Raises questions about the representability of the trauma of rape and the purposes of its representation. Focuses on how the strategic enactment of a culturally dominant rape script can potentially open up a gap within which that script can be contested and the act of rape or death resisted. Discusses pedagogical challenges of teaching the literature of trauma and survival.

Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

Presents a methodology based on the concept of “material rhetoric” that can help scholars avoid problems as they reclaim women’s historical texts. Defines material rhetoric and positions it theoretically in relation to other methodologies, including bibliographical studies, reception theory, and established feminist methodologies. Illustrates feminist use of material rhetoric through a study of “The Account of Hester Ann Rogers.”

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Calls for historians of rhetoric to return to the archives. Argues that it is the neglect of training graduate students in standard research methodologies that prevents the field from writing “better” histories of rhetoric. Argues for archival training similar to that given to graduate students in history departments, training tailored to recovering the history of rhetorical practices and instruction.

Suggests that moves to dispersed authorship signal not a challenge to the old ideology of authorship, but rather its appropriation for commercial ends. Identifies alternatives to this appropriation and explains why embracing these alternatives is important. Concludes that scholars of rhetoric and composition need to identify, theorize, practice, and teach alternative forms of subjectivity and alternative modes of ownership.

Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

Examines the simultaneous rise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. Presents and discusses three definitions of “rhetoric.” Argues for the historical prominence and continued relevance of the third definition: rhetoric as the study of speaking and writing well.

Taps research in American studies to learn more about rhetoric and writing instruction in post-Revolutionary America. Merges the separate (and gendered) histories of early 19th-century American rhetoric, breaking down the separate spheres in contemporary historical and literary scholarship. Examines civic rhetoric found in texts that represent women’s schooling.

I n first chapter of Cervantes' Don Quixote, we read of aging hero's decision turn knight errant and travel through world with horse and armour in search of adventures, following in every way practice of knights errant he had read of. A poor country gentleman, Don Quixote could not buy new equipment, so he refurbished armor of his soldier ancestors, for ages forgotten in a corner, eaten with rust and covered with mould. However, Quixote's ancestral helmet lacked a visor, a feature often mentioned in his readings. To remedy this, Quixote constructed a visor out of pasteboard and attached it to helmet with green ribbons. Then he tested it with two strokes of his sword, the first of which demolished in a moment what had taken him a week to make. So

Discusses “Quixote’s visor,” a rhetorical turn that conceals a logical gap, an appeal to frustration or necessity. Suggests that the form of Quixote’s visor, the testing of a series of possibilities, is a way of deriving logical and rhetorical inferences in response to acts of questioning. Discusses two “cousins”--Sherlock’s visor and Darwin’s visor.

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t was not until I had embarked upon my coming out as a deaf person that I considered my rites of passage, and dwelled on my acts, both deliberate and unconscious, both past and present, of passing. Because my coming out was a mid-life event, I had much to reflect back on and much, too, to illuminate ahead of me. This through an identity crisis, as it were, and the rites of passage then involved in uncovering the paths of my lifelong passing as hearing, took place in a hall of mirrors. (Later I would come to know this place as the art and act of rhetoric.) I first saw myself mirrored in several students I met at Gallaudet University (the world's only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students). I was thirty-two and finishing my PhD, writing a dissertation-that quintessential act of literate passing. What's more, I was finishing it by doing an ethnographic sort of study on deaf student writers at Gallaudet University; thus I was using the guise of an academic grant and a PhD-producing project as a professional foil to make a personal journey to the center of Deaf culture. I was always good at finding a way to pass into places I shouldn't normally be. So, there I was, doing time as a teacher and researcher at Gallaudet, collecting data for my study, taking a sign language class, living with a Deaf woman and faculty member at Gallaudet, going to Deaf gatherings, tutoring some of the students. Mostly, I was trying to pass in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me: to pass (unfamiliarly) as D/deaf-and doing a lousy job of it-and to

n the overheated rhetoric of the culture wars, in which leftists and rightists seem to mimic each other in reviling their opponents as Orwellian twisters of the truth, and in an arena where the concept of objectivity is itself a contested issue, is it possible to delineate any objective criteria for judging the relative credibility of opposing arguments? By objective criteria I mean a set of ground rules that both sides would agree to abide by, at least in principle, and to which the extent of a writer's or speaker's compliance is demonstrable, to the satisfaction of those of good will on both sides. I do believe that following such principles of fair play can make it possible to engage in polemics-heatedly partisan argumentation-without lapsing into the irresponsible, onesided tactics of invective, and to persuade to one's side those on the other or on the fence who maintain an open mind and equal commitment to those principles. Toward this ideal, I propose the following:

Examines the workings of an insistent political logic in Ralph Ellison’s novel. Traces the novelistic operations, specifically the uses of symbolism, that allow Ellison to substitute rhetoric for reference, myth for history. Tests out some of the generalizing claims about Communism this technique enables Ellison to make. Argues that he chose highly anomalous details to practice typification.

Argues that Joseph Conrad’s political novels belie the sweeping and vague rhetoric sometimes used to describe them. States that Conrad, disillusioned with materialism in his political novels, imagines that “industrialism and commercialism” may foster wars between democracies. Contends Conrad’s interest is at least divided between a grammar of motives and a grammar of political cause and effect.

Examines the pedagogy of African-American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown (1845–1949), professor of elocution at Wilberforce University from 1893 to 1923, as it addresses pedagogical issues still important today, such as how rhetorical instruction should address the needs of those who have a different linguistic heritage and culture.

Examines the pedagogy of African-American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown (1845–1949), professor of elocution at Wilberforce University from 1893 to 1923, as it addresses pedagogical issues still important today, such as how rhetorical instruction should address the needs of those who have a different linguistic heritage and culture.

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its principles in the linguistic formulation of Newspeak in 1984, I am surprised to have searched Orwell scholarship unsuccessfully for a specifically rhetorical treatment of the essay. Briefly analytic (and critical) is AlbertJ. Brouse's 1974 note registering his disagreement with Orwell's criticism of Harold Laski's prose in the former's list of not especially bad examples of English as it is now habitually written. Brouse feels that Orwell should be stripped of the golden essay award for the most anthologized essay in college texts on the basis of a miscount of negatives in one of the pieces Orwell attacks (Brouse argues that there are really seven negatives in the sentence rather than, as Orwell would have it, five). The closest to a developed analysis is Cleo McNelly's 1977 On Not Teaching Orwell, in which the first two sentences of Politics are shown, in a long paragraph, to be rhetorically complex, and thus, from McNelly's perspective (following Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations of the same year), unsuitable for the basic or developmental writing student, as is the entire essay, in that Orwell will fail [the student] as a guide, if not as a model as well (557). Shaughnessy writes of Orwell's plain style, To urge a student to emulate such 'simplicity' without exploring it thoroughly is to push him far beyond his verbal resources and encourage the very formalese a writer such as Orwell was careful to avoid (196-97). McNelly's and Shaughnessy's points, in terms of my essay, bear, as noted, on the uses of Politics as a model or

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Richards characterized in 1936 as dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English (3) to pluralistic, multidimensional, architectonic discipline in our time. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown in their introduction to Defining the New Rhetorics point out, for instance, that nothing short of the collective effort of multitude of perspectives would enable an encompassing view of and its place in the (vii). And as John Bender and David E. Wellbery observe in The Ends of Rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical inquiry occurs in an matrix that touches on all major academic fields (viii); as result, it has gained an irreducibly multidisciplinary character (38). Less talked about, yet equally important to putting contemporary redefinition of the classical art in perspective, is the fact that the transformation takes place not so much in congenial interdisciplinary matrix as in what Bakhtin terms verbal-ideological world-a world where the centrifugal and the centripetal forces carry on their uninterrupted work alongside each other (272), the ideal of interdisciplinarity inevitably comes into conflict with the imperatives of disciplinary politics, and the enthusiasm to open up is always conditioned by an urge to close down. Thus in responding to rhetoric becoming the central paradigmatic, epistemic activity, Derrida speaks out in Journal of Advanced Composition interview against what he calls rhetoricism or a way of giving all the power, thinking that everything depends on rhetoric. Rhetoric, he maintains, should stay within its traditional limits of verbality, formality, figures of speech (15).

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I he postmodern penchant for reflexivity has affected all arenas of social research, including composition and rhetoric.Sandra Harding explains the importance of reflexivity as she defines feminist methods: The beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research.This evidence . . .must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence....This kind of relationship between the researcher and the object of research is usually discussed under the heading of the "reflexivity of social science."(9) Reflexivity encourages a questioning of the most basic premises of one's discipline.Charles Bazerman, whose essay "The Interpretation of Disciplinary Writing" appears in Writing the Social Text, describes the fruits of interrogating one's discipline: "By reflection one can come to know the systems of which one is part and can act with greater self-conscious precision and flexibility to carry forward and, if appropriate, reshape the projects of one's discipline" (37).

he generally prevailing concept of the enthymeme, or the one most frequent in the world of rhetoric and composition studies, tends to define it either as a of elliptical, informal based on probable rather than certain premises and on tacit assumptions shared by audience and rhetor, or as a of Toulmin argument, or as a general mode of intuitive reasoning representable in syllogistic or Toulminian terms, or, most simply, as the juxtaposition of any idea with another that is offered as a reason for believing it. All such thinking starts from Aristotle's famous dicta that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism or rhetorical syllogism, and that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic (Rhetoric 1.1 [1355a]; 1.2 [1356b]; 1.1 [1354a]).' This prevailing definition, however, has recently been put in question (see in particular Conley, Enthymeme; Gage, Theory). And, as we will see, it is inadequate. In what follows, we will first reexamine the primary (and not exclusively Aristotelian) ancient sources from which a more adequate concept of the enthymeme can be derived. Then, we will consider the relevance of that concept to the analysis of modern discourse-specifically, to the analysis of Roland Barthes' The World of Wrestling and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, both of which appear in popular anthologies used in composition courses, and both of which provide good examples of modern-but unrecognized-enthymeming.

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Critics have failed to account adequately for Ishmael Reed's recent fiction, and generally dismiss it as less interesting than his more controversial early writing. These recent novels seem more straightforward in their plots and messages, and much less experimental in method. I would like to suggest, however, that this apparent clarity is part of a complex and innovative style. We might characterize this style as in the broadest and most pervasive sense-that is, its overall narrative strategies at the level of plot, theme and character are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Reed broadens the definition of the rhetorical aspects of the literary text as part of a larger attempt to reformulate how his own works relate to the AfricanAmerican tradition. Critics have noted that African-American writers often are particularly aware of their precursors and tradition. Reed, however, not only carefully situates himself in relation to tradition in the abstract, but also anticipates in the novel's plot and structure the reactions of actual readers who share that tradition only in a problematic way. Indeed, in Reed's recent fiction this problematic reception of the work becomes the primary content of the novel. The implications of this move force us to reconsider how we are to trace the African-American tradition and to what degree that tradition can remain independent of the readings given it by mainstream American literary culture. I would like to explore such rhetorical workings in one particular recent novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Critics and reviewers unanimously agree that Ishmael Reed is assaulting feminism in Reckless Eyeballing. His protagonist, Ian Ball, is called a notorious sexist, and yet we are invited to suffer with Ball during his persecution at the hands of powerful women in the theatre world. When Reed climactically summarizes Ball's victimization by revealing him as two-headed, he seems to be using that common African-American trope of black double-consciousness. This trope defines black consciousness as split into two identities, one acceptable to and partially created by the white hegemony, the other more authentic but disturbing to that same mainstream society. But if we simply read the trope conventionally, we stumble straight into Reed's trap, and this is what critics