In the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 (re)election, the National Communication Association's annual conference featured an intellectual “Come to Jesus” regarding Jon Stewart and his brand of comedy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The “tl;dr” (“Too long; didn't read”) of this battle was that Professors Lance Bennett and Robert Hariman defended Stewart as a necessary agent in political discourse and public life; Professors Roderick Hart and Johanna Hartelius condemned Stewart's cynicism, arguing people substitute watching Stewart for material participation in public life to the grave detriment of the public sphere. Nearly 20 years later, James Caron's Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement makes a compelling argument that, while comedic speech has limits and is not by any stretch curative, it is an ideal stylistic fit in an era of postmodern truthiness because it creates an innovative public engagement in a participatory media culture (6).Caron “examines the relationship between satire and the public sphere, a relationship that creates a comic public sphere, a parodic counterpart to Habermas's classic articulation of a particular kind of discourse and set of social practices first associated with Enlightenment values and technologies” (2). Rather than presuming satire is political discourse, Caron's gambit is that “satire [is] a form of aesthetic communication supplementing political discourse with its mode of comic discourse” (7). It directly encourages citizens to act together in real life. Satire is public-directed—its purpose is not to mock one person but to direct attention to issues of broader public concern. In this sense, satire is generative.Caron moves through his argument in two parts. Part One is historical background and theoretical foundation. Part Two is comprised of a series of case studies.Caron defines satire in Chapter One saying “satire signifies those instances of comic artifacts that can “exceed . . . serious communications . . . for the sake of deliberation, advocacy, and exchange” (20). That is, the ridiculous and the ludicrous are effects of comic laughter. The ridiculous is designed to critique and improve its object; the ludicrous offers an appreciation of the object as is. Here Caron introduces a kind of rubric for understanding the comic: play, judgment, aggression, laughter. Play separates the comic from the earnest by providing a cue that something is funny. Judgment is critique that marks “The Comic” as both always serious and unserious simultaneously. Aggression enables ridicule and mockery. And laughter is, well, laughter. Here Caron makes one of the central moves of the book arguing, “satire's power lies in its rhetorical potential to change minds, to effect metanoia via it's a-musement” (26). This deconstruction of “a-musement” means we are not merely laughing about something; we are musing on it.Chapter Two investigates the distinction between the Habermasian theorizing on the public sphere and the contemporary reality of the digital public sphere. Habermas's construct relies on social and political bracketing of reality in which intellectual equals gather in coffee houses and argue enlightened perspectives on the issues of the day. The digital public sphere, on the other hand, values “personalized feedback, instantaneous interaction, participation potentially 24/7, and no geographic limitations” (38). But the digital public sphere is something of a Wild West scenario. While the democratization of participatory media culture invites those who would never have had access to Habermas's coffee houses, it also creates dis and misinformation, trolls, and other serious concerns. However, satire thrives in uncertain times: “Satire's most profound cultural role today, then, employs in comic fashion the basic ethos of modern/postmodern liberalism as part of the aesthetic-expressive rationality of Habermas” (50).In the final pages of Part One, Caron layers the nuance to note that “satire operates as comic political speech, not political speech, in the public sphere” (52). Satire operates within a playful aesthetic that fosters dissent, just of a different order than traditional political speech. Digital technologies afford more involved citizenship and (re)presentation as citizens, and so comic sense, irony, mock news performed satirically, comic name-calling and comic insults” are actually “in service to educating its silly citizens and furthering their conversation of engaged levity” (56–57). In this way, the comedic public sphere deals with fakery itself. Comics and satirists, then, are parrhesiasts, or those who speak truth to power. Both through satire and what Caron names “satiractivism,” there is potential for social justice, to turn a “ha ha into an a-ha!” (81).In the second half of Satire, Caron aligns his conception of the comedic public sphere with J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory, distinguishing between constatives and performatives. Constatives are statements of fact, report, or description that can be judged as true or false; performatives are not just saying something, but doing something (85). Austin also articulates the terms locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Locutionary is a performance of the act of saying something. Illocutionary is the performance of the act in saying something (satire ridicules, for instance). And perlocutionary is saying something that produces effects.Caron contends comic speech in satiric mode is illocutionary in that it performs ridicule, but it has potential to be perlocutionary in that it changes people's minds. It has effects. It is, in spiritual terms, metanoia—a conversion or conversion of belief. Satiractivism, or activism generated through satirical speech, is a special kind of political speech act. It is both serious and unserious; both constative and performative.Caron introduces several pivotal case studies in Chapter Five in which “the comic public sphere and the public sphere often appear as one discursive domain” (89). For instance, we see comics playing with the news on SNL's Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These programs are locutionary—news with comic speech as rhetorical flourish. They are also illocutionary because they ridicule a comic but with the veneer of reporting. One of the examples Caron cites is Jordan Klepper's person-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters.But these moments of “playing with the news” are not merely play, they are also a kind of satiractivism. They are quasi-perlocutionary. Jon Stewart hosting 9/11 first responders who had become ill led to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, for instance. Caron also notes the “John Oliver Effect:” Oliver has always eschewed the sort of SNL Weekend Update formula in favor of in-depth, fuller investigations into a news story but done satirically. Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert are also examples of satiractivism, bringing comedy to “real news” in order to amplify it.Yet, satire has limits. It is a methodological paradox in that the satirist is trying to bring about a better society through critique but is often doing so by ridiculing. And sometimes, it can go too far. This is especially perilous when the audience is not prepared to laugh.Michelle Wolf's 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one such time when the audience in the room felt ridicule crossing a line into mean-spiritedness. Part of this challenge for humorists is the particular and universal audience. The WHCD audience (in particular) found the bites too biting. The universal audience understood better the impossibility of civility in the Trump years.Many pointed out how thin-skinned people in the Trump orbit of power were in inverse correlation to their political and cultural power. Speaking truth to power is supposed to be uncomfortable for those in power. But what if those in power are perpetual victims with an entire media infrastructure designed to amplify their victimhood? That is, is what Wolf did a “screed or satire?” (181).Caron's final chapter of case studies centers Trump as buffoon and troll. Caron asks whether satiric speech is harmful to a democratic public sphere because its uptake can be dangerously corrosive. Trump's characteristic defense is he was “just joking,” but as rhetorical critic and historian Jennifer Mercieca notes, Trump consistently “gaslights” the audience about his intentions when the effect crosses a line.1In his final chapter, Caron reminds readers that postmodernism isn't an abandonment of truth but a deep skepticism about truth with a capital T. Comedic style, then, is ideally suited in this moment to scratch the truthiness veneer. As he writes, “The comic logic of truthiness satire and satiractivism repurposes discursive integration and a regime of simulacra with a postmodern aesthetic” (209). Considering that more people believe in the truth of what they learn from those playing with the news than from those delivering it “straight,” imagining the possibilities for satirical speech in the comic public sphere is a generative and purposeful endeavor.

Pamela VanHaitsma's Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers an insightful queer historiography of romantic epistolary rhetoric that opens the reader to queer possibilities in the rhetorical practice of nineteenth-century American letter writing. The author's stated intention is to queer the binary distinctions between public and private life that often push queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education (4). With the genre of letter writing, VanHaitsma not only transcends queer recovery in American letter writing but also effectively reconsiders queer engagement, practice, and pedagogy within the rhetorical process of romantic epistolary.The introduction begins by citing the rhetorical and queer foundations of scholars like Charles E. Morris and Karma Chavez (6–7), previewing the methodological queering of rhetorical education. VanHaitsma first defines the key terms for consideration, including romantic epistolary and rhetorical education, and then situates epistolary rhetoric as a cis-heteronormative genre. Although the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing during this time exclusively privileged opposite-sex romantic discourse, VanHaitsma makes the case that the genre allows for queer openings. For example, queer possibilities existed in same-sex friendship correspondence; and queer invention emerged through a dialogue of the personal as political given race, gender, and sexuality were imbedded within romantic letter writing. VanHaitsma's archival research examines “complete letter writing manuals” (44) and romantic correspondence archived at the Connecticut Historical Society and Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archive. As the author navigates romantic correspondence, VanHaitsma makes thoughtful choices that focus less on the sexual identity of the subjects and more on the “queer rhetorical practices” (11–12) of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus in chapter two and Albert Dodd in chapter three.The first chapter frames letter writing manuals as rhetorical (26) and then situates teaching manuals like the “complete letter writer” as inherently a heteronormative genre. The author considers the manuals as a launching point for analysis because of their ubiquity and circulation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth-century postal age. Complete letter writing manuals, according to VanHaitsma, were organized similarly by genre and served as a “model” for letter writing with respect to rhetor, audience, and purpose (25). For example, chapters are labeled as “on friendship,” “on business,” or “on love, marriage, and courtship.” By situating complete letter guides as rhetorical education, the author suggests that the teaching and learning guided by the manuals uses “language from the heart” to connect romantic epistolary to social inquiry, including class, education, and family; these matters of course were touchpoints in “appropriate” heteronormative correspondence. VanHaitsma advances three dimensions of heteronormativity encouraged by the manuals: (1) normative gendered romantic coupling; (2) normative pacing in romantic exchange; and (3) letter writing as practice toward the normative conventions of marriage. For example, manuals marked a letter as “masculine or feminine” via salutation like “From a Gentleman to a Lady.” Pacing was marked by dating the letters, and a normative convention of time, especially in romantic exchanges, would proceed slowly, cautiously, and without “passionate outbreaks” (34). Finally, the goal of romantic exchange was achieved only through its “heteronormative telos and generic end” (35), which was marriage between a man and woman. The paradox advanced by VanHaitsma is that the same three rigid cis-heteronormative constraints of letter writing manuals are also the dimensions that offer queer openings. The author suggests two “strategies for queer invention” (37); first, through “queer failure,” that informs a critical and queer “re-imagination” (46) of letter writing outside the genre. Second, VanHaitsma argues convincingly that if manuals are constructed as a resource for invention so that a letter writer may “write from their heart,” those generic conventions are already susceptible to queer challenge.Chapters two and three operationalize the call for a critically queer re-examination of American letter writing toward “queer effect,” first through the everyday romantic correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then a more formal civic training through the letters, diaries, and manuals of Albert Dodd. Chapter two begins with a call for more perspectives on epistolary same-sex correspondence beyond the discourses of public and political figures. To this end, VanHaitsma examines the romantic exchange between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, “two freeborn African American women” (51-52) who corresponded during and after the American Civil War. In this chapter, the author is interested in how letter writers learn to participate in romantic exchange when formal training is perhaps inaccessible. As the author notes, even with access to manuals, there was no same-sex romantic correspondence modeled in the complete letter writers, so VanHaitsma considers what the rhetorical practices of these letters tell us broadly about queering romantic epistolary. The author studied the correspondence of Brown and Primus not only through a same-sex lens but also cross-class as Primus was a schoolteacher born to a “prominent African American community in Hartford Connecticut,” while Brown was uneducated in formal schooling and “worked primarily as a domestic” (51). VanHaitsma finds that Brown and Primus learned and used the generic conventions taught by complete letter writers, including salutation strategies and dating each correspondence for pacing. What differs, of course, is the queering of salutations which range in tone from a familial connection like sisters, to friendship, and even romance (55). The pacing of the correspondence reflects an urgency and intensity outside heteronormative convention with quick replies, often within a week (57). The correspondence also defied a marriage telos given the societal constraint that marriage to each other was an impossibility; as a result, the romantic exchange was never scaffolded around that particular generic convention. Finally, the author illustrates how Primus and Brown queered the rhetorical parameters of the manuals by incorporating political discussions alongside romantic exchange (61). Chapter two concludes by describing how the romantic exchange between Brown and Primus borrowed from poetry to compose and queer language of the heart. The most compelling take-away from this analysis is how the correspondence from two everyday, same-sex, cross-class, African American women adopted the generic conventions of inaccessible manuals and then crafted queer inventions to challenge generic norms.Chapter three examines the letter writing and training of Albert Dodd. Where Brown and Primus lacked access to formal rhetorical education, Dodd—an upper-class white cis-man—studied rhetoric as civic engagement at Trinity College and Yale, where he wrote a poetry album and a “commonplace book turned diary” (75). What interests VanHaitsma about Dodd is how he used classical training to repurpose rhetorical and civic education toward a romantic end, which became a multi-genre and genre-queer epistolary practice. Through his formal training, Dodd possessed a rhetorical awareness of generic letter writing conventions that allowed him to negotiate public and private binaries. VanHaitsma illustrates how Dodd's training developed into a queer rhetorical practice by broadening the genre of letter writing through an introduction of epistle verse, letters, poetry, and same-sex erotic correspondence (92). VanHaitsma connects Dodd's formal training to Brown and Primus through a “queer art as failure” (98) where the correspondence of all three defied normative training when the generic conventions could not be met; instead, the rhetors re-purposed the generic strategies for their own queer effect. Building from this connection, the author's concluding chapter is a pedagogical gesture toward “queer failure” (104) in rhetorical studies. As a challenge to the status-quo orientation and cis-heteronormative expectations of rhetorical education, VanHaitsma turns to queer movement studies and implores scholars in the histories of rhetoric and sexuality studies to stay vigilant to the “failures” of queer pasts.Pamela VanHaitsma's compact book is poignant and an important contribution to rhetorical studies, particularly in realizing queer possibilities in spaces dominated by normative histories. Exploring American traditions of letter writing, the author makes a sophisticated and accessible critique of the hegemonic democratic practices of civic engagement, public and private spheres of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality in the histories of rhetorical education. As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies. As the author notes, queer romantic engagement has always existed but with limited scholarly attention. The case made throughout these chapters advocates for a critical break and crucially, an intentional movement toward “non-normative historiographic ways of knowing” (101). VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary.

Abstract This article explores questions about “civility” in the 2012 election. Through an analysis of media discussions raising the term, four themes are constructed focusing on the limitations of civility discourse. While seeking to preserve the best that civil orientations afford, I argue that adding a deliberative approach to such discourse addresses moments when civil appeals appear to be most limited. This essay finds that working between civil and deliberative constructs provides an instructive perspective for understanding the workings of and possibilities for public discourse during situations when civility rhetoric is typically raised. Relative to civil communication—and associated concepts such as dialogue and advocacy—specific norms, benefits, examples, and implications of a deliberative rhetorical vision are charted for problem-solving, public policy contexts.

Abstract A close textual analysis of Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural encyclical Deus Caritas Est—God is Love is offered from the perspective of Platonic and contemporary rhetorical theory An acclaimed inspirational success, this letter proposes loving "encounter" and "response" as the fundamental dynamic of Christian communication; God is "felt" and made manifest in concrete love-of-neighbor. Benedicts "contact" orientation has significant implications for contemporary theory—humanity becomes ontologically contiguous, subjects are holistically embodied, Truth is grounded in co-felt exchange, and discourse is decentered by direct public engagement. Deus Caritas Est draws attention to ethical limits in Dramatism and Logology and advances embodied, invitational, and theological perspectives on rhetorical theory by showing how genuine love initiates and feeds a divine dynamic that can transcend divisions and unite humanity.