Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

AbstractThis article analyzes the epideictic practices Chicana rhetors use to reclaim the figure of Malintzin, a woman cast as a promiscuous traitor for her role in the Spanish conquest. Since the figure of la Malinche was used to shame Chicana feminists as the traitors of the Chicano movement, Chicanas responded by first rejecting the narrative of la Malinche through rhetorical delinking, reframing her story with the use of amplification and depreciation, and finally reclaiming Malintzin as an aspirational symbol for Chicana feminists. Chicana epideictic makes a political argument about the value and worth of Chicana feminists by praising the Malintzin figure. Chicana epideictic challenges and celebrates community values and blurs the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Notes1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Jaime Armin Mejía and Brigitte Mussack for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. Their guidance was immensely helpful.2 The works by del Castillo and Candelaria represent modern-day encomia to Malintzin since they focus heavily on her values and virtues. Gonzales and Sosa Riddell present an encomium to the Chicana and Alarcón falls somewhere in the middle.3 The events leading to the Cholula massacre remain a contested point among historians because some believe Cortés lied to cover the fact that the attack was meant to cement his alliance with the Tlaxcalan people (CitationTownsend 81-82).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMiriam L FernandezMiriam Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino.

Despite calls to give greater attention to bodies and infrastructures, and despite the development of facial recognition software and face replacement apps, not to mention medical face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic and a long history of political faces in the news, rhetoric has not directly nor adequately dealt with the face. I offer a new materialist rhetorical theory of the face, drawing on the concepts of hyle and iwi to argue that the face is a bio-social conglomeration both human and nonhuman. I look specifically to biometric data collection and to artist Zach Blas’s algorithmically designed masks from his project, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” to illuminate how the face is rhetorical and how faces might resist facial recognition suppression. The study urges rhetoricians to think carefully and ecologically about the face.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard Leo EnosRichard Leo Enos, Emeritus Piper Professor (State of Texas) Quondam Holder of the Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Texas Christian University.

This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.

A concept in Aristotle’s thought that is both politically and rhetorically significant for all life forms is a sign (sêmeion). Yet, scholarship has historically left underexplored how Aristotle positions the utility of a sign across human and nonhuman animal domains. Rereading his presentation of signs in the Rhetoric in light of his statements on the use of sign-inference through physiognomy in Prior Analytics elucidates how rhetoric’s interest in persuasive things makes use of a sign’s physicality. In so doing, Aristotle demonstrates how rhetoric enables political communities to grapple with an inescapable nonhuman status.

This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

As corrective to rhetorical theorists who disparage “expression,” the following article analyzes Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke on “expression” and its communicative counterpart “sympathy.” Pater viewed ideal style as a unity of expression and sympathy. Wilde saw Christ as the singular representative of absolute expression and sympathy. Burke resolved both expression and sympathy into the “compromise” of the symbol. I advocate for a return to expression and sympathy as rhetorical values in the twenty-first century.

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

Nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt’s attention to the complex interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism deepens our understanding of “romantic” rhetoric as reflexive and politically engaged. In sketches of orators and authors, Hazlitt criticizes their moribund deployments of classical rhetoric and its damaging consequences on British parliamentary politics, literature, and society. However, he also reworks classical rhetorical exercises and revives their civic potential in his dynamic prose.

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.

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:...

Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

As music reviewer for The Nation in 1934, Kenneth Burke attended the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, a symphony that Burke felt had the dangerous potential to merge Nazi ideology with other dissenting German voices. Through this review and his introduction of the theoretical term “identification” in Attitudes Toward History, Burke joins a growing body of sonic rhetorics scholarship that investigates the semiotics of sound. Burke’s attention to sonic identifications reveals the fragile nature of sound, meaning, and division.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

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.

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.

Urban slave life in ancient Rome was unlike the absolute bondage and physical labor historically associated with the term slavery. Cicero's administrative slave Tiro was a literary collaborator, a debt collector, a superintendent of sorts, a secretary, a financial overseer, a political strategist, a recipient and content-generator of Cicero's famed practice of letter-writing, and a connected component of Cicero's social scheming. Cicero's correspondence with Tiro praises him for his value and loyalty, but it also shows previously unrevealed rhetorical aspects of the ancient orator and his relationship with his slave, colleague, and friend.

This essay examines the role of rural citizens in the social fabric of ancient Italy and the redefinition of the rural by the mightiest orator of that time: Marcus Tullius Cicero. This redefinition created a novel form of ethos, a rural civic ethos, apparent in the valuing of Arpinum in The Laws and in the rural character of Sextus Roscius in Pro Sextus Roscius. Rural civic ethos is further developed through an analysis of Cicero's dual identity as rustic and urbane, trained according to the oratorical style of the city yet maintaining an allegiance to the landscapes and peoples of Arpinum.

In 1939 Kenneth Burke's book review of Mein Kampf, in isolating how the “crude magic” of Nazism worked, called for rhetorical critics to enter the social and political scene of the day by resisting strongman rule wherever it appeared: “[A] people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic” (Philosophy 192). George W. Bush, who also had “crude magic,” used the Hitlerian rhetoric of a common enemy and a geographic center in order to realign post 9/11 attitudes sufficient to identify the non-Western other as a common enemy, to convert New York's fallen Twin Towers into a new and noneconomic symbol of US government, and to transform himself from a lazy cowboy into a medicine-man.

Abstract This essay draws on concepts developed by Kenneth Burke to examine how a rhetoric of national insecurity has saturated phishing research and antiphishing campaigns. In response to the widespread public dispersal of antiphishing campaigns, it calls for a new terminology that challenges the underlying racial violence that characterizes its current practices. Notes 1Jakobsson and Myers define phishing as "[a] form of social engineering in which an attacker, also known as a phisher, attempts to fraudulently retrieve legitimate users' confidential or sensitive credentials by mimicking electronic communications from a trustworthy or public organization in an automated fashion" (1). 2In July of 2009, Symantec observed a fifty-two percent increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. 3Robert C. Miller and Min Wu argue, "Phishing succeeds because of a gap between the user's mental model and the true implementation, so promising technical solutions should try to bridge this gap" (291). Note how the technology becomes the agent of intervention. 4See, for example, Gurak and Warnick. Later, I will discuss how phishers utilize peer networks to share components of phishing solicitations in order to make the process more efficient. This use of file-sharing technology complicates more sanguine perspectives on the role that collaboration and sharing play in digital networks (see Devoss and Porter; Moxley). I am not alone in pointing out the dangerous limitations of digital technologies such as emails and online forums (see Holdstein; Moses and Katz; Blair and Takayoshi). 5Jenkins writes, "New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments… . Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises" (27–28). 6I am grateful to RR reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Jim Zappen for their helpful feedback on this essay. Thank you RF, MM, and MH—you are indispensable.

Contemporary Native American stand-up comedy is a form of epideictic rhetoric in the contact zone of the performance space, using generic conventions of stand-up comedy, traditional elements of Native humor, and Aristotelian strategies to challenge what audiences think they know about indigenous experiences in this land. Specifically, Howie Miller is one Native American stand-up comedian who constructs an epideictic performance in which entertainment, education, and assumptions collide.

The development of the rhetorical tradition in the West owes a largely unacknowledged debt to Islamic scholars. Between 711 and 1492 CE, Muslim-controlled Spain became a significant site of scholarly inquiry into the European Classical heritage—often involving the efforts of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers. One of the luminaries of this scholarly tradition is Ibn Rushd (known more generally by his Latinized name, Averroes), known to Medieval thinkers as “The Commentator” for his vast, multifaceted corpus of work on Aristotle, The Master of Those Who Know.

The audience's violent response to the 2003 Rockford College commencement address illuminates challenges that surround the epideictic genre in a politically divided society. This essay explores the nature of the conflict that arose that day in order to consider ways in which the generic form of epideictic potentially facilitates communication among people with different views. This opportunity can be realized as rhetors and audiences acknowledge generic constraints, acknowledge social concerns, search for shared understanding, and commit themselves to an epideictic encounter that serves the educational function of constructively interrogating and reimagining public values.

I'd been browbeating and harassing Martin for days. He'd seen the new sequel to Star Wars, and I was wildly jealous—and wild to know the story's surprise ending. Finally, during a game of Stratego ...

Marcus Tullius Cicero is one of the more prominent figures in the history of rhetoric. Our resources for studying Cicero are largely dependant upon literary texts that have been transmitted over centuries. This study examines a Greek inscription, housed at a remote archaeological site, that offers new insights into Cicero's contributions to our field. From this inscription we learn of Cicero as a patron of Greek literary and rhetorical arts. As is sometime the case when we examine primary material, new and unanticipated information appears. In this instance the inscription reveals that the name of Cicero's mother as recorded by Plutarch, may be inaccurate. In addition to these specific observations, this work illustrates that archaeological and epigraphical evidence are also valuable resources for studying the history of rhetoric.

During his long scholarly career, Kenneth Burke interacted with numerous other important twentieth-century thinkers. Several of these relationships have been documented and studied through article- and book-length projects. However, Burke's long correspondence with prominent folklorist and sociolinguist Dell Hymes, while mentioned by some Burke scholars, has not been extensively explored. This article examines their written correspondence and elements of their published works and argues that Burke's articulation of key rhetorical concepts—especially "identification"—figures large in Hymes's early articulation of the basis of sociolinguistic study.

While it has become increasingly commonplace to claim Kenneth Burke as a proto-ecocritic, the question of how his thinking and criticism was influenced by the science of ecology has not been addressed. This article places Attitudes toward History, the work in which Burke first mentions ecology by name, back within ecological conversations of the mid 1930s and argues not only that the science of ecology was fairly well known to Burke and his contemporaries but that ecological rhetoric saturates Attitudes toward History; in particular, it underlies Burke's critique of efficiency and his idea of the "comic frame."

This essay engages two contemporary views as to the authorial purposes of the Rhetoric. Advocates of one view maintain that Aristotle valued democracy and understood rhetoric to be a form of positive civic or democratic discourse and that the Rhetoric was written to express this view, while others suggest that Aristotle's purpose in writing the Rhetoric was to instruct members of the Academy and Lyceum in the "necessary evil" of using rhetoric to deal with the ignorant masses. In response, I demonstrate that the first view is clearly not supported by the Aristotelian texts and that the second view needs to expand the contexts within which the Rhetoric is understood to include the long and turbulent transmission and editorial history of the Aristotelian corpus before any purpose or intent can be ascribed to Aristotle without so much qualification as to make the ascription essentially meaningless.

Focusing on the references to women and the feminine in The Second Philippic Against Antony, I argue that Cicero's female allusions open up a rhetorical space that exposes the subtle tensions within the Roman social dynamic of men and women. This historically contextualized rhetorical analysis offers a complex understanding of Roman women as both historical entities and rhetorical representations. The article illustrates the importance of understanding not only women in the rhetorical tradition but also mythical portrayals of women as an argumentative strategy. 1

Quintilian is known primarily as an advocate of a pedagogical system grounded in imitation. But in Book XII of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian states that he has left the work of his predecessors behind and, further, that he is offering an original contribution to the rhetorical tradition. Quintilian's claims of originality and proprietary interest throughout his texts demonstrate that he is continually announcing himself as an author, in surprisingly modern terms. This paper argues that Quintilian honors his own demand that the ideal rhetor move beyond quotation and canny arrangement of his predecessors' work.

Abstract The study of emotion has regained prominence in the fields of psychology and rhetoric. Despite this interest, little has been written about the art of making an emotional appeal. This essay focuses on the writing of Quintilian, in particular Book VI of his Institutes of Oratory, in an effort to describe his theory of emotional appeal, and to see whether it has relevance today. The essay presents Quintilian's theory in the form of "rules."

Homer's Iliad is an epic story about human character, which predates the Aristotelian lectures by some four hundred years. While classical scholars have always valued Aristotle's notion of ethos as a primary factor in persuasion, few have traced this concept to this earlier period. Following a close analysis of speeches in the Iliad, this examination attempts to reconstruct what Homer's theory of character might have looked like. While Aristotle seems to have understood character much differently than did Homer, enough evidence exists to suggest that Aristotle may have embraced Homer's Iliad and the story it tells about the importance of age, social convention, and the heroic.

This essay suggests that readers of Aristotle's Rhetoric should take a broader view than is usually applied to understanding the book. Specifically, the reader is asked to explore Aristotle's other works to identify his metarhetoric-that is, Aristotle's notion of the prior knowledges a rhetor needs to have in order to be rhetorical. The essay employs four examples from Aristotle's On Memory and Recollection to demonstrate how ideas from even one of his other books can enhance our comprehension of the Rhetoric. It concludes with a suggested plan for studying Aristotle's metarhetoric.

(1998). Rhetorical style and the formation of character: Ciceronian ethos in Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 93-106.

This essay had its origin in my reaction to the claim, repeated in a number of essays by prominent scholars in composition, that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric was a dialogic one.' My response to such claims was and remains one of disbelief. As I examined the essays in which this view was advanced, I came to see that the evidence in support of it depended on related interpretations of Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme advanced by Lloyd Bitzer and John Gage. But in my view whether or not one accepts this controversial understanding of the enthymeme, it does not license a reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric as genuinely dialogic. As I reflected on what I now regarded as the immediate cause of a misinterpretation of Aristotle's Rhetoric (the misappropriation of a controversial interpretation of the enthymeme), I realized that this case had implications for how we, in rhetoric and composition, relate to and use our past. To establish my argument, I must show that important scholars in composition have claimed or implied that the theory Aristotle advances in the Rhetoric is dialogic, that this claim is obviously (not merely possibly) false, and that the evidence compositionists cite in support is derived not from the Rhetoric but depends on a misunderstanding of the implications of Bitzer' s and Gage's interpretations of the enthymeme. Then, having made this argument, I will trace what I regard as more general methodological implications of the misreading of the Rhetoric. Arguments that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric is dialogic have been advanced by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, John T. Gage, Gregory Clark, and Richard Leo Enos and Janice Lauer. In each case the claim is advanced in support of a more general effort to reconcile Aristotle' s theory with modem perspectives on rhetoric. The burden of Lunsford and Ede's thesis, as reflected in their title, On Distinctions between Classical and Modem Rhetoric, is to prove that Aristotelian rhetoric is closer in its theoretical assumptions to modern rhetoric than is generally thought. The view that Aristotle's theory is monologic is among the mistakes they address. They maintain that despite what we have thought in the past, Aristotle' s understanding of the rhetorical transaction is dialogic: Far from being 'one way,' 'manipulative' or 'monologic,' Aristotle' s [presentation of] rhetoric provides a complete description of the dynamic interaction between rhetor and audience, interaction mediated by language, the goal of which is not a narrow persuasion but an interactive means of discovering meaning through

If writers had at their fingertips a mechanism that would produce insight, that would contribute to their self-realization, and that would enable both them and their readers to step toward understanding, would they choose to use it?1 A strategy that discovers presence and penetrates the unknown is available to us as thinkers, as writers . . . ingenium, something old is new again. This essay deliberately refuses to give a simple definition of ingenium, for it cannot be defined in a few neat sentences. Instead, ingenium unfolds with recursive definitions. The first-ingenium, an innovative cognitive power, is a human way of knowing that includes the actual in a particular context and the extraordinary with the concrete. It combines sense perceptions with the imagination to open up and reveal the world. The second definition is from Grassi-the human capacity that enables words or senses or ideas to have adaptability, acumen, and 'instantaneousness' (Heidegger 20). The third layer is a cognitive activity that links a person perceptually with others and with the natural world. A person who uncovers a space for ingenium may generate new ways of inventing or interpreting discourse, problems, or ideas. This essay briefly traces aspects of ingenium as practiced by early Greek sophists and later by humanists. Next, ingenium is conceptualized as an inventional process that has four attributes: generating multiple ideas that may situate themselves in one's hand or ear or eye, opening the senses to the phenomenal world, finding the similar, and transferring meaning through fantasy. Through ingenium we may participate in a process that mirrors our complex world. Sophist and humanist practices touch and complement each other through ingenium. Ingenium as a discovery process subverts and surprises; it actively enriches the usual either-or model perpetuated by the Western objectivist tradition. Although sophists did not call the process ingenium, it was practiced in many ways as Gorgias's Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE) illustrates. Years later, humanist thinkers such as Vico, Gracian, and Vives promoted ingenium's philosophic importance as a means of enlarging the possibilities for communication. From the first sophists to contemporary thinkers, philosophers recognize the power of openness in language that breaks down boundaries of binary

In her examination of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, Patricia Bizzell announces her wish to find a solution to the problem of finding a compelling version of from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the climate of post-modern skepticism which attempts to render all value assertions nugatory (7-8).1 Bizzell understands the ultimate result of deconstruction-the tool that she and others in favor of a left-oriented political agenda have long used for the purpose of criticizing received wisdom and destabilizing traditional foundations of belief, teaching us to regard all foundationalist assumptions with suspicion (14)-to be Pyrrhonian skepticism, a nihilistic abyss of skepticism that refuses to regard even temporary truths. Pyrrhonian skepticism has forced Deconstruction to turn on the very scholars who have employed it to undermine foundationalist beliefs by always already undermining the left-oriented actions those scholars now wish to take. In the past, Bizzell has effectively critiqued foundationalist assumptions (e.g., Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies), but now she says she is ready even to play the fool if she must to pursue ways to engage in processes whereby we use our common capacities to make reasonable judgments about experience in light of egalitarian values so that we may move more decisively toward democratic political (16). Since Bizzell is willing to play the fool for her pursuit, she might make an appeal to an older group of thinkers who have been misrepresented as fools more than once: the early Greek sophists, whom I believe offer a theoretical base to Bizzell and all of us who are interested in professing left-oriented values in our writing classrooms. To explicate that sophistic theoretical base, I will briefly review recent work on the sophists in composition and rhetoric, illustrate how a sophistic understanding of the progress of knowledge can enable us to avoid the trap of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and examine three neosophistic essays that organize the principles of neosophism. In the final section, I will use sample assignments I've designed for my own composition course to demonstrate how a neosophistic pedagogy authorizes sociopolitical action in the composition classroom. Bizzell, to her credit, connects her search for rhetorical authority to the work of the sophists. Playing the fool, she says, allows one to innocently transgress social boundaries, an action that in turn, she hopes, allows teachers

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Kathleen Welch and Richard Leo Enos, RR peer revieweis for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.