work, not just as transposition from one language into another but more broadly as a transfer of ideas across intellectual traditions; and two critical essays. This structure reflects, we hope, some of the general challenges scholars face when engaging with the work of the two Belgian thinkers, from the need to expand the corpus of their writings about rhetoric for English-speaking audiences, to the importance of thematizing translation as a conceptual focus that matters in their case, and finally to the continuing demand for analytic applications of their theoretical ideas.With the first contribution to this special issue Advances in the History of Rhetoric continues a long-standing commitment to publishing translations of important works in the history of rhetoric – in this issue a translation by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank of Perelman’s “l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance” (hereafter, l’arbitraire), a work first published in 1933. This work serves as a philosophical proemium to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric (NR). The burden Perelman accepts in l’arbitraire is to discredit the idea – dear to logical positivists and rigorous empiricists – that there are procedures – deductive, inductive, empirical – that can, if followed, produce conclusions that are logically necessary and therefore universally valid. This same argument Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s set forth in the Introduction and Framework to the New Rhetoric some twenty-five years later. All argument ultimately rests on an element that is arbitrary,1 Perelman argues in 1933, concluding that, in Frank and Bolduc’s translation, “tolerance between groups, all of which are established by means of value judgments”2 is the only basis for all reasonable truth claims. If we substitute NR’s “noncompulsive elements”3 (NR 1) for “arbitrary,” and NR’s “community of minds”4 and “preliminary conditions”5 (NR 14) for l’arbitraire’s “tolerance between groups”, we can readily see l’arbitraire as providing the philosophical underpinnings of NR. The work will be of interest to theorists studying Perelman’s philosophical development or attempting to place the New Rhetoric in its philosophical milieu.The second contribution to the issue is Michelle Bolduc’s “Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric,” which is based on a section from her forthcoming Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric. We think the work is an important and fascinating contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the “new” rhetoric. Bolduc traces how Perelman took inspiration from the Italian philosopher Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (translated into French as Li Livres dou Tresor), an encyclopedic work that included a section on rhetoric, heavily influenced by Cicero’s De Inventione. Perelman was led to the work by Jean Paulhan, an important literary theorist whom Perelman most likely discovered through Olbrechts-Tyteca. Thus, Bolduc documents Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the origin of the new rhetoric, a role that has been under-appreciated. Latini’s Ciceronian and therefore philosophical (as distinguished from literary) sense of rhetoric was most compatible with Perelman’s. As Bolduc also documents, Perelman’s philosophical orientation contrasted with the more literary and linguistic interests of his contemporaries Barthes, Genette, and Ricoeur, with whom Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca shared a complicated relationship. What is most interesting about Bolduc’s history is how differently Paulhan and Perelman understood the importance of Latini’s work on rhetoric. The intellectual genealogy Bolduc reconstructs points to potentially fertile further investigations into the differences in philosophical assumptions and method of study between Perelman and some of the most prominent French language theorists of the time. These differences make it tempting to wonder if perhaps Perelman had a very different vision, not only of rhetoric, but more broadly of language and discourse than, for example, Barthes and Genette. Put bluntly: was he, similar to Ricoeur, too much of a heretic by the standards of these diehards of structuralism? By tracing the historical trajectory of Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca road to rhetoric, Bolduc helps us understand how unique, or even idiosyncratic, they most likely were in the intellectual context of the time, dominated as it was by structuralism.Perhaps this unique, unorthodox intellectual position is partly the reason their contribution to rhetoric is in the paradoxical position of being simultaneously praised and criticized, often for the very same ideas. Praised for conceptual sophistication, but also charged with incoherence or internal contradictions, considered both very general in their applicability and accused of being too dependent on (often obscure) philosophical examples, these ideas have nonetheless exerted a deep influence on the field. Yet they continue to baffle scholars who wish to assess their analytic purchase and to apply them saliently. Two concepts are especially fraught: the universal audience and the dissociation of concepts. It is fitting, then, that our two analysis essays offer a provocative reading of the universal audience by Alan G. Gross, and, in Justin D. Hatch’s essay, an illustration of how the dissociation of concepts can function subversively, not only influencing our perception of reality but in fact transforming it. A senior scholar and a junior one show us both how relevant the New Rhetoric is for enduring rhetorical questions, and, at the same time, how difficult it can be to pin down the conceptual scope of its terms. Gross’s focus is on clarifying what Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca meant by “universal” in coining the term of art “universal audience,” and to this end he puts Perelman in dialog with himself, or rather with a (mis)-representation of himself. Parsing out carefully various readings of the concept of the universal audience, Gross builds upon his own work, done in collaboration with Ray Dearin, as well as expands it to address more recent (by his account) misunderstandings. Whereas Gross addresses fellow rhetorical critics rather reproachfully at times, Hatch finds himself in large agreement with other scholars who have engaged with the dissociation of concepts. The main task he sets for himself is to clarify the analytic significance of the term and to assert, more forcefully than previous scholars, the epistemic and political power of dissociations of concepts.We see these four contributions as advancing the study of the New Rhetoric in significant ways, getting us ever more closely to giving its authors a fully deserved comprehensive attention.

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.

This issue (22.2) of Advances in the History of Rhetoric is comprised of selected papers presented at the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) Symposium in 2018. Authors revised their conference presentations; the revised essays were vetted through a peer review process. Scott R. Stroud, who was the program chair of the symposium, and I serve as co-editors of this issue.

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.

Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke wrote that rhetorical style is nothing more than ingratiation—an attempt to gain approval by saying the right thing in the right context. Marie Lund’s commendable goal in An Argument on Rhetorical Style is to argue beyond this understanding and achieve a greater conceptual consensus on style for rhetorical scholars and critics. Lund does this by developing her own concept of “constitutive style,” making style valuable as an aesthetic aspect of rhetoric, a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and an analytical category comprising communicative actions, identity constructions, and social influence. She achieves this lofty goal by re-theorizing rhetorical style, exhibiting skillful stylistic analyses in selected popular and social contexts, examining the concept of style from historical eras including the postmodern, and analyzing style from several critical perspectives. This rich and important work provides a fresh, appropriate and comprehensive framework for scholars to analyze rhetorical style from textual, interactional, social and theoretical angles. Lund invokes and engages historically with accounts of style from the classical Greek and Roman periods to the present, and does not disappoint in synthesizing these traditions before creating her transcendent “constitutive style” contribution.Lund’s book is separated into two parts—“Rhetorical Style as a Critical Concept” and “Critical Perspectives.” Three chapters are dedicated to each part. The goal of these chapters is to make style “both powerful and useful in line with other concepts in the practical and critical disciplines of rhetoric” (11). Lund argues that style needs to be re-theorized in order to accomplish this goal and introduces an expansive dialogue between research traditions in order to do so. By separating the book into these sections, Lund illuminates previously fragmented analyses of rhetorical style and is able to bring a synthesized framework to focus for the critic. She begins by covering the range of definitions of style since antiquity and explores the Sophistic treatment of style as constitutively inventive, transformational, and performative. She then guides the reader through some of the earliest etymologies of style (stylus), as well as the modern conceptions of “Style as Dress” and “Style as Man.” She describes these historical and modern definitions of style in precise detail and explains how some of them have retained analytical utility while others fall short. For example, although she sees all three conceptions of style (“Style as Dress,” “Style as Man,” and her “Constitutive Style”) as viable formations in shaping our current perceptions of style, she doesn’t view them as equally effective. She draws on Gerard A. Hauser’s view that rhetoric is not only a strategic process but also a “social practice which constructs a reality” (49). Moreover, she argues that style constitutes our social relations, moral actions, identity constructions, and worldviews. She rejects the simplicity of the topos “Style as Dress,” which characterizes style as a rhetorical ornament that dresses thought. Although Lund recognizes the aestheticizing aspect of style as worthwhile and viable for criticism, she opposes the fundamental separation of style from thought inherent in rhetoric’s five classical canons: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. A “Style as Dress” reduction ignores the inventive nature of style and the notion that all five canons can operate constitutively. Moreover, she rejects the presently loose versions of “Style as Man,” which convey the identity of the speaker as purely constituted through language.Instead, Lund proposes a re-theorization of style as “rhetorical language that constructs a social practice and may be turned into particular rhetorical strategies,” depending upon “the particulars of the rhetorical situation, and also, to some extent, the frame and focus of the critic” (50). It is here where Lund argues for an official third topos—“Style as Constitutive”—exploring the inventive side of constitutive rhetoric and how invented styles are ultimately performed. She supports her overall argument by weaving relevant and robust rhetorical analyses throughout her theoretical elaborations across chapters. For example, after taking stock of the contemporary research of rhetorical figures in chapter two, she analyzes how rhetorical figures function in Danish hip-hop style. She does so to “present rhetorical figures and style as significant analytical concepts that are part of a comprehensive theoretical complex” (86). This analysis is a rich, detailed and cohesive foundation for her analysis of constitutive style as argument. She includes rhetorical devices such as figures of speech and metaphor and re-conceptualizes them beyond mere ornament, substitution or value-addition. These views range from the classical to the postmodern, and Lund is able to admirably rise above them and bring clarity to the conceptual ambiguity concerning style and rhetorical devices. By drawing upon the constitutive function of rhetorical figures, Lund shows that strategic devices can be examined, not only as effective means for persuasion, but also as contributing to the very idea, topic, or style created. This is conveyed in her analysis of the Danish hip-hop style, where rhetorical figures are used strategically as textual and argumentative devices within a systematized cultural style.Lund wraps up Part I by examining the development of style in recent rhetorical criticism, noting equivalence between her constitutive style and the constructions of style brought forth by Barry Brummett and Bradford Vivian. However, Lund invokes an analysis of Danish political style to separate and bolster her own constitutive conception. She examines Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Opening Address on the First Assembly of the Danish Parliament in 2011 to illuminate the amalgamation of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical style. She concludes that Thorning-Schmidt’s style is constitutive of collaboration, creating “the qualities, ethics, and aesthetics of cooperation rhetorically, in its practice” (121). In this way, style is developed as constitutive of rhetorical strategies, essential qualities, and as orientations toward rhetorical situations.Part II of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is dedicated to an elaboration of three critical perspectives that may be adopted when analyzing rhetorical styles: feminine, provocative, and speechwriting. The chapters include critical analyses from the three perspectives. Lund argues for the significance of constitutive style as a theoretical and critical construct, designating provocative style as a critical concept comprising argumentative stylistic devices in an interpretive frame, feminine style as a flawed rhetorical strategy, and speechwriting as dependent on her constitutive framework in order to be analyzed as stylistically constructing meaning, identity and performance at the textual level. Ultimately, Lund is dedicated to enabling the critic with a constitutive topos that recognizes the “rhetorical effects of using style to argumentative and strategic ends” (203). Style is thus constitutive of “so-called substantial qualities such as meaning, ideas, argumentation, political action, cultural values, identity, and gender” (208).Marie Lund has synthesized the work on style in rhetoric and related fields and has added to the tradition her own construct, “constitutive style.” An Argument on Rhetorical Style covers the full range of what is known about rhetorical style and advances the scholarship in admirable, pragmatic and analytical fashion. Future scholars can now adopt this new framework to further engage rhetorical style beyond the feminine, provocative, and speechwriting—something Lund was unable to fully accomplish in this comprehensive work. The limited number of critical perspectives expounded upon in Part II warrants closer attention and further contribution. Overall, the theory and critical application of constitutive style provides scholars from different critical approaches with an important, comprehensive take on rhetorical style.

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.

O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

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.

Dominant stories and narratives are violent: They disregard and erase the humanity of so much of the world, with some of us emerging as the dis/figured and inept beings that can, and, apparently, should, be used; our bodies, our spirits, and our lives too easily made into the waste of the world. That making of humans into non-humans happens in all kinds of material ways and through a seemingly never-ending spate of cultural and political practices—colonial histories, immigration policies, labor practices, control of land, extermination—all of which are not just cultural and political, but instead are fundamentally and materially discursive. It is to this force of dominance that Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, intervenes. Advancing a decolonial rhetoric, Wanzer-Serrano takes rhetorical scholars to the complexities of violent narratives and the force of community resistance in his astute assessment of the New York Young Lords and their refusals to submit. His compelling account of the violent narratives surrounding Puerto Ricans makes this point quite clear: “Puerto Ricans were reduced in the popular imaginary and official histories to a caricature, a shell devoid of humanity, an image that was more a reflection of the attitudes of the colonizer than of the people themselves” (33).Given that dehumanized account, Wanzer-Serrano writes a book that asks and answers this compelling question: “Given a history of consciousness regarding Puerto Ricans that was … thoroughly racist and colonialist, how ought we proceed?” (33). Across the book, the answers he offers assess how Puerto Ricans wrote their own histories and futures. At the same time, his larger response, if not your imperative, is dual, and it is this: love and listen. To be fair, Wanzer-Serrano names the book’s primary intervention like this: I argue for a rethinking of democracy rooted in decolonial heterogeneities that keeps open the terrain for political contestation, features commitments to racial and gender justice, is guided more by liberation than by recognition, and empowers people to be engaged political subjects who exhibit epistemic disobedience by delinking from coloniality and rejecting neoliberal hegemonies. (27)Still, as I read through the book, it was love and listening that came together. Consider this frame of the project: “it is a commitment to finding ways to listen to others’ literal and metaphorical voices and to allow such listening to have its full, transformative effects on subjectivity” (127). That argument comes together most powerfully in chapter 4, where Wanzer-Serrano turns to the Young Lord’s “garbage offensive.” The garbage offensive, an instrumental move designed in part to simply clean the streets, became a much more comprehensive move, “a remarkable rhetoric about the decolonial ethos and ethics of [Puerto Ricans’] agency” (134). It’s here, in this analysis, that we can see listening and loving as ethics of both scholarship and activism, for what Wanzer-Serrano makes clear across the book is that the Young Lords intervened, made change, and reconstituted identity, politics, and community through their listening and loving.Wanzer-Serrano’s book raises numerous questions. What are the implications of the turn to decoloniality for scholars (like me) who remain pretty firmly centered in nation-states and race? And for rhetorical scholars more generally? How might we think de-linking outside of decoloniality? Can we? But perhaps the big question that this book raises is this: What would it mean for critical race rhetoricians to write within a love-and-listen framework? I see three critical mandates from this work for critical race rhetoricians. The first is that agency—so critical to Wanzer-Serrano’s project—has to be centered in much critical race rhetorical scholarship. As Wanzer-Serrano reminds us in the conclusion, this work teaches us much about the Young Lords but the bigger contribution lies in “what can be learned from the Young Lords” (167).In his emphasis on the voices, writings, and practices of the Young Lords and with his commitment to decoloniality, Wanzer-Serrano theorizes agency between the abstract and the concrete, always attentive to the histories, the people, and the locales. He advances a theory of rhetorical agency that we would do well to take up. What would it mean to rethink agency along the lines of what Wanzer-Serrano names “body-political modes of theorizing and acting in the world” (13)?If the first key mandate is a vigorous assessment of agency in critical race rhetorical work, a second lies in the discussions of the tensions between identity politics and politics that emerge out of identities. More specifically, Wanzer-Serrano’s project raises questions that we would do well to engage. What does it mean to build anti-essentialist identity politics? What are the other models of anti-essentialist identity politics? If we wanted to continue to theorize anti-essentialist identity politics, where would we begin? How do we make possible moments in which we name our identities, hold them, while also not being reduced to them or constrained by them? Here, Wanzer-Serrano’s turn to Kelly Oliver and response-ability is crucial, in part for the way response-ability, as Wanzer-Serrano argues, “generated the space where gendered subjectivity could become something, where subjectivity could begin to emerge as a set of practices oriented around an ethic of love built on witnessing to one another” (97). There is something in witnessing, something in stopping to see, to hear, to feel, that has potential.A final mandate of The New York Young Lords is the implicit call for more emphasis in our work on relationality. Certainly, relationality does not figure explicitly in the book as centrally as agency; still, it does drive the analysis. Here, I’m thinking relationality as informed by the work of Natalia Molina, in her argument for racial scripts; by that of Alexander Weiheyle, in his turn to racialized assemblages; and by Lisa Lowe, who reminds us that the many raced and colonial violences “are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded” (7). What these folks make so clear is that we cannot think race, colonialism, dispossession, the nonhuman or less-than-human, in isolation. We cannot think just of the body, nor can we forget the body, nor just think here, but also there, not just in the moment, nor just in history.So how do we move forward? We write and think in spaces and voices of vulnerability and connection. This book—a first in our discipline—challenges all of us to attend to modernity and coloniality and our implication in it.

In his book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano makes several important contributions to rhetorical, communication, and Latinx, race and ethnic studies, and social-movements scholarship. Among those contributions is his detailed historical study of the Young Lords as a social-movement group, which had been, until his study, barely (if at all) mentioned in communication literature. Additionally, his study of the Puerto Rican diaspora, specifically Nuyorican culture, identity, and politics within communication literature, is groundbreaking. And, his thorough, detailed, meticulous historical study of the Young Lords’ rhetoric provides a model of contemporary rhetorical scholarship that should be read and then modeled.The contribution I wish to focus on for this commentary is his theoretical contribution to rhetorical scholarship. Work within the field has studied colonialism through critiques of rhetorics of colonialism (Endres; Parameswaran; Stevens; Stuckey and Murphy) and empire (Abbott; Hartnett and Mercieca; Owen and Ehrenhaus; Perez; Pollini; Sandoval; Spurr), postcolonial critique (Dora; Hegde; Gajjala; Hasian; Jarratt; Kavoori; Kelly; Olson and Worsham; Parameswaran; Schwartz-DuPre; Shome; Wang), and neocolonial critique (Ayotte and Husain; Black; Buescher; Kuswa and Ayotte; McKinnon; Ono; Ranachan and Parmett; Rogers; Vats and Nishime) lenses. Moreover, critiques of colonialism have often been approached as what McKerrow calls “critiques of domination.”Wanzer-Serrano’s book offers a theory of rhetoric and decolonization, distinguished from postcolonial scholarship. Not only does Wanzer-Serrano offer a theory of decoloniality, but he also suggests that the Young Lords challenged decolonization in important ways. He argues, “In this book, I make the case that the New York Young Lords’ enactment of differential consciousness pushes the boundaries of decolonial theory. Through critical performances of border thinking, epistemic disobedience, and delinking, the Young Lords crafted a decolonial praxis that resisted ideological oversimplification and generated new possibilities and spaces for activism in their immediate contexts and beyond” (7).The main chapters of the book detail the history of the organization, its revolutionary nationalism, the role of women in the Young Lords, the organization’s neighborhood garbage campaign, and its campaign to reform the ideas and role of the church. A foundational book about Puerto Rican diasporic rhetoric, the book is attentive to historical nuance in its study of the New York Young Lords. It discusses their emergence and formation as a group, their political platform, their social work, and their decolonial orientation. Gaining expertise and knowledge about the Young Lords and Puerto Rican American rhetoric and culture in New York is a substantial undertaking, and the maturity and sophistication of Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s work is evident on the subject.Wanzer-Serrano comes to the study of the Young Lords as a “decolonial liberation movement” (149). He argues that “the Young Lords’ rhetoric of ‘the people’ embarks on an ‘ideologizing of ideology’ that reworked the people through a decolonial lens and for a decolonial function” (150). As part of their decolonial project, the Young Lords “delink from modernity/coloniality in theory and practice” (11). He captures the significance of delinking perhaps most poignantly in his discussion of the Young Lords’ church offensive, during which they occupied and took over the First Spanish Methodist Church and renamed it “The People’s Church.” There, he argues, “I try to enact and locate ‘an other thinking’ in their rhetoric—a delinking double critique functioning within both Anglo-American and Latin@ traditions and simultaneously ‘from neither of them,’ a critique ‘located at the border of coloniality’ that overcomes the ‘monotopic epistemology of modernity’ and ‘releases knowledges that have become subalternized’ by the coloniality in/of modern social imaginaries” (150). Building on the work of Bernadette Calafell and Michelle Holling, who develop the idea of Latin@ vernacular discourse, Wanzer Serrano adds his analysis that “a defining characteristic of decoloniality is a critical delinking that offers pluriversal alternatives to modern coloniality. Such alternatives can coalesce in challenges to ideographs like ‘the people’ but must also include broader epistemic shifts privileging geopolitical location and the body politics of knowledge in contradistinction to the dominant social imaginary” (164). Delinking from modernity also means delinking conceptually from liberal democracy, which he says “means turning toward a differential consciousness (a la Chela Sandoval) to map the connecting strands that can help us ‘change gears’ and envision a revised conception of democracy not dependent on a modern/colonial ethic of nonbeing’” (177). He advocates thinking of democracy as “fugitive—constantly in flight, marked by multiplicity, unbounded, and contingent.” In this way, he suggests, “Such openness, multiplicity, and constitutive antiracism provides a robust starting point from which to launch fugitive, democratic heterogeneities that can challenge homogenizing racial neoliberalism (177–178).Professor Wanzer-Serrano has made a significant contribution to scholarship through his book. His sophisticated discussions of theory and praxis, his bold move to challenge contemporary conceptions of coloniality, and his detailed case study, which (even without the theoretical framework) significantly adds to what we know about the important, yet understudied, social movement group called The Young Lords render this not only a book worth reading, but also one that becomes part of the canon of rhetorical studies, a hallmark of the best work rhetoric has to offer. This kind of contribution, once realized by others, will have longevity. In short, I would say that it is now not possible to talk about race, otherness, marginality, or power seriously in rhetorical studies without having to confront Wanzer-Serrano’s suggested optic of decoloniality.

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.

“In the end, Luciano triumphantly asserted, ‘We’re building our own community. Don’t fuck with us. It’s as simple as that.’”—Wanzer-Serrano 131The epigraph—a quotation buried deep within chapter 4—belies the complexity and richness of Wanzer-Serrano’s project about the Young Lords and their rhetoric of “community control.” Although the quotation asserts a simple act of building community, Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals how difficult it is to reimagine what community is and can be in light of colonial histories and a neoliberal present. Indeed, the concept of “community” is not without its difficulties. It can deny difference by positing togetherness as the ideal and often devalues temporal and spatial differences (Young 7). Yet, even as community is conceived differently, “radical theorists and activists appeal to an ideal of community” (Young 1). From a definition based in the neighborhood to one spanning borders, “community” carries connotations of race, ethnicity, nationality, and, importantly, identity. Narrated by Wanzer-Serrano to convey the affective force and empowerment-via-liberatory politics, the quotation in the headnote reminds the reader of community’s centrality to the Young Lords and their rhetoric but also to their imagining as a people. In this response, I tease out how the trope of “community” functions within the book as part of the discourse of community control. In doing so, I posit that Wanzer-Serrano’s work reveals tensions about community as it is negotiated within the politics of academia, our scholarship, and our relations to the communities we identify with and/or study.The meaning of the term “community” as it is used in the book reflects the tensions about the term. Wanzer-Serrano revels in and unpacks these tensions. Chapters 1 and 2 historicize the Puerto Rican community’s presence in the United States as Puerto Ricans reconcile their distance from the island and histories that led to their present conditions. Although Wanzer-Serrano is the scholar researching from outside, he provides the Young Lords equal positioning as experts to provide a perspective and account born of direct experience. Thus, chapter 1 is “both a history of the Young Lords and a history from the Young Lords” and elucidates a Puerto Rican history informed by the Young Lords’ concern with coloniality (Wanzer-Serrano 34). Chapter 2 attends to the Young Lords’ revolutionary nationalism delinked from coloniality and instead connected with decoloniality. These two chapters contextualize the various ideologies underpinning the Puerto Rican relationship with the dominant United States. In this account, the Puerto Rican community exists and asserts itself in the face of assimilationist discourses while it simultaneously carves out a space for the development of the Young Lords’ revolutionary politics. Although the Puerto Rican people were operating and surviving within the residual structures of community imposed by coloniality, Wanzer-Serrano elucidates how the Young Lords reimagine the possibilities of what a Puerto Rican people (and their community) can be and look like when situated in the mainland of empire and modernity.Chapters 3–5 reveal how an organization is reshaped by a decolonial ethic. Chapter 3 centers women’s voices within the Young Lords’ organization. Chapter 4 focuses on the neighborhood and their needs through the “garbage offensive.” Chapter 5 foregrounds the idea of a shared people—both the neighborhood and marginalized voices within it—through the church offensive. While he does not explicitly state it, Wanzer-Serrano implies that a decolonial ethic of love functions as an ideal mode of building and sustaining community with liberation and justice in mind. An ethic of love, informed by an intersectional “decolonial Third World protofeminist critique,” provides an avenue to reshape and re-form itself as needed to serve the community (Wanzer-Serrano 93). Decolonial love also functions to listen and respond to the needs of a community to address the coloniality’s commonplace oppression, as evidenced in the Young Lords’ “garbage offensive.” Finally, a decolonial orientation allows for a reconceptualization of “people” outside of the “hegemonic constructions of a liberal/Western people” and toward one of a “pluriversal collective, demanding material and epistemological liberation” (Wanzer-Serrano 146). If the people can be reimagined in this way, their community and its social relations with place and others can also be reimagined in a way delinked from coloniality.Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals the very tensions of community and the multiple communities one identifies with, participates in, and is burdened by when traversing the spaces of academia, fieldwork, archive, and the neighborhood. Wanzer-Serrano’s critical self-reflections and revelations of positionality are peppered throughout the book but most evident in the introduction and conclusion. In a decade-long project spanning graduate-school experiences, Wanzer-Serrano’s initial theory building was first related to radical democratic theory, using the Young Lords as a case study. However, he later reoriented his project to focus on the Young Lords’ decolonial practice. In doing so and reflecting on this process, Wanzer-Serrano reveals the stakes of engaging in a decolonial project that requires a reexamination of one’s own epistemology, the education that led to it, and the scholarship that reinforces and circulates it. For Wanzer-Serrano, to build theory from the canon and to impose it on his subjects would inflict epistemic harm to his non-scholarly community in the name of solidifying one’s place within an academic community. Yet, to conceptualize a decolonial perspective in an ethical way requires time, energy, and commitment.Wanzer-Serrano’s book subtly reveals the stakes for academics of color and other marginalized communities. These scholars (myself included) often engage in research in these very communities and demonstrate the productive possibilities of theorizing from the ground up, not wholly disconnecting from the community in the name of securing “scholarly distance.” These academics identify with, and participate and live in, multiple communities, even as their work can serve and sever “community” in an effort to succeed within a neoliberal university model that is increasingly consumer-driven, instrumentally focused, and starved of community input. Yet, as the Young Lords illustrate, the rhetoric of “community control” foregrounds community as it operates from a decolonial orientation. Much in line with such scholars as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and la paperson, Wanzer-Serrano illustrates decoloniality’s power and alludes to the possibilities of the university as a decolonial force. While all rhetorical scholars may not take a decolonial orientation, Wanzer-Serrano’s book beckons us to consider it and to weigh the stakes of not recognizing the world-making value and potential of it.

As my last act as outgoing book review editor for Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am pleased to introduce a forum on Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s important 2015 work, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. When editor Arthur Walzer and I made the decision to host these forums, we envisioned creating a space where scholars could respond to important new works in the field. Some we expected would be provocative, inviting us to think about new possibilities in the history of rhetorical theory, criticism, and praxis. Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s book is both provocative and timely. It pushes us to think about decolonial love and the struggle of the New York Young Lords in the context of rhetoric studies and at a time when immigrant voices are fighting to be heard amidst increasing violence, dehumanization, and exclusion.

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.

The University of Oxford Press has recently published two books on rhetoric, Michel Meyer’s (Chaïm Perelman’s successor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) What is Rhetoric and Martin Camper’s Arguing Over Texts. Meyer and Camper build from the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians to develop the role of questions in rhetoric (Meyer) and stasis theory (Camper). That both books, published by one of the leading academic presses in the world, feature a recovery and a modern renovation of the rhetorical tradition marks a potentially exciting moment in the contemporary history of rhetoric. Camper’s book is but one of several illustrations of a renaissance in rhetorical history. Camper follows the line of argument set forth by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbechts-Tyteca in their New Rhetoric Project and Douglas Walton in his “new dialectic.” They chronicle the origins, development, and fall of an ancient rhetorical concept and then engage in its restoration. Similarly, Martin Camper tells the history of the origins, development, and fall of stasis theory, creating as a result a compelling exigence for a “systematically, theoretically grounded method for understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes and how those disputes are resolved” (3).Camper has developed a new interpretative stasis that complements the new rhetoric and dialectic. He has, with success, revived “ancient rhetorical theory to think about and solve modern problems” (3). Toward this end, he has offered scholars of rhetoric a gift: a modern method of “understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes” (3). Camper has read the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians with care, calling on select passages from Aristotle, Cicero, Hermagoras, Quintilian, and other Greek and Roman rhetoricians to ground his new interpretive stases. Because the rhetorical problems humans face recur, as do rhetorical situations, the theoretical insights Camper draws from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Hermagoras of Temnos’s On Stases: A Manual for Declamation, Cicero’s De Inventione, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintilian’s The Orator’s Education on stasis theory are strikingly relevant and helpful in the twenty-first century. Camper acknowledges the excellent work done by Fahnestock, Secor, and other modern scholars on stasis theory, building out of their contributions a truly novel system of six interpretative stases: AmbiguityDefinitionLetter versus spiritConflicting passagesAssimilationJurisdictionCamper’s illustrations of these interpretative stases are wide ranging, including a controversy involving climate-change scientists and the claim they had used deceitful practices; a truly insightful analysis of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, which provoked significant controversy during Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency; the Supreme Court ruling on gun control in District of Columbia v. Heller; a consideration of Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and others. His use of the interpretative stases introduced in Arguing Over Text to analyze critically passages from the Hebrew and Christian sacred texts stand out as exceptionally cogent. Camper’s new interpretative stases allow for sensitive and astute readings of these sacred texts, fulfilling his promise to provide a model of interpretative stases that effectively joins hermeneutics with rhetoric.Camper devotes chapters five and eight to an explanation of how his interpretative stases work using an extended illustration drawn from the Christian Bible. Passages from I Corinthians and II Timothy, Camper notes, are deployed by some within the Christian faith community to justify prohibitions against women preaching and speaking in church. Camper considers the outbreak of arguments between and among Christians about the meaning of these and other passages and explains how the stases of jurisdiction, ambiguity, definition, letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, and assimilation can be used to explain the interpretative disagreements. These interpretative stases “are ordered, with disagreements moving from jurisdiction, to ambiguity, and then definition, and finally to either letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, or assimilation” (165). The dispute within the Christian faith community over the role of women preaching and speaking in church is better understood as a result of Camper’s application of these ordered interpretative stases.Camper has a strong command of Christian theology and sacred texts, which allows him to trace with expertise the trajectories of the arguments. The arguments about women preaching and speaking in church he considers are those expressed by committed Christians who share a commitment to the authority of the Bible. Yet, because the passages in the Bible addressing the topic of women preaching and speaking elicit different interpretations in the Christian faith community, Camper’s stases constitute a taxonomy that describes and explains, but does not seek to judge, the disagreement. As Camper explains, the dispute takes place primarily within the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” interpretative stases.That members of the same faith tradition draw different interpretations from a shared sacred text underscores Camper’s wisdom in his claim that ambiguity “is the archetypal interpretative issue that readers face when they encounter a text: How does one decide between two or more competing readings of the same passage?” (16). The background, experience, and aspirations of those who interpret sacred scripture will significantly influence how the Christian Bible is understood, a point Camper develops. Humans will disagree about textual interpretations, even those with shared values and common texts, because they approach a communal text from different experiences and backgrounds to fetch out meaning of the same passage. There is, as a result, an essential and even a foundational ambiguity at the core of most sacred texts including the Bible and secular texts, like the US Constitution.Fortunately, Camper resist the temptation to view ambiguity as the ruling feature of textual interpretation. His interpretative stases can help those who must make judgments about conflicting interpretations of textual passages. Using the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” stases, the reader draws the conclusion from Camper’s neutral assessment of the arguments that the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians and II Timothy did not intend a full-scale prohibition of women preaching and speaking in church, that the spirit of Paul’s message on women is inconsistent with the particular passages cited by those who support a prohibition based on his words, and that there are passages in Paul’s letters that contradict and qualify the prohibitions found in I Corinthians and II Timothy.Camper stays true to his promise that he is “not interested in how one might arrive at a valid reading of a text … and does not offer a method for doing so” (11). The interpretative stases he offers are not “designed to offer a theory of proper reading practices,” and he provides “no normative judgments about the validity of any of the interpretations or supporting arguments offered in this book” (11). In Arguing Over Texts, Camper informs his reader that his book purposefully “sidesteps questions of valid interpretations” (11). While it is important to step back and sidestep questions of valid interpretations to understand how interpretative stases work, if Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory is to evolve beyond the goal of describing interpretative disagreements, it will need to step directly into questions of valid interpretations, normative standards, and issues of justice. To this end, the next step in the study of interpretative stases might be for Camper and other scholars of rhetoric to pair the wisdom of the ancients on stasis theory with contemporary research on argument and decision making. This might involve the research of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber on argumentation and reason, Daniel Kahneman and Paul Slovic on system-one and -two thinking, and Robin Gregory on structured decision making. This research provides insights on valid readings of texts, reaching normative judgments, and joining values to action. Regardless, Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory constitutes an important recovery and renovation of a key rhetorical concept.

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.

In the 1980s, Deirdre McCloskey argued that economists should look beyond their mathematical formulas and their positivist methodologies. If “economic style appeals in various ways to an ethos wort...

At one of its biannual conferences, the Rhetoric Society of America offered a souvenir t-shirt that had printed on the back the question “What Is Rhetoric?” Surrounding the provocative question wer...

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.

The image we often have of Henry David Thoreau comes from his time at Walden Pond. Picturing his unkempt hair, scraggly beard, and steely eyes, we envision Thoreau retreating to nature to live deli...

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.

This special issue (21.2) of Advances in the History of Rhetoric has been guest edited by Mark Garrett Longaker. His proposal for an issue devoted to economic arguments was selected on a competitive basis following a “call for proposals” broadcast by the editor of Advances. The essays in this issue were subject to peer review by outside reviewers, as well as by Mark and the editor of Advances.

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.

The original research of Johnstone and Graff on the bouleuteria of ancient Greece and their physical and acoustic features will, I predict, have a significant impact on future work in the history of rhetoric. Of equal importance to me is their gathering together in one easy view the site plans and reconstructions—in some cases three-dimensional reconstructions and interior views—of Greek council houses. Though students of ancient Greek rhetoric will be familiar with the functions of the council house, this will be for most the first opportunity to view this collection of council-house plans and reconstructions in close proximity. This collection and arrangement of images constitute an argument for a deliberate and principled evolution in the architecture of council-houses, from the mid-sixth-century structures at Olympia (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 6–7c) and Athens (Johnstone and Graff, 1a and 1b) to the second-century curvilinear structures at Athens and Miletos (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 17a–21b). Their essay demonstrates nothing less than the invention of a specifically rhetorical space, parallel to the development of deliberative arenas like the Pnyx.We shouldn’t let the current ubiquity of the semicircular, banked theatral area obscure or diminish for us the significance of this invented spatial configuration and rhetorical technology. Today, this form is ubiquitous in lecture halls, movie theaters, playhouses, churches, and assembly halls around the world, but it was for the Greeks a significant achievement and a rhetorical one, as Johnstone and Graff’s essay makes clear. Its underlying purpose was the collection, arrangement, and display of a collectivity—the creation of a people—for mutual regard through political deliberation in service to the city. I mean here to invoke both constitutive rhetoric (Charland) and the social imaginary (Castoriadis). Rhetorical spaces like the council house were instrumental in constituting the polis as an imagined, known, and valued entity.The Greeks, of course, had a name for what Johnstone and Graff have brought together for us. They called something collected and arranged so that it could be easily or clearly seen in one view, eusynoptos. As a result of Johnstone and Graff’s essay, the historical development of the Greek council house as a distinctly rhetorical space becomes eusynoptos. I might then coin the term eusynoptic to name the effect of collecting and positioning objects so that they can be easily seen, and so that the principle underlying their orchestration can be clearly understood. A eusynoptic image, scene, or perspective features a collection of otherwise disparate items deliberately selected and gathered, and strategically arranged for complete visibility of all items within a 180 degree radius. A scene so configured generates in the spectator a clear and rapid comprehension of its implicit rationale. What is eusynoptos is not simply easy to see at a glance, it has been rendered so in a way that demonstrates and illustrates its controlling idea.Graff and Johnstone’s essay makes immediately clear to me that the underlying principle and implicit rationale governing the historical development of bouleuteria from the sixth century to the second century BC was itself eusynoptic. Greek cities and Greek architects crafted and refined their bouleutêria to highlight the ability of both speakers and audiences to easily attend to and comprehend at a glance the collective—the city as its citizenry—and the issue before them in deliberation, and they did so to highlight this very mutual co-presence, to make plain to the council the importance of seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, by speaker and spoken to alike. I suspect that the rhetorical importance of eusynoptics has till now escaped our attention because its disparate applications have not been collected or arranged.Eusynoptic techniques are tools of arrangement and subordination, of hypotaxis out of parataxis, of bringing the many into one: one view, one principle of organization, one controlling idea or purpose. Such a goal might seem mundane to the modern world, where Aristotle’s rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle go without saying, where hierarchical rules of composition are universally taught, and where Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself” remains an eccentric view. But ancient Greeks even into the Roman age regularly entertained incompatible or inconsistent ideas or images in close proximity, what Perry calls “the capacity to see things separately,” and what Veyne refers to as “the Balkanization of the mind” (92). Versnel notes the paratactic character of much Greek literature as “the linking of disparate and not seldom contradictory or incompatible parts and the (apparent?) lack of a uniting and binding central concept or theme” (214). In the same way, Greek city development has often seemed “unsystematic and irregular” (Wycherly 7). Eusynoptic bouleutêria and similar spaces catalyzed then and demonstrate now a Greek commitment to principles of organization, subordination, and comprehension. The elements of eusynoptics are worth reviewing here.Keeping or having something in view implies keeping it in mind and affording it some attention and regard, respect, or affection. And, by contrast, keeping it out of sight implies keeping it “out of mind.” When the ancient hero Diocles fled from Corinth to Thebes to escape his mother’s incestuous love, his lover Philolaus followed him to Thebes, but retained his love for his home city, Corinth. In death, their tombs reflected their allegiances: “Even now people still show the tombs (of Diocles and Philolaus), in full view of each other, and one of them fully open to view in the direction of the Corinthian country but the other one not” (Aristotle Politics, 168–169, 1274a35).Greek homes turned inward around a central courtyard, but kept external windows high and small, so that its members might be visible to each other, but not to outsiders (Phoca and Valavanis 26–29). And after it was partially destroyed by the Persians, the ruins of the old temple of Athena (archaios neos) were left visible on the Athenian Acropolis, to preserve a memory of Persian hubris and Athenian suffering, and a desire for revenge.1 Greeks expressed their values through the planned visibility provided by architectural spaces.Arranging social space to enable mutual visibility was also a goal of city planning. Aristotle limits the population of a city to the number that can be easily seen in one view: “The best limiting principle for a state is the largest expansion of the population with a view to self-sufficiency that can well be taken in in one view” (Aristotle Politics 558–559, 1326b23). In like manner, the city territory should also (from one privileged vantage point) “be well able to be taken in at one view” (558–559, 1327a). This implied not only the ability to see the physical city from one position, but the capacity for the citizens to gather as a collective, to see and be seen by each other.By contrast, a city or a citizenry too large or diffuse to be easily seen could not be comprehended, and thus could neither act wisely nor be managed well. Isocrates complains that “Athens is so large and the multitude of people living here is so great, that the city does not present to the mind an image easily grasped or sharply defined” (Antidosis 282–283 §172). It would be the task of structures like the Athenian council house to make such an image possible and useful.Through its visibility, a person, structure, or text could be grasped, regarded, remembered, observed, and managed. A space or place could be called to mind and taken to heart, including all the characters, actions, and events that it contained and made possible. For these reasons, the Greeks planned structures, precincts, and even whole towns mindful of how, and from where, they could be seen. In particular, Greek spatial planning often valued the full and contiguous visibility of structures within a sacred precinct or area, such that no structure obstructed another and no spatial gaps were left open, so as to maximize visibility of all structures in the smallest possible space (within a 180-degree field of vision), with the exception of the path of approach open to the surrounding countryside, called the “sacred way” (Doxiadis 5).For example, the Sanctuary of Athena at Pergamon was built so that each of its elements—the stoa, altar, temple, and column—was visible within the peripheral vision of a visitor at the entrance. From this perspective, every object filled in the gap left by the other objects, without any one element obstructing any other, presenting one contiguous scene. This principle applies to a wide range of sacred precincts and urban areas across the Greek world.The same principle applied to city planning. Pergamon was laid out so that all the important structures could be fully seen in one view from the theater stage. The elevation of the hillside made it possible to cluster public buildings so that all were visible without overlap. When the theater was in attendance, a speaker or performer would see the city (its citizenry) as well as the city (its important public structures) together at a glance (Wycherly 28–29). The indoor square and round bouleuteria utilized the same combination of elevation, contiguity, and positioning, albeit with a more uniform geometry, the more clearly to express an aesthetic and egalitarian ideal.An understanding of eusynoptics reveals that it would behoove anyone who sought to know (and control) his city—like a prospective tyrant—to keep its people (and their actions and associations) within clear view, and arranging “for the people in the city to always be visible and to hang about the palace gates, for thus there would be least concealment about what they are doing and they would get into the habit of being humble” (Aristotle, Politics 460–461, 1313b7).If Aristotle’s insight applies to Athens, then it is possible that Peisistratus worked to secure his tyranny at Athens by arranging to have the people “hang about” his palace gates (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 1a and 1b) so that they would “always be visible” to him and would “get in the habit of being humble.”The Peisistratids selected a flat area northwest of the Acropolis to build their new agora. At the southwest corner of this open space, a palace is built (Johnstone and Graff, Figure 2a). To the north, an altar to the twelve gods is set up. To the east is a fountain house where women could collect fresh water. The Panathenaic way ran past these two structures, toward the Acropolis. A large open space was available for political, sporting, and theatrical events and for market stalls, creating a eusynoptic gathering place (Camp 32–36).The resulting triangular shape embodied Aristotle’s principle of eusynoptic surveillance and provided a model for the shape of the democratic Pnyx. Like the agora, the Pnyx was an essentially triangular arena built for eusynoptic gathering of the city anchored by the bema rather than the palace complex.2 The logic of eusynoptic parataxis that shaped the bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff demonstrate, also shaped the agora, the Pnyx, and, as we’ll see, the polis.Isocrates’ complaint notwithstanding, Athens, too, was laid out so that the city was visible from at least one eusynoptic vantage point without any one important element obstructing any other. In its earliest form, a speaker at the Pnyx could see in one view all the citizens gathered together (Pnyx, from puknos, means “packed” or crowded) while, at the same time, the assembled citizens could see easily at a glance the whole city laid out before them (Pnyx I, see Thompson 134–138 and plate 18a; orientation, see Camp 4–5, images 1,3). From the Pnyx hillside, the late fifth-century spectator could see, from the far right (southeast): the (unfinished) temple of Olympian Zeus, the theater of Dionysus and Odeon, the Acropolis, and Parthenon. A citizen looking to the Parthenon from the Pnyx would see the temple of Athena Niké (just to the left of and jutting out in front of the Propylaia) nested inside of the larger Parthenon further back.Just to the left of the Acropolis, spectators could see the Areopagus and then, directly in front of them (on a line running through the center of the Pnyx), the western edge of the agora and its important structures, including the stoae, council house, temples and altar. Immediately to the west was the temple of Hephaestus, the Kerameikos, the Dipylon gate (along with the Sacred Gate and Sacred Way to Eleusis) and the Piraeus gate. This contiguous arc of structures asserted, like the curvilinear bouleuterion, albeit with less mathematical precision, that Athens as place and as idea belonged to the political participants who could see it.Visible beyond the city lay the country and many rural demes. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (25), as Dicaeopolis sits in the Pnyx, he gazes upon his fields out in the rural deme of Acharnai, and longs for peace. In this way, an audience would see in one view the entire polis: all the landmarks of the urban center and the rural demes that made up Athens, even as the speaker saw the entire city in the form of the citizens themselves.Tellingly (but not surprisingly), when, with Spartan aid, the Thirty Tyrants overthrew the democracy, one of their first objectives was to reverse the direction of the Pnyx. The idea may have been to prevent the people from seeing (and keeping in mind) the city which they were voting to preserve and protect (Plutarch §19, 99).This principle of a visible array, selected, gathered, and arranged so that it could be seen “easily at a glance” as an organic whole, did not only guide the construction of bouleuteria and other structures, it also shaped the evolution of rhetorical artistry through the spatial metaphors applied to it. That is, the spatial logic of the bouleuteria also provided a fundamental principle of rhetoricStyle, says Aristotle, should be periodic, “and by period, I mean a sentence that has a beginning and an end in itself and a magnitude that can be easily grasped (eusunopton)” (Aristotle Rhetoric 386–387, 1409a–b). Aristotle and Demetrius alike explain with the image of runners on a circular running track: “For at the very beginning of their race the end of the course is already before their eyes, hence the name “periodos,” an image drawn from paths which go around and are in a circle” (On Style 354–355, §11, cf Rhetoric 386–7, 1409a).Plots (of dramatic and epic poems) too should have magnitude, with actions selected and arranged so that the arc of the whole can be seen in one view: “So just as with our bodies and with animals, beauty requires magnitude, but magnitude that allows coherent perception (eusunopton), likewise plots require length, but length that can be coherently remembered” (Aristotle Poetics 56–57, 1451a5, cf 118-119, 1459b; and contrast 116–117, 1459a30–35).Most importantly, speeches should convey an argument in a way that is easily comprehended at a glance. One function of enthymemes, says Aristotle, is to help a lay audience (untrained in dialectical reasoning) more easily see (sunoran; 22, 1357a) a long chain of reasoning in one view (Rhetoric 22–23, 1357a and 288–289, 1395b).3 A well-selected series of enthymemes can tie up even a sprawling narrative nicely and make clear its underlying rationale.Even at the outset of rhetoric, Corax, after gathering the people and his thoughts together, eusynoptically began “to advise the demos and to speak as though telling a story, and after these things to summarize the argument and to call to mind concisely what had gone before, and to bring before their eyes at a glance what had been said to the demos (Rabe 12–13, italics inserted).I am suggesting that the bouleuteria collected by Johnstone and Graff demonstrate eusynoptics to be central not only to civic structures and spaces, but to rhetorical artistry as a whole. In texts as much as in spaces, paratactic arrangement like that perfected in late bouleuteria proves crucial to persuasion.

The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.

Johnstone and Graff’s contribution to what they term the “archaeology” of Greek rhetoric is original and significant. By describing the visual and acoustic characteristics of bouleutêrion interiors, they help us to imagine the experiences of both speaker and audience in these spaces. Speeches before boulai could have been performative tours de force. Orators could have taken advantage of the settings to enhance their words’ persuasive force, to present themselves in competition as confident, powerful men, and, perhaps, to generate particular aesthetic effects. Johnstone and Graff’s approach reflects the contemporary trend of trying to situate ancient performance texts within the physical locations for which they were composed. Probably the most successful example of this is Bissera Pentcheva’s work on Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva and her colleagues have demonstrated how the acoustic properties of Hagia Sophia, particularly its reverberation time, would have affected the experiences of hearing and performing hymns, psalms, and the sung sermons known as kontakia during the Justinianic liturgy of the sixth century CE. Hagia Sophia lends itself to this kind of research, since the complete building survives, as does a large and varied corpus of texts written about it or for performance within it. Johnstone and Graff’s project faces the opposite situation. None of the dozens of known bouleutêria survives as anything approaching a complete building, and we have limited specific evidence of what went on within them. This essay considers Johnstone and Graff’s analysis in light of these two challenges.All the bouleutêria Johnstone and Graff discuss are in more-or-less ruined condition. Sufficient remains of the foundations of the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens survive for us to reconstruct the buildings’ dimensions and floor plans, but we have limited evidence about the heights and materials of the walls and roof and the materials of interior surfaces. It is not even clear whether there were wooden benches for the bouleutai to sit on. Other buildings are better preserved. For the bouleutêrion of Miletus, for instance, we know that the seats and walls were of marble and limestone, and we can reconstruct the exterior walls’ height with reasonable accuracy. Even for the best preserved bouleutêria, fundamental architectural details, including the presence of windows and the materials and pitch of the roof, are matters of speculation. The state of the buildings has important consequences for acoustic analysis, as the example of reverberation time will show.Reverberation time is a measure of how long it takes a sound to die away. Some materials, such as cloth, absorb sound and hasten its decay. Other materials, such as brick or solid wood, reflect sound and prolong its reverberation. To calculate the reverberation time of any room, therefore, we need to know the materials and surface area of every surface that sound could encounter within it, including the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. We also need to know the volume of the room. This poses a challenge for bouleutêria. The Old Bouleuterion in Athens is a representative example. Since we do not know the height of the Old Bouleuterion, we cannot calculate with certainty its volume or the surface area of its walls and roof. Chips of yellow poros suggest that the walls were of this material, but neither the walls themselves nor traces of any of the interior furniture survive (Thompson 129–132). Accordingly, Johnstone and Graff have to make inferences about the height and the material of interior surfaces in order to calculate reverberation time. They estimate a wall height of 6 m and a roof peak height of 9.3 m. Different heights would change both the volume and surface areas, and so would result in different reverberation times. In Appendix A, Table 1, Johnstone and Graff base their calculations on “absorption coefficients that most closely resemble the building materials used.” As with the height, if we posit different materials, the reverberation times would change. Other measures, including speech intelligibility, also depend on height and materials. The presence or absence of windows can affect acoustic conditions as well. Georgios Karadedos, Vasilios Zafranas, and Panagiotis Karampatzakis, who have calculated the reverberation times of some Greek bouleutêria and ôdeia, although with very different results from Johnstone and Graff, note that open windows in their reconstruction of the Odeion of Aphrodisias would reduce reverberation time by 20 percent. When Johnstone and Graff praise the acoustics of the Old Bouleuterion, therefore, their conclusion is a possibility rather than a certainty. They are referring to their reconstruction of the building rather than the building itself. The same holds for other bouleutêria. For the bouleutêrion at Messene, for instance, Johnstone and Graff’s calculations depend on a reconstructed wall height of 17 m and a roof peak height of 20.3 m. All of Johnstone and Graff’s assumptions are reasonable, but results based on information that we do not know must always be used with caution.Even though Johnstone and Graff’s results may be uncertain in particulars, they point to conclusions that are generally correct. Greek bouleutêria, especially those whose shapes resemble the Old or New Bouleuterion in Athens, were effective performance spaces for both visual and acoustic reasons. The Greeks themselves seem to have appreciated the functionality of the Old and New Bouleuteria, since, of all the monumental civic and religious buildings of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, their architecture was the most consistently imitated. This contrasts with another Athenian building that hosted oratorical performances, the Odeion of Pericles. Modeled after Xerxes’ tent, it did not become the model for later ôdeia (Camp 347), perhaps because its many columns and sloping, peaked roof impeded visibility and resulted in poor acoustics, especially compared to the simple box-like shapes of the Old and New Bouleuteria.Research on bouleutêria faces a second central challenge besides the scanty archaeological remains. While we know these buildings housed councils of various sorts throughout the Greek world from the archaic through late antique periods, we have little idea of how these councils actually conducted their business. This is particularly true of Hellenistic cities, but it is also true of Classical Athens. We know much about the Athenian boulê’s responsibilities and procedures, but we do not know what the bouleutai did in the buildings we call the Old and New Bouleuteria and what they did elsewhere. The boulê met almost every day. Its published agendas always included the location of the meeting (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 43.3), and that location may have changed often. As Johnstone and Graff note, inscriptions and literary references attest to the Athenian boulê meeting in various places. Similarly, according to Xenophon’s Hellenica 5.2.29, the Theban boulê would meet in a stoa when its usual meeting place on the hill known as the Cadmea was being used for another purpose, and Christopher P. Dickenson (115) infers from two accounts of the same event in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus 40.2–3 and Life of Cleomenes 19.1 that the Corinthian boulê could meet in the Temple of Apollo, even though there was a bouleutêrion in Corinth (Diodorus Siculus 16.65.6).We need to be cautious about references to bouleutêria in ancient sources, since bouleutêrion is both a general and specific term. In Athens, it can refer to the particular buildings that we call the Old and New Bouleuteria, but any other place that any boulê meets is also a bouleutêrion. Hence, there was a bouleutêrion on the Areopagus for the boulê of the Areopagus (Lalonde). Any building where a boulê was meeting could probably be designated a temporary bouleutêrion, just as a stoa could become a dikastêrion while it was being used for trials. Along the same lines, at least some of the buildings designated as bouleutêria would have hosted events besides meetings of the boulê, since, as a general rule, Greek buildings were designed for multiple purposes. As Johnstone and Graff point out, the Old Bouleuterion may have simultaneously housed both the boulê and Athens’ archives. This affects how we think of bouleutêria as venues for oratorical performances. While there can be no question that they did host oratory, we cannot be sure of what else they were used for or how often speeches took place within them, as opposed to alternative meeting places of boulai.By emphasizing oratorical performances in bouleutêria, Johnstone and Graff’s analysis leaves questions about boulê procedure and the buildings’ other purposes unanswered. How often would speakers who were capable of the kind of performances that Johnstone and Graff envision have had the opportunity to speak in bouleutêria? How would the architectural characteristics that made bouleutêria excellent spaces for oratory have affected the other activities that occurred within them, such as subcommittee meetings or debates like the one in Lysias 22, Against the Graindealers, that Johnstone and Graff mention? What was more central to bouleutêria’s roles, their acoustics or the unimpeded sight lines from almost anywhere inside them? In the rest of this essay, I consider Johnstone and Graff’s analysis from the broad perspective of these questions. I will not offer answers, which is probably impossible based on our evidence, but I will show that reconstructions of bouleutêria need to account for other activities just as prominently as for deliberative oratory. Even though Johnstone and Graff do not specifically address other activities, their study points to how bouleutêria would have been more than simply venues for speechmaking. I will focus particularly on Athens, since we know more about the Athenian boulê than the boulai of other cities.Plato’s Gorgias, who surely has Athens in mind, defines rhêtorikê as “the ability to persuade with words dikastai in a dikastêrion, bouleutai in a bouleutêrion, and ekklêsiastai in an ekklêsia, as well as in any other type of political meeting” (452e, my trans.). The Athenian boulê acted as a kind of gatekeeper for the ekklêsia, setting the agenda of topics for each meeting. An item placed on the ekklêsia’s agenda was called a “preliminary resolution,” or probouleuma. Speakers could influence Athenian policy by successfully persuading the bouleutai to pass probouleumata recommending their pet causes. Since the ekklêsia appears to have approved the boulê’s recommendations without changes about half the time (Rhodes 79), a politician who was skilled at manipulating the boulê could wield considerable influence over the policies of Athens. Debates over probouleumata probably attracted the kinds of trained orators that Johnstone and Graff envision taking advantage of the acoustic conditions of the Old and New Bouleuteria. In the Sausage Seller’s description of a chaotic meeting of the boulê in Aristophanes’ Knights, we hear that Paphlagon was “booming with words that struck like thunderbolts” and “hurling mountain crags” at the bouleutai (626–629, my trans.). Although exaggerated for comic effect, this gives us a taste of the kind of oratory that politicians such as Cleon would have practiced before the boulê in the 420s BCE.There were other opportunities for oratorical performance before the boulê besides debates over probouleumata. The boulê had the power to conduct certain types of judicial hearings, most importantly dokimasiai, or “examinations,” of magistrates who were about to take office, as well as of invalids seeking public support. Dokimasiai took the form of trials. The people objecting to the appointment spoke first, and then the prospective officials defended themselves. Of the five surviving speeches that were delivered before the Athenian boulê, four come from dokimasiai (Lys. 16, 24, 26, 31) and one from another type of judicial hearing (Dem. 51). Dokimasiai would have been ideal occasions for what Johnstone and Graff term the “performance of masculine virtue and virtuosity in a competitive culture that prized honor and reputation.” Prospective magistrates and bouleutai had to justify not only their qualifications but also their lifestyles and habits. For instance, in Lysias 16, For Mantitheus, Mantitheus defends his appearance and reputation as an orator and responds to the charge that he served in the cavalry under the Thirty Tyrants.We should not exaggerate the importance of oratory in dokimasiai. Most of the hundreds of hearings the boulê had to conduct each year must have been resolved with rapid approvals or rejections and minimal speechmaking. Furthermore, whenever the boulê acted as a court, we do not know whether it even met in the Old or New Bouleuterion. Pollux 8.86 says that the dokimasiai of archons took place in the Stoa Basileos (Rhodes 36), and the manuscripts of Lysias 31.1 refer to a dikastêrion rather than a bouleutêrion. While the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens, therefore, seem to have served as venues for oratorical performances during discussions of probouleumata, the boulê seems to have been convened in other places on at least some occasions that may have featured competitive oratory.Even during political debates, prominent politicians could not address the boulê whenever they wished, since only the bouleutai themselves had an absolute right to speak (Rhodes 42–43). As a result, politicians sometimes pursued policy goals through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Demosthenes (23.9,14), Aeschines (3.125), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Athênainôn Politeia (29.1–3) all describe politicians advancing policies through personal relationships (Rhodes 57). As Josiah Ober has argued, the boulê of the fifth and fourth centuries functioned through a series of interlocking social networks that recognized and relied on individuals’ connections and expertise (142–155). Ober calls this process “knowledge aggregation.” The aggregated knowledge of the boulê and its constituent social networks would have served as a check on the power of rhetoric. When bouleutai voted, their decisions were informed both by the speeches they had heard and by the informed opinions of their expert colleagues. Both the Old and New Bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff have reconstructed them, would have facilitated this kind of informed voting. By sitting, or perhaps standing, in what Ober (199–205) calls “inward facing circles,” the bouleutai could have observed each other as they listened to speeches and so reached judgments informed by the reactions of their colleagues. The open space that facilitated oratory would also have encouraged visual communication among listeners and so prevented orators from having too much power.The boulê oversaw many Athenian officials, especially those concerned with finances and the navy. One of the boulê’s most important roles was to supervise monetary transactions. For instance, in the fifth century the boulê observed the presentation of tribute from the allies (Meiggs and Lewis 46), and in the fourth century they watched in the bouleutêrion as the debts of individuals who had paid the money they owed to the state were formally erased from the written record (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 48.1). Duties such as these required seeing as much as hearing, which again indicates that visibility would have been as important as audibility to the design of Athenian bouleutêria. The open space of the Old and New Bouleuteria probably encouraged small meetings of subcommittees as well as mass viewing, especially if there were movable wooden benches. By the fourth century, the boulê conducted much of its supervisory business through subcommittees (Rhodes 143).The Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens were multipurpose buildings whose design facilitated a range of activities besides oratory. We know much less about the business conducted in bouleutêria outside Athens, but they also seem to have hosted both political oratory and other events, some of which had nothing to do with speaking or governing.Inscriptions and literary references make clear that boulai throughout the Greek-speaking world played an active role in political decisions, sometimes through listening to speeches. Polybius, for instance, describes a debate that took place in 226 or 225 BCE in the koinon, here “shared” or “federal,” bouleutêrion of the Achaean League, which was probably in Aegium, on the Gulf of Corinth. At this meeting, envoys of the Megalopolitans read a letter from the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson and urged the representatives of the league to make an alliance with him, but the general Aratus responded “at length,” urging them to continue acting on their own for the time being. The “crowd applauded” Aratus’ speech and accepted his recommendation (2.50.10–51.1). Polybius also paraphrases a speech of the general Philopoemen given in what was probably the same bouleutêrion in 208 or 207 BCE (11.9.1–9), which criticizes the soldiers of the Achaean League for neglecting their armor and weaponry in favor of fancy dress.By the imperial period, bouleutêria hosted performances besides political oratory, including epideictic oratory and musical concerts. Libanius describes the enthusiastic reception that greeted him when he spoke in the bouleutêrion in his hometown of Antioch in 353 CE (Autobiography 87–89), and Dio of Prusa (19.2–3) describes the performance of a lyre player in the bouleutêrion in Cyzicus sometime between 85 and 95 CE. While Libanius and other epideictic speakers probably benefited from the same architectural conditions that Johnstone and Graff show favored deliberative speakers, a focus on oratory alone does not address whether bouleuêtria would also have been effective performance spaces for singers and instrumentalists. Did the buildings host concerts because their acoustics were good for music as well as speech or simply because they were available?Some bouleutêria accommodated events unrelated to government or to individual performances. To take one example, Josephus tells us that the same building in Tiberias was used both for formal political meetings of the Tiberian boulê, complete with oratory and debates, and as a proseukhê, “prayer-house” or “synagogue” (Life 276–298, Rocca 296–300). Other synagogues of the late Second Temple period seem to have been modeled after Hellenistic bouleutêria such as the ones at Priene and Miletus that Johnstone and Graff discuss (Ma‘oz 41, Rocca 305–310). This suggests that the architectural characteristics that Johnstone and Graff associate primarily with oratory would also have been appropriate for the non-oratorical activities in synagogues, the of the the of the and outside and, especially after public while Johnstone and Graff’s specific results need to be used with their analysis of the performance conditions of bouleutêria how skilled orators could have used these buildings to their in the that a At the same time, Johnstone and Graff’s focus on oratory the of their every speech before a boulê would have been delivered in a bouleutêrion, bouleutai had many responsibilities that did not call for and bouleutêria were used for besides boulê The physical characteristics of bouleutêria in Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world that Johnstone and Graff would have accommodated a range of besides oratorical including visual small musical performances, and religious based on Johnstone and Graff’s may us how the architecture of bouleutêria would have facilitated or these at the of well late because they were multipurpose buildings to many of civic to and whose an of this essay, and to who my to ancient

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.