ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

ABSTRACT A major contribution to rhetorical theory and an important tool of rhetorical criticism, Perelman’s distinction between particular audiences and the universal audience has been misconstrued by his critics and even by Perelman himself. Properly construed, the universal audience is focused on facts and truths and consists of all human beings in so far as they are rational; consequently, discourse addressed to it eschews proofs from character and emotion. In contrast, addresses to particular audiences focus on values; they embrace not only proofs reason, but also those from character and emotion.

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

ABSTRACT This is an introduction to and translation of Chaïm Perelman’s “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” published in 1933 by Maurice Lambertin publishing house. De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance has important implications for an understanding of Perelman’s intellectual development generally and specifically for an understanding the evolution of his New Rhetoric Project.

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

ABSTRACT An analysis of Stokely Carmichael’s dissociation of “racism” attempted at UC Berkeley on October 29, 1966 extends the utility of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “dissociation of concepts” for those seeking racial justice. I offer a new term “subversive dissociations” to theorize the foundations of racist dominant narratives as what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call “linguistic common property.” This move reframes dissociative challenges to dominant narratives as attempts to counter other dissociations and thus makes available a set of tools outlined in The New Rhetoric for that purpose. Dissociation emerges as a dynamic anti-racist strategy.

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an unprecedented number of Gnostic manuscripts were unearthed at sites across Egypt. Discovered on the Cairo antiquities market, in ancient trash heaps, and in buried jars, these papyri have radically refigured the landscape of early Christian history. Rhetoric, however, has overlooked the Gnostics. Long denigrated as heretical, Gnostic texts invite historians of rhetoric to (re)consider the role of gender in the early Church, the interplay between gnōsis and contemporary rhetorical concepts, and the
development of early Christian rhetorical practice(s) within diverse historical contexts, including the Second Sophistic. In response to recent calls for rhetorical archaeology, this essay returns to Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi. These three locations refigure early Christian rhetoric(s) in situ.

ABSTRACT Lysias is best known for his portrayal of character (ethopoiia), his believable narratives, his plain or “Attic” style, and for the role he plays as inferior foil to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But he was also an important figure in developing, refining, and employing types of argument, including the rhetorical technique that would later be called the enthymeme. In On the Death of Eratosthenes, Lysias not only uses enthymemes, he highlights their use, selects a term (enthymizing), and demonstrates how “enthymizing” could be central to rhetorical artistry, to narrative development, to legal reasoning, and to political activism. Examining Lysias 1 not only deepens our understanding of Lysias’ rhetorical abilities, but it suggests that the orators had an important role to play in the development of rhetorical theory.

In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender.Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion … can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220).Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.In addition to passive spectators, Kastely notes “the creators of discourse” and “the audiences who can listen to or read that discourse with a critical awareness” (xiii). He then develops a theory of cultural criticism for the non-philosopher, but the hierarchy of the philosopher and non-philosopher creates a doubleness, demanding critique from Plato’s critical readers. Even critical readers are not creators of discourse (rhetoricians?): readers do not represent their desires or create discourse, nor do they constitute their own identity or the state’s. Perhaps Kastely finds evidence for Plato’s constitution of “an audience who can rethink its cultural heritage” (80), but would truly critical readers accept the privilege of philosophers who deny their ability to create? The binary of reading and creating seemingly would frustrate truly critical readers. Would they not desire to create?Another doubleness: If mimesis is banned from the ideal state of Kallipolis, then what is its place in the performance of the state of Republic? Kastely writes mimesis into the state, reading The Republic as epic poetry, and hence he reads the dialogic state of Republic in relationship and preference to the monologic Kallipolis. Yet critical ironies abound in the tension between the imagined Kallipolis and the narrated, multifaceted state of Republic. Let me quickly, and perhaps fairly, trace Kastely’s argument for mimesis. He sees Plato’s difficulty with imitative poetry as an interpretive tension between mimetic entertainment and rhetorical, critical reading, writing “(t)o read the Republic rhetorically requires a reader to go beyond the surface and to understand the issues that the surface text both represents and distorts” (112). Ignoring the critique of poetry as counterfeit reality, Kastely argues that the right kind of reading leads to philosophical truth. Mimesis works pedagogically: in the Republic, “the rhetorical action of the dialogue” is “an enactment of persuasion that provides guidance on how to use poetry rhetorically to effect practical and individual change” (62). That is, the audience should read the Republic’s mimesis as an enactment of persuasive technique, not as drama, for Plato would “undo or minimize” cultural influences by acknowledging the rhetoricity of all discourse (79, 101). In Kastely’s epic Republic, readers engage the dialogue’s narrative, and it “educate(s) them on how to interrogate works of cultural rhetoric” (62). Readers thus become suspicious of the forces shaping their souls, moving away from shared culture toward self-cultivation. But do rhetorical reading and self-cultivation save mimesis? Do they respond to or change common culture? Can’t self-cultivation remove a citizen from common concerns and the polity? Is rhetorical reading the controlled action by which critical readers are separated from the creators of discourse? Doesn’t reception differ from production?Kastely appreciates Plato’s desire for a skeptical reader, and his rhetorical reader is a provocative concept, but he tends to interpret the Republic through dialogic resolution and logical consistency. Might I suggest that Plato is sometimes better read sophistically through contradiction, paradox, and bivalence? In doubleness, Plato violates his own dictates. For example, Socrates defends true philosophers through a tale of low, counterfeit reality. He tells the silly tale of a blind, deaf, and ignorant ship owner faced with sailors wrangling to be captain (488). Seeking the job, the argumentative sailors deny any need for knowledge of sailing. Consequently a false definition—captain as a windbag—emerges. Plato calls this analogy, compiled “out of lots of different elements, like the goat-stags and other compound creatures painters come up with” (488a). Analogy perhaps, but also narrative, full of bad behaviors (including murder), an extreme counterfeit reality: in offering such a tale, Plato assumes his audience is already able to critique mimesis, avoid categorical mistakes, and modulate their identifications with bad characters. He assumes that the dialogic pedagogy has worked or is unnecessary, and perhaps he tests our skeptical ability to read goat-stag extremes.Kastely’s systemic reading of the entire Republic brilliantly draws attention to Plato’s performative method, revitalizing and embodying Platonic rhetoric, but it understates Plato’s doubleness, playfulness, puzzlement, and skepticism. Plato, with his longing for total revolution and his fractured fairy tales, is the writerly critic of writing; the dramatic censor of plot, setting, and character; and the myth-teller who denounces mimesis. Given Plato’s denials and dissatisfactions, his doubleness, tensions, and contradictions, Kastely rightly reads him for performance and rhetoricity and wisely confronts the two states, Kallipolis and Republic. Without a doubt, this book begins another millennium of Platonic delight.

ABSTRACT In moments of crisis, people often make sense of the present by activating memories of the past through particular tropes of public memory. Classical analogies are one such trope, suggesting a sense of continuity between a (seemingly) stable ancient world and a chaotic present. Despite their prominence in American rhetoric, classical analogies have received too little attention from scholars of rhetoric. In the following, I interrogate the use of classical analogies in nineteenth-century American rhetoric— a period in which the classics were a vibrant aspect of public culture—by analyzing analogies between the fall of the Alamo and the fifth-century BC battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae analogies were activated as tropes of public memory to warrant the formation of a defiant political identity for a Texian community reeling from defeat. Through an analysis of key texts that utilized Thermopylae analogies, I show that classical analogies sometimes go beyond comparisons between the past and the present to act as “mirrors” that inspire identification with, and imitation of, the ancients.

ABSTRACT Quintilian’s notion of imitation is often acclaimed for its focus on invention and appropriateness and for highlighting attunement to individual talent. Yet these aspects tend to be somewhat neglected in the practice of imitation as shaped by the classical rhetorical tradition, which primarily focuses on imitation exercises for beginners. This essay accentuates Quintilian’s chapter on imitation, which, as stressed by Murphy, is aimed at the mature student, in order to propel these precepts into today’s teaching. Specifically, this article advances a pedagogy of student-driven imitation constituted of five dimensions and characterized by the student’s own choice of text, valuing reflexive process over mirroring, and strengthening rhetorical agency. The exposition of student-driven imitation is supplemented with questions that students might address and excerpts from a student’s work.

In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.

It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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 As the popular narrative has it, the modern speech discipline in the United States was born out of a concern for democracy and reason. However, this story occludes other, decidedly undemocratic, foundational ideas that were at the heart of rhetoric and oratory during the first half of the twentieth century. Given contemporary concerns with both deliberative democracy and affect theory, rhetoricians and speech teachers would benefit today from a fuller understanding of some of the undemocratic ideas that influenced the modern rhetorical renaissance. This article helps accomplish this by focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, whose concern with persuasion and the masses was influential on early scholars of rhetorical oratory, including James Winans, William Brigance, and James O’Neill. Indeed, it was Gustave Le Bon who popularized the notion that the masses were like a psychological crowd devoid of reason and the ability to deliberate.

ABSTRACT This article offers a rhetorical theory of what Giorgio Agamben has called the “state of exception” through a genealogy of the figure of Cincinnatus. In classical Rome, Cincinnatus was named dictator not once, but twice; first to save the city from invaders, and second to put down a popular, democratic uprising. Here we see the two sides of exception, or what I call the two faces of Cincinnatus: enemyship, and sovereign violence. These two faces are linked by an anti-democratic logic that is premised on the will of “the people,” as becomes clear in the counter-revolutionary writings of the founders of the United States.

ABSTRACT Studies in the history of rhetoric can be enriched by paying more attention to the relationship between theological belief and rhetorical theory. This article describes ways in which theology shaped the rhetorical theory of Austin Phelps (1820–1890), the fifth Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, America's first graduate school of theology and a premiere institution for rhetorical education during the nineteenth century.

ABSTRACT Taking seriously Kenneth Burke's claim that identification follows property's logic discloses identification's rootedness not only in nonsymbolic motion but also in attitudinal sensation, that midway realm between sheer motion and symbolic action. Burke's key distinction is among three terms, not two—implying consubstantial (not antithetical) relations between pure persuasion and identification. Thus understood, these relations have implications for the New Rhetoric, in particular for how it frames the question of justice.

ABSTRACT In antiquity, rhetorical treatises generally identified clarity and obscurity as positive and negative qualities of style, respectively. But in the fifth century, Augustine developed a valuation such that both clarity and obscurity could potentially function as equally viable resources for persuasion. While previous rhetorical treatises acknowledged that standards of perspicuity varied with genre, Augustine's stipulations for variability are tied much more closely to the particulars of the rhetorical situation. In a bold vision of the potency of style, Augustine demonstrates how a principle like clarity can be adjusted according to the rhetorical situation.

ABSTRACT In his monumental speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen urges his fellow townsmen of Syracuse, NY, an “open city” to fugitives, to defy the new federal legislation by protecting the city's fugitives from federal marshals en route to apprehend them. My analysis of Loguen's speech examines his use of American and African American jeremiadic strategies to convince his audience of primarily white Christian abolitionists that their unified resistance against the new law was part of God's providential plan to redeem the nation of the sin of slavery. My study also reveals how Loguen's appeals to manhood, through associating divine punishment with the emasculation of American men, as well as his establishment of “identification” around shared religious and political values, proved effective in rallying Syracuse's citizens to defend their God-given freedom.

ABSTRACTThis article treats the idea of consilium as a concept in the rhetoric of the Western Middle Ages. The tradition of civic oratory in antiquity was associated with the deliberative genre, and civic speech was perpetuated in the Middle Ages but manifested itself as consilium. In the letters of Fulbert of Chartres, the rhetorical commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, and the rhetorical treatises of Albertanus of Brescia and Brunetto Latini, the concept of consilium (“counsel”) systematically describes persuasive human interaction to address deliberative uncertainty about future civic decisions. Medieval rhetoricians use the term consilium both synonymously with deliberation and to describe an activity of persuasion that is akin to deliberative oratory. In rhetorical texts describing the practice of counsel in the Middle Ages, we see a transition from counsel as a subject of rhetorical theory to counsel as a public practice.

The influences of Stoicism on the historical development of rhetorical theory are deeply interwoven into the history of rhetoric, from Cicero to the Enlightenment.1 In recent years, interest in the Stoics has enjoyed a revival in conjunction with discussions of cosmopolitanism, most notably the lively debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum's (2002) proposal for a cosmopolitan education, and some of the articles presented in this issue remind us of the connection between the Stoics and certain conceptions of cosmopolitanism. My interest in the convergence of these conversations stems from my own work on the possibilities and necessity of a cosmopolitan rhetoric for our time, a time characterized by massive displacements: the movement of people through geographical and social space, the homogenization of space, and the technological abolition of space (Darsey 2003).Nussbaum's inquiry into cosmopolitanism is occasioned by an urgent sense of movement across boundaries. Our time has been described as one in which “rootlessness, movement, homelessness and nomadism are the motifs of the day” (Skribs, Kendall, and Woodward 2004, 115). bell hooks begins her recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, with this poignant observation: “As I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going. Many folks feel no sense of place” (2009, 1). As Pico Iyer puts it: For more and more people … the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the furthest point is just a click away. (2001, 10–11)So Nussbaum, drawing from Stoic sources, feels the imperative to move beyond the borders of the nation state (2002, 3).In the world described by hooks, Iyer, and Nussbaum, the question for rhetoric is this: What is the proper rhetorical response to an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world? In a world in which place is rapidly disappearing, from where do arguments come? How can an audience be addressed? About this aspect of radical displacement, Iyer writes: “The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction.” The answer to the question “Where do you stand?” is, for Iyer, “treacherous” (2001, 25). Place has historically been inextricably connected to meaning-making and has, at least prior to very recent time, been the most convenient site of “culture.” As evidence of this relationship, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson point to world maps on which the world is represented as a collection of countries, “inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place… . It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely appended to the names of nation-states” (1997, 34). The mapping described by Gupta and Ferguson suggests two things: (1) a deep desire for definition, the dual and simultaneous operation of inclusion and exclusion; and (2) the conceit that the borders marked by the colored patches are as stable and constant as the mountains, rivers, and other geographical features that populate the map.The fiction of stability presented by the cartography exposed, where, then, do we find grounds for argument in a world in which stable ground has disappeared? What are the bases for argument? Where are the places we search for arguments in a world of flux? Are there any more commonplaces? One temptation, evidenced in the summer 2010 “Restore America” rally in Washington, DC, is to retreat into provincialism. Any cursory survey of recent news stories provides a disheartening number of examples of attempts to reconcile conflicting ethical claims too often retreating to a reassertion of the local. At the time of this writing, those stories include the passing of legislation in the Slovak Republic making that country the only European country to require that its national anthem be played daily in schools, at each town council meeting, and on all public radio and television programs. This, along with the requirement that all state business be conducted in the Slovak language has created concern among the Hungarian minority that these laws are part of a movement to ostracize ethnic Hungarians. In March 2010, a group of Latin American nations joined in a new bloc that excludes the United States and Canada, and in April, investigators found evidence of the revival of human sacrifice among Kali worshippers in Bolpur, India. Throughout the spring of 2010, the revival of Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq threatened the U.S. hope of establishing a stable government there, and a conflict between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China over access to information assumed the dimensions of an international crisis.In the United States in the spring of 2010, Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration became the focus of a nationwide debate, revealing a concern with the movement of people across boundaries. At the same time, a new battle in the ongoing war over sex education revealed concern with the movement of ideas across boundaries. Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, described the latest battle as “at heart … a battle over community standards. Berkeley liberals don't want their kids taught that premarital sex is wrong. Alabama churchgoers don't want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation” (2010, 16). Finally, in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, 2010 the justices were asked to consider whether a Christian organization of law students at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco could be allowed to discriminate against students unable or unwilling to affirm the group's statement of faith, which includes the promise to refrain from sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That is, the court asked to what degree should those sharing a public space and resources be required to adhere to the same values?The examples of retreats into parochial sureties can be multiplied almost indefinitely: burkas in schools in France; the continuing controversy over how to handle Eritrean families living in the United States who insist on subjecting their daughters to what, for them, is a religious ritual, but which we call female genital mutilation; states such as Oklahoma and Wyoming drawing up bans on Sharia law. And so on.On October 16, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made international news when, in a speech to young members of the Christian Democratic Union, she declared multiculturalism to be an utter failure in Germany (Weaver 2010). The following week, William Falk, in his editorial in The Week, wrote: The boundaries between cultures are eroding, due to widespread immigration, economic interdependence, and the Internet, forcing modern societies into an uncomfortable paradox. We believe that every cultural group, religion, and nation has the right to self-determination. But we also hold as a bedrock principle that every human being is born with inalienable rights—including the 50 percent of us who are women. Is it our business to free Muslim women from their shrouds and subservience, to bring a halt to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East? Do we have the right to object to China's insistence that democracy and human rights do not apply there? Genteel tolerance alone will not resolve these questions. The collision of values has begun. How that conflict plays out will determine the shape of the next half-century. (2010, 7)As Falk's editorial suggests, each of the conflicts referred to here is the symptom of a contested boundary: in some cases a boundary that has been transgressed, in other cases a rampart being built against the barbarians who are perceived to be at the gate. These fragile walls and fences have failed to maintain what Gupta and Ferguson call the “play of differences” necessary to meaning-making. “The structures of feeling that enable meaningful relationships with particular locales, constituted and experienced in a particular manner, necessarily include the marking of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through identification with larger collectivities,” they write. “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community and different from those who are excluded from it” (1997, 19). Rhetorically, these examples represent instances in which enthymemes have failed to cross borders, geographical propinquity without community; those with no shared grounds for agreement find themselves having to share the same social space.The alternative to provincialism as a response to an increasingly complex and integrated world is cosmopolitanism. In 1998, Ulrich Beck published in The New Statesman a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” declaring that, just as 150 years prior the moment had been ripe for The Communist Manifesto, the moment was ripe, at the dawn of a new millennium, for a cosmopolitan manifesto: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue which has to be opened up and organised. What is this global dialogue to be about? About the goals, values and structures of a cosmopolitan society. About whether democracy will be possible in a global age… . The key idea for a Cosmopolitan Manifesto is that there is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics… .These questions are already part of the political agenda—in the localities and regions, in governments and public spheres both national and international. But only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved. For this there has to be a reinvention of politics, a founding and grounding of the new political subject: that is—cosmopolitan parties. These represent transnational interests transnationally, but also work within the arenas of national politics. (1998, 28)Beck's call repeatedly draws our attention to place and to the necessity of transcending place. Beck is concerned with the issues of a world in which our fates are bound together but our focus too often remains stubbornly local. Consider the recent climate talks in Copenhagen and the ongoing debates over global warming, what to do about it, and who ought to do it.But Beck's manifesto is notable more for its representativeness than for its originality. Seventy-one years before Beck published his manifesto, Hugh Harris, writing in the wake of “the great war” and two years after the First International Conference on Child Welfare, surveyed the calls for cosmopolitanism among his contemporaries. Harris noted that, while the events of the early years of the twentieth century had done much to give the ideal of cosmopolitanism its “present intellectual currency,” the ideal itself “is not merely ephemeral doctrine, but one that has been transmitted to us through the ages” (1927, 1). Harris notes the “prevalent opinion” that cosmopolitanism in the Western world begins with the Stoics (2). Though Harris sets out to correct what he identified as the “prevalent opinion … that prior to the Alexandrian age and to the foundation of the Stoic school, Greek thought had not advanced beyond the conceptions of a narrow city-state patriotism and of an irreconcilable barrier between Hellenes and barbarians” (2). Harris locates the Greek origins of the cosmopolitan ideal much more broadly—in poetry, science, philosophy, and religion.The prevalent opinion, fueled by the proclamation of Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “citizen of the world,” is tenacious, and it was given a major infusion of new energy when Martha Nussbaum published her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in 1994 in the Boston Review. There were 29 responses to Nussbaum's article published along with the article itself, and two years later the article was republished in book form along with eleven of the original responses and five new ones (Nussbaum 2002, 3). For all of the various responses the article has provoked, it is notable that almost no one takes issue with Nussbaum's claim that the intellectual lineage of cosmopolitanism in the West runs from Diogenes the Cynic through the Stoics to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace. I want to suggest that, as students of rhetoric, perhaps we should.From a rhetorical perspective, Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitan education presents at least four problems. First, Nussbaum celebrates the Stoics as champions of a universalizing and antiprovincial rationality, but the emphasis on rationality, necessarily if paradoxically, is exclusionary. As Peter Euben has noted in his cross-examination of Nussbaum's proposal, Stoicism sponsored “a new exclusiveness based on differential commitment to and practice of rationality… . Very few exceptional humans could be full members in the community of reason,” Euben goes on to argue (2001, 266, 268–270). Rhetoric has long been identified with democracy and inclusiveness, and contemporary work—beginning with Stephen Toulmin and extending through Walter Fisher's work on narrative and Michael Billig's work on argument—has made great strides toward maintaining and even extending that tradition through the articulation and legitimation of mundane forms of argument that are not necessarily logical. Work by Sally Planalp and others has extended our understanding of the role of the emotions in persuasion.Second, Nussbaum's proposal neglects the praxis of real political contention. As Fred Dallmayr has put it: “[I]t is insufficient—on moral and practical grounds—to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation” (2003, 434). Dallmayr goes on to remind us that Diogenes the Cynic, whose example was followed by most of the Roman Stoics (Cicero being the exception), “was described as an ‘exile’ from his city who paid little heed to ‘political thought’ and adopted a ‘strikingly apolitical stance’” (435). Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Nussbaum “quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the idea of a universal ‘moral community’ and ‘world citizenship.’ But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, ‘Man is by nature a political animal,’ has proved to be far more prescient than the Stoic doctrine” (2002, 74). While the question of nature in the human political character has been contested ground at least since Hobbes, we have, whether by nature or by necessity, historically found our existence as part of a polis, and there can be little contesting of Aristotle's asseveration that “politics is the master art,” and rhetoric its ethical branch. A rhetorical theory that neglects politics be no rhetorical theory at and a cosmopolitan that neglects politics be of many of the issues our world within itself a toward the very that the call for a cosmopolitan to to the one the to all human as of their shared for against based on or the other of is by extending to only in the in which they are with (2003, and Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitanism based on universal reason is to our in the degree that it is itself in it is the of our that the grounds of reason itself have been reason has no from which to if we to the claims of against the of the the universal As puts it, of and the cultural of the universal work against its claim to a (2002, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of the universal values and of are not only in practice by a part of they are not in all of in perhaps even Western (2002, response to the of the universal is to it as an of of and … an alternative to Nussbaum's I am to a as the for a theory of rhetoric, a theory of rhetoric that can the world of and and among The of were early in a they were citizens of the and though they were notably by for their as they the of and it was their from that allowed them to put moral questions at the of public Harris includes the in his survey of the of cosmopolitanism in them with the and the and in particular to the of While most of the the of among them only a few of those an between the of the and their Harris Yet it is that is in a of and their to the Western intellectual tradition may be a rhetorical practice with this cosmopolitan following the of that the while they may be and are for a cosmopolitan rhetoric their multiculturalism into or a kind of that the were of the point of or that their were based on is not by the and contemporary find evidence of ethical in the of the the of concern with in interest in the social of proper the in which the to rhetoric bring about for the and us that there is evidence for all of the that they were in politics, often at very necessarily then, making ethical and that or four of the as a of the political they represented beyond the the evidence even more if we include who for the of over war and for a who to his what in to as of It is not that the any idea of but that they it as “the of of in to the Stoics who to and that the case can be a cosmopolitan rhetoric based on the have these over Nussbaum's First, it be a deeply or not the were of rhetoric, they were inextricably with the rhetorical and political of their The were of a rhetoric, being in displacement, ought to the of a world with the of The were and as as as the were also as and is not to the movement of but as Kendall, and Woodward is about of and just as much as it is about of is not only but also and As a rhetoric in displacement, a rhetoric should the of a rhetoric, not bound by a universal ought to be to forms of argument and the possibilities for argument and in that a Stoic rhetoric is not and as and others have us out of the of a alternative for in the between the two world and in that to our own moment in Hugh Harris the poignant for a cosmopolitan understanding that he found in the intellectual of There is, on the one a to see our historical as in of there is, on the other a to historical for our as that we have this before and that our will see us through In a rhetoric represent a with the of but one that has never enjoyed widespread this is its perhaps this time we can it

ABSTRACT As Cicero details in his De Officiis (On Duties), Stoic ethical theory proceeds from a poetics of virtue according to which people act dutifully by performing the roles (personae) in which nature has cast them. Stoicism's dramatistic conception of duty fits within the theatrical dynamics of ancient rhetorical practice, theory, and pedagogy and is a noteworthy precursor to persona theory in contemporary rhetorical studies. Furthermore, the centrality of decorum to Stoic personae theory gives it a poignant rhetorical quality, especially given the circumstances during which Cicero introduced it to Roman readers.

ABSTRACTIn this article, I present a mode of cosmopolitanism that builds on Stoic and Kantian views toward not just rational cosmopolitan agents but rhetorical ones. I outline a new rhetorical approach to cosmopolitanism that addresses the challenge of “otherness.” This rhetorical cosmopolitanism focuses on the conditions for deliberative and participatory practices that bring us before others; it seeks to help us recognize that the way we develop actual—and not just abstract—political relationships to others is fundamentally rhetorical, not just rational or emotional. I explore the debates over the inclusion of minorities in the European Union, particularly focusing on the Muslim population, in order to outline a rhetorical cosmopolitanism that accounts for the place of emotions in discourses of citizenship.

AbstractMust acts of identification via an inclusive “we” mystify the inequalities they are meant to transcend? One answer lies in this essay's reading of Abraham Lincoln's and Kenneth Burke's rhetoric, a reading that tracks (especially through Lincoln's rhetoric) the “ways of identification,” ways which Burke claimed “are in accordance with the nature of property.” Identification in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address confirms much of Burke's theory, yet Lincoln's career of appeals to the connections between property and propriety—and in particular the specific identifications made by such appeals in the Second Inaugural—suggests that Burke's presentation of identification is itself a kind of mystification that can lead to under-reading the ways of identification.

Abstract This essays offers a rhetorical interpretation of judicial opinions Joseph Story wrote in four U.S. Supreme Court cases concerned with the slavery question: U.S. v. La Jeune Eugenie (1822), Groves v. Slaughter (1841), U.S. v. Amistad (1841), and Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). I argue that Story, a jurist trained in the intellectual traditions of the early republic, performed judicial argument as a kind of rhetorical action dependent upon Ciceronian controversia, a mental habit of arguing pro et contra on any matter in dispute. In consequence of this approach to judicial argument, Story's opinions do not represent a choice between positive law or natural law, neither do they represent a commitment to legal instrumentalism or legal formalism; rather they present controversial responses to rhetorical situations broadly conceived.

Abstract A case study of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, can inform nineteenth-century North American rhetorical history by exposing the interplay of rhetorical theory and practice in an educational setting during the antebellum period. Evidence of this interplay emerges in the subject matter of students' quarterly exhibition and commencement orations and of their literary society presentations from 1823 to 1845. When considered as a curricular whole, this evidence suggests a symbiotic relationship between the primarily moralistic and belletristic discourse favored by the college's curriculum and the more broadly civic judicial and deliberative discourse favored by its literary societies.

Abstract The rise of Lech Walesa from shipyard electrician to leader of “Solidarity,” international icon of freedom, and first president of democratic Poland was closely bound up with rhetoric. Walesa's idiosyncratic verbal style galvanized the masses and successfully confronted communist propaganda. The revolution of the workers on the Baltic coast was to a large extent a revolution in language. Walesa was also a skilled negotiator. As president, however, he was a controversial figure; his conception of democracy as a continuing war of words is widely credited with spelling the end of the idealistic “Solidarity” era. Today, allegations remain that Walesa was an agent provocateur and that the Polish revolution may have been a provocation that got out of hand. Some allege that Walesa's myth was a creation of Western media, a function of people's desires, and an accident of the historical moment. While there is no proof that any of these allegations are true and the documentary record reveals Walesa's undeniable rhetorical prowess and political talent, his case provides material for reflection on the relationship between history, rhetoric, and political agency.

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.