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.

The difficulty of resolving the contradiction between personal and academic writing, experience and analysis, and local and global phenomena resides in deeper binary oppositions that continue to haunt us. Time and space, history and structure, are the larger frameworks in which we operate. Understanding the dialectical relationships of these coordinates illuminates the material and social processes of the production of culture, language, and history, suggesting a theoretical perspective based on a unity of opposites rather than their polarization. Through reflection on a course taught according to these principles, the author argues for a dialectical writing pedagogy.

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 This essay explores how recipes and associated text validate African-American women's self-image and resist dominant cultural memory in three cookbooks produced by the National Council of Negro Women in the 1990s. The aim is to establish how these cookbooks function rhetorically as memory texts: to memorialize both individuals and community, to invoke "memory beyond mind," and to generate a sense of collective memory that in turn shapes communal memory.