Interests and Opportunities appears at a critical moment in university writing instruction, a moment when many colleges and universities are relegating the task of basic writing instruction to two-...

Abstract This article, drawing on Aristotle's concept of technê, develops a framework for exploring rhetoric in the process of scientific inquiry. The Aristotelian "causes" specifically highlight the technical procedures through which scientists carry out their work and the visual representations they deploy to generate meaningful accounts, "bring forth" new findings, and contribute to the existing field of knowledge. The author argues that a technê-based framework makes it possible to maintain a focus on rhetoric as a productive art while broadening the object of rhetorical analysis to include practices and modes of representation that contribute to knowledge production in the physical sciences. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Nola Heidlebaugh and James Zappen for their careful and constructive readings of my manuscript. I would also like to thank Trey Bagwell for his assistance in bringing the project to fruition. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. 2I obtained permission for this project through the University Institutional Review Board and from the scientists themselves. Names have been changed to protect participants' confidentiality.

As rhetoric and composition teacher-researchers, we know how paradoxical and, at times, ambivalent the relationship between our work and social action can be. On one hand, many of us are brought to...

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

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...

Abstract The subjective model of empathy, as used in Susan Miller's reading of Morris Young's Minor Re/Visions, is rooted in the prevailing misconceptions of emotion as personal and intrinsic to an isolated and fixed Western subjectivity. It poses tremendous challenges to intercultural empathy: It allows readers to project their own emotions and framework of reference to others' emotions and creates an asymmetrical, passive subject-to-object reader–writer relationship. Conceiving emotions as an index to cultural and social relationships, the intersubjective rhetoric of empathy, contrarily, positions readers as fluid intersubjects, and consequently creates an active subject-to-subject relationship that potentially subverts the power imbalance in rhetorical borderlands. Notes 1I thank my RR reviewers LuMing Mao and Lucy Xing Lu for their patient review, incisive comments, and insightful suggestions, which significantly helped improve the clarity and focus of my argument.

This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.

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 Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition, authors Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth liken the practice of style to a ...

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.

In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn (re)introduced the art of silence, and in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe (re)introduced the art of listen...

Abstract Doug Peacock, known as the inspiration for Edward Abbey's George Hayduke in the environmentalist comedy The Monkey Wrench Gang, has published his own accounts of their relationship and his conservationist work. These memoirs recount his experiences with PTSD after serving in Vietnam and argue for grizzly bear conservation. By using trauma to establish identification with the audience, the texts encourage readers to value other species and their own while resisting the totalizing tendencies of Burkean consubstantiality. The texts build identification and preserve difference through narrative structure and appeals to collective memory that encourage empathy yet stress the specificity of personal experience. Notes 1 I thank RR peer reviewers Jeremy Engels and Randy Lake for their valuable suggestions and encouragement. 2 On the representation of My Lai in popular cinema and how collective memory of the war has evolved, see Owen.

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...

This article examines a series of essays published in 1830 that were instrumental in the founding of Haverford School, the first Quaker liberal arts college, where a literary, language-oriented curriculum would be taught despite the Friends' long antipathy toward higher learning. The essays successfully persuade by deploying commonplaces that bridged the disparate spheres of Quaker discourse of experience and elite, mainstream discourses of taste. The findings are significant to rhetoricians interested in how social change can be mediated even in entrenched discursive traditions, especially faith traditions that are deeply felt and strongly held.

Abstract The professional life of elocutionist Alvina Winker Paterson suggests that previous views about women being excluded from rhetorical activities in the earlier twentieth century need to be revised. Like many other contemporary women, Winkler Paterson was able to avail herself of private instruction in elocution and become a highly successful performer and educator in the Northeast. Her career casts considerable light on the nature of elocutionary performance, the course of elocutionary education, and feminine access to public arenas and power at the time. Notes 1 We owe thanks to RR reviewers Susan Kates, Andrew King, and RR editor Theresa Enos for significant help in revising this manuscript. We also owe thanks to Amber Davisson for using the scrapbooks to create a chronology of Winkler Paterson's performances that was useful in the writing of this article.

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...

This article analyzes The Business of Being Born, a documentary that critiques dominant American childbirth practices, practitioners, and locations as overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.

The phenomenon of the Octalog came into being at the 1988 CCCC when James J. Murphy, with support from Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown, proposed and chaired a roundtable composed of eight distinguish...

Queen Mary I was crowned in 1553, becoming the first reigning queen of England. In order to provide a powerful image of female rule to her people, Queen Mary invented a rhetorical strategy that reflected her society's oppressive gender expectations of chaste silence so that she could become a powerfully voiced ruler. Her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth I, later mirrored Mary's strategy. England's first female monarchs created an image of female rule by employing the figures of the spouse, the mother, and the maiden, embodying conventional roles for women in Tudor society, and reclaiming them as images of power.

Despite arguments to the contrary, division is as natural to the civic-minded human animal as is identification. Both sides of this natural inclination are explored in the works of Kenneth Burke, although the latter, rather than the former, tends to be championed. In this essay we explore Burkean ideas about the division/identification binary through a particularly personal and frequently ignored national example: Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. As the first woman ever elected to Congress, Rankin is known best neither for her work toward universal suffrage nor for her fight against corporate excess. Instead, she is simply the woman who voted against US involvement in both World War I and World War II.

The biblical account of Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus is perhaps history's most repeated and influential telling of a spiritual transformation, and it is with this account that Dana Ander...

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

In The Long Road of Woman's Memory, Addams develops a theory of memory that accounts for the rhetorical function of reminiscence. Drawing on I. A. Richards's conception of rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding, this essay offers an analysis of Addams's theory in relationship to her attempts at rational discourse with a group of immigrant women who believed there was a “Devil Baby” in residence at Hull House. Her successes and failures during these conversations prompted Addams to consider the rhetorical function of memory as a theoretical tool both to understand and remedy discursive conflict.

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.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 So, this phrase has gotten a lot of attention. First during and immediately after the Octalog panel in the Tweetstream, then in f2f and continuing social-media interactions after. Most younger scholars express excitement to hear someone say what they've been thinking all along; many "established" scholars express dismay at my lack of respect. Disciplinarity does do its job, does it not? 2 I will, however, offer my definition of rhetoric. Just for the record, when I use the word rhetoric, I am evoking a shorthand that encompasses thousands of years of intellectual production all over the globe—a set of productions that we have only just begun to understand—and that generally refers to systems of discourse through which meaning was, is, and continues to be made in a given culture. 3 In Signs Taken for Wonders, Homi Bhabha reminds us that "[t]here is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently" that it "inaugurates a literature of empire." That scene, he tells us, is always "played out in the wild and wordless wastes" of "the colonies" and consists entirely of the "fortuitous discovery of the English book" by colonized peoples; this scene marks the book as an "emblem," one of the colonizers' "signs taken for wonders" (29). 4 See especially Lisa Brooks; Joy Harjo; Thomas King; Nancy Shoemaker (ed.); Linda Tuhiwai Smith; Robert Warrior; and Shawn Wilson. 5 For an examination of "paracolonial," see Vizenor. 6 A totally unsatisfying and provocative opening into my current work that argues for situating specific rhetorical events in the continuum of rhetorical practices (alphabetic and non-alphabetic) that hold particular cultures together over time. 7 I take inspiration from Richard Graff and Michael Leff; Thomas Habinek; Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz; and Susan Miller. 8 See http://wealthforcommongood.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf for more information. 9 For Jim and Bob … Susan, Sharon, Richard, Jan, Nan, and Jerry (chair), Octalog, 1988, St. Louis. 10 Éthea, where animals belong, in their wildness. I'm using Charles Scott's The Question of Ethics for reading, as CS cites such in the Iliad (6.506–11). The horse wants to return to its Nomós, field, as opposed to Nómos, law (Scott 143). I've consulted Charles Chamberlain's "From Haunts to Character." 11 I would claim, therefore, that it is our responsibility to search out our other-abilities, our impotentialities, to address the other that is indefinite. I'm not referring to potentialities, that is, Techné or Dynamis. Rather, I am referring to what Aristotle notes only in passing as Adynamis, or Impotentiality (see Metaphysics 1046e, 25–32). This, then, would be the para-methodology of misology! As well as the wildness that I refer to! In reference, as Giorgio Agamben says, Adynamis, or Impotentiality, would address all that has NOT YET been intuited, thought, acted on in ethico-political lived experiences (see Potentialities). Or forgotten! At least, in our wide, impotentially wild field.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is experiencing a change in its core curricula as graduate programs are replacing a traditional set of core courses with a more customizable, elective plan of study that focuses on specializations. Graduate student dissertations predict the flow and direction of the field, determining curricular change. Programs are also being responsive to a trend in the listing of specialist positions in the MLA JIL. The 2000 and 2008 Rhetoric Review surveys of graduate curricula as well as the authors' most recent survey results reveal a change in values from general to more specialist curricula.

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.

Amy Kimme Hea has pulled together strong articles that discuss issues associated with wireless and mobile technologies. The 2009 copyright masks the slow pace of print publishing, with citations on...

Finally Persuaded: Rhetoric, History, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War This is certainly not the place to undertake a comprehensive and systematic new approach to Thucydides. But it...

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is often defined by binaries: rhetoric/composition, teaching/practice. Our doctoral programs, however, occupy space at both ends of the spectrum through the simultaneous emphasis on composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory. The changing curricula in doctoral programs offer a unique lens through which to interpret some of the forces that have shaped rhetoric and composition as it has developed in the past fifty years. Examining the curricula highlights how our disciplinary identity has been shaped, at least in part, by our various institutional locations.

Abstract The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century. Notes 1In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS. 2I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions. 3Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts creation of a stable ethos in her political tract, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and forwards liminality as a frame within which to understand ethos in this work.

New York Times articles on environmental issues attempt to constitute an audience transcending gender, race, politics, and religion in its pursuit of environmentally sound behavior. While some articles' use of a rhetoric of sacrifice is undercut by fear appeals and an exclusionary narrative strategy, other NYT articles come closer to transforming the rhetoric of sacrifice into a widely inclusive, aesthetically grounded, and celebratory narrative strategy. Taken together, the articles seek to transform readers not so much into environmentalists as into what Foucault described late in his life as “artists of living.”

With its wide circulation and its resistance to old-fashioned morality, the popular magazine provided late nineteenth-century American women a location within which to counter doctors' long-held views of their physical frailty. In articles promoting the bicycle as an agent of women's health, nonmedically trained women countered medical commonplaces of women's limited energies and need for constant doctor scrutiny. Instead, they posited a renewable, self-governing female body capable of taking on both the bicycle and the challenges of the new century. In doing so, they influenced doctors' perspectives on women's bodies from outside professional boundaries.