This essay argues that literary theory can no longer afford to adopt an exceptionalist view of its own disciplinary identity and relation to the Western tradition. To this end, it outlines a conceptual framework that distinguishes between competing tendencies within the Western tradition represented by the terms metaphysics and ontology. The implications of this distinction for literary theory are that the most important sources of the latter's disciplinary identity are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term poststructuralism implies, nor a "modernity" that has been superseded, as the term postmodernism implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism.

Abstract This essay examines the question of the body as it appears in Burke's texts. Drawing upon a rereading of-and friendly amendment to-Burke's action/motion writings, I argue that other terminologies of embodiment suffer from a lack of complexity and therefore offer not dialectics but rhetorics of embodiment. After briefly applying this reading of Burke to discourse on race and racial identity, the essay concludes that his action/motion polarity can be used as a critical instrument of sorts, prompting us to greater vigilance regarding the vocabularies of embodiment we employ, the terms we impose upon our bodies and ourselves.

Progymnasmata are collections of speaking and writing exercises for students of rhetoric. As historians have shown, they played an extremely important role in European education from Antiquity to the beginnings of the Modern Era. Unfortunately, they are treated today, if at all, as an historical curiosity, a relic of the old "school rhetoric." Occasionally, there are attempts to revive the traditional sequence. Both approaches miss what I believe is most valuable about the progymnasmata, the very idea of a unified pedagogical program in the language arts, spanning primary, secondary, and higher education, oriented toward the shaping of rhetorical character, and organized around a sequence of well-defined exercises in verbal analysis and composition.

(Editor's Note: Jim W Corder submitted the following essay to Rhetoric Review in 1996. The essay was accepted for publication but never published because of uncompleted correspondence and manuscript preparation. We decided to typeset and format this essay in order to bring to readers this first posthumous Corder essay, convinced that it is an important addition to his rhetorical canon. Introducing the essay is a contextual note by Keith D. Miller, who like this editor, is a former graduate student of Corder's.)

Abstract The material conditions in which most writing classes are taught-by an adjunct, who has little or no job security, is poorly compensated, and is isolated from colleagues-cannot be conceptualized as merely an "adjunct problem." This so-called "adjunct problem" cannot be separated from the ethics of the university and its faculty, from the principles of the discipline and its pedagogies, or from the responsibility of this particular adjunct and her future career decisions.

Using the founding of the Austrian Academy of Science as its lens, this study attempts to break new ground in three ways. First, it establishes the perception of rhetorical change as a product of underlying textual features. Second, it accounts for rhetorical change by reference to a causative factor that can be precisely located and is in no sense rhetorical. Finally, it tries to show that under the influence of a powerful model, rapid change in rhetorical practices can take place as a consequence of adherence to a preferred model. I see this as a form of learning. A conclusion reflects on the implications of this study by comparing the rhetorical changes I examine with those of another sort of learning, that which accompanies graduate training in rhetoric.

Abstract The study of emotion has regained prominence in the fields of psychology and rhetoric. Despite this interest, little has been written about the art of making an emotional appeal. This essay focuses on the writing of Quintilian, in particular Book VI of his Institutes of Oratory, in an effort to describe his theory of emotional appeal, and to see whether it has relevance today. The essay presents Quintilian's theory in the form of "rules."

Homer's Iliad is an epic story about human character, which predates the Aristotelian lectures by some four hundred years. While classical scholars have always valued Aristotle's notion of ethos as a primary factor in persuasion, few have traced this concept to this earlier period. Following a close analysis of speeches in the Iliad, this examination attempts to reconstruct what Homer's theory of character might have looked like. While Aristotle seems to have understood character much differently than did Homer, enough evidence exists to suggest that Aristotle may have embraced Homer's Iliad and the story it tells about the importance of age, social convention, and the heroic.

Nineteenth-century college literary and debating societies, which required at least some students to publicly question dominant ideologies and the status quo, offer a potentially rich historical analogy to some of today's critical pedagogies. Using archival evidence from the Clariosophic Society of South Carolina College, the author points out the limitations of using certain kinds of agonism, specifically pro-con debate, to achieve the goals of critical pedagogies.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the study of English was accelerating rapidly. At this time linguistic theories identified which members of society warranted inclusion in the political process. Conservative men of letters, like Samuel Johnson, claimed the lower and middle classes lacked cultural capital. To counter this linguistic class-ification, William Cobbett published A Grammar of the English Language, an enormously popular text meant to teach laborers how to write. Mostly neglected as a "grammarian" or rhetorician today, Cobbett was in fact a forerunner to current linguistic trends that stress literacy's social and political formulations.

In calling for more attention to the theorizing and historicizing of rhetorical praxis, this essay breaks new ground by tracing the history of needlework sampler-making: first, to bring into relief the rhetorical force of diverse material practices that create text and, second, to push at the boundaries of what counts as rhetorical practice and who counts in its production. This history demonstrates how discursive practices can be displaced, transformed, and then erased as they emerge in new rhetorical constellations. It ends with a consideration of two levels of questions: those concerning the theorizing and historicizing of rhetorical practices and those concerning the methodological limits and possibilities of this kind of scholarship.

Bill Clinton can be seen as a perfect embodiment of the contradictory tensions in capitalist ideology between production and consumption that were described by the sociologist Daniel Bell in 1976. Kenneth Burke's scapegoat paradigm explains why Clinton, as representative of this central flaw in capitalism, was marked for vehement attack and ultimate casting out. Examining the House Managers' choice of Clinton as scapegoat illuminates the danger inherent in any attempt to construct an ideologically consistent Order such as "the rule of law" and thereby seize the high moral ground.

"An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States" represents a largely overlooked but significant rhetorical effort by one of the earliest and most uncompromising (white) abolitionists in antebellum America, Sarah Moore Grimke. I argue in this essay that Grimke's missive deserves the kind of scholarly attention that her more-recognized Letters on the Equality of the Sexes has been given and in particular that we pay close attention to her ability to rhetorically reframe her opponents' arguments in the service of her own.

This essay suggests that readers of Aristotle's Rhetoric should take a broader view than is usually applied to understanding the book. Specifically, the reader is asked to explore Aristotle's other works to identify his metarhetoric-that is, Aristotle's notion of the prior knowledges a rhetor needs to have in order to be rhetorical. The essay employs four examples from Aristotle's On Memory and Recollection to demonstrate how ideas from even one of his other books can enhance our comprehension of the Rhetoric. It concludes with a suggested plan for studying Aristotle's metarhetoric.

This essay argues that modernist British writers revived the ideologies of the Victorian New Women in their fiction and essays in order to influence the reception of radical feminism. The New Women novelists, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, developed a rhetoric of domestic feminism, a method of protofeminist subversion usually confined to the domestic space. Modernists outwardly disdained Victorian women's writing; yet they revived "the woman of the past" in their art. This seeming inconsistency within modernist sentiment actually signifies a coherent rhetorical movement that directed twentieth-century reactions to feminism and women's participation in British literary history.

In the second edition of Writing Without Teachers (1998), Peter Elbow issues an explicit "challenge. . . for people to engage me in a theoretical context" (xxv, xxvii). When Elbow is read "carefully" as he requests, much more is at stake than the reputation of one "expressivist" (xxvii). For John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy provides a theoretical framework that not only highlights the strengths of Elbow's theory but also exposes some flaws of social theory and practices so that they can be revised.

In the spring of 1995, I inherited a diary that very few would care to read.1 It is boring, repetitious, and very, very bare. Annie Ray, my great great great-aunt and a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century, was clearly not invested in creating a out of her days. While the diary scholar Elizabeth Hampsten warns that often nothing happens in the diaries kept by nineteenth-century women, I was convinced that Annie's was a story that had to be heard. Following the lead of other diary scholars, I edited Annie's diary into a narrative of loss, crafting scant entries into dramas of infidelity and barrenness. While I think I moved my readers with the tale, I have only recently come to understand what remains in the wake of such a recovery. By turning what was ordinary into what was not, I lost sight of the fact that the inscription of nothing is as complicated a rhetorical act as the fabrication of something. We do not know how to read what I call ordinary writing: writing like Annie's that is not literary, writing that seems boring, barren, and plain. My initial reading was heavily influenced by the study of nineteenth-century diaries, a tradition that regards diaries as literary texts. More pointedly, my reading participated in a scholarly tradition that prefers reading only those diaries that exhibit literary features. I have outlined this tradition elsewhere and have argued that reading diaries through a literary lens privileges diaries that are coherent, crafted, and whole, excluding ordinary diaries like Annie's that define the diurnal form in their dailiness. Here my goal is to demonstrate what is gained by reading an ordinary diary through a lens that is shaped by the daily rather than the literary. Dailiness, the act of writing in the days rather than of the days, is the single quality that marks the diary as a distinct form of writing. It is what prevents the diary from being reflective and forces both writer and reader into the immediate present, a place from which the critical distance a reader/writer is typically taught to obtain and value is impossible. Dailiness means that the diary does not cohere around an organizing event or principle, but by documenting the everyday, makes these measured (and typically unmarked) moments available for the diarist's use. Dailiness also prevents the privileging of some events over othersinstead always resting in the middle. Schooled to appreciate occasioned texts

Heedless, irreverent, unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots-the last refinement of the farmer's cowhides-wearing linen dickeys over hickory shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice ... the decade of the [eighteen] seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good sense.

(2002). Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 170-187.

This early letter plainly embodies Burke's conflicting views about the constituents of the aesthetic experience. Is the delight of literature a hysteric result of the work's overlap with an audience's ideology-the nodus of beliefs and judgments in a work? Or is the pleasure the result of a technical response to the formal qualities of art? The answer in the letter to Cowley suggests that the enjoyment is an unproblematic result of both the ideological and the technical, the rhetorical and the formal. But the incipient contradiction contained even in this early and tentative resolution seems to haunt Burke throughout his career, most clearly ghosted in his first book of criticism, Counter-Statement.1 To announce that this wrinkle can be found in many of the pages of Counter-Statement probably trespasses on the platitudinous. From the earliest reviews of the book, such as that of Granville Hicks in the 2 December 1931 issue of The New Republic, to its most contemporary explication, such as Jack Selzer's article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the unsettling tension . . . between the aesthetic and the social is given place and sometimes even described as the animating principle of the book (Selzer 37). As Selzer notes, most of the major critics of Granville Hicks, Isidor Schneider, Robert Penn Warren, Armin Paul Frank, Paul Jay, Grieg E. Henderson, William H. Rueckert, and Frank Lentricchia, and even Burke himself note the internally-contradictory character of Counter-Statement, each with his own manner of reconciling, laying bare, or judging the discordant timber (45-46). What is absent in the criti-

(2001). Guardian Angel: Lessons of Writing Poetry. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 3-4, pp. 359-367.

(2001). The Persuasive Work of Organizational Names: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the Struggle for Collective Identification. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 3-4, pp. 234-250.

One thread in the American nineteenth-centuryi f discourse of sentiment wraps itself around women's bodies.1 This essay is about those bodies, women's writing, and sentimental rhetoric. The three intersect in corsets-and not just in those torso-squeezing contraptions that assured a woman's hourglass figure in Western bourgeois Figure I Coat advertisement, culture from at least the 1750s to the early twentiMcLure's Magazine (1896). eth century. In this article I address a number of cultural constructions, formal matters that perform a kind of poesis shaping a woman writer's heart, spirit, and body back in the nineteenth century, and now, too. The Canadian National Film Board ad quoted above views the corset and its culture only as restraint. But sentimental rhetoric puts those corsets and cultural bodies in a different light. Rhetorical codes map a particular significance of

Having come of age before poststructuralism got its toehold on the university, I had the pleasure of discovering uncertainty at my own pace. Even as late as 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania, the war in Vietnam and the one on Philadelphia's streets had done little to disturb the work going on inside our classrooms where eminent literary historians were still trying to hold their own against the new critics. Yet even then, something else was in the offing. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism-required reading in our proseminar for new graduate students-provided a strange counterpoint to the close readings we were struggling with in other classes under the influence of faculty subversives. Abandoning the particularity of a given poem to meet the anagogic Frye on loftier heights left us breathless, but we were certain, despite our exhaustion and exhilaration, that Frye's more theoretical speculations were not our main business. Neither were historical schemes that omitted the reading of literature. Our main business was the poem itself. Despite what people say now, it never occurred to us back then that we could get our reading of a given poem exactly right, or that there was only one reading, or that everything we needed to know was there in the poem. We did know, however, that some readings were better than others because they accounted for more of what was there. Our readings had an inherent obligation in them to account for a poem's beauty and to consider that beauty as a way of speculating about the poem's meaning. We acknowledged a hierarchy of value and had a yen for aesthetic pleasures. We were not troubled that we knew too

(2001). Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 1-2, pp. 94-112.

(2001). When Ideology Motivates Theory: The Case of the Man from Weaverville. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 1-2, pp. 66-93.