Advances in the History of Rhetoric
312 articlesSeptember 2017
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Abstract
In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”
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ABSTRACT This essay argues that enargeia, the “vivid” quality of language that encourages listeners or readers to develop mental images, was an integral element of rhetorical strategy in the courts of Classical Athens. It relies on ancient evidence and modern comparanda. Ancient rhetorical theorists demonstrate how enargeia would have contributed to a sense of presence and simulated in Athenian jurors an experience similar to that of actual eyewitnesses. Modern lawyers and authors of trial handbooks advise litigators to appeal to their jurors’ imaginations with language that recalls ancient descriptions of enargeia and the related concept phantasia, “imagination.” The results of modern psychology research into the “vividness effect,” especially the distinction between figural and ground vividness, show how enargeia may have increased the likelihood of Athenian jurors accepting an argument. Lysias deploys ground vividness in On the Death of Eratosthenes (1) to draw his jurors’ attention away from the question of entrapment and figural vividness in Against Eratosthenes (12) to focus their attention on the crimes of the Thirty Tyrants. Finally, Aeschines’ description of the Thebans’ sufferings in Against Ctesiphon (3) may have harmed his case by emphasizing a weak point through misplaced figural vividness.
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Abstract
In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.
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Rhetorical Accretion and Rhetorical Criticism in William Hazlitt’s Eloquence of the British Senate ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper examines William Hazlitt’s collection, Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), alongside our interest in reception, accretion, and the rhetorical culture of Parliament. I trace Hazlitt’s interpretation of oratory, including his analysis of remediated, printed speech. Hazlitt investigates the circulation and power of oratory in modern print culture, while beginning a multidisciplinary, career-long interest in rhetoric. By mapping how Hazlitt criticizes the status quo while avoiding partisan exposes of corruption, I argue he thinks like a critical rhetorician in ways that enrich our histories of nineteenth-century rhetoric and help us reflect on our own enterprise as historians of rhetoric.
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Editor’s Note: The Book Review Forum has become a regular annual feature of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. This issue’s forum features Ned O’Gorman’s The Iconoclastic Imagination. In this work, O’Gorman focuses on events that are so engraved on our memory that we can never forget where we were when we learned of them—the Challenger disaster, the assassination of John Kennedy, for example. O’Gorman examines in what senses and how these iconic moments have saturated public discussion in the context of neoliberal political economy.The responses to O’Gorman’s book by Nathan Atkinson, Timothy Barney, and Rosa Eberly that follow below, as well as Ned O’Gorman’s response, were presented in slightly different form in an ASHR session at the NCA conference in November, 2016 in Philadelphia.
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ABSTRACT In Book III of the Rhetoric, Aristotle focuses at length on the effect of lexical energeia. Scholarship on energeia in this passage almost always associates it with with analysis of enargeia in later texts. However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in Aristotle. Here I survey Aristotle’s conceptions of energeia across the corpus in order to understand Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely. I argue that Aristotle’s model of energeia has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many topoi, and that Aristotle’s rhetorical energeia cannot be conflated with enargeia.
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ABSTRACT This essay examines how Francis Bacon’s speech in Calvin’s Case (1608) and Edward Coke’s report on the case engage with the doctrine of the king’s two bodies. While both texts portray the subject as perpetually obligated to the king’s personal body, the ambiguity of the doctrine combined with the topical resources of early-modern legal rhetoric allowed for disparate constructions of the king’s two bodies that could at once support and displace the absolute sovereignty of the king’s personal body. In the end, I argue that both texts offer distinct contributions to the early-modern era’s budding anti-royalist discourse.
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Abstract
In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets three architectonic topoi in motion, charting them across a “range of political, aesthetic, and theological histories” (xiv). O’Gorman gives image, catastrophe, and economy greater presence in different sections of the book, enabling microscopic and macroscopic views of his particular objects of study as well as his ambitious inquiry as a whole. In method as well as conclusions The Iconoclastic Imagination provides a dynamic interplay of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism that together provide an inspiring example of what rhetorical studies—and rhetorical education—fully realized can see, make, and do.1In Part 2, for instance, what O’Gorman describes as “the heart of the book,” he “attend[s] not only to the explicit rhetoric of the texts … but also to subjectivities of spectatorship and the aesthetic logics of the technologies of representation in and against which they are situated” (xv). An example of the kind of profound insight such a method can provide comes two pages into O’Gorman’s conclusion: In the context of Hayek’s and Friedman’s argument that nation-states police economic systems, O’Gorman observes, The state appears as an instrument of necessity, rather than freedom. As such, we have a remarkable reversal of the ancient Greek distinction that Arendt discusses between the polis and the oikos. In the neoliberal version, politics is the space of necessity, and economics is the space of freedom. (199)To highlight the power of O’Gorman’s ideas and methods, I herein juxtapose his superlative study with another recent and worthwhile book that sets out to explicate our contemporary dis-ease.A metaphor O’Gorman uses at the end of chapter 1 pushed from likelihood to necessity my juxtaposition of The Iconoclastic Imagination with the proximately published Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by sociologist Jennifer Carlson. As O’Gorman sums up chapter 1 he observes, “though the age of market triumphalism may or may not be past, I think we remain today in important respects in the crosshairs of a contradiction with respect to the history of liberal democracy” (43). Crosshairs? And how.In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson states that she is “not … attempting to provide a value judgment on guns themselves” (10); nor does her book “attempt to advocate for specific gun policies” (9). Instead, Citizen-Protectorsexamines a world in which guns are a sensible, morally upstanding solution to the problem of crime, a world in which the NRA is not a hard-line lobby that distorts the political process in Washington, D.C., but rather a community service organization that serves middle America, and a world in which guns are attractive not only to white men but also to racial minorities. (9)Carlson’s training as a sociologist enables her to work from inside the norms and practices of men who use guns “to navigate a sense of social precariousness” (10). She analyzes what she first calls the “turn toward guns” and then “the celebration of guns” in terms of “three registers of decline”: First, “changing economic opportunities that have eroded men’s access to secure, stable employment”; second, “abiding fears and anxieties surrounding crime and police inefficacy, concerns that encourage men to embrace their duties as protectors”; and third, “a response to growing feelings of alienation and social isolation, such that guns come to represent not simply an individual’s right to self-defense but also a civic duty to protect one’s family and community” (10) and to police others—hence the book’s title, Citizen-Protectors.Carlson blames neoliberalism for the “age of decline” referenced in her title, and the loss of confidence in the state that Carlson posits harmonizes with O’Gorman’s account of legitimation crisis. Yet Carlson names an additional cause beyond neoliberalism for United States gun mania: what she calls “Mayberry,” “a fictional small North Carolina town on the long-gone Andy Griffith Show” (11). It is here that Carlson’s account becomes deeply unsatisfactory. In her words, “Rich in cultural imagery, Mayberry expresses a nostalgic longing for a ‘state of mind’ … about a particular version of America”; “Mayberry represents, in the American psyche, an idyllic space of single-family homes, nuclear families, community cohesion, and safety and security” (11). Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of the conceptual work she is asking a television program about a fictive town to do in a work of sociology, Carlson hastens to add that the real-life emergence of Mayberry depended on white flight en masse from American cities to suburbs in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and a manufacturing-based economy that offered men a breadwinning wage to support the nuclear, single-family household that it idealized. While white middle-class Americans chased the socioeconomic security of the white picket fence, their mass divestment from urban centers helped to further concentrate and isolate poor people of color, who were left behind in American so-called ‘urban ghettos.’” (11)O’Gorman’s profound and novel connection between legitimation crisis and the aesthetics of representation offers a much more comprehensive account of the historical and cultural factors that prompt celebration of not only gun culture but other cultures of violence in the United States. What sums up the neoliberal imaginary better than the celebrated—and globally marketed—figure of the American sniper?Perhaps my preference for O’Gorman’s transdisciplinary understanding of neoliberalism and its entailments is merely a consequence of my own pluralist standpoint. While I long ago lamented Plato’s having “put the -ic in rhetoric” by adding the suffix -ike to rhetor (“Plato’s Shibboleth Delineations”), I have come to see that Plato’s ambivalence about rhetorike is—I will take it to be—a gift for rhetorical invention and reinvention. O’Gorman confesses that his study—in his words—“ranges widely”; that suits this free-range rhetorician just fine. To appropriate Luce Irigaray, this rhetoric “which-is-not-one” at its plural heart remains paideia, a teaching art. No better gift to a teacher than for a student to reciprocate and—to use a metaphor which as a non-athlete I have not earned any right to use—raise the bar. By synthesizing rhetoric’s interpretive and productive capacities in a work of unimpeachable scholarship that ends by stressing rhetoric as a teaching art, O’Gorman has, indeed, raised the bar for rhetorical studies.In his postscript, O’Gorman makes a case for, in his words, “a multidisciplinary school for the artificial in all its aspects. This would include a substantive revival of the liberal arts” (210). Nowhere more than in undergraduate rhetoric classrooms, even and especially in the required writing and speaking classes—for all students, not just honors students—can such a revival make a material difference in the quality of our polity. Many thanks to Ned for this book, for his example, and for passing to another generation of rhetorical teacher-scholars the powers of rhetoric’s kaleidoscope, through which we can glimpse in motion ideas across time.
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Abstract
The most important thing to say here is thank you: thanks to Heather Hayes, Rosa Eberly, Tim Barney, and Nate Atkinson for so thoroughly and graciously engaging with my work. Thanks to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, which more than any other disciplinary organization with which I have been associated has been the source of so many of my “ah ha!” moments. And thanks to rhetorical studies in the United States more broadly, which affords me and many others intellectual and critical space to move. The Iconoclastic Imagination, as my commentators note here, ranges widely. In its scope, and not just its methods, it is a product of a paideia in the house of many rooms that is United States rhetorical studies. I am grateful.I must confess that, as I read responses and reviews, I am still learning about The Iconoclastic Imagination. It is a book, as Professor Eberly knows, that was long in developing. While clear in its basic arguments, it is also a book that you have to deliberately work your way through. As a reviewer in American Quarterly recently wrote: O’Gorman stresses at the outset that The Iconoclastic Imagination is not a “history” of neoliberalism in a conventional sense. There is therefore no overarching narrative to his exploration of different moments of catastrophe in the twentieth century. Instead, he offers a series of essays that, together, argue that the neoliberal imaginary “entails a discourse of transcendence that appeals to invisible, unrepresentable orders as the overarching means of organizing and safeguarding [American] society” (xi). It is an intellectual history, but also a history of state policy during the Cold War. It is a history of media, but also of political economy. It dabbles in the minutiae of film analysis, and it meanders from Byzantine iconography and Protestant iconoclasm through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime. It dizzies readers so that they might orient themselves in a free-floating neoliberal imaginary. It demands complete attention. If O’Gorman’s narrative approach seems at times bewildering, if it seems to dwell too often in the weeds or the clouds, the book is functioning as intended. (157-158)When I first read these words, I laughed out loud. It was a laugh of uncanny recognition, of surprise that another recognized in this project that I had been living with for so long my own artistic as well as intellectual aims. In fact, I did treat The Iconoclastic Imagination as a work of art, of rhetorical art. Its “bewildering” quality was in fact intentional—an effort at rhetorical iconicity in the way that Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs wrote about it back in 1990 (“Words Most Like Things: Iconicity in the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, 1990). But this “intentionality” is probably less a product of my rhetorical intentions than a reflection of my own attempts to come to terms with the bewildering quality of “neoliberalism” as both a critical term and as a political, economic, and cultural formation. The Iconoclastic Imagination is a book of essays precisely because it is an exploration, maybe even an investigation. As a friend of mine who is a Special Agent with the F.B.I. says, bewilderment can be a means of understanding what the hell is going on.Speaking of the F.B.I. and bewilderment, I want to focus the rest of this response on guns, a topic Professor Eberly raised in thinking about The Iconoclastic Imagination. Professor Barney wonders about the role of “the more quotidian rhetorical events of the Cold War play in the perpetuation of a neoliberal imaginary,” noting that The Iconoclastic Imagination does not address the “gaps” between the extraordinary or epochal events it investigates. He is definitely right about the gaps in my book. And if I were to try to fill them in, I would need to take on the quotidian interregnums between the “where-were-you-when?” events I examine. Guns, in fact, are a good place start. Guns are not only pervasive in American culture, they negotiate, on a day-to-day basis, many of the political issues I explore in my book: legitimacy, nationhood, nationalism, national politics, political representation, nature/artifice, and order.Professor Eberly points to the way in which guns circulate in American political culture as a counter-democratic, perhaps even counter-revolutionary, force. Much of The Iconoclastic Imagination is concerned with the sublime, an aesthetic that in the eighteenth-century was a means of rhetorically negotiating revolution and counter-revolution. The sublime, as I suggest in the book, is not just a rhetoric and aesthetic of transcendence, but marks limits and thresholds—that is, it is a rhetoric of limits. In the longer arc of American history, it seems to me that guns have stood as icons of the threshold of political legitimacy. As a revolutionary nation, the United States has long been a nation wherein political legitimacy hangs, like a loose chad, from the ballot. The bullet, in turn, is kept on reserve for a revolutionary function when the sovereign, the state, or the system is deemed illegitimate. Of course, this ballot-and-bullet logic stands at another threshold integral to The Iconoclastic Imagination, that between the American social imaginary and the actual operations of the American state. Guns, as Professor Eberly suggests, form a copia of cultural imaginaries that go well beyond Mayberry, and even the NRA: freedom fighters, survivalists, mafia bosses, kingpins, gangbangers, weekend outdoorsmen, James Bond, cops, and so on. Guns also, especially when amplified into bombs and missiles, have been a primary means of American global power since the middle of the twentieth century. Arms are, in this sense, “icons” of America, images that point beyond themselves without annihilating their own representational integrity. But this means that guns are not really sublime, but mundane.Yet, part of the pacifying quality of neoliberal discourse, and part of its ideological function, is to tell us that what I have just articulated is all wrong: arms aren’t really integral to American power or political culture, but rather part of the nation’s necessary emergency reserve. The essence of America is found instead in its economic productivity, or “freedom.” In this sense, neoliberalism entails an elite discourse positioned against “populist” elements that continue to insist on the primary Hobbesian natural right of self-preservation vis-à-vis guns. Neoliberalism would transform these gun-wielding citizens into participants in the “labor market” as part of a national project in pacification under the conditions of globalization. To which, in a kind of reversal of the ballot-and-bullet logic, these gun-wielding citizens approach the ballot as a kind of emergency reserve by which to protect their natural right to the bullet: and so, we have the NRA, Donald Trump, and now, perhaps, Neil Gorsuch.I think Professor Atkinson is quite right to draw our attention to indexes so as to better orient collective action in bewildering times. Guns, to be sure, are indexes of shifts in American political and economic culture. Gun ownership is rapidly becoming what Hobbes would call a natural right. Guns are, as Professor Atkinson suggests, “signs linked to their objects by causal connection.” My point in The Iconoclastic Imagination was not to cast doubt on the political potential of indexes so much as to argue that within the parameters of the neoliberal imaginary indexicality cannot be taken for granted—that it, like normative versions of rhetoric, depends on certain cultural and political conditions in order to survive, let alone to thrive. So, I would join Professor Atkinson in his call to citizen-critics (a phrase I first learned from Professor Eberly) to “direct our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation.” Guns and arms are an important place to look. I would only insist that we recognize just how difficult such looking is under neoliberal conditions. It can be downright bewildering.
May 2017
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Abstract
This issue, 20.2, 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 2016. Authors revised their conference presentations; the revised essays were vetted through a peer review process. Kathleen S. Lamp, who was the program chair of the symposium, and I serve as co-editors of this issue.
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Abstract
The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, exploited architecture to convey his sophisticated propaganda. He famously boasted to have found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble. This claim has been considered an apt metaphor for the establishment of an imperial state, though the quantitative, physical veracity of the boast has never been fully interrogated. A team from UCLA mapped and modeled the marble projects added to Rome in the decades of Augustan power, using rule-based procedural modeling to generate numerous 3D, interactive, geo-temporal simulations of the entire cityscape with each marble intervention placed in situ topographically and chronologically. Broad, pan-urban views of the city’s evolution revealed that Augustan marble projects were neither overwhelming in number nor readily visible. Examination of the urban experience over time and space, however, revealed that marble construction had a constant and pervasive impact. Daily urban residents found their movements blocked by marble transports and their senses bombarded by the noisy, dusty work at construction sites. Thus, it was not the rhetoric conveyed by architecture that justified Augustus’ claim, but the rhetoric of the building act that spoke loudly and persuasively in situ.
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Abstract
Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the ways that doing rhetoric in situ can reveal sets of decolonizing practices within interdisciplinary rhetorical studies. I discuss the idea of rhetoric in situ and its possibility for establishing sets of decolonizing practices in rhetorical studies drawing from fieldwork methods found in disciplines including anthropology. I advance a call for a more literal interpretation of in situ as one way of demonstrating the ways that historians and critics of rhetoric contribute to the conceptual world of publics to co-create imagined rhetorical possibilities with displaced persons. By way of demonstrating the methodological approach I’m advancing in this essay, I turn to a set of discourses born from my own fieldwork, completed on the northern border of Jordan in 2014, amidst the Syrian refugee crisis. In analyzing discourse from two refugee families living in the Mafraq Governorate of Jordan after escaping the violence of the Syrian conflict, I offer the concept of the “nomad citizen” as one way to expand understandings of citizenship in rhetorical studies to be more responsive to crises of transnational migration born out of colonialism.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Socrates is an oddity. This past decade has seen both his radical contextualization through archeological efforts to locate him in the public spaces of his native Athens and his radical decontextualization through studies of his reception in later times and places. What unifies those seemingly divergent investigations of Socrates is a fascination with discovering and discerning where Socrates belongs. Socrates’ own contemporaries called him “atopos” (odd, literally, out-of-place), and our contemporary attempts to locate him seem to oppose this displacement, on the one hand, and capitalize upon it, on the other. By seeking Socrates in his own time and place, we may come to understand better how his very movements marked him as out of step with Athenian norms and how such a demarcation affects how we map rhetoric’s borders during that formative time. By seeking Socrates in other times and places, we learn that Socrates himself is a rhetorical topos returned to again and again by people who find or think themselves similarly marked as odd, inappropriate, unbelonging, or out of place. This location work matters for Rhetoric because Socrates is such an atopic (odd) figure in our history.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an unprecedented number of Gnostic manuscripts were unearthed at sites across Egypt. Discovered on the Cairo antiquities market, in ancient trash heaps, and in buried jars, these papyri have radically refigured the landscape of early Christian history. Rhetoric, however, has overlooked the Gnostics. Long denigrated as heretical, Gnostic texts invite historians of rhetoric to (re)consider the role of gender in the early Church, the interplay between gnōsis and contemporary rhetorical concepts, and the development of early Christian rhetorical practice(s) within diverse historical contexts, including the Second Sophistic. In response to recent calls for rhetorical archaeology, this essay returns to Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi. These three locations refigure early Christian rhetoric(s) in situ.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Each year, members of the Moore’s Ford Movement conduct a memorial rally for and reenactment of a lynching that took place in 1946 near Monroe, Georgia. While a lynching memorial that includes a reenactment may sound suspect, particularly because lynching reenactments play a role in white supremacist activities, the Moore’s Ford Memorial’s unusual form offers affordances that other lynching memorials do not. This article argues that the memorial’s simultaneous attachment to and critique of necessarily inadequate traces of the past raise questions about what it means to remember violence in situ. Most lynching memorial rhetoric revolves around the narrow archive of lynching photographs produced, for the most part, by lynchers themselves. Through its combination of archival and lived memory, the Moore’s Ford Memorial both tells a broader story and draws attention to the archive’s inability to capture all that was lost. In dwelling in the gap between past and present, the memorial creates a generative space for community action.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT The landscape surrounding a memory site strongly influences how it is perceived by the people who visit it. As landscapes are prone to change over time, it is important to acknowledge the ways that such change exerts influence over visitors’ experiences. Through a historically oriented in situ investigation of Atlanta’s Civil War commemoration sites, I reconstruct a narrative from that city’s history that demonstrates how changing contexts, physical and social, can influence both the use of memory sites and the construction of future memory sites. I suggest that change in these sites’ fragmented surroundings prompted the construction of new monuments that were chiefly informed by ideological inadequacies created by transformed landscapes at older memory sites.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay uses the commemoration of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta to explore the connections among race, geography, and memory. I provide four examples of how race and memory have conspired to fundamentally alter the geography of the Delta. I suggest that these four examples challenge the historic articulation of memory and site. While site is traditionally figured as a stable ground for commemorative work, I suggest that practices of commemoration can transform sites of memory. I conclude by previewing a collaborative, digital, public humanities initiative called the Emmett Till Memory Project. The project seeks to commemorate Till’s murder even as it alters the meaning and practice of commemoration.
January 2017
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Lysias is best known for his portrayal of character (ethopoiia), his believable narratives, his plain or “Attic” style, and for the role he plays as inferior foil to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But he was also an important figure in developing, refining, and employing types of argument, including the rhetorical technique that would later be called the enthymeme. In On the Death of Eratosthenes, Lysias not only uses enthymemes, he highlights their use, selects a term (enthymizing), and demonstrates how “enthymizing” could be central to rhetorical artistry, to narrative development, to legal reasoning, and to political activism. Examining Lysias 1 not only deepens our understanding of Lysias’ rhetorical abilities, but it suggests that the orators had an important role to play in the development of rhetorical theory.
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Abstract
The review of work on ancient Roman rhetoric that follows below is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature in Advances in the History of Rhetoric—comprehensive reviews of scholarship in a given area. Subjects for these reviews and author-reviewers can be proposed to the editor or invited by the editor. Proposals from senior scholars working in collaboration with graduate students are especially welcome.
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“Government Is an Instrument in Their Hands”: Jeanette Rankin on Progressive Technologies of Democracy ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 address at Carnegie Hall is replete with metaphors of political machinery, systems, and technologies. We argue that the metaphor of political machinery is central to Rankin’s definition and enactment of democratic power because it creates a cohesive vision of systemic change that combines equal suffrage with other progressive reforms. While scholars have noted Rankin’s appeals to domestic ideology, the political-machinery metaphor cluster provides a broader justification for equal suffrage as a necessary part of a democratic system. Further, Rankin’s deconstruction of the complexities of political machinery works to enact Rankin’s political leadership as the first woman to serve in the United States Congress.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Limiting ourselves to scholarly books published in English from 2009–2016, we survey classics scholarship about rhetoric in ancient Rome from the late republic through the early empire. We seek traditional threads and growing trends across those works that advance our understanding of rhetoric’s practical, theoretical, and material manifestations during that time of tumult and transition. We begin broadly, using companion books to delineate three structural pillars in the scholarship: rhetoric as a formal cultural system, the republic as subject to ruptures and reinventions, and Cicero as a foremost statesman of the late republic. Then we move into scholarship that draws upon nontraditional rhetorical objects, such as art, and that moves into increasingly vibrant areas of interest in rhetoric, such as the senses. Overall, we find that classicists writing about ancient Roman rhetorical culture share with their counterparts in rhetoric an urge to test old verities and to add historical depth to larger scholarly turns within the humanities.
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Abstract
[1] Perhaps some of you came here tonight hoping to learn something of the state that would send a woman to Congress; you may have the impression that there is something rather unusual about a state that will select a woman to be its representative in national affairs.[2] I will put you at ease at once by assuring you that Montana is unusual.[3] I am very proud of my native state. I remember when I was a small child going into town from the ranch with my mother. When we went into the store, the storekeeper greeted my mother with the news that Montana had been admitted into the Union. I remember being quite impressed with the idea that we then lived in a state. I am still thrilled by the consciousness that I live in Montana, that Montana belongs to me and I to Montana.[4] However, I hope my pride is not such that will blind me to its many shortcomings. But I trust that it is the kind of pride that will enable me to see its imperfections and spur me on to lend my services toward developing a civilization that is worthy of the great advantage given us in our natural resources, in our vastness, and in our people.[5] At first one thinks of Montana as a mineral state, perhaps because the first settlers came in with the discovery of gold or it may be because we are surpassed by only one state in the production of silver and by another in the production of copper. We produce lead and zinc and have an abundance of coal. We have precious gems, sapphires and rubies. The development of the mining industries have been so rapid and so startling that we were quite dazzled by it and forgot that the other more modest resources were even more valuable.[6] Our forests of douglas fir, western yellow pine and western larch are as beautiful as they are valuable. We have a stand of living timber of merchantable size estimated at thirty-three billion board feet.[7] When Lewis and Clark journeyed up the Missouri river on their way to the coast as the explorers of the Northwest Territory, they encountered insurmountable obstacles in what the Indians call The Great Falls. They were forced to carry their boats twenty miles over land. One of these falls they named the Black Eagle Falls in memory of the Black Eagle they saw hovering over the water. I often wonder what Lewis and Clark would think if they could see the waters of these falls being used to produce thousands of electrical horsepower and could know it was carried over the mountains starting 3,200 feet above sea level going up 5,000 feet higher and then down 2,000 feet traveling 152 miles to the destination where it turns the wheels of machinery and lights the passages of mines thousands of feet underground in one of the biggest mining camps in the world.[8] Some of the reports of my election in the Eastern papers said that I campaigned on horseback. To us, campaigning on horseback is very commonplace. We are amazed and delighted that we can reach almost every point by train or automobile. I traveled 6,000 miles by train and over 1,500 miles by automobile, but I wonder if any candidate in any other state could ride 500 miles through the mountains on an electrified train. The last Saturday night in the Primary, I spoke at Roundup, then went to bed in a comfortable sleeper and arrived at my home 380 miles distant in time for Sunday dinner.[9] Not only do we have electrified railroads, but many women have electrified kitchens. It is the unusual small town which does not boast of electricity. While we have the water power developed to the extent of two hundred thousand electrical horsepower, we have made only a beginning. We have water power enough in our state to cook every meal that is eaten, to do the hard work and heat every home if it were developed and used for the people, besides using it for the industrial purpose we generally associate with electricity.[10] But just as we are beginning to appreciate the possibilities of our water power and electricity we are discovering that we have natural gas in great quantities. Last winter was one of the severest winters we have had for many and the in the town of in the of the state for they the one had to up in the to not even the The are on the gas hundred miles in to it in their It is such a discovery and been at such distant that one even as to the possibilities of But with these the natural is the just the used for We have We have as as the state of or as are with these as Some you will have to toward the last the to so and the is the one is the that to the Last Montana enough to of for every woman and child in the hundred thousand Our of is to that of and put The of and in the and Montana the for the of at the with the idea and with the reports that Montana almost one and a as many of to the as the in the Our to the work of women as as The on the in is by a woman on of and almost of to the We for our we small and I have said of the water power is of resources, we have only made a to of we have two national The where we the into a with of Montana is because of the They from from every state in the from every in the I was in the first of the of the were from every for news and have that for every the to of I have in on in other there been a woman to native state. many such so there is of one one of the the and another the The the of Some came were Some women are there because their came and they could not be but of because they had an abundance of and and could see the in a they had that could not be in an and more and for more that they They came with their and with a to the and the that are to It been that the and women so in a The still have a very of the which women have Some can remember the women the see in the mining camps or on the in the and in the They have the women to the and the are to the One of our women at a said that that a came into and you remember at and am I do to memory a woman one to to the and to a went up the and through the over the down the other the river and the on to the town mining camps had traveled miles on horseback night was The woman the The I am I you were for the and so I I would up and you I am for have been by such but in there is women will not through to such miles may not very to us but it was a way one of my in the last a woman came up to me to that had miles to the and going that woman I came miles in a and miles in a is a miles in an and I am going I could many of the women on our the women came to their and developed We are so the beginning of We have so many in rapid that something us with hope and We are for in living in of in in We being the When I went to and that it would be an to be the first state in that of the to woman one me that they were the first state to the and they to be first in One very of that in the and been a for its The was one had the to from The for were about for the was not enough of a in the of the to a there was more I have you of some of our I will to be and you of our Our are about and with their the last of the of the is We have that our other natural resources are in the of a our water and our the more is by two and small We in other and that the is of their the we that the that the resources of our state are the the resources of the other they the resources of the and they are into other We have our with by in the state and by We have given our almost forced on for Montana had the of the which of thousands of of to the not because of the of but because many of our are made for the and of a We had when the could a for when with The was when the could over to the or the and a ranch for But from the on the ranch we have to the traveling on the these in we the of the of We of in and of of the industries that are of the state because we While the are in and they are very in and there were thousands of of The of the is not of and are very We are beginning to have we have We have of Perhaps not our of but they are We have our our is into the of and is then to the is for a ride on the train and so Our is of Our were from the where it was a to to we have the When our in and are we will still have these and women are to be and be for as When we have once for the of other will be for some way of our we are of a in the We are beginning to that the people, of the our only We can remember the which we saw with our of land. perhaps the the great of and been by the and a of which it in But the of can be It is of and national we the with our of production in such have we to the of it to have so and these the of the for a in their will be we have in in in if we are to have The first be through the they can for It is to the but it is not so The is the great of the We appreciate that the can the While there is to from an and a and of and may the for a However, we learn by our The from in are that to a more in the of to the of The is the by which we into and its been its the time that the of have been we have developed the that from the to the and the in these been the of The the the they or would their the the was given the power to for for and to be the from in of for the of work is and and the is a in into with the of the the time have had the their been for women I have it to be with to appreciate they have been Not only the many of had a a their but the of can boast of the only a I would have more I very it is to the of I was made of when an in of my to one of my to think even the When I the I was of for but in one is of so many it is to The women of are still to their and that they have to It is hard to about such a with the of on there is for the women to to think or to work for their they have the the and the that with the they have The women of have the of or not they were to their for they had of but when was it was However, then the of have given their women and will not be The women have the for the that in then they have it because they are women and have a to They have it because they are to a in be not only at the by and but in and in our national and the of are the will be to with the of our When we for a in the that in many the very of the we are not of what the have in the but we are to be to do our It is not to the to do their work and work and it is work to for the We a great about but are we we that we of we the through which the of the are made other have we the and for It to me that one of the of our civilization is When we that it is only that we have and we see and that the of their to have a still but there can be is an of the of we would have we the of is the of the We to the child an One may be in developing a higher of by a and more in through the will when they have been to The is an of and the are to the in and in or which have to do with the are going to be in when they know these are to They will see that every that in the in the or in the to do or with the They will for the when they appreciate that the is an in their which may be to their is over the can its not even the in the very what to be the of the When I went into was very that I to about woman but at first that was the in the state, and in the I if were a me I you that their just from the of the I about the their the I was very and the and the the is the of the the to have their perhaps the that will be in our national when a woman can be not only by the of women the by the of women and by the of are that the of our be I to that there is for the women to think to or to work for they have their they have the the and the that with the they have state the to for where a of the people, the do not a is not that is if we are to have a in We have the machinery by which the may be One of the and that we have in Montana is the by which a may of where is on election While Montana is a state does not us from traveling The last two election I and women in every town had their in other I a from a small town in which of a to the woman on a the carried a which for for for and to put Montana home is in was the winter in but not with using an the first every and every other was forced to be on election had the as at We have a that been of great to the on election It the of in any even the of to the is and any on election the election of the candidate for it is carried The is in the of the by that the of or for and the the of the and they are for the of in be so However, only a beginning been made a One that will the and be to the candidate it the One that will a of and an of our of is which was will be is the kind of a the is to be the machinery be such that will have a in the of the The more that is the we will to the of the Montana had a for the was to for their The of Montana are that they are of their We know we would have a in if we had a for the last for we one hundred and thousand and had only with only thousand had one in had over the of a in is even more in the just the of and just two and the of so a in the of a in be for on the of the for with the of as of and with in the thousand a state with the of only thousand at the election of would the of the that a and one one Montana a which a in in I that the in of the is but can that it are generally of or are the of some I do not for but Our that may with the of or of to for any on any the candidate may a of the on which to be and a to be on the the candidate or have in a of the and the to a of the in the last The with the The be a is by the state and to every may in in which to their and the candidate for the for the in the is to by the of the They that it is is by the that the do not for While the is for the candidate the work in the by the candidate in the may to are The to the state of two is from a the However, there are of It to me that any which does not the for a of is for any to the other any which will the to a to the will in The of some in the of by the is many thousand it was with the the is to for the great advantage that it the of the of the on the there is way to the of the for will be The will learn by its and it will learn to the more and more We have that the in our state to for on of the are some in every state an election if they had the of a and if the that they had the candidate on being could not by an these are the a great about the not into the for will into to their to the it to Our that the of the be on the was great that the would for the first two there being two at came I that I to the of Montana every time I think of I they would for the first two on the and The for our can The first two about thousand the the the thousand and the thousand the two were and the thousand The and the last were with the a that the on the is of small Some the in so that will an of at the but where the can One of our that is an over the in some is that it does not the to is given the of the At our last there were in the the in the to then was to one in the and two in the The of there being a on the of one to select a candidate in the is for there would be a time when there would be on the state or there was in the for the state on the the was so that which are for for state their there were for great advantage in the is the of being in the that are by the I I will by our last While Montana been state in the the for very in the last there were only two in the came for the candidate for and was a and a went to the women and said was a but to stand for came in first with the of for and a of the by an I came for state and national and for it from the I thousand and the candidate for had the the the so when we for purpose the were in of a forced the to put a in their the are with will that was rather a It was the of the that made such a It the to that the to to were of a of and were to their a there is to the for a there will be for will the to select by the and and they will to do it will have a to the more the of the of the people, the have the of the to the extent of for the of their the would be to some by which they over their they be or The is the which the of have used to the in the other western by While Montana been so to such a we the of it very The a by which the can the they have when or It is on the idea that an is a and can be at any The of the is more the of to the to an the is by the the can at any time so have the to the of a the are the and the is a to a from The machinery of the is very the of a are with they can by and a for from election is and at election the is a candidate and are in the The been in in the enough to its to a of the by its are It is a the very of which the of its only very it been The one the It the from to a or in that it in the power of the other it the from in of the the It a small of from and an when is the of the I of an where a of the town was by a of They to up in to The of the to be They have the if you the The not to the with their for they it was the the as an of the our for the and have The had a very on or the or by a is not in any way by the of the but it may be very through the and the and a by a of It in the of and a may be the or the other the is a any or of may a for a and when they have the of a of they may have it to the at for their or the by the may be carried to the for their going into The the the power over The of such be by the or of from the quite from the great of it is to the it in the to a of their of of are to the people, and the of a is on to the of a of the for through It a and a by the for and an for and development is One of the and been that of more to the of the When it is that by the can be by the in a or that can be if the to the the more and with they would if they there was from the of the Our are to the They their and to the of the so that their will not be through the of and The machinery by which the is by some of the of The is generally by a of are in its the which would the in the the work with a of which a of and in a an be by the work with a consciousness of the that if the is to the of the it be to the the may be not to for a in is that that will or will generally to the The first the is is to the of a of to that there is in a for the of such a as is in the a of for as the the for it is and many of the western the is by a by the state and to every not election the of the and the as it will on the with the and of the as by the and of the an to the and not only the of a into the but it a these of an is to the and an is for the development of and women are with rather with and are to their to the every a to such as to be for the and that the will to a call for when it is by a is by the of our in The a to in Montana was being by a of one of which was in of the with a The other of the were to that they the time to it The was given of the and of the would a and so on and at and a and it with the It is a of the Montana and more one election for the people, and is It would be to in a by the and a by machinery in the of is enough in the to the lead in the and not only a more in the with to but it about a more the and the have been in the of the there is a of their and an to work their It is the of Montana, and to a or the of every state, to work a of by which the power is in the as a and is by or by by I have to point some that to the more power in and even to the extent of the to the which been to the However, the great of work be by and we have that even with the and as a our are still not representative of the We are to the that the in any of the power that been but it rather in the of the of to in their idea of to its is the of the by the When we our we in many of of the by a of the people, a of in of the to the of the for the The of the election of the the the and the the of the had been in the as a of that would have to the and the of the would have and the of the to the the one and the and the still a of in to of the of of in that been in our my is the point in the of representative as and that a of the are my as an I have been by the are about in my and they have been there for the last any more hope of a representative on the of of one in the of Great in been by the of the of so that every in the state may a of or as the may The is that the state is in by from the or the the in is would be the even where are not for our to of the of the is to lead to the to in a of been which that be in the of its to the in a state which for of that of or would be to one every candidate is of and every is to one representative for a of the would be to of to as the with more or been in for some in and The of the in these been the of for the of a in and the The of is an of idea in and is with It is being and and as an of a representative The in are The of and the of the of the of and the of and are to The machinery and the work their if they are to be made to I have some of the to the in the to their of a But in is not We have in as is by the do the that the of the of and of the produce is to be It is by that the of are to be and to be not only by the of and it to of it which is but another kind of is a we into I it as a of what is that we may have in The more we reach in the more will we the time when we will a with the for and with the for
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Abstract
ABSTRACT With this essay, I present an argument about the performative and perceptual nature of prudence. I support my argument through a case study in which I examine Barack Obama’s response to Edward Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures about NSA surveillance programs as a way to observe prudence in practice. In my analysis, I identify three ways in which Obama performed prudence. First, he established his image as a prudent and informed leader. Second, he established surveillance as a prudent and historically effective practice ensuring national security. Third, he established the contemporary policy of surveillance as a prudent and deliberate choice reached through discussion and participation by all citizens.
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Abstract
The archival turn in composition and rhetorical studies has yielded yet another gem. Lori Ostergaard and Henrietta Rix Wood’s edited collection demonstrates how small-scale, inductive work at local...
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Abstract In 1917, Jeannette Rankin became the United States’ first female member of Congress. This is a critical edition of the speech Rankin gave before 3,000 people in New York City on her way to be sworn in to office. Her speech promoted her home state of Montana, woman suffrage, and direct democracy.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 address at Carnegie Hall recast a religious rhetorical form—the Puritan errand—for the democratic needs of the early twentieth century. Rankin’s “democratic errand” positioned the American West as a place that nurtured the truths of democracy and could help purge the nation of its political sins.
September 2016
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In Tradition of Speaking Fearlessly: Locating a Rhetoric of Whistleblowing in the Parrhēsiastic Dialectic ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay examines how the dialectic over the presence of rhetoric in Michel Foucault’s catalog of truth telling in ancient Greek and Roman texts informs a separate but similar dialectic over the relationship between parrhēsia and contemporary whistleblowing. I posit that the argumentation justifying the practice of government and military whistleblowing used by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning parallels the dispute over rhetoric’s place in parrhēsia. This essay plots out how the arguments for or against the presence of rhetoric in parrhēsia routinely manifests at specific junctures in the whistleblowing timeline, indicating how the dialectic of parrhēsia naturally leads to a rhetoric of whistleblowing.
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Medical Discovery as Suffrage Justification in Mary Putnam Jacobi’s 1894 New York Campaign Rhetoric ↗
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Abstract This article examines the suffrage rhetoric of nineteenth-century American physician Mary Putnam Jacobi. As a medical researcher, Putnam Jacobi believed that women’s participation in scientific research and their use of scientific arguments would improve the public’s perception of women, making woman suffrage more likely. As science grew in influence around the turn of the century, deploying its persuasive resources became an important part of both men’s and women’s social-issue rhetoric. This analysis of Putnam Jacobi’s suffrage rhetoric identifies two science-inflected arguments: first, she asserted that scientific findings had already prompted governments to be more inclusive, creating a science-driven model of social reform; second, she contended that women had met all the qualifications to vote, offering an empirical-evidence argument for suffrage.
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Abstract
In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender.Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion … can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220).Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.In addition to passive spectators, Kastely notes “the creators of discourse” and “the audiences who can listen to or read that discourse with a critical awareness” (xiii). He then develops a theory of cultural criticism for the non-philosopher, but the hierarchy of the philosopher and non-philosopher creates a doubleness, demanding critique from Plato’s critical readers. Even critical readers are not creators of discourse (rhetoricians?): readers do not represent their desires or create discourse, nor do they constitute their own identity or the state’s. Perhaps Kastely finds evidence for Plato’s constitution of “an audience who can rethink its cultural heritage” (80), but would truly critical readers accept the privilege of philosophers who deny their ability to create? The binary of reading and creating seemingly would frustrate truly critical readers. Would they not desire to create?Another doubleness: If mimesis is banned from the ideal state of Kallipolis, then what is its place in the performance of the state of Republic? Kastely writes mimesis into the state, reading The Republic as epic poetry, and hence he reads the dialogic state of Republic in relationship and preference to the monologic Kallipolis. Yet critical ironies abound in the tension between the imagined Kallipolis and the narrated, multifaceted state of Republic. Let me quickly, and perhaps fairly, trace Kastely’s argument for mimesis. He sees Plato’s difficulty with imitative poetry as an interpretive tension between mimetic entertainment and rhetorical, critical reading, writing “(t)o read the Republic rhetorically requires a reader to go beyond the surface and to understand the issues that the surface text both represents and distorts” (112). Ignoring the critique of poetry as counterfeit reality, Kastely argues that the right kind of reading leads to philosophical truth. Mimesis works pedagogically: in the Republic, “the rhetorical action of the dialogue” is “an enactment of persuasion that provides guidance on how to use poetry rhetorically to effect practical and individual change” (62). That is, the audience should read the Republic’s mimesis as an enactment of persuasive technique, not as drama, for Plato would “undo or minimize” cultural influences by acknowledging the rhetoricity of all discourse (79, 101). In Kastely’s epic Republic, readers engage the dialogue’s narrative, and it “educate(s) them on how to interrogate works of cultural rhetoric” (62). Readers thus become suspicious of the forces shaping their souls, moving away from shared culture toward self-cultivation. But do rhetorical reading and self-cultivation save mimesis? Do they respond to or change common culture? Can’t self-cultivation remove a citizen from common concerns and the polity? Is rhetorical reading the controlled action by which critical readers are separated from the creators of discourse? Doesn’t reception differ from production?Kastely appreciates Plato’s desire for a skeptical reader, and his rhetorical reader is a provocative concept, but he tends to interpret the Republic through dialogic resolution and logical consistency. Might I suggest that Plato is sometimes better read sophistically through contradiction, paradox, and bivalence? In doubleness, Plato violates his own dictates. For example, Socrates defends true philosophers through a tale of low, counterfeit reality. He tells the silly tale of a blind, deaf, and ignorant ship owner faced with sailors wrangling to be captain (488). Seeking the job, the argumentative sailors deny any need for knowledge of sailing. Consequently a false definition—captain as a windbag—emerges. Plato calls this analogy, compiled “out of lots of different elements, like the goat-stags and other compound creatures painters come up with” (488a). Analogy perhaps, but also narrative, full of bad behaviors (including murder), an extreme counterfeit reality: in offering such a tale, Plato assumes his audience is already able to critique mimesis, avoid categorical mistakes, and modulate their identifications with bad characters. He assumes that the dialogic pedagogy has worked or is unnecessary, and perhaps he tests our skeptical ability to read goat-stag extremes.Kastely’s systemic reading of the entire Republic brilliantly draws attention to Plato’s performative method, revitalizing and embodying Platonic rhetoric, but it understates Plato’s doubleness, playfulness, puzzlement, and skepticism. Plato, with his longing for total revolution and his fractured fairy tales, is the writerly critic of writing; the dramatic censor of plot, setting, and character; and the myth-teller who denounces mimesis. Given Plato’s denials and dissatisfactions, his doubleness, tensions, and contradictions, Kastely rightly reads him for performance and rhetoricity and wisely confronts the two states, Kallipolis and Republic. Without a doubt, this book begins another millennium of Platonic delight.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In moments of crisis, people often make sense of the present by activating memories of the past through particular tropes of public memory. Classical analogies are one such trope, suggesting a sense of continuity between a (seemingly) stable ancient world and a chaotic present. Despite their prominence in American rhetoric, classical analogies have received too little attention from scholars of rhetoric. In the following, I interrogate the use of classical analogies in nineteenth-century American rhetoric— a period in which the classics were a vibrant aspect of public culture—by analyzing analogies between the fall of the Alamo and the fifth-century BC battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae analogies were activated as tropes of public memory to warrant the formation of a defiant political identity for a Texian community reeling from defeat. Through an analysis of key texts that utilized Thermopylae analogies, I show that classical analogies sometimes go beyond comparisons between the past and the present to act as “mirrors” that inspire identification with, and imitation of, the ancients.
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Abstract
I am grateful to Arthur Walzer and Heather Hayes for arranging the opportunity for three scholars to respond to my book, and to Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda for their responses.Because he so thoroughly disagrees with my argument, Professor Krajewski offers me a helpful place to begin to clarify that argument. He argues that, whatever the intent of my argument, my reading of the Republic relies on the presumption that rhetoric is subservient to philosophy. My concern, however, is not with some hierarchical arrangement but with addressing questions essential for the theoretical grounding of rhetoric. Because these questions do not admit of empirical or fixed answers, they are the kinds of questions that the rhetorical theorist Michel Meyer characterizes as philosophic (74).Professor Krajewski is troubled by Plato’s unfair characterization of the sophists. No one can argue that Plato’s representation of the sophists is friendly, but I would argue that it is more nuanced than a simple dismissal of them as corrupt. More to the point, corruption is really not the complaint that Socrates brings against the sophists in the Republic. Indeed, he explicitly defends them against the charge of corruption and criticizes them, instead, for confirming rather than challenging the city’s views on justice.For Professor Krajewski, Socrates’s various depictions of the audience show contempt for interlocutors and readers, characterizing them as children, sheep, and worse. But Plato’s critique of the public is grounded on the assumption that we do not know who we are. This lack of self-knowledge is not one that divides elites and masses but is a condition of the entire human race. For Plato, the philosophical issue that necessitates his dialogue arises because the citizens of Athens are justified in what they believe, responsible in the way that they hold those beliefs, and, despite that, they are in deep self-contradiction. Glaucon argues that Socrates is simply the latest in a long line of apologists for justice who perpetuate a public discourse in which no one believes. This discourse has led unintentionally to a corrosive situation in which no one believes that he or she really desires to be just. Glaucon’s request, in which he is joined by his brother Adeimantus, is for a new form of discourse that has the potential to be genuinely persuasive—they seek from philosophy a rhetoric that can honor and address the concerns of the average citizen.Professor Krajewski raises the important issue of the relationship between ruler and ruled. To understand this relationship, it is important to realize that for Socrates this is an issue of persuasion and not of legislation. The rule that occupies Socrates is effected through public discourse; hence the request for a discourse that can genuinely speak to what the public believes. Glaucon does not seek advice on how to govern the citizens but on how to speak to them. The goal is not compulsion but persuasion.In pointing to the methodological role of doubleness in the Republic, Professor Lyon zeroes in on an important aspect of the dialogue, and she makes me wish that I had given more explicit attention to it. Although she admires my approach to the Republic, neither I nor Plato has convinced her fully that the goal of reconstituting a democratic citizenry can be accomplished through an act of persuasion. At issue is the way in which the audience participates in this reconstitution. Professor Lyon advocates for a process of deliberation, for such a process would invite active rather than passive spectators. She is uneasy with what seems to be a passive role for the spectator or reader of the Republic. I think that her insight into the doubleness of the dialogue provides a way of addressing her concerns.If part of the rhetorical effort of the dialogue is not simply to provide an intellectual defense of justice but to alter the way that its readers desire, so that they genuinely desire to be just, how can a text achieve that end? Professor Lyon argues that Plato attempts to achieve that end “through erasing alternative desires.” I don’t see any effort to erase desire. What I see is a text that is attempting, as a text, to transform desire, and I see it doing this through recourse to a doubleness that produces a dissonance, which, in turn, opens up justice as an object of desire. To suggest how this happens, I turn to Anne Carson’s account of the tension at the heart of the erotic experience. Although she does not use the term doubleness to characterize erotic engagement, that is what her account suggests. For her the moment of desire is when the actual and the ideal are brought into a proximity that both offers the hope of a new identity at the same time that it reminds one, painfully, that that identity is, in fact, not the case (17, 36, 69). The dissonance between the ideal and the actual fosters desire. Such a dissonance is at the heart of the Republic, as the Kallipolis as an impossible ideal is brought into continual contact with a reality to which Socrates and his interlocutors seek to be adequate. Out of that tension a desire for justice is born.Professor Svoboda and I agree that there are strong reasons to read Plato’s Republic, not as an anti-democratic text, but as a more complex response to a set of historical events that both created a series of crises for Athens and that led to the establishment of its democratic constitution. He rightly notes that Plato’s text makes deliberate allusions to those events, and that its opening book, in particular, engages those events and would be so viewed by fourth-century Athenian readers. I agree fully. Further, I agree with his argument that Plato’s philosophy is best understood as a “situated practice responding to particular problems.” Such a perspective supports a reading of philosophy as a particular kind of effort to engage responsibly the events that provoke critical reflection. It recovers a purposiveness for philosophy and makes clear that philosophy is inextricably joined with rhetoric.The point whose force I felt the most was Professor Svoboda’s reminder that the peace achieved in Athens after the Peloponnesian wars was attained only by an agreement of both sides “to forget injustices that had been done to them during the civil conflict.” This is a sound historical point and, as Professor Svoboda notes, this agreement turns the “Republic’s common sense understanding of justice on its head.” He goes on to make an important point: that it precisely the dissonance between Plato’s account of justice and Athens’ important pragmatic response to those serious injustices that marked civil strife at the end of the fifth century BCE that helps us understand the possible philosophical motivation behind the Republic. In offering an account of justice and making clear that such an account requires an extended philosophical justification, Plato is challenging his readers and confronting the costs hidden in the agreement that had succeeded in establishing peace. The question becomes: how to develop a complex understanding of the problem of justice sufficient to the world as it is and that provides a genuine reason to be just? It is this type of question that is at the heart of a philosophical rhetoric as a discourse essential to the psychological health of individuals and the overall health of the commonwealth.It is my hope that we have begun a discussion that relocates what I take to be an old, tired opposition and recasts it as a theoretically more compelling inquiry into the importance of rhetoric for values that are foundational to our culture and that shape us as creatures of language who participate in those cultures.
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A Reevaluation of Alcuin’s Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus as Consular Persuasion: The Context of the Late Eighth Century Revisited ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT Alcuin’s Rhetoric possesses a singular relationship to the history of rhetoric and to its own unique historical period. The puzzlingly diverse evaluations of the Rhetoric’s purpose and “importance” are often clouded by the question of its subsequent historical influence. The purpose of the present argument is to present contextualizing information based on newly emerging historical data surrounding the mid-790s, the date of the Rhetoric’s composition, and its Augustinian influence. Alcuin’s Rhetoric is an early example of consular rhetoric to “advise the prince” that forms, in itself, a deliberative argument regarding a very specific set of historical exigencies that relate to legal policies toward unconverted subjects in the Carolingian empire. Alcuin’s motivation for the composition of the Rhetoric can be understood in the historically imminent adoption of the Saxon Code and its contradiction of the rhetorical counsel found in Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus.
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Abstract
While finding material to admire in The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, I present a trio of significant presuppositions within Professor Kastely’s text in order to show that they are wrong, or, at least, questionable. It’s difficult to imagine a reader of his book who could deny the author’s profound concern for justice, for example. However, the misguided, well-intentioned can, at times, be a greater danger than obvious opponents bent on our demise. It will become clear that Kastely and I work in the same state, but do not live in the same political neighborhood.What interests Kastely from the opening pages of his text is “the philosophical importance of rhetoric” (ix). Now, this runs smack into extensive evidence in Håkan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists. Tell’s homework reveals that the distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to establish distinctions, to set boundaries, and to insist on a hierarchy of disciplines that persists with Kastely’s help.It’s an ugly story we get from Tell. The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. The Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for interactions with the young men. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men is a life that might be less than human. Gerald Bruns describes the philosophical life meant to function as a model for disciples of Athenian philosophy, what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (Bruns 14).The launching pad for Kastely’s text requires an acceptance of a several preconditions, such as that Socrates and Plato endorse dialogue and dialectic. My counterproposal, following Kojin Karatani, is that Plato’s dialogues, while looking for world-like conversations, are monologic (Karatani, 69). Many rhetoricians know that the dialogues turn out to be long stretches of Socrates speaking followed by an interlocutor’s response of panu ge, or something similar, phrases that are usually read as ongoing agreement, reluctant or otherwise.Kastely issues contradictory statements on the topic. At one point, Socrates exhibits “gentleness” (81, 113, 114), but in other contexts is said to shame interlocutors. At other points, Kastely offers evidence that Plato/Socrates hold audiences in contempt through various depictions that refer to the public as children, sheep, or worse (see Republic 488b, 590e–591a, 598c, and Kastely 42, 117, 180, and 189).Nancy Worman asserts: “The language that characterizes Socrates and his opponents shares more with the kind of parodic, insulting usage found in mimes, Attic comedy, and oratorical invective than it does with historical prose writing that depicts public speakers” (Worman 154). Platonic exchanges tend to denigrate and reconfigure interlocutors who do not accept the rules of the game set out by the philosophers (Karatani, 70).The philosopher Hans Blumenberg contends that the philosophical insult extends over the Republic: “The viewers of the ideal [thinking here of the figure who leaves the cave and then returns as representative of philosophy], the owners of the actual, have constantly found it easier to deride others who wanted to see with their own eyes than to show them what they could gain if they ceased to want only what is available physically” (Blumenberg 20).We have no shortage of scholars who want to read the Republic straight, adding in, where hermeneutical problems crop up, excuses about “Socratic irony.” Anyone working with Platonic texts ought to be aware of evidence pointing toward a deliberate Platonic agenda of esotericism described in the Seventh Letter. Plato: “We did not use such plain language as this—it was not safe to do so—but we succeeded by veiled allusions in maintaining the thesis that every man who would preserve himself and the people he rules must follow this course, and that any other will lead to utter destruction” (332d). In the same letter, Plato more than suggests a hermeneutical method that anticipates esotericism whenever a reader encounters a text by someone “serious,” and Plato fashioned himself “serious” (see 344 c & d in the letter).Arthur Melzer confirms Plato’s esoteric elitism (Melzer 21), using 341e as the proof text. I do not propose that Kastely has missed the boat on Plato’s esotericism, though some evidence points that way, such as the comment that Plato does not have a “fixed position he is trying to disguise” (35), or a line about those who “whisper in the ear of power” (17). Kastely then constricts options to an either/or: “This leads to a stark choice: either philosophy reconciles itself to being an esoteric form of discourse, persuasive only to a very limited number of practitioners and hence irrelevant to political life, or it discovers a way to speak to the multitude who are not philosophers.” Plato did not intend to make philosophy’s code “open source.” Kastely writes, “The philosopher becomes politically active in response to human need. If this seems like a convoluted understanding of philosophy, it is helpful to remember that it is an account of philosophy intended to explain to a non-philosophic audience the peculiar and privileged authority that should be granted to philosophy to rule” (155).Kastely: “The allegory of the cave establishes the legitimacy of philosophic rule—it is the tale of a humble and reluctant king who is moved by a sense of social responsibility to assume a burden of leadership for the benefit of a people” (141). Kastely feels that he cannot have his rhetoric without marrying rhetoric to philosophy, naming philosophy master of the household and asking rhetoric to sign a prenuptial agreement. “There’s a need for an unequal distribution of power in the city” (91), Kastely asserts. Kastely’s “heroes” are philosophers, in part because “philosophy, as Plato imagined it, is an arduous pursuit that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and tremendous stamina of which few are capable” (xv). From Kastely’s perspective, you and I are here to obey the practitioners of esotericism. We are the “they” of this sentence: “They need to obey rulers, even if they do not fully understand them” (133).Thus, I conclude with a question that discloses my political neighborhood, one illegal in the United States since 1954. The question comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (15.4): “It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten…. In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?”
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Abstract
When Hawthorne traveled north to Niagara Falls, he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was on a writer’s journey to see America and sketch its beauty. In June, 2016, I journeyed 740+ miles roundtrip to see Niagara Falls for one brief day. My journey was both similar to, and monumentally different from, Hawthorne’s.As many have said, the Horseshoe Falls of Canada—undoubtedly more splendid than the American Falls, which are stunning in themselves—are nearly indescribable. When Hawthorne went to Niagara in search of the sublime and the grand in America, he dramatically restrained himself from immediately viewing the falls, worried they would not meet the expectations set by numerous authors’ tour books he had read or that his experience would be tainted by that of others who had not yet seen the falls for themselves. He first listened to their roar. Then, when he allowed himself to see the falls, he spent days and nights trying to apprehend them for himself. His final view of the falls was from the famed Table Rock on the Canadian side. While Hawthorne struggled with tasteful tourism and criticized tourists who viewed the falls through others’ eyes (ah, he would have had a few problems with me thinking about him and his trip), or who consider manmade feats more admirable, he seemed to most want to just be with the falls—sitting alone, contemplating, and communing with them. By the end of his visit, Hawthorne was able to meditate deeply on the falls despite the presence of other people. He simply “got it,” as we might say.The Niagara Falls that both Hawthorne and I saw are majestic and amazing. What words really can describe them? I spent hours simply looking: snapping some photos (while Hawthorne could only sketch with words), sitting and staring, or closing my eyes to muse by its roar. For nearly two hours, I watched the late afternoon sun-bow shift with my position and perspective, coloring the scene through the mist.Nonetheless, the Niagara Falls that I viewed are vastly different from those Hawthorne experienced. For example, only in the eighteenth century had Table Rock, on which he and other nineteenth century tourists sat, emerged from the water itself—part of the erosive power natural to waterfalls. In 1818, 1828, and 1829, parts of Table Rock broke off in minor rock falls. Hawthorne sat upon their remnant. In 1850, nearly a third of Table Rock collapsed, thundering into the gorge (“Table Rock, Niagara Falls”). Today, after other rock falls and a dynamite blast in 1939, there remains only a bronze tablet marking the mid-point of Table Rock, pointing visitors to its remains—and Hawthorne’s seat—below (see Photo 1). Photo 1.The author at Table Rock.The falls themselves also changed. In the early nineteenth century, both the American and the Horseshoe Falls were much closer to Table Rock, which their water flow had shaped over tens of thousands of years. For example, according to “Online Niagara,” the Horseshoe Falls eroded approximately 3.8 feet annually from 1842 (the first year of official study) to 1905. The erosion changed to 2.3 feet annually until 1927, after which the diversion of water through hydroelectric power stations diminished the erosion to approximately 1 foot annually. (By contrast, the American Falls now are eroding at a mere 3–4 inches annually, although their erosion rate was once much higher.) Today, one must walk over one hundred yards further in approaching the threshold of the falls. When Hawthorne watched the falls from Table Rock, unencumbered by the railings and fences that marked my journey, he sat at the edge of the falls themselves. Did his feet kick stones to the mist below?Water treaties between America and Canada were instituted in 1909 and 1950 (“A River Diversion”). They continue to regulate boundaries and the sharing of water for power; sanitary and domestic means; water navigation; and, of course, to preserve the natural wonder of the falls. Hence, the waterfalls continue to thunder, but their intensity has been diminished—not that we would see or feel that diminishment, never having experienced them differently—as hydroelectric power companies on both the American and Canadian sides divert some of the water that used to rush over the falls. At nighttime, the flow over the Horseshoe Falls is cut by half. The daytime flow of approximately 600,000 gallons per second is left higher for tourists, yet it is still not equal to the brute power Hawthorne witnessed in 1832 (“Facts about Niagara Falls”). Indeed, the powerful water with which Hawthorne communed was likely more than twice that which I experienced in 2016.Today, people can view the combined Niagara Falls from the air by a touring helicopter or from the water by one of four boats—two from each side—that leave from their docks every quarter hour in a carefully orchestrated dance. On the American side, one can either take an elevator up to an observation tower to look over the falls, or take an elevator down to experience the “Cave of the Winds,” in the process becoming soaked with splashing water and experiencing some of the falls’ true power. On the Canadian side, although one can no longer climb down to the base behind the Horseshoe Falls, the “Journey Behind the Falls” uses an elevator set deep in the rock to deposit tourists to a different viewpoint at the base of the falls. Thus, by air, river, elevator, and stairs, the falls are accessible in ways Hawthorne could not have dreamed. He had never seen an airplane, let alone a helicopter. Hawthorne cautiously climbed up and down rocks to his views. I imagined him using the curled maple staff with carved fish and snake images, the craft of a Tuscarora Native American, to steady his feet on the slippery rocks (Hawthorne 56–57). What boats in his time would risk the trip into the mist of the thundering water, and, indeed, why would they? He had never imagined the ubiquitous tourists, taking selfies at every view of the falls; yet, with Hawthorne’s devotion to experiencing the falls for himself turning over in my mind, I could picture him shaking his head, penning critiques of their shortsighted, sightseeing eyes—eyes that failed to perceive what he had spent days attempting to apprehend.Despite all the wonders I have experienced that Hawthorne had not—from traveling by jet to scuba diving to gazing at the Hubble’s views of the cosmos—the falls held me: beautiful, amazing, awesome. I was mute. Almost two centuries ago, Hawthorne used words to describe the same-yet-different falls that I viewed. I have only a few words to add. Not one drop of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that falls per second will pass through the falls again in the same exact form. Every drop of water that falls is in exactly the right place at the right time of its existence. As was Hawthorne. As was I.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Travel Sketches and Samuel P. Newman’s A Practical System of Rhetoric: A Case of American Belletristic Theory on Praxis ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT Historical study of teachers and students reveals how rhetorical theories influence writers (McClish 2015). This case study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose considers the nineteenth-century rhetorical teachings of Samuel Phillips Newman, Hawthorne’s professor at Bowdoin College, a student of Blair, and a proponent of rhetorical taste. Using Newman’s 1827 A Practical System of Rhetoric and Hawthorne’s 1832 travel sketches, we analyze Newman’s influences on Hawthorne—particularly taste and the sublime and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne as a writer in the travel sketch genre. We consider Newman’s influences on Hawthorne as evidenced by writing practices that Newman had recommended or disapproved. In particular, we examine Newman’s explanation of taste and its complementary construct of sublimity and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne. We argue that Hawthorne both wrote within the paradigm of rhetorical taste as Newman taught it and struggled against its constraints to find his own perceptions. Furthermore, we see this struggle happening within the context of Hawthorne’s exposure to Newman’s American-inflected belletrism that emphasized both a discriminatory principle of taste and the growing body of American literature.
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Abstract
From time to time, we will dedicate our review section to the discussion of a new work in rhetoric studies. In these more lengthy review sections, which we are calling “Book Review Forums,” we will invite scholars to write short responses to the chosen book and invite the author to respond to the reviews. We hope this will offer a robust space for discussion, debate, and deliberation over important book-length works as we think about advances in the history of rhetoric.Forum: James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of PersuasionThis issue’s forum focuses on Professor James L. Kastely’s 2015 work, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion (University of Chicago Press). Within rhetoric studies, Plato is often cast as rhetoric’s foremost critic, and, at least since Karl Popper included Plato as an enemy of the open society, as a foremost critic of democracy. In his book that is the subject of this forum, James L. Kastely offers a new reading of the Republic that challenges both of these characterizations. He argues that Plato’s goal in the Republic is to develop a rhetoric for philosophers that will persuade non-philosophers of the value of justice and the importance of living the moral life. On Kastely’s reading, Socrates presents this rhetorical approach to persuasion as an alternative to dialectic, which the interlocutors in the Republic judge to have failed to persuade the non-philosopher of much, except that philosophy is useless pettifoggery.The responses to Kastely’s book by Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda, as well as Kastely’s response to their judgments that constitute this forum, were first presented at an ASHR session at the Rhetoric Society of American conference, May, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia. The panelists revised and shortened their original oral presentations for publication here
May 2016
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Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay discusses the philosophical grounding of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in order to appreciate the rationale for his view that rhetoric is central to education. This appreciation for Quintilian’s orientation is intended not only to garner a deeper understanding of the principles behind his view of education but also to offer insights to the issues that we share today with respect to teaching oral and written expression. One of the central topics of this essay is how Quintilian reconceptualized the concept of declamation away from its sophistic forms to a problem-solving system of casuistry that provided a ratio for developing proficiency in adjudicating issues of value and preference.
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Student-Driven Imitation as a Means to Strengthening Rhetorical Agency—Or, Propelling Quintilian’s Chapter on Imitation into Today’s Teaching ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACT Quintilian’s notion of imitation is often acclaimed for its focus on invention and appropriateness and for highlighting attunement to individual talent. Yet these aspects tend to be somewhat neglected in the practice of imitation as shaped by the classical rhetorical tradition, which primarily focuses on imitation exercises for beginners. This essay accentuates Quintilian’s chapter on imitation, which, as stressed by Murphy, is aimed at the mature student, in order to propel these precepts into today’s teaching. Specifically, this article advances a pedagogy of student-driven imitation constituted of five dimensions and characterized by the student’s own choice of text, valuing reflexive process over mirroring, and strengthening rhetorical agency. The exposition of student-driven imitation is supplemented with questions that students might address and excerpts from a student’s work.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay discusses the relationship between Quintilian’s vision of the ideal orator and his emphasis on declamation. I argue that, for Quintilian, declamation was much more than a useful exercise. Rather, it was a method for training orators to experience the world from a variety of perspectives, something Quintilian considered to be both an essential rhetorical skill and an important quality of the “good man speaking well.” I further argue—taking an exercise from my own first-year writing classes as an example—that contemporary adaptations of ancient rhetorical pedagogy often fail to fully engage with the ethical dimensions of exercises such as declamation. I conclude by calling for a greater consideration of the ethical dimension of ancient rhetorical exercises in our contemporary adaptations of them so that we can truly meet Quintilian on his own ground.
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Abstract
In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Quintilian does not offer an explicit mechanism that connects eloquence and ethics. This essay suggests that this omission is a consequence of the significant role that imitation plays in Quintilian’s pedagogy. This essay further suggests that the particular habits of mind that are cultivated through imitation are those that are associated with civic virtue, and it offers some ways that civic virtue might be cultivated in contemporary classrooms through a pedagogy that relies on imitation.
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Abstract
When I first learned of Dave Tell’s project, I expected his book to be dominated by religious exegesis. I suspect I am hardly alone in this assumption. Nowhere is confession a more preeminent and slavish requirement than in religious practice, specifically in the Judeo-Christian idioms that dominate the American psyche, and our blind(ing) faith in religion’s standard of confession affects the public’s consumption of media. Consider American Crime Story (FX) portraying the O.J. Simpson trial, Confirmation (HBO) about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Making a Murderer (Netflix), a documentary series on the trials of Steven Avery, or Serial, a podcast series—the fastest to garner 5 million downloads—covering the murder of Hae Min Lee for which Adnan Syed was convicted. The popularity of these shows manifests the ubiquity of what Tell calls “confessional hermeneutics,” the “collaborative but always contested activity of deciding which texts do, and which texts do not, qualify as confessions” (3). In Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America, Tell outlines various forms of confessional hermeneutics to foreground the cultural significance of confession.The point Tell drives home repeatedly is that confession matters; it is a critical cog in the machinery of American social life. In the twentieth-century, Tell finds that confessional hermeneutics “concretely shaped the public understanding of six intractable issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy” (4). Understanding confession’s role relative to these six crucial cultural topoi requires “those of us invested in public discourse to understand the confession, not as a stable, ahistorical form, but as a practice informed by competing traditions” (144). Failing to do so risks ignoring the “genre politics” (183) that make confession “a powerful but volatile political resource” (187), an “important, if often overlooked form of cultural intervention” (184). To support this argument, Confessional Crises rehearses six key confessional crises spanning the twentieth-century: Bernarr Macfadden’s 1919 launch and subsequent transformation of True Story; William Huie’s 1956 publication of the confessions of Emmett Till’s murderers; the publication in 1967 of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; and the confession controversies sparked by Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton. For Tell, cultural politics trump generic constraints: each case illustrates that “the rhetorical function of a confession is determined more by the political needs of the confessant than by the formal features of the text” (124).Take, for example, chapter one on the subjective sexual moralism in Macfadden’s launch of True Story magazine. As Tell recounts, Macfadden reasoned that the best way to inoculate the public against sexual malaise was by presenting them with the unvarnished truth about sex. For Americans to avoid the sexual pitfalls Macfadden adduced to ignorance and scripted silences around the body, “the American people needed a moral reeducation” on matters of sexuality and “just as insistently that they needed a rhetorical reeducation” (28). Why the rhetorical reeducation? Because Macfadden needed real-life stories to advance his moral-political agenda. Through sidebars and editorials, Macfadden coached readers on how to read the stories he published as authentic accounts of ordinary people. The arrangement was straightforward: the “unvarnished prose guarantee[d] the authenticity of the tales, and the authenticity of the tales guarantee[d] the propagation of moral virtue” (41). Frank testimony about bodily fantasies and functions was Macfadden’s antidote to ignorance about sexual matters.In the 1930s, Tell finds that Macfadden pivoted from sexual politics to class politics, changing the import of confession. This is the story of chapter two. As millions battled the scourge of the depression, True Story began to foreground “a well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed” (47). Why would as staunch a moralist as Macfadden engage in such a mendacity? Herein lies the re-conscription, Tell holds, of confession, except this time with capitalism not moralism as the telos. Macfadden needed to transform his readership into a consumer class so he could sell access to advertisers. Just as he had instructed the public in the appreciation of plain speech, Macfadden directed his rhetorical pedagogy at America’s captains of industry: “he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile and eager, consumers” (55). Using Macfadden’s example, Tell articulates confession to both sexual and class politics.Or take the controversies about William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, the subject of chapter four, which Tell uses to connect confession to the politics of violence. Two arguments about the reception of Styron’s Confessions form the vectors of this connection. First is that whether one deemed Styron’s book an expression of Turner’s admission turned less on the fidelity of Styron’s content to Turner than it did on the politics of the different respondents. At stake was how one understood the nature of slavery and the status of the African-American within it: “was the American slave a ‘Sambo,’ a happy-go-lucky, bumbling fool, given to petty thievery but fundamentally docile” owing either to racial inferiority (as Ulrich Phillips believed) or to slavery’s brutality (as Stanley Elkins and Styron held), “or was the slave a seething embodiment of resentment, incensed by the brutality of the ruling class and prone to rebellion” as Herbert Aptheker argued? (99). Differences of opinion on these matters framed the contested reception of Confessions. Second is that differences of opinion between White defenders of Styron and his Black critics were based in competing ideologies about “the legibility of violence” (112). For many White reviewers of Confessions, violence was simply beyond understanding. They wondered, “what could have prompted someone to lead a rebellion so violent?” (106). Enter confession: “only confession—an insider’s account—could possibly redress so profound a mystery” (106). “For Styron’s black critics,” however, “Turner’s rebellion was perfectly legible” (112). The formerly colonized and enslaved required no special erudition, no fancy literary conceit, to understand the rebellion. Confessions, to these critics, read instead as Styron’s confession to imbibing “the fantasies of the southern tradition” (115) that sanitized the violence of slavery while exaggerating that of slaves like Turner. Confessional Crises thus associates confession, through a postcolonial hermeneutic, to violence.Readers of AHR will appreciate the theoretical history Tell brings to bear in his analyses of Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton, the subjects of chapters five and six. Yes, argues Tell, Swaggart fashioned, with the aid of the leadership of the Assemblies of God, a confession he and his allies presented as a Christian confession. The imbroglio he found himself in demanded that. Yet despite appearances, Swaggart’s, Tell insists, was no Christian confession. Instead, Swaggart’s apology bore the blueprint of a distinctly modern secular confession. Specifically, “his emphasis on the inadequacy of speech, his devaluation of grammatical sensibilities and logical coherence, and his emphasis on his humanity” (136) constituted Swaggart’s rhetoric as a modern secular confession. To prove this point, Tell contrasts the genealogies of classical-Christian confession (123-4; 129-30) and modern secular confession (130-36). By retracing to Periclean Athens those tenets of classical confession that were eventually appropriated by Christianity, this discussion carefully historicizes confession in religion and politics. But this retracing also exposes the Athenian-Augustinian model of confession Tell endorses to criticisms first raised by feminist and critical race scholars. If Augustine’s Roman Empire and contemporary America attest that confession can function as “a means of reversing the political currents of pridefulness” (130), both societies also evince the limits of that power. What confession, whose confession, could have challenged the pride that drove slavery and genocide in the Roman Empire, or “shock-and-awe,” the “New Jim Crow,” and the FISA court in the American?In chapter six, which focuses on the crisis ignited by the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, Tell isolates confession’s function in democracy. Re-contextualizing Clinton’s rhetorical performances of 1998 in light of statements Clinton made during the Gennifer Flowers controversy in 1991-92, Tell credits the president with showcasing the ideal of democratic public confession, a “belief that public confession must hold in equipoise the competing needs of contrition and legal argument” (162). Prosecutor Kenneth Star and the many critics of Clinton’s vexatious semantics upheld an established tradition of confession, one in which, “only an unlimited admission of guilt counted as a confession” (162). Confession, the reader learns, influences how the public understands politics.By the end of Confessional Crises, the reader has gathered an expansive vocabulary for understanding the power of confessional practices. But how to assess a project so expansive, so revisionist, and transdisciplinary? Let me end by returning to the beginning. The introduction of Confessional Crises advertises the book as “the first reception history of confession,” (6) acknowledging the influence of Steven Mailloux. This hat-tip points us to Mailloux’s ambitious project for criteria by which to judge Confessional Crises. Since Mailloux explains that “Reception history is rhetorical hermeneutics” (ix), readers can thus pose Mailloux’s famous definition of rhetorical hermeneutics as a question of Confessional Crises: does it use “rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (ix)? Anyone who reads Confessional Crises will find that in it, Tell fulfills this tripartite obligation elegantly. He relies on discourse, develops fresh ideas about confession, and generates a record of the past.
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An Essay on Current Quintilian Studies in English, With a Select Bibliography of Items Published Since 1990 ↗
Abstract
It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.