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The author proposes a concept of ethics for the writing course, one derived from a moral theory that is both old and new and one that engages us when we teach such practices as making claims, providing evidence, and choosing metaphors in corollary discussions of honesty, accountability, generosity, intellectual courage, and other qualities. These and similar qualities are what Aristotle called “virtues,” and they are the subject of that branch of moral philosophy known as “virtue ethics” today. While the word virtue may sound strange to us today, Duffy argues that the tradition of the virtues has much to offer teachers and students and can clarify what it means, in an ethical sense, to be a “good writer” in a skeptical, postmodern moment.

On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”

In the post-Civil War United States, several historically black colleges gave a central role to classical rhetoric in their curricula, and many of their students used its concepts to develop a distinctly black, oppositional public sphere.

or rhetoric and composition, the last decade of the twentieth century might be deemed Return of the Ancients. In many ways, contemporary scholars have taken up an earlier resurgence of the ancients, one that began decades earlier with what have since become standard historical treatments of the ancients (Kennedy, Kerferd, and Guthrie), and, perhaps most notably, in 1972, when Rosamond Kent Sprague's volume The Older Sophists made available the sophistic fragments in translation for the first time. But recent work aims to be more connective: rather than writing history for the sake of history, scholars such as Janet Atwill, Richard Enos, Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, Kathleen Welch, Victor Vitanza, and most recently Jeffrey Walker (Rhetoric) have reclaimed, refigured, and reread Aristotle, Isocrates, and the sophists, delineating ways in which these ancient figures might help us reframe or reconsider contemporary debates about pedagogy. The connections to feminism (arratt), cultural studies (T. Poulakos and Welch), postmodernism (Vitanza and Atwill) and the liberal arts (Atwill and Walker) have been convincing enough to spark renewed and broadened interest in how the ancients conceptualized rhetoric, how they taught, what they did. In many ways what follows is also a return to the ancients, but rather than attempt to connect the ancients to discourse already in circulation-an important task, to be sure-I want to instead explore a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection that isn't as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but as I will suggest just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. It is important to note at the outset, as many writers have pointed out (for

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.

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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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hat's happened to American humor lately would be funny if it weren't so serious. Potshots have been fired at it from highest levels of government and academe; it's been unjustly accused, mangled beyond recognition, and in some cases outlawed. A recent potshot came from Harvey I. Saferstein, president of California Bar Association, after a gunman opened fire in offices of a law firm, killing eight people before shooting himself-and leaving a letter that railed against lawyers and others involved in a failed real estate deal. In response, Saferstein called a news conference to denounce lawyer jokes. Mean-spirited jokes about lawyers could lead to more violence like massacre, he warned, according to an Associated Press story dated July 6, 1993; such jokes could be the straw that breaks camel's back for a fringe person; Americans should stop lawyer-bashing... that sometimes can incite violence and aggression toward lawyers. Saferstein's plea was undoubtedly well intentioned, and he joins a long line of protesters who are tired of being butt of jokes. However, point he missed is that humor flourishes only when there's a moderate level of tension between groups. If tension becomes too high, then humor won't suffice, which is what Cicero observed two thousand years ago when he said that people want criminals attacked with more forceful weapons than ridicule. The man who shot up law offices was feeling a much greater level of tension than that felt by people who tell lawyer jokes. And although it's risky to guess about someone else's innermost thoughts, one could conceivably argue that if, over years since man's business dealings went awry, he had been able to relieve his tensions through laughter-even laughter at his lawyers' expense-he might not have resorted to violence.

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.

Two articles in the December 1992 College English presented historical perspectives on the field of Basic Writing. In "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" Min-Zhan Lu argued for the value of a pedagogy in which conflict and struggle help Basic Writers to reposition themselves; she suggested that resistance to such a pedagogy is traceable to three pioneers in the field, Kenneth Bruffee, Thomas Farrell, and Mina Shaughnessy, and the historical context in which they worked. In "Waiting for an Aristotle, " Paul Hunter analyzed the special issue of the Journal of Basic Writing published in 1980 as a memorial to Mina Shaughnessy, finding a conservative impulse both in its structure and in its reading of Shaughnessy's message. This symposium presents several commentaries on Lu 's and Hunter's articles, followed by the authors' responses. Sources for all contributions to the Symposium are combined in a common Works Cited list at the end.

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It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-

As most everyone teaching literature must know by now, the various kinds of study and analysis grouped under the rubrics of new criticism and formalism are very much in retreat. What most of us learned in college and graduate school by way of analytical method, and indeed what has been the dominant mode of teaching and discussing literature in the United States during the last fifty years, we have been urged to renounce. While unquestionably it is good that teachers develop a fresh perspective on what they are doing, for many such renunciation is an unsettling, and even painful and threatening, prospect. For me it involves denying the neo-Aristotelianism to which I was introduced over twenty years ago by my most thoughtful and persuasive English professor-an attitude, a rigor, and an analytical method that were the cornerstones of his teaching and critical writing, and that I still respect as probably the most flexible and fruitful way of asking certain key questions about what we read. Broadly speaking, this method insists on examining the unifying principle of a literary text-that principle of inclusion and ordering that best explains what elements make up the text, how they are arranged, and to what ends. A good deal of my early interest in the neo-Aristotelian enterprise centered on what I perceived to be its tolerant, non-authoritarian manner-which is ironic in light of how it and related methodologies have come to be attacked for their narrowness and rigidity. At any rate, it has hardly surprised me, at least, that many of the chief proponents of critical pluralism, notably Wayne Booth, have come out of this approach. Nor, I think, is it surprising that the proportion of attention I myself have come to give matters of form and shaping principles in the fiction, poetry, and drama I teach has fallen off sharply during my teaching career. Of course, even at the beginning, though I talked of little besides form and shaping principles, I did so largely without the jargon of Aristotelianism, and was never so much concerned with my students' my analysis of a particular poem or novel as with their learning how to read more formally, how to ask the questions of texts. But even my notion of what were the right questions soon began to broaden. For example, many years before I knew of reader-response criticism, I began

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Few will disagree, I think, if I say that twentieth-century discussion of the lyric has often granted little recognition, and sometimes none, to the role of argumentation. Indeed, the word itself may not appear at all: we are much more likely to be told, instead, that lyric poems contain-and we should emphasize the word contain--such things as subjects, ideas, themes, or even conceptual schemes, and we are just as likely to be told that none of these things are what the lyric is really all about. Such things belong to prose, and in the lyric are merely there, contained, as useful but dispensable accessories and props; the lyric dramatizes or expresses feeling. Or rather, it bodies forth image of the poet's thought as it moves through some phase or phases of an intensely felt experience (Hardy 1-2). It is essentially dramatistic or expressive, rather than, say, discursive, argumentative, or suasory-no matter how much, in the reader's experience, it may seem to operate discursively, as an argument intending to create, intensify, or change belief. The feeling's the thing. Or so that argument goes, or has gone. This is the average mainstreammodern view of lyric, the view most likely to be taken as a self-evident given in a typical account of this most protean mode of poetry. (Barbara Hardy, for example, is able to simply declare it, as an opening premise for her book, with virtually no recognition of a possible disagreement.) I believe that few will disagree, either, if I say that strong objections to this mainstream-modern version of the lyric are and have been available. We can argue, as did Yvor Winters, that lyric poetry, or any poetry, intends not only representation or embodiment of an or state of but also judgment or evaluation of human experience, and thus is necessarily suasory and involved with argumentation, or what Winters called exposition. Or we can argue, as Gerald Graff has done, that the logos and the pathos projected by a poem are necessarily related, as premise(s) and conclusion(s), what Graff calls ground and consequent: the ground provided by what is said, by logos, makes the speaker's represented state of feeling or act of mind both convincing and intelligible-as opposed, say, to self-indulgent, incoherent, and neurotic. Graff's line of objection, then, defines the lyric once more as a form of argument. We

In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York

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