The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 As I detail in the book I’m writing, Hitler received intensive, rhetorical training in public speaking and propaganda in the German military’s demobilization force after the First World War.2 He actually says there are six elements of eloquence, but the fifth entry in his enumeration is just a list of analogies he thinks are incontrovertible.

The climate change crisis is a matter of increasing concern to rhetoric and composition. Some scholars in the discipline, specifically on the new materialist turn, have engaged and accounted for the damage through methodologies of ontological entanglement and relationality. The potential of ontological accounts to facilitate global activism faces the obstacle of scalar derangement. By acting as Foucauldian specific intellectuals, rhetoric and composition scholars may employ new materialist ontological projects to bridge the gap between local accounts of climatological damage and a global, pluralist assemblage of climate activists.

This article examines the 1893 lynching and suffrage rivalry between Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard in the WCTU and the racial tension generated between its Black and white members on sisterhood. It uses rhetorical analysis and frame theory to illustrate that Wells’s and Willard’s rhetorical conflict is disturbingly related to the present. Finally, the article argues that patriarchy is a resilient specter that haunts womanhood.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular and prolific writer, is now perhaps best remembered as Victorian England’s foremost “propagandist of domesticity.” Ellis, in her Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) “domesticated” women’s elocution by situating it within the home. Although women occupied the private rather than the public sphere, they nevertheless were responsible for much of England’s national greatness—its distinctive “domestic character.” In The Young Ladies’ Reader, elocution becomes a domestic duty supporting the English home and nation. Ellis restricts women’s reading to the private domain thereby reinforcing rhetoric’s traditional separation of male and female discourse.

Analyzing the function of quasi-public intellectuals in debates over the Common Core State Standards helps us to understand why some publics in a networked public sphere have greater influence in policy-making than other publics. Granted authority because of privileged access to the state, quasi-public intellectuals introduced discourse into education publics that influenced reception of the Common Core, divided potential (counter)publics, and created an exigency that foreclosed possibilities for debating policy alternatives. Theorizing how these intellectuals manipulate debate allows us to recognize other arenas in which they operate and to develop strategies for inviting stakeholders to meaningfully participate in public deliberation.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

This article explores the rhetorical nature of “tangled” memories, what Marita Sturken describes as an intermeshing of sanctioned histories with personal and/or public narratives. To exemplify this phenomenon, the author examines the public memories of Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Greenhow and Boyd actively promoted slavery in their published accounts yet common “retellings” of their lives often elide these positions, and instead focus on their sensational work as Confederate spies. Such a reframing depicts them as progressive women, creating a tangled memory that uncritically lionizes them. Ultimately, the author argues, more complex “retellings” of historical figures are needed.

There is little to nothing rhetoric can teach us about Donald J. Trump. That’s fake news. Don’t get me wrong. Rhetoric has a lot to teach us about many things. Indeed, I am a teacher of rhetoric my...

In her position as both teacher and administrator in the late nineteenth century, Mary Church Terrell navigated the racism and sexism of an increasingly bureaucratic educational landscape to emerge as a powerful, activist voice for children. Through a closer look at the strategies she and others used to advocate for social uplift via children and the home, we can continue to uncover the uneven rhetorical terrain black women navigated as they advocated for youth within an environment that constructed black children as outside of normative conceptions of childhood.

In the introduction to Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman, Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins acknowledge that Kenneth Burke and posthumanism may be an odd coupling. So we wonder:...

Recent historical scholarship in composition has sought balance between disciplinary histories that obscure institutions and local histories that obscure the discipline. Enter Ryan Skinnell’s monog...

As Beverly LaHaye tells it, Concerned Women for America (CWA) was born during the evening news. The year was 1978, and LaHaye was sitting in her San Diego living room with her husband, the conserva...

Roughly over the last twenty years or more, critical race theorists and whiteness theorists have magnetized considerable attention in the academy. Many scholars, including numerous critical race th...

According to Mary Shelley’s 1831 Introduction, her great novel is her “hideous progeny.” This proclamation along with numerous birthing metaphors place her Introduction within the obstetric discourse field of the maternal imagination, a theory which claimed that pregnant women’s imaginations had the power to deform their fetuses. More importantly, the maternal imagination, and thus Mary Shelley’s Introduction, is a form of mêtic rhetoric with a distinctly maternal flavor.

In Cicero’s great dialogue De Oratore, Antonius (one of the two main speakers) at one point delivers an instructive anecdote. I paraphrase:In his retirement Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian gen...

Rhetoricians and compositionists of all persuasions—and rhetoricians of science in particular—have much to celebrate with the publication of Leah Ceccarelli’s On the Frontier of Science: An America...

A reconstruction of the required two-year course in composition and rhetoric for all incoming students at Bryn Mawr College at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on archival sources such as college catalogs and related documents, administrative correspondence, and student papers—specifically those by Margery Scattergood, who entered Bryn Mawr in 1913—shows an adherence to the belletristic tradition. The course provided practice in criticism in the Arnoldian sense of the word. The focus on the role of the writer as critic provided Bryn Mawr students with opportunities to engage with issues of public interest.

Artist Graham Robertson referred to British performer Ellen Terry (1847–1928) as the “Painter's Actress.” Many nineteenth-century female performers benefited from relationships with fine art, using the image on the canvas as a vehicle for combatting stereotypes surrounding women in the theater. In aligning herself with the bohemian Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, Terry established respectability through fine art and offered a feminine persona that was a powerful alternative to domesticity. Cultivating this persona not only through paintings but also through photographs and textual representations, Terry suggests the ways in which women could employ multimodal arguments to secure their place in the public sphere.

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...

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

Kelly Ritter's book, Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse, part of Hampton Press's New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Series, would at first glance appear to be writt...

In one of many scenes Frances Ellen Watkins Harper developed between student and teacher in her works, the impulsive Annette Harcourt explains her conflict with an Irish-American peer to her teache...

The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, takes its title from the theme of the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference. I vividly remember sitting i...

For it is only through speech finely spoken that deeds nobly done gain from their hearers the meed of memory and renown. Plato, Menexenus 237a Now when they saw the boldness [parrhesia] of Peter an...

How apt that I received Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis in January of 2009, a time now marked as National Mentoring Month. Rhetoric and composition as a discipline has long prided itself on...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Student contributors: Aaron Erdman, Dorota Glosowitz, and Lauren Hansen. All student quotations have been used with their explicit permission: Jesse Eslin, Gigi Johnson, Kristen Kucks, Jeff Marbacher, and Ashley Poulin.

By relying on Oliver Wendell Holmes's decisions as a Supreme Court Justice, I argue that aphorisms employ enthymematic reasoning and that enthymemes are best conveyed through aphorisms. Such an argument requires that I classify Holmes's decisions as aphorisms and show how Holmes explicitly rejects formal, legal rhetoric. These two moves are most clear in his First Amendment decisions, and it is these decisions that demonstrate how Holmes rethinks, broadly, the relationship between rhetoric and law. Holmes's position on the First Amendment, informed by the relationship between aphorisms and enthymemes, helps show how style is constitutive of reason.

Troubled when none of her students “had ever heard the story” of American GI Forum founder Dr. Hector P. Garcia, and dismayed that his long, effective campaign against discrimination had been large...