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

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

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

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.

Abstract At Pseudolus 41–73 Plautus represents the slave Pseudolus as reading a passionate letter from the courtesan Phoenicium to his master, Calidorus. Pseudolus and Calidorus offer strikingly different reactions to the letter. Calidorus praises its style and content, but Pseudolus ridicules both—with a string of sexual insults. In this essay I focus upon gender and class as factors in the literary reception of Phoenicium's writing in Plautus' comedy. My discussion compares the writing attributed to Phoenicium with several second century BCE texts by men. In light of these comparisons, I argue that Pseudolus unfairly holds Phoenicium's writing to standards different from those applied to males, and I suggest that social class—that of the critic as well as the writer—played a complex role in the public assessment of what Roman women said and how they said it.