Abstract Aristotle's Rhetoric leaves a number of unanswered questions, among them the nature of the relationship between verbal style and êthos, or character, as a means of persuasion. Statements throughout the Rhetoric suggest a connection between manner of expression and persuasive character, but Aristotle's ideas in this area are underdeveloped. Here we argue that Aristotle's stylistic theory, while not demonstrably inconsistent with the technical proof through character, cannot be made to conform neatly with it in most salient respects. Though Aristotle does not explicit y identify style as a means through which the speaker may convey the impression that he possesses positive intellectual or moral qualities, he does recognize a role for lexis in the expression of generic character traits and is aware that an inappropriate style will damage the speaker's credibility. Hence, attention to style is important for the presentation of a plausible êthos and, in this limited respect, style does contribute to the maintenance of persuasive character. This conclusion must be inferred from passing remarks in the Rhetoric. The absence of a more fully developed theory is curious in light of the availability of examples from the discourse of Attic logographers like Lysias, a speechwriter universally praised by later critics for his mastery of ethopoeia(character portrayal).

Abstract This paper has three goals: (1) to point out a characteristic of Isocrates' style of advice, (2) to use that characteristic to discuss the authenticity of To Demonicus, and (3) to place Isocrates' interest in style in its cultural context.

Abstract This paper examines the historical processes that spurred the Cuban feminist movement to articulate positions on suffrage, property rights, reproductive rights, marriage and divorce, children's issues, welfare, and education. It also discusses the changes in Cuban society during the Castro years and how the communist alignment of Cuban society influenced Cuban feminism. Finally, this paper suggests that one of the most interesting spaces to excavate women's history, women's voices and feminist activism is in exile. In exile, we see the hybridity and doubleness that has characterized Cuban life, particularly since the Soviet collapse. Writings by Castro's daughter, Alina Fernandez, help us understand where Cuban women are positioned at the beginning of the 21st century and the subject positioning of women writing in exile.

Abstract The tradition of Western stylistics, initiated by Aristotle, is impregnated with the dialectics between established and unconventional usage. In the twentieth century, Bakhtin acknowledged this dynamic through his conception of the dialectical nature of language. Concepts of the plain style, many of them emanating from the United States, deviated from this dynamic. Prestigious style handbooks such as The Elements of Style and Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which championed a form of the plain style based on empiricism, offered advice that undermined the dialectical, dynamic nature of language. At the same time, calls for cavalier self-expression, e.g., experimentation in Baudrillard and experimentalism in Lloyd, could not account for the great achievements of Western stylistics. A paucity of stylistic diversity led Foucault to promote “heterotopias.” Cixous proposed a three-stage model for linguistic development designed to heighten dialectical interplay between tradition and novelty. Attuned to the crisis in written expression, Kristeva stressed the need for enhancing the role of aesthetic products in contemporary life.

Abstract Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de Vargumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique marked a revolution in twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In this essay, we trace Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's turn from logical positivism and the accepted belief that reason's domain was the vita contemplativa to rhetoric and its use as a reason designed for the vita activa. Our effort to tell the story of their rhetorical turn, which took place between 1944 and 1950, is informed by an account of the context in which they considered questions of reason, responsibility, and action in the wake of World War II.

AbstractJohn Genung's late nineteenth century rhetoric textbooks, although founded on an eighteenth century model of Scottish composition, present an original conception of oratory. Genung's theory breaks free of the classical models and lays out the path to be followed during the development of speech studies among American rhetoricians of the early twentieth century.

Abstract In his essay “What is Poetry ?”(1833), John Stuart Mill described the difference between rhetoric and poetry using the antithesis, “rhetoric is heard; poetry is overheard.” In the twentieth century, scholars from the field of Speech Communication appropriated Mill's words as justification for the separation of Speech Communication (and rhetorical criticism) from English (and literary criticism). This essay argues that twentieth-century scholars misunderstood Mill's meaning. They failed to recognize that, for Mill, the key issue was not the frequently quoted distinction between rhetoric and poetry but a more problematic distinction between art and science.

Abstract In eleventh century Italy, Anselm de Besate claimed rhetoric had become too technical and difficult to use. He wrote the Rhetorimachia as a controversia, applying declamatory form to a written composition, in order to illustrate rhetoric's usefulness. Nonetheless, Anselm complained that critics failed to understand this intent. Contemporary readers, unfamiliar with the declamatory tradition, have also misunderstood the intent of his controversia. Here, I compare Anselm's controversia with those found in Seneca the Elder and with the declamatory pedagogy of Quintilian, showing that Anselm was imitating a well-established tradition of educational practice as well as displaying his rhetorical artistry.

Abstract This essay offers an analysis of “The Truth about the Paterson Strike,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's 1914 speech containing her ideas about the nature of propaganda in radical working-class movements. Flynn defines propaganda as ideological education, and her speech highlights the importance of oratory to early twentieth century radical propaganda campaigns. These ideas belie fundamental principles of contemporary propaganda studies, which define propaganda as manipulative, mass mediated persuasion to advance the interests of powerful elites and institutions, and contain oratory within the ethical art of rhetoric. The study concludes by recommending that the purview of propaganda studies be expanded to include Flynn's activities and those of other radical propagandists.

Abstract This essay grows out of a larger project, one in which I look to account theoretically for ways in which underpowered groups creatively manage limited physical resourcesfor maximum rhetoricaleffect. My assumption in that larger project is that underpowered groups - groups whose publicness must be either granted or commandeered from same more greatly pouered group (e.g., government) - suchgroups encounter and engage constraints ofpublic rhetoric in way not necessarily of concern to the overpowered. For example, the mayor of any city can, at his or her choosing, call together a press conference inside City Hall to address tbe issue of homelessness: the homeless do not possess tbat same rhetorical option. Of the three terms central to that larger project - place, kairos, and delivery - it is upon kairos that I will focus this essay. My argument here is that. while I am respectful of the literature accounting for kairos as a rhetorical concern in ancient Athens, most of that literature focuses on the etymology, philosophy, or theology of the term, Fully acknowledging that literature, I wish to add politial dimension, and propose that kairos becomes even more complex when coupled with perhaps the most Significant political development in the democratization of classical Athens: isegoria, or the right of any citizen to address the Assembly.

Abstract The orthodox liberal conception of society and politics has proven incapable in this country of sustaining a system of social relations in which individualistic and communitarian impulses are balanced, and in which personal freedoms and community controls are not seen as being mutually antagonistic. William Sullivan looks to the classical notion of citizenship for a vision of life that is simultaneously political and moral. The “classical notion” he promotes has its roots in theAthenian conception of citizenship both as aform of consciousness and as a call to duty. Thisform of consciousness grows out of an awareness that we are communal beings and that members of a community can influence the course of both civic and natural events. It ultimately embraces the ideas that social knowledge is fluid and tentative, that multiple viewpoints can claim legitimacy, and that resolutions of social conflicts are achieved through persuasion. Thus, the essential. act of citizenship is “doing rhetoric,” and its most fundamental duties are to participate in governance, to listen and respond to others, to acknowledge our own fallibility, and to advocate for our own views as we participate in civic life.

Abstract Little attention has been paid to the often profound differences between artes praedicandi written in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the sermon theorists loyal to Rome often employed classical rhetoric without any sense of disjunction, the Reformers' dedication to Scripture as a model of discourse impelled them to ratify any use of classical rhetoric in terms of Scripture and Christian commentary. In Bartholomew Keckermann's De rhetoricae ecclesiasticae utilitate, for instance, the author makes use of Aristotle's Rhetoric, but not without heavy reference to similar concerns in Augustine's De docfrina christiana and the epistles of St. Paul. Keckermann's procedures parallel those of other reformers such as Philip Melanchthon and Gerhard Andreas Hyperius, and stand in sharp contrast to the works of Erasmus and the Milanese cardinal Saint Charles Borromeo.

Abstract In this paper I develop a speculative reading of Gorgias's Encomium on Helen that begins from several common assumptions about the work—especially its status as a “pretext” for Gorgias's hidden purposes and its character as a sort of advertisement. Beginning from these common assumptions I propose that the Encomium is appropriately read as an allegorical representation of Athenian political life. By way of this allegory Gorgias was able to advertise his conception of persuasion despite its highly controversial political implications. I refer to Gorgias as a “barbarian” due to the fundamental incompatibility of the model of political persuasion implicit in the Encomium with democratic Athenian political culture.