(1997). Composing a discipline: The role of scholarly journals in the disciplinary emergence of rhetoric and composition since 1950. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 322-348.

John C. Brereton. The Origin of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. xvii + 584 pages. $24.95 paper. Krista Ratcliffe. Anglo‐American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. 227 pages. Ulla Connor. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross Cultural Aspects of Second‐Language Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 201 pages. $44.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown, eds. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Madision: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. xii + 315 pages. $21.95 paper.

(1997). Rhetorical situations and their constituents. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 264-279.

There has been little room for the British Romantics in the study of rhetoric because it is generally agreed that they did not concern themselves with it, but their influence upon academic culture and upon the relationship between literature and rhetoric is a central concern for contemporary studies of rhetoric, composition, and literature.2 Rhetoricians and critics divide Romantic British discourse into the rhetoricians and the poets. Rhetoricians study Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately while theorists study philosophers, critics, and poets such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Some substantial efforts have been made to include the literary Romantics in our discussion of rhetoric. Don Bialostosky's recent work, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism, for example, gives us a reading of Wordsworth from a dialogical perspective, and in the past rhetoricians of such stature as Kenneth Burke (see Blankenship), I. A. Richards, and Ann E. Berthoff have included Coleridge and Wordsworth in their theories of rhetoric and composition. Still, in the main, rhetoricians regard the British Romantics with distrust.3 the surface the distrust is well earned. The term rhetoric had pejorative associations for the Romantics. Although their philosophical views about rhetoric may be traced to Plato, their belief that rhetoric was a secondary and fraudulent art was the product of a longstanding academic and ecclesiastical debate over the virtues of Ramist rhetoric, where logic afforded the composer the means of thinking and rhetoric afforded the composer a way of presenting those thoughts.4 In this view rhetoric was mechanical, and once the organic experience of creation was over, what was left to the rhetorician was merely gesture or mere rhetoric. The British Romantics' distrust for mere rhetoric led them to write about discourse rather than rhetoric. Coleridge, for example, uses the term method, a term usually associated with Descartes in philosophy and with Ramus in rhetoric, when he writes about rhetorical acts. However, throughout his works, he not only demonstrates a substantial understanding of the history of rhetoric but also includes well-known principles of rhetoric in his method. In his Essays on the Principles of Method, he argues that method is a habit of considering the relationships among things, specifically either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state of apprehension of the hearers (451). Thus, although Coleridge argues against the sophists in On the

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer Subjects according modernist identity/difference binary oppositions that are politically problematic.1 The modernist Subject is defined in terms of its objective relationship reality and its opposition Other subjects, and the construction of the modernist Subject (autonomous and sovereign) is an effect of ethno-centric formulations (frames, constructions) of identity/difference oppositions.2 In Orientalism, for example, Edward Said describes how modernist European societies construct cultural differences not only as but also as opposite (the of the West is constructed in opposition the of the East). According Said, When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, . . . the result is usually polarize the distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. The tendency, then, is to channel thought into a West or an East compartment (46), eliminating the possibility for common ground, agreement, understanding, or in more extreme cases, destroying the human capacity for tolerance of We cannot maintain oppositional notions of identity/difference without inevitably falling into a situation in which gains (or attempts gain) hegemonic control over difference. A few recent cultural theorists, on the other hand, do not view and as oppositional terms; instead, they construct identity and difference as a complementary pair, as an alliance rather than an opposition. And the subjectivities that result from this alliance refuse the structural closure of the modernist Subject and articulate themselves (engage in cultural and rhetorical practices) in the aporia between and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular deconstruct the unified structure of the sovereign and autonomous modernist Subject, positing in its place a space in the aporia between and where subjectivities construct themselves and each other. Throughout much of his work, Foucault is concerned with issues of and in the textual construction of subjectivities. Discursive

Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

In past fifteen years, scholars in both composition and literature have called for a more integrated approach to reading and writing.1 essays in collection Composition and Literature: Bridging Gap edited by Winifred Horner, for example, stressed common interests of scholarship in these two domains. Similarly, Modern Language Association recommended in a 1982 report that MLA publications make deliberate efforts to stimulate thought and research about interrelations of literature, composition, and rhetorical theory (952). More recently, Peter Elbow has called for end of the war between reading and arguing that the primacy of reading in reading/writing dichotomy is an act of locating authority away from student and keeping it entirely in teacher or institution or great figure (17). Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea Lunsford have also emphasized importance of an integrated approach to reading and writing in curriculum, one that allows teachers to foster student learning in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening (316). Like Elbow, Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford insist that integration of reading and writing not only enables students to become more active learners but also is critical for educating students for participation in democracy (85). But while an integrated approach to reading and writing is certainly a worthy goal, scholars in literary and composition studies differ on fundamental issues that may preclude (or at least complicate) our attempts to develop pedagogies that allow students to connect their own texts with other texts they encounter both inside and outside classroom. One such issue involves very nature of texts themselves-what texts are, how they are produced, and how we should read them. assumptions, for example, about what it means to interpret a text diverge radically depending on whether text is a student text or a literary text. As David Bartholomae observes: The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of 'meaning' of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings (255). Instructors who interpret elements such as narrative leaps, obscure references, and twisted syntax as errors in student texts read same elements in a literary work as

American intellectuals and educators are dismayed by crisis in public discourse. With Jurgen Habermas and others, they worry over of public sphere and a degeneration in rational-critical debate. Cultural critics often contrast contemporary public discourse with what seems to be America's golden age of public discussion: nineteenth-century America, before culture industry or late capitalism, before professionalism, before TV, before mass media or multimedia.1 The usual suspect is modern communications technologies, specifically TV. According to Neil Postman, we should deeply lament the decline of Age of Typography and ascendancy of Age of Television (8). Televisual media, he argues, has eroded public's span and shriveled its capacity for rational thought. Looking to Lincoln-Douglas debates, he maintains that Americans' verbal facility and attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards (45). The citizenry has declined, he argues, because citizens watch TV and no longer read: almost every scholar . . . has concluded that process [of reading] encourages rationality, while televisual logic short-circuits rational thought in favor of slogans, images, mere stories-in short, entertainment.2 The late Christopher Lasch, in The Revolt of Elites, blames not only television for making argument a lost art but also undemocratic leanings of intellectuals and academics. How far we have fallen, he argues, from Golden Years of nineteenth century, when serious public argument was practiced by both citizenry and media. In those days newspapers (Lasch singles out Horace Greeley's New York Tribune) were journals of opinion in which reader expected to find a definite point of view, together with unrelenting criticism of opposing points of view (163). The beginning of decline (the nadir of which he hopes we are presently experiencing) began in progressive era, when intellectual leaders preached 'scientific management' of public affairs.... They forged links between government and university so as to assure a steady supply of experts and expert knowledge. But they had little use for public debate (167). Academics and

Traditional notions of the rhetorical community as the locus of shared beliefs and values have been challenged increasingly and from several directions-from radical and postliberal democratic political theory (Miller; Mouffe), from cultural studies and cultural criticism (Brantlinger 1-3, 54-59; Harris), and, most recently, from the perspective of the ill-defined and elusive place called cyberspace (Selfe and Selfe, Politics; Selfe and Selfe, Writing; Stone 110-11).1 At the heart of these challenges is the problem of the relationship of the community to those outside it or on its margins, an uneasy relationship that is variously characterized as a tension between communitarianism and liberalism (Mouffe 71-73), between ourselves and Others (Brantlinger 2-3), between a culture and its marginalized individuals (Selfe and Selfe, Politics 482-84), and as a complex relationship between the One and the Many (Miller 79-80). Contemporary notions of the rhetorical

In Challenge of Diversity, H. Roy Kaplan, executive director of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, writes, Our obsession with or fear of differences has become a morbid fetish that threatens to tear our moral fabric apart (8). The article appeared in a weekly newspaper that covers arts, entertainment, and public issues in and around Tampa Bay area. The newspaper is also read-with varying degrees of attention-I discovered, by about two-thirds of my first-year composition students at University of South Florida. Although well intentioned, piece answers the of with a kind of laissez-faire pluralism: We must create an environment where people, all people, feel needed and wanted-part of a of caring and sharing human beings; where diversity, pluralism and differences are valued for richness and value they bring to human experiences (8). My students' offerings on cultural diversity and race relations bear striking resemblances to Kaplan's sentiment. At institutions with culturally diverse populations like South Florida, students often find it convenient and reassuring to believe in promise of a harmonious pluralism. Like Kaplan, many students believe that it is focus on and preoccupation with gender, racial, and class differences that is actually problem and not social and political dimensions of these differences. Certainly, in order to work for livable futures and in order to interrogate asymmetrical power formations in multicultural societies, we should envision difference as an asset and not a liability. However, we cannot create livable futures by simply ignoring real frictions and tensions created by unequal access to power and benefits of dominant culture. The answer to challenge of is not to imagine a community of caring and sharing human beings but to recognize our multicultural society as a tense plurality, as Joseph Harris says, and learn how to generate productive dialogue from tensions of difference. As evidenced above, students do not come to class ignorant of tensions

Kevin Robb. Literacy & Paideia in Ancient Greece. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. x + 310 pages. Joseph Petraglia, editor. Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 272 pages. Ira Shor. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 242 pages. Mark Lawrence McPhail. Zen in the Art of Rhetoric: An Inquiry into Coherence. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. 220 pages.

H. I. Marrou. A History of Education in Antiquity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Pp. xviii + 466. Paper, $16.95.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus's attention to harmonious composition from the small part of the clause to the whole of a work is at the heart of what Eduard Norden has called Kuntsprosa, the ancient theory of formal prose composition that came to fruition during the Augustan age of the early Empire. The effort of fifth- and fourth-century BC Greek writers to provide prose the dignity and affective power of oral poetry through literate embellishment and studied arrangement was fundamental to the transformation of literate consciousness and therefore cultural consciousness in which the power of the modern state was birthed. As the eye continued to supplant the ear as a means of using words effectively to move audiences and as literacy brought about an interiorized way of thinking and manner of expression, ancient Greek and Roman historians, orators, and philosophers learned to play with language. They found in this new consciousness exciting ways in which elegantly conceived discourse could formalize the affective power of poetry and the spellbinding magic of persuasive words (Romilly). And it is this compositional tension between words heard and words seen that came to fruition in the first century Critical Essays

Person 1-I'm trying something new in my intro to literature course this year. I decided not to lecture any more. So I've been trying to have more discussion, more group work, give the students more responsibility for the course. And you know what's happened? In their journals, they say they want me to lecture; they've actually asked me to lecture. Person 2-When you get right down to it, all the theory about collaboration and shared responsibility is great if you've got students who want that sort of thing. But my students say they've paid their fees to find out what I have to say. Frankly, when I've got group work scheduled for a period, a lot of them just don't come.

Most interpretations of rhetoric use a version of what is called This standard interpretation, also called Platonic Idealism, imposes a systematic order upon philosophy out of a distinctly unsystematic group of texts. Platonism has become an interpretative construct, or a terministic screen that dominates our understanding of thinking on rhetoric. In order to get a more accurate understanding of the two dialogues that are canonical in rhetorical studies, I will reread rhetoric by exploring the ways in which presents a disclosive view of truth. The disclosive view of exists in a creative tension with the correspondence of that is articulated in Socrates' hypothesis of Ideas. I will argue that rhetoric is an inquiry into the disclosive nature of discourse. Many scholars have argued for the necessary distinction between and Platonism. Platonism is a systematic philosophy that has been constructed by others, out of texts but by himself. In the words of Jirgen Mittelstrass: Plato is no 'Platonist' (134). Emerson also argues that thinking is not a system. [And his] dearest defenders and disciples are at fault for creating the system of Platonism (491). Eric A. Havelock argues that the phrase Plato's Theory of Forms is a scholarly construct that suggests a doctrinal position in which wished to vest his philosophical prestige. But the actual tone of his writing does support (254).2 The correspondence of truth, as the discussion of Heidegger will indicate, is derived from Platonism and relies upon what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the two-world theory. For Gadamer, the two-world theory does accurately describe thought: Plato was a Platonist who taught two worlds (1988, 260). Platonism teaches that reality is bifurcated: There is one world of phenomena, while separate and apart from this there is another more real world of forms or ideas, a world of absolute and static being. Along with Gadamer, I will argue we must reject this argument.3 Martin Heidegger's Plato's Doctrine of Truth argues that the correspondence of originates in Platonism. Although Heidegger's thesis is that the correspondence of presupposes the disclosive nature of truth, he does develop the ways in which notion of is disclosive. His critique of doctrine of truth is based upon a critique of the correspondence theory, which the character Socrates proposes as a

If writers had at their fingertips a mechanism that would produce insight, that would contribute to their self-realization, and that would enable both them and their readers to step toward understanding, would they choose to use it?1 A strategy that discovers presence and penetrates the unknown is available to us as thinkers, as writers . . . ingenium, something old is new again. This essay deliberately refuses to give a simple definition of ingenium, for it cannot be defined in a few neat sentences. Instead, ingenium unfolds with recursive definitions. The first-ingenium, an innovative cognitive power, is a human way of knowing that includes the actual in a particular context and the extraordinary with the concrete. It combines sense perceptions with the imagination to open up and reveal the world. The second definition is from Grassi-the human capacity that enables words or senses or ideas to have adaptability, acumen, and 'instantaneousness' (Heidegger 20). The third layer is a cognitive activity that links a person perceptually with others and with the natural world. A person who uncovers a space for ingenium may generate new ways of inventing or interpreting discourse, problems, or ideas. This essay briefly traces aspects of ingenium as practiced by early Greek sophists and later by humanists. Next, ingenium is conceptualized as an inventional process that has four attributes: generating multiple ideas that may situate themselves in one's hand or ear or eye, opening the senses to the phenomenal world, finding the similar, and transferring meaning through fantasy. Through ingenium we may participate in a process that mirrors our complex world. Sophist and humanist practices touch and complement each other through ingenium. Ingenium as a discovery process subverts and surprises; it actively enriches the usual either-or model perpetuated by the Western objectivist tradition. Although sophists did not call the process ingenium, it was practiced in many ways as Gorgias's Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE) illustrates. Years later, humanist thinkers such as Vico, Gracian, and Vives promoted ingenium's philosophic importance as a means of enlarging the possibilities for communication. From the first sophists to contemporary thinkers, philosophers recognize the power of openness in language that breaks down boundaries of binary

No one in the history of philosophy and the history of rhetoric, not even the sophists, has been more abused than Socrates.1 The sophists were merely scorned and maligned.2 was quite eliminated, his voice appropriated by another.3 As consequence, has traditionally been read as mere point of origination of Platonic/Aristotelian philosophy and rhetoric, and both he and the so-called method have been sharply dismissed from contemporary and composition studies. Vitanza, for example, characterizes Socratic dialogue as search for generic concepts-concepts that can be transferred to and acquired by another human being-and describes Socratic pedagogy as a series of questions [from teacher] that force an interlocutor [a student] to always give the desired answers, thereby leading the interlocutor to arrive at the predetermined conclusion to the inquiry (162, 166). Sosnoski, deploring the teacher/student relationship implied by such pedagogy, says simply Socrates Begone! from the and composition classroom (198). Nonetheless, has enjoyed revival in contemporary scholarship, most strikingly in the works of Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin but also in the works of numerous contemporary historians and philosophers.4 This revival has potential interest for and composition studies, for it reveals different from the one handed down through the Western tradition: who speaks and listens to many voices, not just one; who is more concerned with living than he is with knowing; whose rhetoric is means of testing people and ideas rather than means of imposing his ideas upon others.5 Derrida's dramatic portrait of writing is at once characterization of the traditional way of reading and an invitation to imagine different Socrates. Bakhtin's is more detailed sketch of what such different might be. This different is figure with many voices, central figure in Bakhtin's dialogism, which has brought these many voices to contemporary and composition studies.6 This is also the less familiar figure who lives in Bakhtin's carnivalesque world of everyday experience. Finally, he is figure with links to the rhetorical tradition, the figure who appears in the early Platonic dialogues, whose is means of testing people and ideas, not means of persuading others to accept his ideas, thus imposing his ideas upon them. This has potential interest as an

In her examination of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, Patricia Bizzell announces her wish to find a solution to the problem of finding a compelling version of from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the climate of post-modern skepticism which attempts to render all value assertions nugatory (7-8).1 Bizzell understands the ultimate result of deconstruction-the tool that she and others in favor of a left-oriented political agenda have long used for the purpose of criticizing received wisdom and destabilizing traditional foundations of belief, teaching us to regard all foundationalist assumptions with suspicion (14)-to be Pyrrhonian skepticism, a nihilistic abyss of skepticism that refuses to regard even temporary truths. Pyrrhonian skepticism has forced Deconstruction to turn on the very scholars who have employed it to undermine foundationalist beliefs by always already undermining the left-oriented actions those scholars now wish to take. In the past, Bizzell has effectively critiqued foundationalist assumptions (e.g., Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies), but now she says she is ready even to play the fool if she must to pursue ways to engage in processes whereby we use our common capacities to make reasonable judgments about experience in light of egalitarian values so that we may move more decisively toward democratic political (16). Since Bizzell is willing to play the fool for her pursuit, she might make an appeal to an older group of thinkers who have been misrepresented as fools more than once: the early Greek sophists, whom I believe offer a theoretical base to Bizzell and all of us who are interested in professing left-oriented values in our writing classrooms. To explicate that sophistic theoretical base, I will briefly review recent work on the sophists in composition and rhetoric, illustrate how a sophistic understanding of the progress of knowledge can enable us to avoid the trap of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and examine three neosophistic essays that organize the principles of neosophism. In the final section, I will use sample assignments I've designed for my own composition course to demonstrate how a neosophistic pedagogy authorizes sociopolitical action in the composition classroom. Bizzell, to her credit, connects her search for rhetorical authority to the work of the sophists. Playing the fool, she says, allows one to innocently transgress social boundaries, an action that in turn, she hopes, allows teachers

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Kathleen Welch and Richard Leo Enos, RR peer revieweis for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

It has become a commonplace in scholarship on teacher response: viewing comments as a between teacher and student, an ongoing discussion between the teacher reader and the student writer, a conversation. Erika Lindemann advises teachers to make comments that create a kind of dialogue between teacher and student and keep the lines of communication open (216). Chris Anson encourages teachers to write comments that are more casual than formal, as if rhetorically sitting next to the writer, collaborating, suggesting,

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes We thank our RR revieweis Edward P. J. Corbett and John Schilb for their dose reading of our work and our colleague Brian Conniff for his helpful advice about the final draft.

Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney.... I couldn't begin to survive without my personal [computer] base: I wouldn't know who I was.... We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward. -Marge Piercy, He, She and It (150)

New research into the pre-Socratic arts of discourse (technai log6n) has not only enriched our understanding but also increased our respect for the work that the great pre-Socratic thinkers did.1 In this paper I want to encourage a rereading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle with the results of this research in mind. If scholars would accept that Plato and Aristotle, at least some of the time, reflected an understanding and respect for the work of the sophists and rhetors similar to the one now emerging, the result might well be a new, fruitful, and richer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle. I believe that as a result, both Plato and Aristotle would emerge as more rhetorical and nuanced than they have been previously thought to be. This seems a strange expectation. First, it is well known that Aristotle, for example, seldom seems to allude to particular individuals who were sophists with anything but scorn. Certainly, when he uses the word sophist as a general term, it is used in a pejorative sense for the besetting vices of philosophy and philosophers: self-promotion through speech and victory at any cost in speech. Such usage is itself a reflection on those who claim the name as a serious description of their work.

Alan W. France. Composition As a Cultural Practice. Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. 171 pages. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps, editors. Composition in Four Keys: An Inquiry into the Field. Mountain Valley, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 608 pages. A. L. Becker. Beyond Translation: Essays in Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, 1995. 431 + ix pages. Sherrie L. Grandin. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 166 pages. Mike Rose. Possible Lives. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 454 pages. $24.95. Richard McKeon. On Knowing—The Natural Sciences. Compiled by David B. Owen. Edited by David B. Owen and Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 405 pages. $65.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Jasper Neel. Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 259 pages. $24.95.

(1996). To capture the essence of Chinese rhetoric: An anatomy of a paradigm in comparative rhetoric. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 318-335.

Eugene Garver. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. xii + 325 pages. Helen Fox. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. xxi +161 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 130 pages. Marcello Pera. Discourses of Science. Translated by Clarissa Botsford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 250 pages. Pera, Marcello, and William R. Shea, eds. Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric. Canton, MA: Science History, 1991. Perelman, Chaïm, and L. Olbrechts‐Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1969. Planck, Max. Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Trans. F. Gaynor. London: Williams and Norgate, 1950. Simons, Herbert, ed. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. Fredric G. Gale, Political Literacy: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Possibility of Justice. Interruptions: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discoursed). Albany: State U of New York P, 1994. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds. The Rhetoric of Law. Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought 4. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

In the final chapter of Patterns of American Culture, anthropologist Dan Rose creates what he terms piece of fictional which he attempts to describe life America as total stranger to might find it (78). Generally speaking, his fictional poetics describes a young ethnographer's exploration of a strange people, all of whom are apparently masked. He, the ethnographer, believes the masks to be in some way central to the cultural values of the people who wear them (81). At one point, he decides to try on one of these masks. Once the mask is on, he comments that

In August of 1810, the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh met William Henry Harrison, then governor of the territory of Indiana, at the governor's mansion in Vincennes, Indiana.1 The two leaders came together to discuss a disagreement about a recently signed treaty that would give to the United States a large tract of Native American land in central Indiana. Accounts of this first face-to-face meeting between these two important men abound, and several versions of a text of the speech delivered by Tecumseh have come down to us. These accounts and texts contain many inconsistencies, but they all agree that Tecumseh steadfastly refused to accept the new treaty. Claiming that he was speaking for all the tribes, Tecumseh is reported to have said, This land that was sold and the goods that were given for it were only done by a few (Klinck 71). He went on to predict dire consequences should the whites occupy the land that he claimed was improperly sold to them. It was an important moment in Tecumseh's efforts to unite Native Americans in opposition to white expansionism. The meeting is perhaps most famous for the dramatic way in which it ended. At one point after having finished a two-hour speech against the treaty, Tecumseh apparently became furious with Winnemac, a Potawatomie leader who had signed the treaty. As Tecumseh assailed Winnemac in the Potawatomie tongue, Winnemac became alarmed and began to prepare his flintlock pistol, whereupon many of the white spectators reached for their weapons. Harrison rose from his seat and, facing Tecumseh, drew his sword, and at the same moment Tecumseh's warriors drew their weapons as they advanced to Tecumseh's side. Accounts of the incident often highlight this image of these two leaders, one white, one Native American, facing each other with weapons at the ready, and undoubtedly the embellishments of the scene have spawned much of the folklore surrounding the great conflict between Harrison and Tecumseh that would continue over the next two years.2 But this meeting was important for other, less obvious reasons. The meeting underscores the vital role that public discourse played in the conflicts between Native Americans and white Americans as the latter pushed westward into traditional Native American lands. More important, the extant texts from this meeting and other key meetings in Tecumseh's efforts to establish a pan

(1995). Rhetoric and reality in the process of scientific inquiry. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 106-125.