ABSTRACTThis essay makes the case that the account of delivery featured in the Institutio Oratoria remains germane to contemporary speech pedagogy. Quintilian emphasizes that (1) powerful delivery is central to eloquent public speaking; (2) delivery functions in concert with the other canons of rhetoric; and (3) delivery is governed by general rhetorical concepts such as decorum and ethos. Furthermore, scrutiny of Quintilian’s perspectives on gender and power can lead to fruitful rethinking of current pedagogy’s traditionalist tendencies.

ABSTRACTThere has been a surge of scholarly interest lately in the progymnasmata, those ordered exercises in composition that played such an important role in rhetorical education from antiquity to the Renaissance. Comprising an integrated program in literary, civic, and moral effectiveness, they offer a compelling alternative to language arts pedagogy today, which seems too often driven by the goal of “college and career readiness.” But to be truly useful as a pedagogical model, the progymnasmata need to be embedded in something like the comprehensive educational philosophy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

This year 2016 marks an important six hundredth anniversary in the history of rhetoric and education.In September, 1416, the Italian humanist and book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini visited a Benedictine monastery in St. Gall, Switzerland. There he found—not in a library but in a dungeon which he declared was not fit for a condemned man—the first complete copy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (Orator’s Education, 95 CE) that any scholar had seen for nearly six centuries. Suddenly aware that it was a valuable book, the German monks refused to let Poggio take it away, so he was forced to sit down and copy it by hand over the next 54 days.The reaction to the discovery among humanists, especially in Italy, was swift and fervent. Leonardo Aretino wrote, “I entreat you, my dear Poggio, send me the manuscript as soon as possible, that I may see it before I die” (Shepherd 105). Lorenzo Valla’s first book (1428) was a comparison of Quintilian and Cicero. Later Quintilian was to influence Guarino da Verona, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Philip Melanchthon, the major Lutheran educator. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was one of the first rhetorical texts printed (1470, twice), and an even hundred editions appeared in print during the next 75 years. The work immediately ranked in popularity with the rhetorical works of Cicero and Aristotle, its precepts soon becoming a key segment of the “General Rhetoric” (rhetorica generalis) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ultimately the work permeated English rhetoric texts and eventually came to North America through Harvard and the parallel influence of writers like Hugh Blair.Why did Poggio’s discovery find such a ready response, and why did it lead to centuries of influence? One reason was that fragments of Quintilian’s work had been known throughout the Middle Ages, a tantalizing sample (textus mutilatus) which was obviously incomplete but which at the same time gave great promise. So the author’s name was known to scholars. Humanists like Gasparino Barzizza and Petrarch so admired Quintilian that earlier they had tried to fill in the missing sections themselves. Moreover, the discovery came at a time of humanistic debates about public life, literature, philosophy, the place of rhetoric, and the role of education. Thus the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio suddenly provided a thorough and balanced account of rhetoric embedded in an educational system offering to prepare young men for public life; it defined the perfect orator as “a good man speaking well,” combining morality with efficiency.What was nature of this text that so inspired readers over so many centuries? It was the longest and most ambitious treatment of rhetorical education in the ancient world. Its audacious aim is stated simply: “I am proposing to educate the perfect orator.” The Institutio was composed in Rome about 95 CE by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a retired legal pleader and teacher. Quintilian was one of the most famous teachers in Rome, flourishing under three emperors, and under Emperor Vespasian was one of the first teachers to receive public moneys for his teaching.Quintilian declares in his General Preface that he had taught for twenty years and then spent two years in his retirement researching and writing the Institutio. It has been described as four major works blended into one: a treatise on education, a manual of rhetoric, a reader’s guide to the best authors, and a handbook on the moral duties of the perfect orator (Little 2:9). But the fact is that every segment of the work is a teaching tool. The lengthy section on rhetoric, for example, is provided for the use of students, not for its own sake; Quintilian is not a rhetorical theorist like Cicero, but a teacher using anything (including rhetoric) that can help make his students better and more efficient citizens.The Institutio Oratoria is a large work of about 700,000 words, divided into twelve Books (libri)—a size which could make some readers reluctant to take it up. But Quintilian himself offers a helpful summary of the work to guide the reader: Book One will deal with what comes before the rhetor begins his duties. In Book Two, I shall handle the first elements taught by the rhetor, and problems connected with the nature of rhetoric itself. The next five books will be given over to Invention (Disposition forms an appendix to this), and the following four to Elocution, with which are related Memory and Delivery. There will be one further book, in which the orator himself is to be portrayed: I shall there discuss (as well as my poor powers allow) his character, the principles of undertaking, preparing, and pleading cases, his style, the end of his active career, and the studies he may undertake thereafter. (Institutio, Prooemium 22–23)A little later he adds that this is not an ordinary dry textbook, but that instead he has “gathered together in these twelve books everything that I think useful for the orator’s education” (Institutio, Prooemium 25). He begins in the cradle—the very first sentence in Book 1 says that “As soon as his son is born, the father should form the highest expectations of him” (1.1.1). He ends in Book 12 with a discussion of when to retire and what to do after retirement.Quintilian’s educational objective is to prepare the perfect orator—a good man speaking well—through a systematic program described in Books 1 and 2 (early education) and Book 10 (continuing adult self-education). His specific goal is the inculcation of what he calls habit (Greek hexis), an ingrained disposition in the writer/speaker to be able to use the right language in any situation. This is not the modern sense of “habit” as a blind repetitive tendency beyond the individual’s control. It is closer to Aristotle’s concept of “facility” (dynamis) in his Rhetoric (1.2; see Murphy; Murphy and Wiese). His aim, in other words, is to change the psyche of the student, to make him “rhetorical,” not merely by having him learn a set of rules, but also by having him exercise a wide variety of language uses so that ultimately he has familiarity with a large number of options. So Quintilian does include an extensive survey of the five “parts” of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but illustrates them with profuse examples to demonstrate that a great variety of possible language uses can occur in every situation. “Rhetoric,” he says, “would be a very easy and trivial affair if it could be comprised in a single short set of precepts” (2.13.2).In the classroom he employs systematic exercises in four categories: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. In the process called imitation (imitatio), model texts of various genres are read, analyzed, and imitated to familiarize the student with a variety of styles. A set of twelve specific graded exercises called progymnasmata, each more difficult than its predecessor, draws the student through increasingly complex thought and wording tests. As the student becomes more proficient, he is introduced to an exercise called declamation, in which a problem is set out and the student is charged to prepare and deliver an oration to solve the problem. Declamation becomes the main teaching method for older students, since it includes every feature of the whole preceding instructional program. (It also became so popular later as an ornamental display outside the classroom that for centuries onward it became a form of public entertainment by adult performers).Can the educational principles and methods of this famous author be applied in today’s world as they have been for almost two thousand years? We, the authors of the essays in this special issue on Quintilian, believe they can. So do others (Knoblauch; Kasper). We appreciate that this brief survey cannot do justice to the humane wisdom Quintilian applies to student psychology in his search for ways to enable the development of the autonomous language-user, nor to his appreciation of the almost infinite variations possible in the human interactions faced by speakers and writers. But readers are encouraged to pick up any part of his book and read two or three pages to get a sense of the intensely personal attention he devotes to every subject he looks into. Readers, on the other hand, are also encouraged to look to his general principles, not merely to details that might seem remote to a modern observer.The essays offered in this current issue of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, then, are offered as possible answers to the question posed in the preceding paragraph.

ABSTRACT Quintilian makes writing one of the four interrelating elements (with reading, speaking, and listening) to be used in producing in his “perfect orator” what he calls “habit” (hexis), or the facility of being able to write or speak well on any subject. It requires constant study over time, requires organization, and is reinforced by constant practice. His practical observations on writing may well have value for us in modern times.

ABSTRACT British rhetorical theorists demonstrate a persistent interest in Demosthenes, but their interpretations of his significance reflect different understandings of rhetoric. This article uses reception theory to illuminate how British depictions of Demosthenes at different moments in history reflect writers’ values and rhetorical aims. The focus on Demosthenes as a model of rhetorical prowess becomes particularly important for nineteenth-century British theorists who conceive of rhetoric as an individualistic display of linguistic virtuosity. Viewing Demosthenes through the lens of reception history reveals the inherent instability of a disciplinary history that is not only shaped by important figures, but also constructs those figures in ways that reflect shifting scholarly values.

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the tenth-century pedagogical text Ælfrīc’s Colloquy as an instance of Anglo-Saxon rhetorical instruction in the spirit of the Greco-Roman progymnasmata. Through a comparison of the text with classical sources such as Priscian’s adaptations of Hermogenes and Isidore’s Etymologies, this essay concludes that Ælfrīc knew of the progymnasmata and that these exercises served as the basis for rhetorical instruction that emphasized Benedictine ideals of communal concord through trained speaking and writing. Drawing on the commonplace of the three estates, the Colloquy demonstrated the ideal role of rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon society while modeling traditional progymnasmata exercises such as fable composition, impersonations, and comparisons.

I am honored to be the fourth editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (AHR). I walk in the shadow of distinguished predecessors, and I pledge imitation as the currency of my respect and gratitude. One can never equal the contribution of a founder, but to Rich Enos, who began Advances in 2002 and served for six years, I pledge to continue his expressed and enacted commitment to encouraging, aiding, and then publishing the work of beginning scholars. By his example, Robert Gaines, editor from 2004–2011, teaches me to be a proactive editor—not to depend for the content of the journal exclusively on what comes in through the transom but to create platforms for experienced scholars to address timely questions in colloquies and to invite and publish translations and critical editions as well as thesis-driven essays. Katya Haskins, who served from 2012–2015, made special issues a regular feature of the journal, a practice that I will continue, but even more importantly worked intentionally to expand the scope of Advances to ensure a robust and inclusive understanding of “the tradition” in terms of the periods emphasized, national literatures covered, and the media examined under the sign of rhetoric. I hope to publish any quality work in rhetoric that benefits from being examined through an historical lens. I also welcome the work of graduate students, will initiate a regular invitation to submit proposals on special issues, and will regularly publish book reviews and invited essays that assess the state of the research on particular period or topic.I encourage scholars working on topics related to historical rhetoric to submit their essays to AHR. I promise you a fair and quick review process. If your essay is accepted and published it will be available to patrons of the over 2000 libraries that subscribe to one of the Taylor & Francis packages that includes AHR.

ABSTRACT The emplacements of rhetoric are manifold and the inquiries into the topologies of rhetoric are ways of understanding developments in rhetorical theory. To these ends, I contrast in this article the invocations of place in rhetorical theory old and new. In this long view, the spatiality of rhetoric appears to be multifaceted. I show that in Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, spatiality is topical, figured metaphorically and literally, and functions as a precedent condition for rhetoric. I argue that modern/postmodern theories differ from traditional theories of rhetoric not because they rely more or less on the materiality or immateriality of place, but because of their orientations to place as heterotopic, that is, as fluid and contingent. I then offer an account of how heterotopic rhetoric challenges orders of knowledge allowing for ever-new articulations through a close reading of Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. The heterotopology of rhetoric proposed here expands understandings of the heuristic function of place. The essay considers the implications heterotopic place holds for identity and subjectivity.

ABSTRACT A theoretical bias pervades enthymeme. Most studies of the enthymeme are thoroughly Aristotelian and syllogistic, while the study of enthymemes in ancient oratory is virtually nonexistent. Yet the Attic orators used enthymemes commonly and consistently, and as practitioners, they have something to teach us about enthymemes that theorists can’t. In this article, I begin an examination of oratorical enthymemes and the variety of their use and offer a preliminary understanding of the “oratorical enthymeme” as a rhetorical technique. I conclude by briefly touching on the connections between oratorical enthymemes and ancient theory.

Advances in the History of RhetoricAnnual Publication of the American Society for the History of RhetoricEditorEkaterina HaskinsCommunication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteEditorial BoardDon Abbott, English, University of California, DavisJanet Atwill, English, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleBeth S. Bennett, Communication Studies, University of AlabamaRobert W. Cape, Jr., Classical and Modern Languages, Austin CollegeAmitava Chakraborty, Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of DelhiClive E. Chandler, Classics, University of Cape TownChristopher P. Craig, Classics, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJeanne D. Fahnestock, English, University of MarylandLinda Ferreira-Buckley, English, University of Texas, AustinDavid Frank, Clark Honors College, University of OregonCheryl Glenn, English, Pennsylvania State UniversityRichard Graff, Writing Studies, University of MinnesotaS. Michael Halloran, Communication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteDavid Hoffman, Public Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New YorkBernard E. Jacob, Law, Hofstra UniversityNan Johnson, English, Ohio State UniversitySahar Mohamed Khamis, Communication, University of MarylandJanice Lauer, English, Purdue UniversityAndrea Lunsford, English, Stanford UniversityNoemi Marin, Communications, Florida Atlantic UniversityGlen McClish, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State UniversityMarina McCoy, Philosophy, Boston CollegeRaymie E. McKerrow, Interpersonal Communication, Ohio UniversityThomas Miller, English, University of ArizonaJean Dietz Moss, English, Catholic University of AmericaJames J. Murphy, English, University of California, DavisSean Patrick O’Rourke, Communication Studies, Furman UniversityAngela G. Ray, Communication, Northwestern UniversityAndreea Deciu Ritivoi, English, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPatricia Roberts-Miller, Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at AustinJohn Scenters-Zapico, English, University of Texas, El PasoJohn D. Schaeffer, English, Northern Illinois UniversityRobert Sullivan, Speech Communication, Ithaca CollegeJane Sutton, Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, YorkDave Tell, Communication Studies, University of KansasArthur E. Walzer, Communication Studies, University of Minnesota—Twin CitiesBarbara Warnick, Communication, University of WashingtonKathleen Welch, English, University of OklahomaMarjorie Curry Woods, English, University of Texas

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that for John Milton in Paradise Lost and Areopagitica freedom was a rhetorical quality of action: an ethical capacity to address a situation by means of language. I contrast Milton’s approach to that of Thomas Hobbes, for whom freedom was only a state. These reflections suggest that Milton’s rhetorical freedom, a capacity to act amid oppositions by virtue of the wisdom and power of discourse, offers the outlines of an alternate modernity.

ABSTRACT Freedom is a contested concept, at once bound up with and promising transcendence of social bonds. This article examines the understanding of freedom particular to rhetorical theory, a troubled freedom that is the negotiation of constraint. Articulating this concept in negotiation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “universal audience,” the article explores a key implication of troubled freedom for the governance of human persons. Given that human personhood is a rhetorical phenomenon, that persons emerge in flows of tendentious discourse, the article urges a rhetorical approach to democratic constitution writing. Constitution should be composed to foster the rhetorical capabilities of demoi.

ABSTRACT This article considers versions of kairos within the context of World War I and the 1917 Espionage Act, a U.S. law that significantly narrowed parameters for free speech to protect the national interest. Many political activists and pacifists who perceived the war as an opportune moment for a critique of state power and corporate interests suffered material consequences for making such a critique—or remained silent for fear of consequences. While affirming the materiality of kairos and the centrality of body performance, I suggest an expanded version embodying the principle that freedom to respond to kairotic moments is always a product of struggle.

Looking back at my four years as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am thankful to all the authors, reviewers, and special issue editors whose hard work we see represented in volumes 15 through 18. I am also proud of the diversity and high quality of scholarship included in these volumes. I think that the journal’s contents prove that the history of rhetoric as a field has evolved beyond its original preoccupation with ancient and medieval rhetoric into a robust scholarly enterprise that illuminates rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy in all historical periods. What binds this diverse set of studies together is the historical lens, a perspective that is sensitive to discontinuities and disruptions, to power struggles, and to the performative complexity of rhetoric as an embodied practice.This is not to say that we all abide by a fixed methodology. On the contrary, historians of rhetoric do not take their approach for granted but instead continue to debate how their scholarly habituation and lived experiences influence their theories and methods of historical research. Witness, for example, Practicing Histories: On the Doing of History and the Making of Historians in Rhetoric, a special issue guest edited by Christa J. Olson (volume 15, number 1, 2012). As Olson remarks in her introduction, “historiographers take aim at points of disconnection” (3) and stitch together places and moments that may not appear related.That this sort of opportune stitching together can generate powerful insights is apparent in the journal’s special issues, most of which began as American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) symposia. Rhetoric and Its Masses (guest edited by Dave Tell) and Rhetoric and Freedom (guest edited by Susan C. Jarratt) offer not only broad-ranging explorations of their respective topics but also demonstrate the value of historical inquiry into some of the most abiding issues in rhetorical studies. ASHR symposia and special issues that grow out of them allow us to bring together the work of established and young scholars alike, and as such they illustrate the value of ASHR and its journal as sites of scholarly training of historians of rhetoric.In addition to themed special issues, I would like to highlight some of the exciting trends that I believe are gaining prominence in the history of rhetoric. One such trend is the exploration of spatial and visual practices in different historical periods. For example, Diana Eidson’s study of the Celsus Library at Ephesus probes the power of spatial rhetoric to address its historical audiences, both elite and nonelite. Or take Julia Marie Smith’s article on The Book of Margery Kempe, in which she examines the contributions of multiple hands to this medieval manuscript’s central narrative. Not incidentally, both authors use images to support their arguments. Although Advances can accommodate only black-and-white illustrations in print, the journal’s online version allows one to view their color versions.Another trend is the investigation of the relationship between rhetoric and religion in diverse historical and cultural contexts. In the past three years, the journal published studies of theological influences on rhetorical theories and pedagogical doctrines of such figures as Augustine, Austin Phelps, and William Enfield; analyses of the argumentative strategies used by medieval rabbis and Jaina mystics; and essays on the use of religious appeals deployed by nineteenth-century African American speakers. Besides being “sermonic” to begin with (Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks 1970), rhetoric often derives much of its poignancy from a connection to religious rituals and imaginaries. Examples of this connection are ubiquitous in contemporary culture; consider President Barack Obama’s spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the slain parishioners of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on climate change. Historians of rhetoric are particularly well positioned to shine the light on such interventions.I do not mean to suggest, of course, that classical and medieval rhetoric have been exhausted as areas of inquiry; quite the opposite. If recent publications are any indication, we still have much to learn from reinterpreting Plato and Aristotle as well as from revisiting the Middle Ages. As someone who is personally invested in regarding afresh rhetoric’s ancient heritage, I wholeheartedly agree with Olson’s (2012) claim: “we look again at old ideas and find ourselves with new questions” (7).This is why I am thrilled to welcome Art Walzer, a renowned scholar of Greek and Roman rhetoric and a beloved mentor to many historians of rhetoric, as the journal’s incoming editor in chief. I am confident that under Art’s guidance the journal will continue to deepen our understanding of traditional sites of historical inquiry as well as grow in promising new directions.Ekaterina V. HaskinsRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

ABSTRACT In spring 2012 the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot became world famous when five of its members were arrested for their “Punk Prayer for Freedom” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow. Western media swiftly embraced the group and celebrated it as an icon of youthful female rebellion against Putin’s authoritarian regime. Yet the Western reception largely obscured the “regional accent” of the group’s protest rhetoric. This article seeks to restore this regional accent by foregrounding the rhetorical significance of place in Pussy Riot’s acts of protest.

I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, 2.36Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of MotivesCome, taste freedom with us.—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom is the precondition of choice and will, essential to his sense of the human; Pussy Riot, on a more celebratory note, extends an invitation to freedom’s banquet but tacitly acknowledges that that invitation needs to be accepted. The sixty and more rhetoricians who gathered to mull over this pairing of rhetoric and freedom in San Antonio in May 2014 at the biennial symposium of the American Society of the History of Rhetoric brought with them that open spirit—a utopian urge to pursue freedom as a ground, a practice, and a potential outcome of rhetorical action. They also brought their deep rhetorical knowledge of the complexities of this subject: their awareness that this long-standing relationship between rhetoric and freedom is paradoxical, fraught with deception, and at times a spur to violence.The distortions of the term in political/popular discourse since 9/11 suggest that the time is right for a scholarly return to “freedom.” Casting himself as “author” of and “worker” for freedom, George W. Bush (2003) has now branded his own presidency and its legacy as a “Freedom Agenda.” Can freedom be authored, or forced, by one state onto another? Does “working for” freedom through military invasion not constitute the most basic violation of freedom? Although it is unlikely that such questions will be posed within the Bush Institute, a think tank “separately managed” by the Bush Foundation over the objections of trustees at Southern Methodist University adjacent to which it is housed (Traub 2009), we rhetoricians have the space, time, and conditions for contemplating and working through questions that the creation and naming of the Bush Institute raises. What is the relationship between freedom and the state, especially states that purport to be democratic? What are the personal conditions that enable rhetorical acts? Who are rhetorical persons and to what extent can we grasp their “freedom,” or lack thereof? And what will we rhetorical beings, or at least some of us, risk to win the pleasures and rewards of collective freedom?The articles brought together here, expanded versions of talks delivered at the symposium, explore these questions through an impressively diverse range of rhetorical approaches. To get a grasp on rhetoric and freedom, as these scholars demonstrate so compellingly, requires making fine distinctions, paying close, critical attention to stance and voice in historical texts and material culture, especially with regard to the state (Pernot; Lamp); it requires attending to questions about rhetorical personhood in relationship to governance as presented in Early Modern and Enlightenment political philosophy (O’Gorman; Stroud; Allen); and it demands that we direct our analysis beyond the page to the significance of space and body in the performance of protest under conditions of unfreedom (Trasciatti; Haskins). In what follows I introduce the articles offered here by reflecting on the topoi of freedom and rhetoric emerging from them—as a report on what I have learned from them and in hopes of framing and enhancing your reading experience.Freedom enters into rhetorical history and theory early on through a founding statement and performance of Athenian democracy: the funeral oration Thucydides (1954) attributes to Pericles, Athenian general and statesman, delivered early in the course of the war against Sparta, 431 BCE. Honoring the first to fall in the traditional state funeral, Pericles offers an encomium of the polis that celebrates several different kinds of freedom. As soon as he designates Athens as a free country (in the epigraph above), Pericles notes with praise that the fathers added to the city an empire; thus, the freedom of the first democracy was from the beginning contaminated by conquest and slavery. It is appropriate then that our issue begins with studies of the constraints on free speech and expression under empire. Laurent Pernot unveils the intricate processes through which Greek rhetors under the Roman empire were able to weave critical perspectives into their orations: a practice of using “figured discourse.” Kathleen S. Lamp approaches the question of freedom and captivity from the Roman side, reading state art in the Roman empire—representations of captives and conquest in sculpture, painting, and architecture—not merely to comment on the images but to ask: What happens when Roman citizens view this art? As citizenship becomes more and more available to subjects across many categories of difference, does the experience of viewing produce anything like freedom? Or does it rather foster imperial relations?The word for “free” in the passage from Pericles previously quoted is the superlative form of autarkês, meaning self-supporting or independent, as a sovereign. The same roots serve to designate imperial sovereignty (autokratoria) and the emperor (autokratês). It therefore is not surprising and is symptomatic of the state of rhetoric studies at present that the Athenian democracy praised by Pericles is, for the some of the authors in this special issue (e.g., O’Gorman; Allen; Trasciatti), a point of reference, sometimes an inspiration for the historical figures they study, but not a sanctified origin. And it is also fitting that this special issue closes as it opens, with essays that focus on the ways repressive states—the United States during World War I (Trasciatti) and Russia in the contemporary era (Haskins)—limit and punish free expression especially through the control of space and bodies. In each case, the analysis draws out the power of collective action and the rhetorical impact of bodies “prepared for freedom” (Trasciatti).As the ancient funeral oration proceeds, Pericles declares that “in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 1954, 2.41). Here it seems (eidê) that each man appears to be self-sufficient with reference to his body (to sôma). The general, like so many leaders since, must obscure the cruel paradox of destroying persons in the service of the freedom of the state. The “seeming” to be free and the reference to the body intrude as an unconscious into Pericles’s glorification of the solider who is “owner of his own person.”Burke’s (1950) sense of the person (in the second epigraph) is like and unlike that presented in the ancient Greek oration. Couching his project within the extreme limits of war, killing, and enslavement to dictatorship, Burke acknowledges the ultimate boundaries of freedom as life or survival—“good to remember, in these days of dictatorship” (50). The self imagined here might be that self-sufficient or sovereign: the solitary and defended self who can arm himself or herself against persuasion as aggression. And yet as Burke begins the section on “traditional principles of rhetoric,” he introduces the notion of persuasion “to attitude,” “attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination” (50), qualities of a different sort of rhetorical actor. Several articles offered here in a similar fashion explore and expand the concept of rhetorical freedom as a practice, an activity, and a capacity of the person. Ned O’Gorman, for example, reads Milton against Hobbes to find in the former the concept of rhetorical freedom as a quality rather than a state. Scott R. Stroud discovers in Kant a rhetoric wherein autonomy is enacted across multiple agents toward an educative end. And Ira J. Allen presents rhetorical personhood as the characteristic of citizens who are capable of crafting collectively new forms of democratic governance.In all the articles we gain a sense of freedom as an incomplete process, a struggle requiring risk and effort but one with rewards worth savoring (as in the third epigraph). Freedom is an enticement: something sweet to taste and something to be shared. In praising Athens, Pericles remarks not only on the polis and its warriors but on daily life: “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other” (2.37). Here the word for “freedom” is eleutherôs, coming from a verb that means to loose or let go. This freedom is available to all and reminds us of the creativity and open expression that draws rhetorical thinkers of all eras to the ancient polis despite its limits. We might find a modern parallel in Burke’s (1950) ideas about the sublime: “by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own comparative futility. The identification thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations (though the effect is made possible only by our awareness of these limitations)” (325). The courageous activists presented in Mary Anne Trasciatti’s work on antiwar protestors who defied the Espionage Act during World War I and in Ekaterina V. Haskins’s study of Pussy Riot’s daring performances aimed at Putin’s authoritarian regime and the Church patriarchy supporting it give us a sense of the dangerous lengths to which rhetors will go, in the face of limitations and futility, to seek a common freedom.Through this fine work, we readers are offered more than a taste but rather strong draughts of rhetorical scholarship on freedom. I invite you to imbibe, to slake a thirst, but at the same time to whet your appetite for evermore rhetoric and freedom.

ABSTRACT This article examines constructions of Roman citizenship in Roman state art, arguing that beginning in the late republic a broader concept of citizenship was prevalent—one rooted largely in shared culture and defined in opposition to a “barbarian” other. From this reading of state art, two arguments emerge: First, the emphasis on enculturation created an ever-moving line between Roman and barbarian. Second, the subject position created subjected both the Roman viewer and non-Roman subject. The article then turns to a reading of Greek orator Aristides’s Regarding Rome to show that the concept of citizenship stressed in state art is clearly present, though not necessarily well received.

ABSTRACT Kant clearly valued freedom in his moral philosophy, but he also seemed to distance the moral realm from the activities of rhetoric. This article challenges the long-standing concept of Kant as anti-rhetoric, complicating the view that rhetoric had no place in Kant’s philosophy. After examining the centrality of freedom as autonomy in Kant’s moral and political philosophy, this article carefully dissects Kant’s pronouncements on rhetoric in his various works. The conclusion reached is that Kant advances a bifurcated notion of rhetoric, with some uses of communicative means being characterized by freedom-restricting features and other employments foregrounding autonomy-enhancing aspects. This latter sense of communication is what can be identified as Kant’s educative rhetoric given its focus on preserving and promoting the freedom of both rhetor and audience.

ABSTRACT Under the Roman Empire, the Greek elites expressed the greatest respect for the emperors and celebrated the advantages of Roman domination. But behind the brilliant façade, certain factors of complexity were at work. This article uses the notion of “figured speech” to detect covert advice or reservation in the works of Dio of Prusa, known as Dio Chrysostom, and Aelius Aristides, two important representatives of Greek literature and the so-called Second Sophistic (first to second century CE). By “figured speech” ancient rhetoricians meant the cases in which orators resorted to ruses to disguise their intentions, by using indirect language to get to the points they wanted to make. Our method consists of linking certain texts by Aristides and Dio and passages from theoretical treatises together to make clear the precise procedure of figured speech that is used in each case: eloquent silence, “the hidden key,” blame behind praise, generalization, and speaking through a mask. Figured speech is an avenue of research that is opening up to interpret Greek rhetoric and literature better. The Greek case is particularly rich, and it could help analyze the return of the same phenomenon in other epochs and other cultures.

ABSTRACT This article situates the extraordinary events of 1989 within the symbolic and politicoeconomic context of Reform-era China. It sees 1989 as a threshold moment for the political culture and a turning point for the collective ethos. The article argues that the vitalistic 1980s made for an ethical existence for the demos, culminating in the “poetics” of 1989, while the post-1989 era witnessed a homogenization of the Chinese ethical imaginary. The latter is the very exigency that drives this study. Drawing on the ethical understandings of Deleuze and Burke, the article calls for the return and fusion of the ethical and the political, and points to a reason for pietas toward the world and the demos. The article is informed by a genealogical understanding of history and a ritualistic-dramatistic understanding of political life. Its central concern is the retransformation of the soul of the Chinese people in the here and now.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the development of national identity and political ideology in Hungary’s Szoborpark (Statue Park), where resides a collection of Soviet-era statues relocated from the city streets and public squares of Budapest in 1993. Although a narrative of the Cold War and the theory of postcommunism enable understandings of the park as a decisive break with the past, this article argues that Statue Park constructs a more ambivalent sense of politics, identity, and history in Hungary. By showing that the park represents a number of conflicting and unresolved features of Hungarian national identity and politics, the article helps demonstrate the way that a sweeping historical narrative like the Cold War can produce inaccurate understandings of local political developments in post-Soviet countries.

This special issue marks years of research and inquiry on the rhetoric of freedom and dissent in the pre- and post-1989 global context. Many of the ideas in this issue have been discussed and developed during conferences and seminars on Communism and post-Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, on rhetoric and freedom in South Africa and Tibet, as well as on discursive perspectives on history and the politics of domination in the final decades of the twentieth century.The editors of this special issue want to express their deep gratitude to Robert N. Gaines, the general editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2003[#x02013]2011), whose unconditional support and relevant comments made possible a series of publications on this topic, building up to this publication, which marks twenty-five years of political and rhetorical change throughout the world.Special thanks to Susan Jarratt, the current president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, who in supporting this project has invited new perspectives on rhetorical research that highlight the complex relationship between history and rhetoric in transitional and transnational political contexts.Grateful acknowledgment is due to Taylor & Francis as well as to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric for its generous publication grant.The editors would also like to thank their respective families (Merrie and John) for editorial support, intellectual stimulation, and moral encouragement.

Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

ABSTRACTThe Romanian political scene at the end of 1989 calls for a critical rhetorical perspective to understand how totalitarian politics clash with revolutionary changes and how communist space, so ambitiously crafted to cover an entire country’s public sphere, influences, if at all, a free(d) discourse on national unity. Examining official discourse on the cusp of revolutionary changes in Romania, in December 1989, this study argues that the concept of rhetorical space along with the enthymematic argument by definition of “we the nation” capture rhetoric in action, showing complex discursive crossings that legitimize the relationship between rhetoric and history at such times. Thus, the relationship between rhetorical space and the “we the nation” political argument, when applied to Romanian political discourse of 1989, reveals challenges that continue to feature the unsettledness of postcommunist discourse twenty-five years later.

ABSTRACTIn 1989, the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who accepted the prize on behalf of his much-beleaguered Tibetan people who continue to be engaged in a nonviolent struggle for their autonomy and freedom. This article examines the Dalai Lama’s Nobel Prize speech as it demonstrates his capability as a public intellectual (along the lines of Edward Said’s delineation of the role for exiles as public intellectuals) and broadens and renews the tradition of nonviolent rhetoric practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Throughout the speech, the Dalai Lama employs a rhetoric of nonviolence forged in Buddhist principles, one that supports a rhetoric of peace that does not depend on the divisiveness of Western political rhetoric but on a recognition of common humanity and shared responsibility.

ABSTRACTThis longitudinal case study about the political rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—prime minister of Hungary between 1998 and 2002, and since 2010, respectively—demonstrates that the first, remarkable personal experiences in public communication may have a major impact (“imprinting”) on the future behavior of political actors. Orbán gave a memorably radical talk on June 16, 1989, urging Hungary’s democratic transition from Communism. The study uses critical discourse analysis and links it to media scholarship on live media events to show that Orbán became hostage of his own rhetoric and speech situation for the two decades that followed his 1989 entry.

ABSTRACT Year 1989 was memorable for rhetoric. Words had power. Clumsy Communist speeches, delivered in a futile attempt to preserve the old order, backfired and sealed the downfall of the old regime. The town squares became public arenas for ad hoc referenda; rhetoric became a legitimate weapon. Battles for public opinion culminated in unique confrontations of speakers and crowds at the ČKD industrial plant and Letná plain in Prague. Václav Havel, a dissident and shy unlikely leader, won by both his ethos and logos. Havel’s slogan ‘Truth and Love has to Prevail over Lie and Hatred’ became a staple of the Velvet Revolution and is still alive, provoking the enemies of moral politics and civil society. Drawing on academic literature, the article provides a closer analysis of Havel’s rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Just as the popular imagination became inflamed by the events of 1989, and the “fall of the wall” was commonly taken as a sign of the inevitability of a new, open, free, and democratic Eastern Europe, so too was the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 taken as a sign of the inevitability of a new, open, free, and democratic Russia. Although the events in Berlin were significant in spurring changes onward, with different rhetorical choices by Soviet and Russian leaders along the way history could have been written quite differently. The central concern of this article is to show how these rhetorical choices shaped the future of post-Communist transition in the Russian Federation. We proceed chronologically, examining key moments in the rhetoricity of the Russian transition from Communism toward its current form of governance.

ABSTRACT This article follows a “rhumb” along four nonrhetorical observations on the concepts of date, moment, time, and semelfactive, and nine rhetorical theorems concerning “date” in relation to eidos, eugeneia, credibility, kairos, anagnôrisis, Innerzeitigkeit, evidence, différend, and the sublime, so as to explode our “idiocy” about the topic of date and to offer a rhetorical and phenomenological critique of “date.”

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways by which former Czech president Václav Havel and former Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus approached their rhetorical roles in the postcommunist climate of a splintering Czechoslovakia. The main argument revolves around how Klaus and Havel divergently employed national memory to make historical arguments about the Czech past and how these symbols could be marshaled to navigate the uncertain waters of postsocialism. Ultimately, Klaus employs a rhetorical strategy of “rupture” with the Czech communist past, while Havel attempts a strategy of “repair.” The tensions between such rhetorical strategies evidence the ways in which Czech intellectuals-turned-public officials vied for the position of chief public historian and national storyteller for the Czech nation.

Pragmatically, for most of us, “history” consists perhaps primarily of chronotopes, accumulations of symbols and shorthand associations that invest temporality with meaning: 1776, 1848, the 1960s, 1968, 1989. The chronotope 1968, for instance, consists, for many Americans, of symbols of the hippie movement, images of the Chicago Democratic Convention, the escalation of the Vietnam War. For the French, 1968 means primarily the month of May and the student revolt. For Poles, 1968 signifies March: student demonstrations in Warsaw followed by a paroxysm of official anti-Semitism that forced thousands out of their jobs and even out of the country. For Romanians, 1968 represents the political turn away from Moscow, as Nicolae Ceausescu aligned the country with the West in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.1 Each society, regime, generation, perhaps even each locality, group, or family, has its own “time capsules” that to a large extent constitute the shared sense of history.2This special issue attempts to unpack and interrogate, from a variety of rhetorical perspectives, the chronotope of 1989—one of the more significant chronotopes that continues to haunt contemporary history and public discourse. It is also intended to serve as one possible time capsule of reflections on the year 1989.According to the American historian John Lukacs, the year 1989 marks the de facto end of the twentieth century. Lukacs argues that history does not observe neat divisions. The twentieth century did not actually start on January 1, 1901, because nothing happened on that date to make people think they were suddenly living in a different century. It was World War I that ushered in a different era: massive casualties, mass propaganda, the beginnings of “mass society,” the crisis of traditional values, mechanization of death and life, nagging doubts about the “civilizing” value of education and “civilization” itself, and the concomitant beginnings of new intellectual and political trends. Empires and monarchies (Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, Czarist Russia) that had defined the political order in Europe fell, while a new regime arose in Russia. Both Soviet Communism and German Nazism have their roots in World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, the Western world changed profoundly, only to change again in 1945, and then again in 1989 to 1991.The twentieth century, Lukacs claims, was a “short” century, one characterized by utopian experiments and totalitarian nightmares, punctuated by two of the bloodiest wars and greatest genocides in history, including both the Nazi and Communist genocides. As a direct or indirect result of the former, about 60 million people lost their lives (Romane 2006); as a result of the latter, about 100 million worldwide, including 20 million in the Soviet Union and 1 million in Central/Eastern Europe (Courtois et al. 1999). The century ended with the fall of the Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. Anyone who left for Mars in 1983, following the premiere of the film The Day After about the putative nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, would hardly recognize the world a mere decade later. Poland was a fully sovereign country once again, and the European Union was heading toward another extension. Tismaneanu (1992) has called the breakdown of Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe “one of the most important events in this [the twentieth] century” (ix).British anthropologist Anthony Cohen has argued that human communities cohere around symbols. Symbols, however, Cohen (1985) argues, “do not so much express meaning” as “give us the capacity to make meaning” (15; emphasis added). They are capacious containers, so to speak, that people invest with a diversity of meanings and interpretations. Human collectivities, Cohen (1985) suggests, share symbols, but they do not necessarily share their meanings. While most Americans, for example, profess the belief in freedom, few could probably agree as to its exact meaning. (Michael McGee [1980] refers to such specifically ideological symbols as ideographs). Cohen (1985) argues that “the reality of ‘community’ in people’s experience inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols”; yet “the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning” (16).Indeed, 1989 has become such a symbol, one whose multiple meanings continue to both unite and divide. While in the West, especially in the United States, 1989 is associated mainly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, in countries ranging from Russia, Poland, and Romania to China and Tibet its meanings are much more local and diverse, and its symbolic currency and potency in the political field are far from diminished by the passage of more than two decades—in fact, just the opposite. In many of these countries (for instance, in Poland or Romania) attitudes toward 1989 have become a major determinant of political orientation, a key element of public memory, and a clue to the interpretation of the contemporary political scene.In his contribution to this special issue, Philippe-Joseph Salazar captures the dual articulation of such symbolic dates: On the one hand, to date something is to recognize a “moment” as a movement, the passage of a force … [and] on the other hand, a date fixes a “moment” as a static pause, an interval in time. A date carries therefore the force of history, as something hits something else, the dynamic of politics, and the sense we have that, for a date to be imprinted in our experience of the world, some motion has to pass from one to another, through, literally, an act of force and, plainly, violence.The aim of the present issue is thus to interrogate 1989 as both, on the one hand, a fixed moment “imprinted in our experience of the world” and in the memories of its different “stakeholders,” and, on the other hand, as a “movement”—not only a “passage” from one state to another but as a movement, a transformative symbol, that continues to haunt the rhetorical imagination and to animate the political debates in much of Europe and beyond.As a historical moment, 1989 represents not only a revolutionary time—if by revolution one understands “a fundamental, deep change in the social order and organization of the state”—but also as a historical and rhetorical context for a variety of historical experiments, which “did not necessarily have to succeed” (Baczynski 2009, 8).As a metaphor (thus a “figure of perspective,” according to Burke [1966]), 1989 represents a past in perpetual return as a lens for the present, a creative rhetorical space (not unlike anniversaries, which are rhetorical occasions during which narratives and symbols of the past are used to nourish and shape the present, as well as the future).3 As one Polish member of parliament put it almost a year after the transition: “In every national yesterday there is a national today.”4 Indeed, for many Central/Eastern European countries, 1989 remains very much a part of the national today.However, 1989 also constitutes a potent symbol and creative rhetorical space to be exploited in strategic, geopolitical contexts. On June 4, 2014, Poland celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the June 4, 1989, semidemocratic elections that effectively ended Communist domination. The celebrations coincided with the political crisis in Ukraine: the Russian occupation of Crimea and struggle with Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Both U.S. president Barack Obama and Ukrainian president-elect Petr Poroshenko attended, and many Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd in Warsaw’s Castle Square during the main celebration. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in his speech in reference to Ukraine, opening the ubiquitous Polish slogan from the 1980s to a new interpretative twist: solidarity with Ukrainian struggle against Russian aggression. While President-Elect Poroshenko emphasized the analogy between Poland’s Solidarity and the Ukrainian Majdan (a reference to the recent bloody demonstrations on Kiev’s Majdan Square against pro-Russian president Janukovitch), Barack Obama suggested that “the story of this nation [Poland] reminds us that freedom is not guaranteed” and that “the blessings of liberty must be earned and renewed by every generation—including our own. This is the work to which we rededicate ourselves today”; Obama’s words were reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address. “The Ukrainians today are the heirs of Solidarity,” Obama declared, cementing the analogy between the struggles of 1989 and the situation in Ukraine. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” he ended, echoing Komorowski, but now from the geopolitical perspective of an outsider to the region and a world leader.Many of the articles in this issue (Matthew deTar, Senkou Chou) address this symbolic and metaphoric quality of 1989. Others, especially Anna Szilágyi and András Bozóki, note the persistence of the “force of history” contained in the 1989 moment in the post-1989 rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—a “revolutionary” force that, as Bozóki and Szilágyi note, had “once been used to initiate a transition to democracy” and is “now [being] used to complete a constitutional coup d’état against an established democracy.”Dialogue around the events of 1989 often assumes a static Cold War space and then, conversely, some sort of definable post–Cold War space. Yet if we see transition as a process by which political communities and their leaders forge new rhetorical spaces and articulate new visions, as well as create ways to marshal and integrate complex histories into these visions, we gain a richer sense of how profound changes in collective identities and imaginaries are negotiated. This process is, as Cezar M. Ornatowski points out in his contribution, dialectical and rife with multiple ironies. (It is worth remembering here that Kenneth Burke [1969] considered irony to be the master trope of history—an insight borne out by the complex events of the transitions and the complexities of the posttransitional period). Noemi Marin’s contribution proposes rhetorical space as central to the examination of the Romanian 1989 scene, where totalitarian rhetoric enforced by Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime clashes with democratic opposition to redefine Romanian identity. Jason A. Edwards’s contribution investigates how the rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic modified the national myths of Kosovo as a redemptive argument for the Serb pre-1989 national identity. David Cratis Williams and Marilyn J. Young’s article emphasizes the challenges Soviet/Russian leaders such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev faced in finding a suitable lexicon of politics to invent, and articulate, the novel shapes of freedom and democratic life. Their article highlights another rhetorical dimension of the transitions of 1989: the challenge of “shaping freedom.” That challenge, according to Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, proved to be even more difficult than the winning of freedom. “For years,” Mazowiecki (2009) remembers, “it seemed that winning freedom is so dreadfully difficult. Then it turned out that the shaping of freedom is not much easier” (13). Speaking from, and about, another place altogether, Jane Robinett analyzes the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize speech by the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, looking at how the discourse on freedom continues to remain in tension with political histories and cultural narratives that conflate national and nationalistic platforms of public action.The Cold War and the post–Cold War, however we define these terms, do not exist without culturally bound, ideologically explosive, discursive contestations that bring them to life. The transition between these two periods becomes a tense site of ideological struggle between competing articulations of national history, as both Timothy Barney and Martina Klicperová-Baker demonstrate in their articles on Czech pre- and post-1989 political rhetoric. However, as Barney emphasizes in a comment that applies to all the articles in this special issue, and perhaps also to all attempts to come to terms once and for all with as complex a phenomenon as 1989, The historical arguments in the case of a changing (and ultimately disintegrating) Czechoslovakia … [are], of course, only one small piece of an entire spatial and temporal reimagining of Central and Eastern Europe, one that is still in process. Yet, by examining the implications of the rhetorical tensions in democratizing nations during the crumbling of the Cold War, we can perhaps reach a bolder cartography of transition that gets us further out of the binaries that both Cold War and even post–Cold War constructs create.Ultimately, 1989 represents what historians Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (2004) refer to as a “transnational moment of change,” alongside 1848 or 1968. Such moments foreground the “question of commonality” and, one may add, difference, which, for Horn and Kenney, become “central, a window into the processes of history” (ix).5 In terms of the complex relationships between rhetoric and history, which belong to the central problematic of rhetorical studies, such moments are thus momentous from a rhetorical, not just historical, standpoint.Rhetorically, explorations of such windows provide an opportunity for comparative studies—not, however, in the vein of comparative rhetoric (which has a specific meaning in rhetorical studies) but in the vein of what one may perhaps conceive of as comparative rhetorical histories, somewhat loosely analogous to what Horn and Kenney (2004) advocate as “comparative history.” In terms of such histories, the transnational moment of 1989 appears to consist largely, and paradoxically, of returns to, or perhaps reinventions of, national histories. Horn and Kenney (2004) note, “[I]t is in the modern era that one begins to observe moments in which social, political, and cultural movements, and even entire societies, even as they are bound within a narrative of the nation-state, consciously or unconsciously embrace similar experiences or express similar aspirations across distinctly national frontiers” (x).In the cases of all such modern transnational/national moments, as Horn and Kenney (2004) point out, the underlying processes of change predated the particular date associated with the change and continued after it—sometimes long after it. In fact, in the cases of most of the Central/Eastern European transformations associated with the year 1989, the processes continue to shape internal politics and to reverberate through the cultures, signaling perhaps not the Fukuyamasque (1992) “end of history” but rather its continuation “by other means.” For the denizens of such countries as Poland, the year 1989 marked not the “end of history” but the end of the utopia of an ideal state based on enforced monocentric unity that could transform human relations and human nature itself—a utopia that began, in Western political imagination, with Plato’s Republic. Ornatowski’s article examines the dialectics of the dissolution of such a utopian vision in the case of Poland. This dissolution, Ornatowski suggests, marked in effect a revolutionary return from utopia back to history in an ironic reversal of the dialectical process followed by Plato in his Republic.The articles in this issue, beginning with Salazar’s whimsical musings on the tradition and meanings of dating itself, thus in various ways and from various perspectives interrogate the received narratives of 1989 from the distance of the twenty-five years that separate us from these historic events. While many of the authors note the centrality of the ubiquitous theme of return in 1989 and post-1989 discourses (return to Europe, return of/to politics, return of the people, and so on), they note that such returns also mark new beginnings that present alternatives and/or transformative possibilities in different historical contexts, such as former Yugoslavia, Soviet/Post-Soviet nations, or the “new Europe.”Twenty-five years later, 1989 continues to remain a thriving locus of rhetorical inquiry, as debates over “post-Communism” (the situation after Communism) and/or “postcommunism” (the sociopolitical situation characterized by the persistent presence of the past) continue to define transitional dimensions of political life and remain an open field of political persuasion. Attempting to reconstruct the relationship between history and rhetoric during and after 1989 as a referential anchor for transitional studies, this issue addresses both past and present, the historical moment of 1989, and the broader pre- and post-1989 historical contexts as a temporal framework within which political and rhetorical dynamics of transition can be examined. How these dynamics continue to play out on the local and global scenes still remains to be seen and depends very much on the evolving and contested perceptions and interpretations of the meanings of 1989.

ABSTRACT The article offers a rhetorical account of the “leap into politics” by the Polish Communist authorities that led to the political transition of 1989. In contrast to accounts of the transition focused on “dialogue” between the authorities and the opposition, this article examines the move toward dialogue from a dramatistic and dialectical perspective—that is, in terms of the shifting principles of motivation, changing rhetorical identities of the key actors, and associated transformations of terms that characterized the transition from a monocentric ideal of the state to a “political” one.

ABSTRACT Slobodan Milosevic’s rise from a minor Communist Party figure to the eventual Serbian president was bound up in rhetoric. Specifically, I examine how Milosevic rhetorically recast and modified the myth of Kosovo. The myth of Kosovo is one of the fundamental pillars of Serbian identity. I argue Milosevic modified the fundamental themes of the myth—disunity and unity—to bring an earthly redemption to Serbs in the late 1980s. Milosevic’s use of the Kosovo myth cemented his hold on presidential leadership in 1989 and is an important example of how past events are fruitful topoi for political leaders trying to build nationalist movements.

ABSTRACT This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze book 6, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught.

ABSTRACT This article presents the case that the perspective on taste set forth in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres significantly influenced Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s version of the Scots’s concepts—sense, sensibility, understanding, feeling, delicacy, correctness, and so forth—features the tendency in individuals of taste to favor either sense or sensibility, as well as the novelist’s decided tilt toward the former. Despite her inclination toward sense, however, Austen ultimately follows Blair in characterizing these faculties as complementary and cooperative, rather than competitive or oppositional. Just as Lectures provides potential insight into Sense and Sensibility, so, correspondingly, study of Austen’s novel provides a better understanding of Blair and his influence.

ABSTRACT Eighteenth-century British dissenting minister and rector of Warrington Academy William Enfield, author of the enormously successful elocutionary manual, The Speaker, although often ignored entirely or dismissed as trite and uninteresting in many histories of rhetoric, in fact wrote his elocutionary manual as part of a comprehensive educational system grounded in moral theology and faculty psychology. This article places Enfield’s elocutionary work within religious and pedagogical context through analysis of his writings on religion and education and his pamphlets debating Joseph Priestley over the nature of dissent.

ABSTRACT Among Aristotle’s arts of argumentation, two are directly linked to archai, or first principles. Analytic deduces from them and dialectic tests their veracity. This article situates rhetoric as likewise useful for philosophical investigation in Aristotle’s own system by demonstrating how the Rhetoric assigns to rhetorical practice attributes that are uniquely related to the archai—without which investigations into and based on them would be impossible. That is, given the primary nature of the first principles as described by Aristotle, the strategic use of metaphor is the only intellectual machinery he has for articulating, disseminating, and gaining acquiescence for them.

ABSTRACT Through examining Jarena Lee’s employment of hymns in her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, I demonstrate how hymnody, a largely understudied literary genre in rhetorical studies, proved a critical instrument in authenticating her spiritual conversion and validating her qualifications to serve as a ministerial leader. Using Chaim Perelman’s concept of “presence” and recent research in neuroscience (on the brain and music) I show how Lee’s excerpts of the nineteenth century’s most popular hymns create an aural ambience reminiscent of a worship service that engages her Christian readers’ pathos and sense of piety in order to disengage their prejudice against her race and gender.

Advances in the History of RhetoricAnnual Publication of the American Society for the History of RhetoricEditorEkaterina HaskinsCommunication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteEditorial BoardDon Abbott, English, University of California, DavisJanet Atwill, English, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleBeth S. Bennett, Communication Studies, University of AlabamaRobert W. Cape, Jr., Classical and Modern Languages, Austin CollegeAmitava Chakraborty, Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of DelhiClive E. Chandler, Classics, University of Cape TownChristopher P. Craig, Classics, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJeanne D. Fahnestock, English, University of MarylandLinda Ferreira-Buckley, English, University of Texas, AustinDavid Frank, Clark Honors College, University of OregonCheryl Glenn, English, Pennsylvania State UniversityRichard Graff, Writing Studies, University of MinnesotaS. Michael Halloran, Communication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteDavid Hoffman, Public Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New YorkBernard E. Jacob, Law, Hofstra UniversityNan Johnson, English, Ohio State UniversitySahar Mohamed Khamis, Communication, University of MarylandJanice Lauer, English, Purdue UniversityAndrea Lunsford, English, Stanford UniversityNoemi Marin, Communications, Florida Atlantic UniversityGlen McClish, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State UniversityMarina McCoy, Philosophy, Boston CollegeRaymie E. McKerrow, Interpersonal Communication, Ohio UniversityThomas Miller, English, University of ArizonaJean Dietz Moss, English, Catholic University of AmericaJames J. Murphy, English, University of California, DavisSean Patrick O’Rourke, Communication Studies, Furman UniversityAngela G. Ray, Communication, Northwestern UniversityAndreea Deciu Ritivoi, English, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPatricia Roberts-Miller, Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at AustinJohn Scenters-Zapico, English, University of Texas, El PasoJohn D. Schaeffer, English, Northern Illinois UniversityRobert Sullivan, Speech Communication, Ithaca CollegeJane Sutton, Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, YorkDave Tell, Communication Studies, University of KansasArthur E. Walzer, Communication Studies, University of Minnesota–Twin CitiesBarbara Warnick, Communication, University of WashingtonKathleen Welch, English, University of OklahomaMarjorie Curry Woods, English, University of Texas

ABSTRACT Combining Zeno’s rhetorics of the open hand and closed fist, Nachmanides addressed the heirs of Rashi to defend Maimonides. Polemical letters were a vehicle for this controversy, and a major example is his “Letter to the French Rabbis.” Using cleverly organized arguments and a brilliantly learned style of allusion to Biblical and rabbinic texts, called “shibutz,” Nachmanides influenced his addressees to mitigate a herem (ban) against students of Maimonides. Nachmanides sought to unify the warring factions rather than to achieve victory for either side, and his densely packed allusions to texts all the combatants revered comprise common ground for reconciliation.

ABSTRACT Recently, scholars have explored the empowering potential of epistemic privilege, a concept that refers to knowledge acquired through oppression as a privilege. Advancing these conversations, this article considers epistemic privilege as a rhetorical strategy. To explore the strategy’s potential and limits, this article turns to public letters exchanged between suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, in which the mother–daughter pair deliberated over the voting rights of the immigrant and working classes. Through this case study, this article finds that a rhetoric of epistemic privilege can work to empower multiple oppressed groups and yet reify power relationships.

ABSTRACT This article defends the “rhetorical chorus” as a useful method for recovering women’s voices in the history of rhetoric. As distinct from the more amorphous term “collaboration,” which designates any act of cooperation in the production of rhetorical texts, the “chorus” offers a more nuanced way to identify and map the recording, preservation, appropriation, and alteration of works originally dictated by women rhetors. Using The Book of Margery Kempe as an example, the study traces both homophonic and polyphonic relationships between the lead voice of Margery and the voices of her scribes and annotators.

ABSTRACT Building from extant scholarship on normal schools, this essay takes up a complementary but less well-examined topic: state teachers’ institutes of the nineteenth century and the short-term practical training and professional guidance they provided teachers. Focusing on California’s state-sponsored institutes held from 1861–1863, this study examines the ways these institutes promoted the new progressive European pedagogy. More significant, extending an ecological approach to historical analysis, this essay proposes that the relationship among normal schools, teachers’ institutes, and some faculty from select eastern colleges may have been closer than has been suggested. Thus, this analysis suggests a more complex and integrated history during this period.

ABSTRACTThis study represents a detailed inquiry into the rhetoric of Jainism, an understudied religious-philosophical tradition that arose among Hinduism and Buddhism on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the unique use of pluralism in Jaina authors such as Mahāvīra and Haribhadra, I advance the concept of engaged rhetorical pluralism to account for the argumentative use of pluralism to promote Jaina views. This concept is linked to Jainism’s theory of multiperspectivism (anekāntavāda) as an orientation toward one’s rhetorical activities in contexts of disagreement. Highlighting the controversies surrounding the relationship between Jaina tolerance and intellectual nonviolence, this study uses the concept of anekāntavāda to ground a pluralism of often contradictory critical claims made by those studying rhetorical phenomena from other cultures. Thus, anekāntavāda both describes the engaged pluralism evident in important Jaina rhetors and serves as a source of methodological guidance for scholars involved in comparative rhetoric and its inevitable situations of interpretative disagreement.

In virtually every epoch of its history, the theory of rhetoric has been associated with large, anonymous groups of people. They appear sometimes as crowds and at other times as mobs. At still other times, these large, anonymous groups of people are figured as herds, (counter)publics, imagined communities, “the people,” the audience, or social imaginaries. In whatever guise they appear, these anonymous groups of people have played a major role in the development of the idea of rhetoric. A few examples will make my point. Plato (2001) defined rhetoric as discourse that would persuade an ignorant crowd (94). Augustine (2001) tailored rhetoric to the “multitude of the wise” (459). In the sixteenth century, Castiglione (2001) calibrated rhetoric to the tastes of “ladies or gentlemen” (663). In the eighteenth century, David Hume (2001) suggested that discourse must account for “man in general” (836). Thomas Sheridan (2001) developed his “Lectures on Elocution” from a consideration of “man in his animal state” (884). By 1828, Richard Whately (2001) could characterize the entire history of rhetoric as so many theories on how to persuade the “promiscuous multitude” (1007). In 1958, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca made a large, anonymous group of people—the “universal audience”—famous as the enabling presupposition of all rational argument (Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca 1991, 31–35). Finally, consider the vibrant subfield of public sphere theory. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, public sphere theory may be the most institutionally secured of rhetoric’s modalities. In this popular mode, rhetoric is understood as the democratic practice of engaging groups of people qua citizens. Administrators seem to love this vision of rhetoric. Basic courses in both writing and speech are often designed explicitly as training in civic engagement, and institutionalized centers for civic engagement are now a common feature of research universities. Rhetoric, we might say, has generated institutional security by tying its fate to (and betting its value on) a particularly resonant large group of anonymous people: the

ABSTRACT This article argues that the founding logics of late neoliberalism actively mitigate against a radically democratic future. By calling attention to the invocatory drive which is responsible for effecting the Symbolic order’s interpellative address, the article makes the case that Lacan’s retheorization of desire, the drives, and/as jouissance opens the way toward an ontologically grounded conception of radical political agency and rhetorical intervention whose abiding ethical injunction is to “imagine there’s no Publics!”