This essay offers a chronology of over sixty works that have directly innovated, solidified, or critiqued feminist research methodologies in the study of historic rhetoric and composition over the past four decades. The ongoing conversation about feminist research in rhetoric and composition continues to raise questions about method, methodology, and canonicity just as the research itself continues to recover and re-vision a wealth of historic work. This essay, in its broad review, presents readers a panoramic snapshot of the major trends and methodological debates that have shaped feminist historic scholarship in our field.

This article argues that writing teachers can encourage students to adopt a rhetorical perspective toward research-based writing by characterizing products of research in terms of how writers use them in their texts. It maintains that the standard nomenclature for treating sources (primary, secondary, tertiary) is antirhetorical and proposes an alternative: Background for materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence; Exhibit for materials a writer analyzes or interprets; Argument for materials whose claims a writer engages; and Method for materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working.

Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly cited the Bible, no one has seriously examined his rhetoric as biblical hermeneutic. Here I argue that in “I Have a Dream,” King explodes closed memories of the Exodus by reconceptualizing a hermeneutic of (Second) Isaiah as he interprets African-Americans' experience of oppression and exile in Babylon/America and their hope for a new Exodus. Drawing on African-American political rhetoric, King spotlights biblical writers' dialogue with each other and extends the arc of biblical narrative into the present. He also anticipates certain forms of liberation theology of the 1970s and beyond.

As Aristotle began to codify rhetorical practices in Greece, a theoretical and pragmatic text on argument, the Nyaya Sutra, emerged in Ancient India, founding one of six key philosophies of India. Though it describes in detail a procedure of reasoning based on a five-part method of dialogic presentation, the rhetorical emphases of the Nyaya approach have been mostly overlooked. This essay proposes Nyaya's inclusion in the field of rhetorical studies, exploring its methods within their historical context, comparing its approach to the traditional logical syllogism, and relating it to the contemporary perspectives of Stephen Toulmin, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman.

Margaret Cavendish took an active part in the Royal Society's discussions about plain style. Her contributions to the Royal Society's plain style discussions were closely connected to her scientific practices, both of which explicitly and implicitly challenged the practices of the Royal Society. In her own rhetorical practices, Cavendish modeled herself as a reader and writer of scientific texts, and her challenges to the discursive and experimental practice of seventeenth-century science make her a compelling figure in the rhetoric of science.

Wayne Booth died October 10, 2005. I remember the pang at seeing the announcement. As The New York Times reported, he was “one of the pre-eminent literary critics of the second half of the 20th cen...

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.

Devin Stauffer's The Unity of Plato's Gorgias presents a novel reading that further enriches an already rich tradition of interpretation of this complex dialogue. Stauffer is a political theorist, ...

In addition to the need to correct a significant number of typographical errors, a few factual mistakes, and a few translation omissions, Kennedy explains in his “Prooemion” that the impetus for th...

Abstract This paper employs mixed methods, namely, corpus linguistic and rhetorical analysis methods, to examine Confucius's theory on language, persuasion, and virtue as reflected in the Analects. The triangulation of methods allows in-depth analysis of Confucius's use of key concepts surrounding the language—virtue relationship and the way these concepts operate in different levels of persuasion. The study shows Confucius's theory as a virtue-centered rhetoric. For him, virtuous conduct, rather than artful words, should be employed as the primary persuasive tool.

Abstract This paper analyzes four popular essays on punctuated equilibrium by the late paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, who coauthored the evolutionary theory with Niles Eldredge in 1972. It begins with a survey of Gould's disparate reception among scientific amateurs and professionals. Main concerns include the role of accommodated science in the public perception of truth and whether Gould was able to manipulate popular views through his talent for writing vivid prose, the validity of metaphor for constructing our understanding of scientific theory, and the degree to which the disciplines (literature, rhetoric, economics, biology) can usefully interact in the elucidation of scientific ideas.

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.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Abstract This article traces the argumentum ad baculum, or appeal to fear, from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to the contemporary fundamentalist Christian practice of staging morality plays, often called Hell House. In his scare-for-salvation sermons, Edwards used descriptions of the reality of hell to invoke psychosomatic reactions of terror in his audience, and we see similar rhetorical tactics at work in evangelical hell houses. In a post-9/11 world where leaders, governments, and media can exert considerable power over individuals by frightening them into impulsive behavior, and considering the New Testament's message of love, this strategy seems questionable.

Abstract This article traces the argumentum ad baculum, or appeal to fear, from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to the contemporary fundamentalist Christian practice of staging morality plays, often called Hell House. In his scare-for-salvation sermons, Edwards used descriptions of the reality of hell to invoke psychosomatic reactions of terror in his audience, and we see similar rhetorical tactics at work in evangelical hell houses. In a post-9/11 world where leaders, governments, and media can exert considerable power over individuals by frightening them into impulsive behavior, and considering the New Testament's message of love, this strategy seems questionable.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

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.

While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim: Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication de partments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we con sider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this care ful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism. However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical crit icism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim?Shirley Wilson Logan's We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken McAllister's Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture con ducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason that rhetorical criticism has historically belonged to speech communication may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our own scholarship. Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which com prise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those

Through an analysis of the April 2000 IMF/World Bank protests in Washington DC, I identify an expanded repertoire of the creative arts of the contact zone in an era of global capitalism. I argue that three theories of deliberation are at play in the events: a rhetoric of benevolent capitalism, a rhetoric of a rational public sphere developed through supranational organizations, and an emerging rhetoric of grassroots globalization. I conclude that grassroots democratic globalization may provide a new model of the public sphere—a site of rhetorical deliberation where strangers meet to imagine the world they will create.

Abstract Whereas the postcritical conversation about student resistance often adopts a political or psychological perspective, this article argues for a rhetorical approach to understanding why students may resist the imperatives forwarded by critical pedagogies. Through an analysis of two cultural studies readers, this article suggests that we examine critical composition courses as pedagogical arguments that ask students to accept (and even embody) certain enthymematic messages about their subjectivity that they may be unable or unwilling to help construct, thus resulting in apparent resistance.

This article examines issues surrounding the maternal rhetor in public spaces through a case study of Anne Hutchinson, a leading figure in the antinomian controversy that divided the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late 1630s. It details how Puritans employed Hutchinson's fertility and malformed offspring to discredit her, silence her supporters, and consolidate secular and religious power. Their argumentative uses of Hutchinson's pregnancy and childbirth constitute a form of maternal rhetoric, a set of gendered obstacles, opportunities, and persuasive means that arise at the junction of maternity and public discourse.

This article examines the development of Kenneth Burke's early rhetorical theory in relation to the coterminous cybernetic research to which Burke was often responding. I argue that recuperating Burke's early attempts to construct a rhetorical subject embracing nonrepresentational vectors is salutary for intervening in ongoing debates over subjectivity and affective experience in contemporary critical, rhetorical, and cultural theory.

This essay argues that the rhetorical strategies of radical activist groups can complicate our theoretical understanding of rhetorical situation. It first examines the textual practices of the Situationist International (SI), a group of French anarchists who in the 1950s and 1960s purported to make accessible to non-elites modernist experimentation in art, literature, architecture, and urban design. It then describes and reflects on what happens when these practices are utilized in a women's studies classroom with an explicit activist orientation.

This article examines rhetorical places (loci) in Lydia Maria Child's abolitionist rhetoric during the course of her career as a social-activist. I invoke the term homeplaces to consider how Child's rhetorical places constitute collective social agency for freed African Africans.

Mainstream and movement rhetorics interact as political actors and struggle to control meaning in ways that are not evident from single-site analysis. This article examines how three speakers in southern Arizona give meaning to "sustainable ranching." The vir bonus is used to understand meanings developed in face-to-face deliberative forums. Social movement framing theory, briefly reviewed, is used to analyze activist rhetoric and limits of the vir bonus model. Finally, Gerard Hauser's "reticulate public sphere" is used to account for invention as a dialogic response to rhetorics from multiple sites.

In rhetorical studies recent attention to the central role of pedagogy in the formation of disciplinary identity has obscured the disciplinary-based differences in the presentation of the history of rhetoric in English and communication classrooms. This essay surveys introductory rhetoric textbooks to contrast our presentations of rhetorical history.

This essay challenges accepted versions of rhetorical history by recovering the mythical figure of Hephaestus and the cunning rhetoric he embodied, metis. This critical retelling offers a new and more expansive perspective on history, rhetoric, and embodiment, as it lays bare many of our assumptions about the available means of persuasion. The author asserts that a cunning approach to rhetoric might allow for the celebration of all of our embodied differences.

This essay analyzes curricula and textbooks currently used in graduate programs in rhetoric and composition. Drawing on data from a web-based survey of 592 faculty in rhetoric and composition, we raise two main questions: How adequately are graduate students being prepared for their future professional lives, and should professionalization be a primary goal in graduate education?

While disciplinary histories have traced the origins of professionalized literary study, little attention has been paid to the development of specialized rhetorical conventions in this field. This rhetorical analysis of the first publication of the MLA, Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America 1884–5, draws on "writing in the disciplines" research to categorize the stases, topoi, and sentence subject conventions developing in this publication. This analysis clarifies the longstanding and entrenched nature of some current conventions of literary scholarship despite the profound changes in the object of study this field has undertaken.

Abstract This study offers scholars in composition and communication studies an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between feminists and rhetoric in the context of edited collections. The author first recasts recovery and gender critique as inventive arts for editors, and then analyzes a selection of edited collections' framing texts to demonstrate how editors compose their collections by mediating these arts. This work reveals that an early either/or relationship between the arts of recovery and gender critique gives way to a both/and approach that opens possibilities for multiple, rich avenues of inquiry in feminist rhetorical studies.

Abstract This essay illuminates the place of seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in the history and theory of rhetoric. I examine rhetorics of silence and interruption in La respuesta, Sor Juana's most well-known prose piece and an autobiographical polemic that preceded her actual silence in the face of disapproving Church authorities. By insisting that silence is something to listen for and demanding that rhetors underscore their use of silence by "naming" it, Sor Juana theorizes about silence as a persuasive entity and provides an early instance of a nondominant, protofeminist, New World rhetoric.

Recent discussions of metaphor illuminate its function as a paradigm-building trope with significant rhetorical and epistemological power. Historical and current discourse within biological science provide a complex and poignant example of metaphor's influence: Throughout much of the twentieth century, the field operated under a deterministic assumption that DNA is the "genetic code." Though this reductionist association still shapes biological research, postgenomic discoveries are now reconceiving the connection between DNA and cells in more complex ways. The ensuing scientific debate demonstrates that rhetoric and language have primary roles in the discourse of contemporary biology, creating a rhetoric of cells.

Abstract Through rhetorical analysis this study examines the recent discursive practices in our country about smallpox vaccinations. Michel Foucault maintains that no analysis is complete without contextualizing and historicizing the discourse we hope to understand. Smallpox vaccinations have a four-hundred-year-old history, and the insights gained from such historic studies can teach us much about our present course. Recent studies, including a Harvard survey, help us contextualize the present discourse. By comparing present and past practices, we gain a perspective that gives us predictive power as well as a concrete plan for the future in this time of bioterrorist threats.

I argue that the debate between the Elizabethan theater and the Puritans was more than a simple argument about public morals. Drawing on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concepts of arguments that structure reality, I examine this debate as a rhetorical struggle over the way reality itself would be conceptualized by a culture. This historically situated debate can, in turn, shed light on the political implications of arguments that structure reality.

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.

Abstract This article explores archival information about the University of Michigan's Progressive Era graduate programs as they pertained to the female graduate students in rhetoric. The article explores the reasons why women went to the University of Michigan to study rhetoric, the influences on the program, how the women got there, and how the program influenced their later teaching. Finally, the article notes that the University of Michigan's graduate program in rhetoric merits more exploration.

This essay discusses the emergence of whiteness studies in the study of English rhetoric and composition in the U.S. History of whiteness studies; Function and definition of whiteness in the U.S.; Role of race in different U.S. cultural logics; Relationship of whiteness studies with teaching composition.

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 The way rhetorical analysts now use the term appeals—meaning to plead or to please—has outstripped the available theories, particularly those derived from Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos may not even be appeals in the modern sense. A revised model relates author and author positions to values in a triangulating relationship. Appeals also appear as techniques for working through varying media, not only media defined semiotically but also as forms of resistance related to cultural differences. Examples from criticism, film, and advertising provide a foundation for replacing a modes approach to rhetorical appeals with a genre approach.

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.

In recent years a number of studies have limned the generic features of the instructor end comment on student texts. This study complements these large-scale analyses by examining from a rhetorical perspective two end comments, written by a first-year composition instructor, and by evaluating how the comments reflect and resist elements of two schemes that classify teacher response.

Abstract In his recent studies on classical Chinese text structures and contemporary Chinese composition textbooks, Andy Kirkpatrick claims that Mainland Chinese students are taught to write Chinese compositions in contemporary "Anglo-American" rhetorical style. This paper examines the historical formation of modern Chinese writing instruction and argues that the introduction of Western rhetoric into China in the beginning of the twentieth century did enrich modern Chinese rhetoric through, for example, Western scientific rhetoric(s); but more importantly, together with other historical forces, it helped to revitalize and retrieve the extremely rich Chinese rhetorical tradition in modern Chinese writing instruction.

Bronislaw Malinowski introduces influential ideas of context to rhetoric when he rejects texts and etymology to argue that meaning is determined by tangible, embodied circumstances. I turn to ancient texts and Kenneth Burke's reading of Malinowski to argue that we order—and are ordered by—rhetorical contexts that are composed of hierarchical designs, oppositional ideas, and material bodies.