Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

In the same vein as my Burkean Parlor essay (2011), another ready classical discourse form useful for learning rhetoric and for non-academic speaking and writing opportunities is the encomium. This...

The first and only time I ever heard Martin Luther King speak I was a college undergraduate. It was in the early sixties and I sat mesmerized in the upper tier of what was then the Charlotte (North...

Did nineteenth-century newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst manipulate representations of Evangelina Cosío y Cisneros, a young Cuban woman, in order to spark the Spanish-American War? Hearst's arguments for American intervention in Cuba represented a deceptively uncomplicated public opinion, a consensus that only appeared to have been attained through rational deliberation. Situating this event in public spheres studies, this article demonstrates how the Hearst Corporation used representations of Cisneros to disrupt boundaries between political and commercial realms.

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

As Peter Elbow embarks on his fifth decade as a central contributor to the national conversation on writing pedagogy, his new book—Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing—is at once ...

Abstract From Aristotelian logic and sensate perception to Lakoffian rational and experiential meaning-making, I merge theories: Metaphor is emotive change, a use of language that expresses emotion and evokes emotion, which can inform behavior and persuade. The power of metaphor is in the physiological relationship between reason and emotion in the brain, supported by recent research from Alice Flaherty, neurologist and writer. Metaphors are sensory experiences, images brought-before-the-eye, which effect persuasion as rhetorical tools in argument. I argue that emotion-language-thought is in dialectical relationship, expressed by metaphor. Notes 1I appreciate RR reviewers Pat Hoy and Duane Roen for reviewing and offering suggestions for revision of my manuscript. Additionally, many thanks to Sara Newman for her patience and response to my inquiries. With her support and guidance, the relativity of rhetoric in everyday life continues to be seen and studied. Lastly, thank you to Theresa Enos and others at Rhetoric Review who have taken the time to allow this work publication. 2Recently, I read about being a sheep or goat from an Orthodox Christian perspective. The message was developed from a verse in the New Testament: "All nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blesses of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'" (Mat. 25:32). Interestingly, the article that follows attributes negative characteristics to those who are like goats as ones who: take, exploit, hoard, fear, judge, mock, and as ones who are unsatisfied, selfish, and distrusting of others. With this context, I understand anew the reference that my in-laws made to the goat in my kitchen. Meaning changes as one's knowledge base shifts over time, and metaphorical expressions evolve, even after they've been spoken.

Introduction: The Hunt for Traces of Remnants [T]here are remnants around me, or traces of remnants—misunderstood and misremembered moments and events, ghostly presences, hazy icons. I'm such a tra...

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.

Writing centers have long been rich sites of critical inquiry into individualized instructional styles and methods. One of the great writing center debates involves directive versus nondirective tutoring styles and methods. While many writing center scholars have discussed the intricacies of directive or interventionist versus nondirective or minimalist pedagogical methods, few have examined the rhetorical implications of this important debate in relation to more classroom-based peer collaborations. This article rhetorically analyzes the literature on directive/nondirective methods and various approaches to tutoring writing, drawing pedagogical and rhetorical connections and implications useful for all teachers of writing and rhetoric.

Shakespeare's stage-practice may have been influenced by several texts on rhetoric that would have been accessible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, and which consider the implications, philosophical and practical, contained in the construction and reception of openings in oratory. By alluding, for example, to the concern of the orator in engaging audiences and to the mechanics of ordering oratorical material to influence audience reception from the outset, the treatises and handbooks of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, for instance, may offer important dimensions for understanding the construction of Shakespeare's openings, even though the media are markedly different.

Reading Julian of Norwich through an Augustinian lens allows us to position her within extant rhetorical tradition while showing ways she revised that tradition. Engaging the Augustinian rhetoric of memory by focusing on the interpretive moves that Julian made to produce her texts reveals the important role of both memory and time in Julian's compositional process. Read this way, we see that Julian provided us with a hermeneutic for reading her texts within the vernacular tradition that reconceptualizes Augustine's generative theory of memory.

During the Middle Ages, rhetoric and literature were thoroughly intertwined, whereas current notions of disciplinarity, in which literature and rhetoric are constructed as separate traditions, muddy our understanding of medieval practice. This essay reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous fourteenth-century poem, as engaged in a Ciceronian debate over the ramifications of legislative rhetoric on civic decision-making. Because of the paucity of information on medieval rhetorical practice, it concludes, literature is a resource that illuminates this neglected and misunderstood historical period.

This article explores how the perceived identity of a population may be rhetorically constructed by a discursive relationship between a place and the people that live there. This relationship is constructed through the use of metonymy and the establishment of an indexical connection between people and place. People become synonymous with place and vice versa so that reference to one is also a reference to the other. The article illustrates this relationship by examining depictions of New York City's Five Points neighborhood during the nineteenth century, particularly Riis's How the Other Half Lives and Asbury's The Gangs of New York.

In light of recent high-profile communication failures in times of crisis (the Fukujima nuclear disaster, the finger-pointing following the BP oil spill, and the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina ...

During World War II, government and individual industries opened childcare centers across the country to support working mothers entering the war plant. At war's end, leaders moved to close these centers, prompting great debate. This essay explores the wartime discussion and postwar debate over the WWII childcare center by analyzing how the gendered ideograph <home> was deployed in ways that both praised and blamed not only the childcare center but also working mothers. While the primary work of the essay is to mine ideographic uses of <home>, it also aims to elaborate on feminist engagements with rhetorical historiography.

Recent legislative action invites teachers of rhetoric to revisit Isocrates' Antidosis from a perspective suggested by Jean Baudrillard. A Baudrillardian perspective positions this ancient text as a rhetorical offensive against the conventional value systems that affix very particular meanings to certain types of education and educators.

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

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...

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson's research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson's medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

In 1934 Gertrude Stein returned to the United States, for the first time in thirty years, to give her Lectures in America. Approaching the delivery of her lectures within their historical context, mediating communicative shifts from the nineteenth-century novel to twentieth-century publicity, and accounting for distinctions between speaking and writing, Stein used public relations strategies to capitalize on her celebrity and to introduce audiences to her modernist compositional processes. The lecture tour became an occasion for engaging the public relations culture that dictated the terms of her image's circulation and for retheorizing delivery in an age of publicity.

The continent of Africa is rich with rhetorical traditions that remain largely unexamined. One such African context is Botswana, which means literally “land of the Tswana people.” A look into two sites of Tswana rhetoric—the traditional village meeting place known at the kgotla and traditional Tswana praise poetry—reveals much about the discursive practices of the Tswana and what such practices convey about Tswana life.

Charles Abrams and Robert Moses engaged in a decades-long rhetorical skirmish regarding urban housing and planning in New York City. Despite Abrams's stylistic efforts to alter the physical permanent plans of Moses, his efforts for the most part failed to overcome institutionalized power and its ability to cement the public terms of debate, especially slum. Yet Abrams's sensitivity to multiple factors of urban use illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived social problems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complex issues with an orthos logos perspective.

This article compares economic and rhetorical writings by examining two nineteenth-century American rhetorician-economists, Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill. Both men directed both their rhetorical and their economic writings toward a common purpose—making citizens comfortable with new and uncertain instruments of (monetary and linguistic) representation. Considering the economic and rhetorical writings on representation, we come to understand how rhetoric (both theory and pedagogy) fits into the emerging and quickly morphing capitalism of industrializing and financializing America.

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.

A single phrase––“beyond the scope of this paper”––is used by academic writers to accomplish various communicative moves in research articles. Writers use the phrase (1) to establish a territory and occupy a niche; (2) to introduce previous research into the conversation; (3) to recommend further research; and (4) to acknowledge limitations. An examination of its uses in scholarly articles from five disciplines suggests that “beyond the scope of this paper” is a useful phrase to introduce to students still learning how to claim the value and establish the focus of their academic writing.

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.

Abstract Humor that addresses race can easily backfire. This article engages in an analysis of The Boondocks, an adult cartoon, to investigate how humor about race and racism can function not only to generate laughter through satiric rejection of long-held racist stereotypes in the American context but also to encourage new perspectives. The analysis makes use of rhetorical concepts drawn from theorist Kenneth Burke to analyze the rhetorical and comedic functioning of the dialogue, the use of music, and the visual features of the show. Notes 1We thank two extremely helpful RR reviewers, Richard Marback and Adela Licona. The quotation in the title comes from Glenda R. Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 15. 2As an example, CitationVidmar and Rokeach (1974) examined audience interpretations of the humor in All in the Family. They found that while some viewers laughed at the overt racism in the comments of Archie Bunker, others laughed at his hippie son-in-law Michael, who portrayed a racially enlightened person. 3McGruder has also published his comic strips in a series of books including The Boondocks: Because I Know you Don't Read the Newspapers, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel (2000); A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, New York: Three Rivers P (2003); Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection, New York: Three Rivers P (2005); and All the Rage: The Boondocks Past and Present, New York: Three Rivers P (2007). 4Readers interested in the media portrayal of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers will find the following works helpful: Pearson, Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America; and Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. The Party is seen to have continued the militant and nationalistic efforts of Malcolm X. Huey Newton, who earned a PhD in Social History from the University of California at Santa Cruz, also continued the intellectual legacy of Malcolm X. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1967, but this was overturned two years later. He and the Black Panther Party later adopted a nonviolent creed and focused on providing food, housing, and basic social services to black Americans in need. He later faced another charge for murder, but this did not result in a conviction. In 1989, after a conviction and short jail sentence for the misuse of public funds, he was murdered in Oakland, apparently participating in a drug deal that went bad. 5All quotations from episodes of The Boondocks, season one and season two. 6Anime is a uniquely Japanese visual art form that began in the early twentieth century. In the United States, the form became popular in the 1960s when a Japanese comic book, Aru Machikado, was made into a television show, Astro Boy. Other anime television shows followed in the midsixties including Gigantor, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion. The art form often includes children as main characters and heroes. The form also presents human emotion in a very visual manner and highlights the role of emotion in human interaction: "In anime the feelings of the characters play an important role in shaping their actions, much more so than in most American products, live or animated" (Poitras 55).

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscure memory of their sophisticated persuasive techniques and political campaigns. Such has been the case with Geneva Smitherman, the noted sociolinguist and scholar activist. This essay analyzes the persuasive choices in a corpus of her earliest essays as a rhetorical campaign to situate her innovative use of antagonism and analysis within a tradition of African-American women scholars and activists who have used essay-writing as a means of sociopolitical action and to model a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of their efforts.

Journalists and political pundits have described Barack Obama's beliefs and political style with the label pragmatism. This essay answers the following questions: What is the meaning of this label? What specific strands of the pragmatist tradition resonate through Obama's presidency? What effect does the label have on Obama's rhetorical practices? To answer these questions, this essay argues that Obama's rhetoric extends Jane Addams's political philosophy and Alain Locke's philosophy of race and that Addams and Locke are important resources for understanding Obama's pragmatism. Moreover, Obama develops a rhetorical pragmatism embodied in the form and style of his speeches.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded the first global rhetorical curriculum. Jesuit educators founded schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America—all ordered on their 1599 Ratio Studiorum. Yet this organizational and educational achievement faced several challenges. The Ratio reveals an attempt to reconcile the medieval education that shaped the early Jesuits and the classical humanism that excited later generations. The Jesuits articulated a reconciliation of humanistic and Christian virtue for the vita activa. These accomplishments mark Jesuit rhetoric as a distinct tradition worthy of deeper study by contemporary rhetoricians.

While a number of scholars have discussed a need to retheorize the fifth canon in the age of the digital (K. Welch; Trimbur; DeVoss and Porter), the field lacks empirical research on rhetorical delivery itself (Rude). By examining one case example from a larger research project, this article explores how practitioner stories can challenge and expand existing theoretical frameworks of rhetorical delivery to include insights from practitioners' knowledge. This article argues that gathering qualitative case examples is a useful, though by no means exhaustive, methodological research framework for studying rhetorical delivery.