Socrates: But I do think you will agree to this, that every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a...

Robert Danisch's book, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, brings together the traditions of rhetoric, as it was practiced and theorized in Classical Greece, and pragmatism, as it...

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

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.

“It's the economy, stupid.” This statement is simple, concise, repeatedly resonates with voters, and is a position that the Republican Party is astutely aware of. The importance of Mark Smith's boo...

In this essay I analyze the plain style as conceived of and used by the Lollards, a late fourteenth-century religious group. I argue that the same practices that set Lollard reading and writing apart from orthodox discourse were foundational to the Lollards' departures from orthodox belief, theorizing language and style in such a way that meaning was free from priestly mediation. This demonstrates the importance of the Lollard plain style as both a marker of heresy and a precursor to subsequent notions of plainness.

Editor Linda K. Fuller in her introduction clearly situates Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations within the interdisciplinary field of sports studies by hi...

Some years ago I saw a video of a motivational speech in which IBM CEO Lou Gerstner spoke of a then-new unit of time, a “Web year,” which he defined as equivalent to about six months of the Gregori...

Abstract Of the sharp judgment of the South in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, prior scholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy—a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with God's purposes. This view of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his address obliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcing their affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which is then followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. This strategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Reconstruction: the Radical Republicans. Notes 1Many thanks to Rhetoric Review's two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose careful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me read Lincoln in the first place.

Who Says? is a collection of essays that ranges widely over rhetorics of work and the working class. In his introduction the editor of the collection, William DeGenaro, points out the lack of atten...

The chapters of David Fleming's story could, with modifications, be the chapters of all our stories (Burkean Parlor, Vol. 25.4, 2005). Until fairly recently, many of us have come into the disciplin...

Editor's Note: Several invited responses to this review will appear in RR's Burkean Parlor. Two, by Joshua Gunn and James Bunker, appear in this issue. We welcome responses by others. We have also ...

Abstract St. Patrick of Ireland's legend suggests that he was a great rhetor: After all, he drove the snakes out of Ireland. As is often the case, however, the actual story is far more interesting and compelling than the myth. Born to an aristocratic family in fourth-century Britain, Patrick should have studied rhetoric in the Roman system. But when he was fifteen, he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. As a result, he received a different sort of rhetorical education than his peers in Britain, an education that made him uniquely suited to evangelize Ireland. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers William Covino and George Kennedy for their suggestions for this manuscript. I also extend thanks to Richard Johnson-Sheehan and the members of the Rhetoric Reading Group for their close reading and valuable insight. 2Augustine and Patrick were not exact contemporaries. Augustine was born about thirty years before Patrick in 354. According to Hanson, Patrick was born somewhere between 388 and 408 (Origins and Career 179). St. Augustine died in 430; the earliest date of death that has been suggested for Patrick is about 460, and the latest is about 490. 3His name—cognate with patrician—hints at his station: His father, Calpornius, was both decurion, a city councilor and tax collector, and a church deacon; his grandfather, Potitus, was priest (before the rule of priestly celibacy was firmly established). It appears that though their lineage produced a saint, their service to the church may have been less than saintly. When Constantine became emperor, he exempted church officials from the taxation duties associated with the curiales. (If the curiales failed to raise the required taxes, he was required to pay them out his own pocket.) Thus, Patrick's father's position as deacon, or decurion, may have indicated an unwillingness to pay taxes more than a willingness to serve the Church. This loophole soon proved too costly to maintain, but it also proved difficult to close, especially as far away as Britain. The same was true for the rule of priestly celibacy, upon which the popes of the time were beginning to insist. Given the dates of the changing ordination and celibacy rules, Hanson suggests that we can date Patrick's birth no sooner than 388 and no later than 408 (Origins and Career 179). 4Patrick arrived in Ireland as the island's second bishop. Preceding him was Palladius, who was perhaps a Gaul. The fact that Ireland already had a bishop means that the Christian community in Ireland was large enough to require one. At this time, bishops were assigned at the request of the particular community. Traditionally, Palladius's bishopric was supposed to have ended in about 430, and Patrick's was supposed to have begun in 431. However, O'Rahilly argues that Palladius's tenure was shortened by hagiographers who could not deny Palladius's existence but wanted to make Patrick the “first” bishop nonetheless (15–16). O'Rahilly puts the end of Palladius's bishopric at about 461 and the years of Patrick's at about 461 until his death in 492 (8). It may also be possible that hagiographers blended Palladius—who, O'Rahilly argues, also went by the name Patricius—with the second Patricius, the Briton who became Ireland's patron saint (15). Nevertheless, no scholar doubts that the second Patricius was the author of the Confession and the Letter to Coroticus. 5Freeman's surmise may be supported by a detail offered in the Letter to Coroticus, in which Patrick describes Christians he had just baptized as “still in their white dress” (sec 3). 6In some ways it is hard to understand precisely why Patrick had such trouble writing Latin. The obvious answer is his slavery, but he would have had to make up his lost education in order to become a priest. Why, then, did that education not make him a better writer? His prose problems may have the result of disuse after so many years of speaking Irish. Latin also might have been Patrick's second language to begin with. While some historians suggest that Patrick would have spoken Latin as a first language (Thompson 40), others, like Freeman (10) and Charles Thomas (308), suggest that Patrick, as a Roman Britan, would most likely have spoken British as his first language and studied Latin in school. O'Rahilly offers a slightly different thesis, arguing that “his admittedly imperfect command of Latin suggests that he came, not from a fully Latinized district, but rather from one in which, while the official language was Latin, British was the common language of the mass of the population” (33). Mohrmann, on the other hand, suggests that Patrick would have grown up bilingual, but that “his six years of captivity . . . weakened his command of Latin very seriously” (45–46). Finally, it may be that Patrick dictated the Confession to a secretary. It's even possible that he dictated it in Irish and that the transcription and translation hampered the style. The high number of biblical quotations, however, suggest that the Letter was first composed, whether orally or chirographically, in Latin. As to his Irish, Patrick may have known a little before he ever set foot in Ireland. Patrick's family owned slaves, as did most wealthy families. Ironically enough, it is quite possible that some of their slaves were from Ireland; therefore, Patrick might have known a few words of Irish when he was kidnapped. Whatever his levels of fluency in either British or Latin, Patrick would have learned much more Irish during his slavery than he could have picked up from his family's slaves, thus gaining a skill that would later set him apart from his clerical peers. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of Patrick's life, the question of his language is clouded in mystery. 7Kennedy writes, “There is no ‘zero degree’ rhetoric in any utterance because there would be no utterance without a rhetorical impulse” (Comparative 5). 8Throughout the essay I rely on Hanson's translation in The Life and Writings of Saint Patrick (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983). I do not follow his practice of italicizing quotations that Patrick takes from scripture. Though Hanson also capitalizes the first word of these quotations, I have followed normal rules of English capitalization. 9For more on Irish mythology and its relation to rhetoric, see Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul Lynch, “Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: Ancient Irish Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 233–52. 10I have taken this quotation from the Catholic Study Bible (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). In his note to his translation of the Confession, Hanson writes, “I have refrained from consistently reproducing in my translation of Patrick's quotations from the Bible any contemporary English translation of it, because Patrick's biblical text corresponds to no text which has appeared in an English translation. He was in fact reproducing (sometimes from memory) for the most part a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament and a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew (and the Aramaic) of the Old Testament. His Bible therefore differed considerably in some details from ours” (Life and Writings 57). 11All Latin quotations come from A. B. E. Hood's St. Patrick: His Writings and His Life (London: Phillimore, 1978). 12There has been some dispute about whether the original text is corrupted in this place. The passage may read either as dominicati rhetorici or domini cati rhetorici, and scholars are unsure to whom Patrick was referring (Hanson, Origins 109–12). A. B. E. Hood translates the phrase as “clerical intellectuals” (43); Hanson, on the other hand, argues that it means “masters, cunning ones, rhetoricians” (Origins 109). 13Patrick manages to disguise admonitions to his audience in admonitions to himself in other sections, too. In Section 7 he writes, “I am not ignorant of the witness of my Lord who testifies in the psalm, thou shalt cause those who speak falsehood to perish. And in another place it says the mouth which tells lies kills the soul. And the same Lord says in the gospel the idle word which men shall have spoken they shall give an account for it in the day of judgment” (sec. 7). At first glance this passage seems straightforward enough: Patrick reminds his opponents that if they bear false witness against him, it is they who will be punished. However, the context dictates otherwise. In the previous two sections, Patrick has said, “For [God] said through the prophet, call upon me in the day of your trouble and I will deliver you and you will glorify me, and elsewhere it says now it is honorable to display and confess the works of God. However though I am unsatisfactory in many points, I want my brothers and relations to know what I am like, so they can perceive the desire of my soul” (sec. 5 and 6). If Patrick is reminding his audience of the stricture against false witness, he is doing it through the guise of reminding himself.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Bob Scott, my PhD adviser, uses this phrase to describe relatively uninteresting, scientistic, or cookie-cutter modes of rhetorical criticism. 2Ronald Walter Greene, for example, has been critiquing the neoliberal rhetoric that concerns Smith for some years (see “Rhetorical Capital”; “Rhetoric and Capitalism”). 3I think we could even argue that in the twentieth century, rhetorical studies adopted such a one-sided approach until Burke was taken up and rhetoric-as-seduction eclipsed argumentation, the supplication of good reasons, and so forth. Even so, attempts to more directly engage emotional appeals and affect have been met with some derision (for example, Brockriede; Corder). For a recent, excellent attempt to engage the affect of rhetoric, see Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment.

A frequent rhetorical technique in classical Greek oratory, especially in ­judicial speeches where it is used both by prosecution and defense, is the speaker's allegation that his opponents and the...

In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

Abstract This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons "dying well," specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life. Notes 1I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay. 2Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister. 3Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151). 4Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton. 5These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada. 6It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways. 7Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855. Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.

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 ...

Using the Victorian writer Samuel Butler's response to Darwin's Origin of Species as an example, I argue for a method of reading characterized by the process of fascination and seduction. Such an antimethodical method not only requires a different kind of agency on the part of the reader, but it also resituates rhetoric as an art of response to the dynamic flux of the communicating world.

This essay argues that the significance and nature of ancient epistolary theory have been underestimated and misunderstood due to the nature of the ancient materials, their history of transmission, and the prestige economies of modern (and ancient) academic hierarchies, and it discusses ways in which shifts of interpretive focus can further our understanding of certain aspects of ancient verbal skills training and theory.

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.

It is my contention that David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow's well-known discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s—sometimes referred to as their “debate”—is still a text of central importance in the field of composition studies, one that speaks to timeless questions of narrative and pedagogy in the writing classroom. Indeed, rich representations of writing teachers in contemporary fiction remind us that Bartholomae and Elbow were articulating a crucial theoretical divide, not just in comp theory but in American higher education.

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.

Though Plato may have been making a metaphysical argument when he valorized orality over textuality in Phaedrus, a close reading of “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Jacques Derrida's response, which reversed Plato's oral/textual dissociation, was metaphorical. The difference/differénce between the metaphysical and metaphorical is itself lost in the Yale School's translation of French deconstruction into American poststructuralism. When the Yale School's metaphysical interpretation of poststructuralism, and particularly the literary notion of the author, is imported into composition, Derrida's claim that writing is “essentially democratic” is itself reversed, and the student subject is deconstructed alongside student writing.

The last time I had lunch with my grandmother, I again listened sadly as she mourned the loss of her sight. “Now I can't see anything at all,” she told me. “I can only tell someone's across the tab...

Working-class people perform class identities. These performances are marked with ironies in which working class symbolizes power and powerlessness. Such performances elide linear meaning-making in favor of poetic paradox and help us understand the contradictions of working-class life. The New Deal, a chapbook by my great-grandfather, represents an occasion for understanding how one working-class person used language to consider his life's contradictions. The chapbook articulates a unique “working-class poetics” and suggests why rhetoricians ought to locate representations of the paradoxes of working-class life.