The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association's publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd's relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd's ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

AbstractEquitable access to fertility care remains precarious and often dependent upon definitional rhetoric of infertility, which insurance policies and state legislators use to determine access to alternative family building options. This article builds upon prior rhetorical scholarship on infertility by applying an embodied rhetorics framework to capture the resilience infertile persons exhibit when faced with barriers to build their family. To do this, I share a series of texts self-identified infertile advocates produced as they reflected on their encounters with barriers to accessing care and building their families. As a disease that requires self-disclosure as a form of advocacy, I analyze the visual and written texts produced through an embodied rhetorics framework. These texts are forms of public advocacy in that they make visible the multiple embodied misconceptions infertile persons navigate when trying to build one’s family. I discuss these texts as illustrating “misconception fatigue” which is affective toll that accumulates when advocating for one’s reproductive right to have a family. I conclude by encouraging other rhetorical scholars committed to reproductive justice to adopt an embodied rhetorics framework to their scholarship and develop participatory research projects to support the advocacy needs of marginalized reproductive health communities. Notes1 I would like to express thanks to Megan Faver Hartline, Katie Manthey, and Phil Bratta who took time to read this article and provide generous feedback. A heartfelt thank you to RR reviewers Michelle Eble and the two other blind reviewers who took time to engage with the ideas of this piece and construct helpful reviews. Finally, additional gratitude must also be extended to the infertility advocates who decided to participate in this photovoice project and make visible vulnerable moments in their infertility journeys.2 One IVF cycle is defined as ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and embryo transfer. The cost of those procedures varies by the individual’s insurance coverage, provider, and medication needs. Hence, the range of costs. See Marissa Conrad’s article “How Much Does IVF Cost?” Forbes Health, 28 Sept. 2021.3 RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association offers the most accurate reporting of state-by-state insurance coverage for fertility treatment. For instance, the organization offers up-to-date data on insurance coverage per state on their website under the page “Insurance Coverage by State.”4 The ACA does not cover fertility related treatments as reported by health insurance reporter Louise Norris.5 Alternative family building refers to other methods of conception and/or accessing options such as adoption or surrogacy to have a family. Alternative family building options may be needed for heterosexual couples experiencing infertility but also include queer couples and single parents by choice.6 The Institute for Women’s Policy Research defines reproductive rights as “having the ability to decide whether and when to have children” (n.p.). This definition asserts that there is a fundamental right to have a family/child, if one so desires. This assertion is also supported in a reproductive justice framework which includes the right to a family as one of its three tenets.7 The World Health Organization defines infertility as “a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine defines infertility as “the result of a disease (an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs) of the male or female reproductive tract which prevents the conception of a child or the ability to carry a pregnancy to delivery.”8 To be clear, I am not suggesting embodied identity and embodied rhetoric as interchangeable terms. Rather, my use of embodied identity is informed from how Knoblauch and Moeller define “embodiment”. For them, “embodiment is more than ‘simply’ the experience of being with a body but is instead the experience of orienting one’s body in space and among others…the result of objects and being acting with and upon each other” (8). Embodied identity, in the context of infertility, is the meaning-making of coming to learn/see oneself as infertile. Embodied rhetoric, however, examines the potential actions and production of knowledge that is exerted because one sees identifies as infertile.9 Advocacy Day is an event coordinated by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association where the infertility community talks to Members of Congress about increasing family building options and access to care (“Advocacy Day,” RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, 2022).10 All photovoice submissions analyzed for this article are included in the appendix.11 I would like to note the distinctions between reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice to be accountable to the individual histories of each term: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. My use of the term ‘right to have a family’ is informed from Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger’s definition of reproductive justice that asserts “reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right now to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have [in safe communities and conditions]” (9). When I use the term the ‘right to have a family’ it is drawing upon these three tenets central to reproductive justice and acknowledges the history in advocating for the reproductive experiences of women of color and other multiply marginalized individuals.12 It should be noted that other infertility stakeholders have more recently adopted a reproductive justice approach to discussions of infertility. For instance, the March 2023 publication of Fertility and Sterility focused explicitly on moving beyond recognizing the racial and ethnic disparities in women’s reproductive health and have pushed for more action-oriented approaches that seek to align with the reproductive justice movement.13 By collective fatigue, I refer to the multiple experiences of fatigue represented the photovoice submissions. These include financial, emotional, and even physical fatigue. Collectively, they produce the experience of misconception fatigue.14 The toll of various treatments, doctor appointments, and time devoted to attempting to become pregnant can physically impact an infertile person and contribute to fatigue.15 A 2020 Forbes article written by Pragya Agarwal documents the retaliation some women in the workforce face when actively attempting to become a parent and how discrimination is heightened for women who need assisted reproductive technology to become pregnant.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaria NovotnyMaria Novotny is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research considers how reproductive health patients advocate for health care through her collaborations with The ART of Infertility. Her co-edited collection Infertilities, A Curation portrays the myriad voices and perspectives of individuals who experience infertility and difficulty in family building using art and writing as mediums for personal expression. Other scholarship related to the intersections of infertility, rhetoric, and advocacy has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

This argument demonstrates how rhetorical theory was shaped recursively by the mythology of ancient Sumer and China, and resulted in new discursive formations in subsequent rhetorical theory. These discursive theoretical formations occurred after the advent of widespread literate practice. The myth of Cangjie shaped the teleology of rhetoric of ancient China and the myth of Enmerkar shaped rhetorical theory in Sumer in similar ways. Following the authority of Walker, Schiappa, and Johnstone, which charted a similar phenomenon in ancient Greece, these non-Greco-Roman myths were deployed to form a similar pattern. By following Rita Copeland’s call to “allow the history of rhetoric to be written through mythic time,” it can be shown that the use of myths by ancient cultures to shape their rhetorical theories suggests that this is not merely a Greco-Roman feature of rhetoric in antiquity, but a human one.

As a Latinx writer who has attended and taught at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in South Texas, I have been disappointed to find that much existing scholarship assumes sameness among us, oft...

In their seminal text, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. K...

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

Researchers in literacy studies have been refining the definitions and examples of literacy development over the past four decades that have significantly improved our knowledge about marginalized cultures and their literacy development. This article explores the literacy practices of the medieval Scandinavians through archaeological and textual sources. First, I explore the gaps in literacy research followed by a detailed examination of medieval Nordic literacy practices shown in the runestones, artifacts, and the sagas. The intent of this article is to shed light on a literacy tradition outside of the privileged Latinate Christian tradition during the medieval period.

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

By now, the statistics that illustrate the scope of mass incarceration play like a haunting and familiar refrain: the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world, and a disproportio...

Integral captions and subtitles are specific forms of captions and subtitles that are designed to be essential elements of videos in coordination with sound, signs, and other modes of communication. Integral captions reflect the importance of embodied rhetorics in Deaf culture, particularly in the kinetic language of ASL and Deaf Space design practices. Designing a (Deaf) space for integral captions that embody multimodal and multilingual communication is an essential multimodal literacy practice that benefits d/Deaf and hearing composers and viewers. Five criteria that characterize integral captions provide instructors and scholars with a tool for captions and embodied rhetorics.

Much recent composition scholarship has focused on pedagogies of personal writing, championing students’ own languages, and discursive communities. In Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric...

Charlotte Hoggaa Texas Christian UniversityCharlotte Hogg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Texas Christian University. Her publications include From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (U of Nebraska P, 2006), Rural Literacies, coauthored with Kim Donehower and Eileen E. Schell (SIUP, 2007), and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, coedited with Donehower and Schell (SIUP, 2012), and scholarly and creative work in Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century, Western American Literature, Great Plains Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on sorority rhetorics.

In classical stasis, jurisdiction questions are posed within a traditional institutional context where speakers share material proximity and a background consensus. However, in modern literate controversies, it can be difficult to assume either of these kinds of shared experience. This study shows how cultural professionals writing about the Brooklyn Museum controversy used referee design to help constitute the art world jurisdiction. Referee design can extend classical stasis frameworks to help explain jurisdiction in cases where ostensive participants are writers and readers who do not share proximity or a background consensus.

Historians of rhetoric have provided research over the last three decades that has significantly advanced our knowledge of women in the rhetorical tradition. These achievements, while often stunning, have also exposed the need for more primary research, particularly in classical rhetoric where a wealth of evidence awaits study. Such evidence is frequently found in nontraditional sources and, correspondingly, calls for nontraditional methods of analysis. The need and merits of this view are presented in two ways. First, an overview of nontraditional sources offers new insights to the literacy of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan women. Second, a more specific and detailed illustration of the research potential of this perspective is presented by deciphering an inscription from Teos, a small but important Greek city that is now a part of Turkey. The epigraphical evidence available from the archaeological site at Teos reveals that young women had systematic education in advanced stages of writing. Such findings challenge traditional characterizations of ancient women as nonliterate. The intent of this work is to reveal the need for more primary fieldwork in order to attain a more accurate understanding of women and the range of their manifestations of literacy in the ancient world.

I was raised beneath the Big Sky, and my students are, almost exclusively, the children of loggers and miners, laborers and low-level managers—students, many both attending school and working fullt...

Abstract RateMyProfessors.com has received critical reception in the academy: While some college teachers and administrators express support for the site, others complain that it invades their privacy and impinges on their academic freedom. This essay looks closely at one response to Rate My Professors, a weblog titled Rate Your Students that was founded in 2005. The site offers a compelling example of how Rate My Professors—and the movement to commodify higher education that it represents—affects public discourse between students and teachers. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Duane Roen and Edward White as well as Dana Anderson, Theresa Enos, Christine Farris, Joan Pong Linton, and John Schilb, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 2With a masthead that reads "Plagiarism, misery, colleagues, absinthe, snowflakes, ennui," Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com has hosted academic complaints about students multiple times a week since 2005. As of June 2010, the site closed down after five years, citing insufficient staffing as the primary cause. The original website still maintains a limited archive of its first five years. A spin-off site called CollegeMisery.com opened its doors at the same time. Both sites regularly accept and post reader comments about the drudgeries of academia, peppering them with bits of news and commentary related to higher education. Although the site's content is now somewhat more diverse than it was in the earlier years (not all posters are now attacking students, and some even defend them) the blog's initial inflammatory rhetoric has attracted attention and even inspired debate. However, the site itself is still strongly framed as a space for virulent and personalized critiques of students. 3In this essay I organize my thinking about publics according to Michael Warner's three definitions: the public as social totality (what Elizabeth Ervin terms in Public Literacy as the national public), the public as concrete audience, and the "public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation" (Warner 50). Warner focuses on the third type of public, as will I in this essay. A textual public is self-organized through discourse and operates independently of structuring institutions such as the state or church. Such a public is maintained through the circulation of discourse, and one can become, even temporarily, a part of that public simply by accepting its address (61). There is then not just one public but many that overlap and intersect at local, national, and global levels. Publics represent a heterogeneous range of context and group-specific interests and values, and they are maintained through the circulation of discourse that is both personal and impersonal—that addresses us (if we accept the address) and some group of imagined strangers beyond us. 4While I want to adopt this textual understanding of public formation for the purposes of this essay, I also do not want to lose sight of what David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki recently refer to in their analysis of the Arab-American press as the material embodiment of counterpublics (50). Drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, Kaufer and Al-Malki remind us that oppressed groups generate resistant and/or self-protective rhetoric in counterpublic spaces, offering insight into how power differentials between groups structure the terms of their participation in publics. Based on this understanding, I also define publics in this essay as not purely textual but also importantly connected to embodied experience and unequally positioned in relationship to cultural power, often in ways that place them in a contested relation to one another. However, as my analysis of the interaction of RMP and RYS indicates, public power differentials do not always manifest directly in the embodied presence of the actors involved; rather, power dynamics are written into the structures that mediate a public's textual circulation. 5The exaggeratedly caustic and insulting rhetorical postures of participants in RYS are certainly legible as a kind of Menippean satire, one that indirectly buffoons student rhetoric on Rate My Professors and the attitudes it implies. By returning the volley of character assassination begun by RMP, posters reveal some measure of the childish irresponsibility inherent in the rhetoric itself. Yet, while I do think there is certainly a relationship of subtle satire at work in the interaction between these two sites, I do not choose to concentrate on this relationship in my analysis but rather to look beneath it at the more lasting and meaningful public investment that posters on RYS seem to be expressing in their work. 6Nancy Fraser provides a crucial foundation for this point in her critique of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the public sphere. Fraser contends that Habermas's concept of the universal public actually emerged in conflict with a variety of counterpublics, which themselves represented the interests of oppressed groups who could not meet the minimal expectations of property ownership and disembodiment, which were requirements for participation in the so-called liberal bourgeoisie public sphere. In imposing dominant interests as universal and seeking to delimit the terms of what could be civilly debated (and in what language), the bourgeois liberal public sphere in fact represented a larger shift from more openly autocratic to hegemonic forms of social control (Fraser 62). While Fraser is most often credited for rendering Habermas's concept of the public as a plural one, her critical intervention more pointedly challenges the vaguely positive connotations usually associated with public dialogue. Far from being an open forum for meaningful civic discussion, Fraser finds that the so-called public sphere is a veil of rationality that kept more divisive forms of social conflict out of view. 7In her article Welch persuasively argues that we err as teachers when we present public writing and rhetoric as an individual activity. According to Welch, seeing public action as individual dangerously isolates students and makes them less able to effectively confront the complexities of privatized public space. 8My analysis of the site layout was written in the spring of 2007, and the homepage of RateMyProfessors has since changed. 9The method of purposeful sampling is, I maintain, appropriate to the site and my inquiry alike. Obtaining a random sample from a site like RMP would be not just impossible but unnecessary, since I do not aim to make generalizable claims about the broader student population as a result of my analysis. I do want to make claims about how the site structures a kind of public discourse through consumerism, and a purposeful sample is more than adequate to that task.

Social settlements established in the United States in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were important sites of literacy sponsorship for immigrant families. In Texas settlement houses differed from their larger Eastern and Midwestern counterparts in that they were founded against a backdrop of often angry anti-Mexican sentiment and in a region in which the white settlers themselves were often the more recent immigrants. An understanding of these differences contributes to a more complete picture of the varieties of social settlement experiments and their literacy practices in the United States.

Over the last two decades, environmental rhetoric, ecocomposition, and related work in scientific and technical communication have developed at a steady, if overall unimpressive rate compared to th...

Abstract In this essay we explicate notions of technology, self, and writing imbricated in new media responses to the Virginia Tech shootings. In our analysis we bring a consideration of affect and the normalization of emotional responses to bear on "aftermath texts" (online commentary on the shootings and on Cho's writing itself). We ultimately argue for a greater awareness of subjectivity and affect in our disciplinary and pedagogical explorations and narrations of technology. Notes 1We thank our RR peer reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Shane Borrowman for their insightful feedback as we worked on this essay. 2It is a sad reality that neither the Virginia Tech tragedy nor the human response to it is unique. Cell phones, texting, and amateur video have played a role in every major disaster since the technologies became readily available. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, for example, documented their plans for Columbine on videotapes, a number of which were found in Harris's bedroom after the massacre, and there are, literally, terabytes of digital archiving and commentary on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the 2005 London subway bombings, and roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our profession and others have responded to trauma and its implications for our work: Witness Shane Borrowman's 2005 collection Trauma and the Teaching of Writing; the 2004 two-volume issue of JAC focused on "Trauma and Rhetoric"; online discussions on the WPA listserv about using writing and the composition class to respond to institution-wide tragedies; and, of course, the burgeoning field of trauma studies. Indeed, the sad, simultaneous proliferation of technology and tragedy has offered much evidence of the epistemelogical power of writing; to write is to make sense, even if what we write about is, finally, senseless. 3See CNN.com for more information about the Columbine shooting and the shooters' use of video and other technology: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/US/12/12/columbine.tapes/index.html 4Dissenting views on the blogsite appeared scattered throughout the postings: 5Certainly, like many of our colleagues in English and writing studies across the country, we sympathized with our colleagues at Virginia Tech and understood that writing and literature courses would be among the primary places—given their size and the humanist content and subjects frequently taught in them—in which students (and faculty) would want to process such a terrifying and tragic experience. We also understood that Cho's status as an English major, and the fact that both his print and video texts were held up as objects of scrutiny and even as "explanations" for his behavior, demanded an accounting of the connections between violence, writing, and subjectivity. We know we are not alone in our continuing horror in response to that April morning in Virginia. We wonder, again, how we as a culture might prevent such violence, and we are keenly aware of the fundamental inability of academic texts to respond to such a tragedy. We thus offer this essay as an exploration of yet another explosive instance of what Lynn Worsham famously called "pedagogic violence." Indeed, such tragedies as the Virginia Tech murders pose seemingly unanswerable questions: Why would someone do such a thing? What kind of person is capable of killing so many others? What must his sense of self, his interior life, have been like? And how have his actions changed the interior and communal lives of others? Such questions cut to the heart of subjectivity, and they were frequently debated through a wide variety of electronic media. At the same time, such questions evoked Worsham's exploration of pedagogic violence in "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." Many of us wanted, as Worsham writes, to "be comforted by the view that violence is the unfortunate result of individual pathology" rather than an outlaw response to regimes of affect that are the "primary and most valuable product" of late consumer capitalism" (219). To some great extent, Cho's behavior up to and including his multiple murders offers us that comfort. It also points to larger issues of systemic violence, to the relative ease of gun possession, to institutional inabilities to prevent violence, and so forth, in ways that removed that comfort for us almost immediately. 6Some of our previous work has touched on this idea; specifically, see Jonathan's Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, which examines students' development of rhetorical savvy in the design of websites for a variety of purposes—personal, communal, and even political.

Why do the Chinese relate rhetoric only to stylistic devices in writing? This question, which has puzzled scholars for decades, is finally answered. Modern Chinese rhetoric began to form in the late 1800s when Chinese students learned Western rhetoric from their Japanese professors, who translated it into “the study of beautiful prose,” subsequently severing it from oratory. In the early twentieth century, scholars returning from Japan and the US integrated Japanese theories and Anglo-American figures of speech into Chinese literary and literacy traditions despite nativists' protests and appropriated them into a canon of aesthetics only for writing studies.

In this essay I analyze the plain style as conceived of and used by the Lollards, a late fourteenth-century religious group. I argue that the same practices that set Lollard reading and writing apart from orthodox discourse were foundational to the Lollards' departures from orthodox belief, theorizing language and style in such a way that meaning was free from priestly mediation. This demonstrates the importance of the Lollard plain style as both a marker of heresy and a precursor to subsequent notions of plainness.

Ancient Ireland presents an interesting case for rhetorical study. While the island is usually considered a part of geographic Europe, it long resisted the influence of cultural Europe. Unlike Britain, for example, Ireland was never conquered by Rome, and its pre-literate culture flourished beyond the fall of the Empire. Consequently, the Irish maintained a mythopoetic rhetoric based in narrative. Their stories recounted not only the deeds of their heroes, but also their words. And, like ancient Greece, ancient Ireland also had a class of sophistic rhetors, the Druids. When Patrick arrived around the end of the fourth century, he eschewed the Ciceronian rhetoric of Augustine and instead adapted Christian theology to fit Irish rhetoric.

Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term "color blindness" to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness. Notes 1I appreciate Lorien Goodman, Steven Mailloux, Catherine Prendergast, Jacqueline Jones-Royster, and Victor Villanueva for making comments on a rough draft of this essay. I wish to especially acknowledge RR reviewers Keith Miller and Barbara Warnick for their insightful suggestions. 2Though it has been well documented that many blacks switched allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, many others remained loyal to the GOP. Of particular note here were the two preconvention meetings that the NAACP sponsored in 1960, one in Los Angeles for the Democrats and the other in Chicago for the Republicans. Of the combined 14,500 who attended these meetings, 7,500 attended the pre-Republican convention. According to Roy Wilkins, the NAACP was determined to remain nonpartisan. Aside from this, several prominent African Americans, according to Taylor Branch, wanted Democrats other than Kennedy to receive the presidential nomination. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, for example, initially supported Lyndon Johnson. Baseball great Jackie Robinson, a Republican, supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey during the primaries. Robinson said he would support Nixon if Kennedy were nominated, and Powell, as the third Kennedy-Nixon Debate reveals, eventually made some outlandish statements in support of the Democratic frontrunner. Powell's support, if not these statements themselves, may be attributable to the bribe Powell sought and received from the Kennedy camp. See The Crisis, August-September issue of 1960 and Branch's critically acclaimed Parting the Waters. 3While Nixon alludes to Lincoln five times in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in July 1960, he does not invoke his name at all during the four debates. Kennedy alluded to Lincoln twice during his acceptance speech and four times during the debates. Though both men referred to how slavery supposedly fueled Lincoln's moral fervor for the Union's cause, all of the references gloss over the inequities that African Americans were experiencing during the 1960s, and only one of these references, ironically, identifies their race. Equally important, domestic freedom became a synecdoche for America's international agenda. Lincoln's larger-than-life status as a harbinger of freedom for blacks has been well researched and critiqued. For a fairly recent, provocative analysis, see Lerone Bennett's Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. 4The Republican and Democratic respective civil rights planks of 1960 are worthy of rhetorical analysis aside from this study. As might be expected, both parties appealed to the spiritual, legal, and moral implications for civil rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence supposedly suggest. More surprisingly, each plank condemns racial discrimination as a practice that extends beyond southern borders. Both planks also appeal to the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960 as the foundation and impetus for racial progress. While the Democratic platform set a deadline of 1963 (an acknowledged link to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation) to comply with the Brown decision, the Republican platform rejects this specific timetable, believing that it would actually encourage delays in school desegregation. Under proposals to ensure voting enfranchisement, the Republican platform proposes that "completion of six primary grades in a state accredited school is conclusive evidence of literacy for voting purposes." In contrast, the Democratic platform promises to "support whatever action is necessary to eliminate literacy tests and the payment of poll taxes as requirements for voting." These passages underscore a fascinating ironic twist, for it was the Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) who started and protected literacy tests as one way of disenfranchising black voters; yet the Republican proposal could be viewed as an appeasement to the Southern Democrats' constituency. 5The widely recognized birth date for the Sit-in Movement is February 1, 1960. Only nine days later, according to Lerone Bennett, "the movement had spread to fifteen Southern cities in five states." By March 22, "more than one thousand blacks had been arrested in sit-in demonstrations." No wonder Nixon felt compelled to say a word about this movement. Curiously, he did not say more. More curiously, Kennedy says nothing on this topic during the debates. 6Kennedy admits during this debate that he borrows the phrase "moral leader" from Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Platform also uses the expression. In reality, Kennedy, according to Mary Dudziak among others, would not become fully convinced about civil rights until after the Birmingham campaign of April and May 1963, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in September would transform him into a full-fledged moral leader. 7At the close of the fourth debate, Nixon asserted that with regard to "civil rights," the Republican Party had made "more progress in the past 8 years than in the whole 80 years before." The Republican platform, from which Nixon lifts this statement almost verbatim, specifies what "progress" Nixon may be alluding to, namely the civil rights legislation passed in 1957 and 1960. 8King had little tolerance for permutations of "liberalism" that were not radically progressive on the issue of racial justice. Two stellar examples of this posture are his speeches, "Give Us the Ballot," delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, and the other, "The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness," delivered at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League in 1960. Both speeches contain sections that challenge Northern liberals to examine their motives behind fears about achieving racial justice. See The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, editor. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid G. Holmes David G. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Hu-manities at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, composition, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance. His most recent essays have appeared in College English and in the anthology Calling Cards. His research interests include epistemologies and rhetorics of racism, theories of ethos, and the civil rights movement mass meetings.

This essay examines the rhetorical practices of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato, freeborn African-American women of the Antebellum North. I argue that their highly literate texts contribute to the history of women's rhetoric on at least two counts. They engage the major theoretical and philosophical influences of nineteenth-century rhetoric in America, in particular George Campbell's Principle of Sympathy. These women's writings also attest to the gulf between rhetoric and reality in a "democratizing" culture that fails to address the issue of race.

Abstract In the nineteenth century, traditional paradigms for rhetoric became increasingly outmoded as industry, technology, and cultural disruptions reshaped printing practices, and rates of literacy improved, problematizing classical rhetorical and writing practices. Victorian rhetoric became fragmented as control of and access to print to disseminate attitudes and ideas became less centralized among an educated male elite. Thomas De Quincey and Margaret Oliphant illustrate ways that rhetoric was theorized and practiced in the Victorian periodical press as the terms of authorship, gender, and culture fluctuated.

Contrary to much recent scholarship, this essay argues that there is no such thing as a collaborative mode of literacy. Specifically, it takes issue with Andrea Lunsford and others who have called for a profound shift in the zeitgeist of composition studies, as though it were possible to transform students from competitive to collaborative writers. In a larger sense, though, the article is not about collaboration at all; rather, it uses the literature on collaborative writing to illustrate a certain kind of scholarly exaggeration, whereby composition reformers try too hard to distill practical lessons from interpretive categories.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the study of English was accelerating rapidly. At this time linguistic theories identified which members of society warranted inclusion in the political process. Conservative men of letters, like Samuel Johnson, claimed the lower and middle classes lacked cultural capital. To counter this linguistic class-ification, William Cobbett published A Grammar of the English Language, an enormously popular text meant to teach laborers how to write. Mostly neglected as a "grammarian" or rhetorician today, Cobbett was in fact a forerunner to current linguistic trends that stress literacy's social and political formulations.

Anne Ruggles Gere. Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 367 pages. George A. Kennedy. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross‐cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 238 pp. Cheryl Glenn. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. 236 pages. Michael Bernard‐Donate and Richard R. Glejzer, eds. Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 468 pages. $35.00 hardback. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor, eds. Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. Albany. SUNY Press, 1997. 247 pages.

In past several decades, much talk about orality and literacy has appeared in academic circles. Havelock (Preface to Plato and The Muse Learns to Write), Ong (The Presence of Word, Orality and Literacy), Jamieson (Eloquence in an Electronic Age) and McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy) write of changes in both and consciousness associated with either or modality of communication. They write of distinctions between oral culture and oral state of mind, and literate culture and literate state of mind. However, distinction between orality and literacy itself is never directly called into question. The categories have been set and subsequent scholarly discourses pivot on these platforms. I offer an alternative discourse and argue that categories of orality and literacy are not as definitive as Havelock, Ong, Jamieson, and McLuhan would have us believe. While I agree that shifts in modalities of discourse have occurred from tales of Homer to texts of Hegel to technological trends of Hollywood, human experience does not sustain these demarcations. The sensating body experiences a simultaneity of sound, vision, and tactility, even if a particular discursive modality favors speech, print, or electronic pixels. The orality-literacy schism does not acknowledge this simultaneity. In fact, it further compartmentalizes human experience by separating it into and Havelock writes that early Greek mentality, because it was oral, was not capable of or thought (xi), and it was not until alphabetization that eye supplanted ear as chief organ (vii). For Havelock, the and sensual is coupled with oral culture while the and metaphysical is coupled with literate culture. I argue in this paper that orality-literacy dichotomy is fallacious and that notions of either being concrete or being abstract cannot be anchored in it. Furthermore, I argue that it is rhetorical capability of language, not its capacity for production or literal production, that generates either the concrete or the abstract. More specifically, I explore notion that language, whether produced orally through mouth or literally through mind will tend to be more or less euphonic, more or less dramatistic, or more or less imagistic. In short, degrees of euphony, drama, and image will be in direct proportion to degree of rhetoricity in any given discourse. With this

Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

In past fifteen years, scholars in both composition and literature have called for a more integrated approach to reading and writing.1 essays in collection Composition and Literature: Bridging Gap edited by Winifred Horner, for example, stressed common interests of scholarship in these two domains. Similarly, Modern Language Association recommended in a 1982 report that MLA publications make deliberate efforts to stimulate thought and research about interrelations of literature, composition, and rhetorical theory (952). More recently, Peter Elbow has called for end of the war between reading and arguing that the primacy of reading in reading/writing dichotomy is an act of locating authority away from student and keeping it entirely in teacher or institution or great figure (17). Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea Lunsford have also emphasized importance of an integrated approach to reading and writing in curriculum, one that allows teachers to foster student learning in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening (316). Like Elbow, Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford insist that integration of reading and writing not only enables students to become more active learners but also is critical for educating students for participation in democracy (85). But while an integrated approach to reading and writing is certainly a worthy goal, scholars in literary and composition studies differ on fundamental issues that may preclude (or at least complicate) our attempts to develop pedagogies that allow students to connect their own texts with other texts they encounter both inside and outside classroom. One such issue involves very nature of texts themselves-what texts are, how they are produced, and how we should read them. assumptions, for example, about what it means to interpret a text diverge radically depending on whether text is a student text or a literary text. As David Bartholomae observes: The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of 'meaning' of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings (255). Instructors who interpret elements such as narrative leaps, obscure references, and twisted syntax as errors in student texts read same elements in a literary work as

Kevin Robb. Literacy & Paideia in Ancient Greece. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. x + 310 pages. Joseph Petraglia, editor. Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 272 pages. Ira Shor. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 242 pages. Mark Lawrence McPhail. Zen in the Art of Rhetoric: An Inquiry into Coherence. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. 220 pages.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus's attention to harmonious composition from the small part of the clause to the whole of a work is at the heart of what Eduard Norden has called Kuntsprosa, the ancient theory of formal prose composition that came to fruition during the Augustan age of the early Empire. The effort of fifth- and fourth-century BC Greek writers to provide prose the dignity and affective power of oral poetry through literate embellishment and studied arrangement was fundamental to the transformation of literate consciousness and therefore cultural consciousness in which the power of the modern state was birthed. As the eye continued to supplant the ear as a means of using words effectively to move audiences and as literacy brought about an interiorized way of thinking and manner of expression, ancient Greek and Roman historians, orators, and philosophers learned to play with language. They found in this new consciousness exciting ways in which elegantly conceived discourse could formalize the affective power of poetry and the spellbinding magic of persuasive words (Romilly). And it is this compositional tension between words heard and words seen that came to fruition in the first century Critical Essays

Eugene Garver. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. xii + 325 pages. Helen Fox. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. xxi +161 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 130 pages. Marcello Pera. Discourses of Science. Translated by Clarissa Botsford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 250 pages. Pera, Marcello, and William R. Shea, eds. Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric. Canton, MA: Science History, 1991. Perelman, Chaïm, and L. Olbrechts‐Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1969. Planck, Max. Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Trans. F. Gaynor. London: Williams and Norgate, 1950. Simons, Herbert, ed. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. Fredric G. Gale, Political Literacy: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Possibility of Justice. Interruptions: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discoursed). Albany: State U of New York P, 1994. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds. The Rhetoric of Law. Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought 4. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

In the final chapter of Patterns of American Culture, anthropologist Dan Rose creates what he terms piece of fictional which he attempts to describe life America as total stranger to might find it (78). Generally speaking, his fictional poetics describes a young ethnographer's exploration of a strange people, all of whom are apparently masked. He, the ethnographer, believes the masks to be in some way central to the cultural values of the people who wear them (81). At one point, he decides to try on one of these masks. Once the mask is on, he comments that

(1993). The war between reading and writing— and how to end it. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 5-24.

In 1976 Mina Shaughnessy invoked the phrase converting the natives (235) describe an undesirable attitude for a teacher of composition. In her article Diving In: An Introduction Basic Writing, she outlines four stages of development for composition teachers, of which converting the natives is the second. The tendency of teachers at this stage is see themselves as missionaries who initiate the unenlightened into the true path of correct writing. At this stage the teacher's goal is to carry the technology of advanced literacy the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country (235). Joseph Harris also mentions the term conversion in his 1989 critique of the use of discourse communities in the composition classroom (16). We have, Harris suggests, pictured various discourse communities as fundamentally different, in fact, so fundamentally different that we are at a loss explain how students make the break with former communities in order enter new communities. Harris describes the way we have tended think of students

Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

My purpose today is to frame, quite briefly, the somewhat different critical assumptions found in literacy and communication studies and then to illustrate the latter perspective with a discussion of rhetoric and the media. Before doing so, however, I want to express my deep appreciation for having been asked to address you today. We are cousins, you and I, for we share a common ancestry. A bit under eighty years ago, seventeen stalwart professors of public speaking walked out of the third annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (which was itself formed in reaction to the MLA) and fashioned what would later become the main professional organization in Communication Studies in the United States. They did so because they felt that rhetoric done orally had a unique character, that that character manifested itself in distinctive conceptual and behavioral ways, and that it took a special pedagogy to tease spoken eloquence out of college sophomores. I mention these historical matters not in the spirit of academic chauvinism but because these facts made a difference in the professional options available to me. Nevertheless, I confess a certain ambivalence when realizing that this intrepid band of dissidents, aided and abetted by the rise of the electronic media, can now claim great-grandparentage to some 200,000 Communication majors in US college and universities today. These students dwarf by a factor of two the current number of English majors, a fact that might dismay some of you but a fact that has gladdened the hearts of both linebackers and Miss Virginia contestants for decades. Being neither a linebacker nor a raving beauty as an undergraduate, I studied English. I did so until I became a college senior, at which time I faced decisions about graduate study. I was not as wise as many twenty-year-olds, but I was wise enough to know that studying English had become an affaire de coeur with me.

Richard Leo Enos, ed. Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches. "Written Communication Annual, An International Survey of Research and Theory,” vol. 4. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990. 264 pages. Susan C. Jarratt. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 181 pp., $22.50. Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 151 pages. Jeanette Harris. Expressive Discourse. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990. 206 pages.