The #MeToo movement unveiled a shifting testimonial landscape available to victims of sexual assault, one that was able to apprehend the attention of vast public audiences unlike other protests before it. Through an analysis of published #MeToo tweets and public discussion of them, this essay argues that what happened during #MeToo reveals a feminist deployment of megethos. Theorizing what I term feminist megethos through the lens of listing extends theories of magnitude beyond the idea of cultivating coherence or amounting excessive detail, toward a theory that captures how megethos can puncture pervasive yet normalized attitudes that constrain efforts for justice.

This essay discusses the racialized politics, histories, and ideologies that inform the crafting and instituting of core curricula in rhetorical studies. As is the case in many rhetoric and writing studies undergraduate majors and graduate programs, core curricula can be counted on to contain survey courses that review the histories and theories of rhetoric and composition—sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping, and always subject to the ideological orientation of the program/department and the scholarly training of its professors. Through critical race counterstory, this essay explores what core curricula are intended to do within rhetoric and writing studies programs/departments.

This essay analyzes the grammar of military graffiti in Nigeria to uncover the mindless posture with which the military deploys it to assert their power, identity, and temporal orientations in ways that not only subvert and shame a minority group and its belief systems, but also expose the brutal and liminal conditions of the state agents. This analysis extends studies of state graffiti by framing the multifold grammatical components as rhetorical acts of domination.

Analyzing the function of quasi-public intellectuals in debates over the Common Core State Standards helps us to understand why some publics in a networked public sphere have greater influence in policy-making than other publics. Granted authority because of privileged access to the state, quasi-public intellectuals introduced discourse into education publics that influenced reception of the Common Core, divided potential (counter)publics, and created an exigency that foreclosed possibilities for debating policy alternatives. Theorizing how these intellectuals manipulate debate allows us to recognize other arenas in which they operate and to develop strategies for inviting stakeholders to meaningfully participate in public deliberation.

Hugh Blair’s rhetorical theory reflects the tenets of New Science, answering the call for communication as the transfer of knowledge from the composer to the audience. Reading Blair on style through the Enlightenment cognitive model of physiological psychology suggests a mutual cognitive associative model. In this model, style is essential, not ornamental, as it limits dissonance in the audience’s cognitive process through perspicuity.

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor united most workers regardless of craft or trade. They also organized African American workers and women. This essay uncovers how the Knights maintained unity by analyzing speeches given at their annual conventions from 1885-1890. Leaders defined male Knights as chivalric, self-sacrificing, and battle-tested. After identifying the elements of the rhetoric of knighthood, I then explain how the rhetoric offered only ironic inclusion to white women and excluded Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. This argument builds rhetorical scholarship on inclusion and exclusion in social movements by theorizing its partial and ironic modes.

Rhetorical scholars have long regarded identification as a concept central to Kenneth Burke’s work. However, a close reading of Burke’s work of the 1930s locates the early incarnations of identification in the dialectical relationship between human embodiment and symbolicity. By restoring the complications neglected by a largely symbolic approach to identification through increased attention to the body and the material consequences of symbolicity, a revised understanding of Burkean identification captures more effectively the complex material and symbolic divisions that characterize human social life and prescribes means of negotiating these divisions.

This article explores the rhetorical nature of “tangled” memories, what Marita Sturken describes as an intermeshing of sanctioned histories with personal and/or public narratives. To exemplify this phenomenon, the author examines the public memories of Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Greenhow and Boyd actively promoted slavery in their published accounts yet common “retellings” of their lives often elide these positions, and instead focus on their sensational work as Confederate spies. Such a reframing depicts them as progressive women, creating a tangled memory that uncritically lionizes them. Ultimately, the author argues, more complex “retellings” of historical figures are needed.

This paper provides insight into how place can be important to the goals of a social movement. Through analysis of a series of historical events, I explore how a place can be constructed by a social movement to act rhetorically and then can be reconstructed through repeated usage to signify a larger meaning. To illustrate these concepts, I examine the creation, evolution, and transformation of Pittsburgh’s “Freedom Corner” as a site of resistance.

“We wonder where the rhetorical theory is for unsettling this resting place when it turns out to be a place of oppression for others?” —Sutton and Mifsud, A Revolution in Tropes, p. xiii.In a time ...

Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insider-outsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.

Throughout The Mark of Criminality, Bryan McCann thoughtfully challenges dominant narratives about gangsta rap by shedding light on its kairotic relationship with the beginning of the U. S. governm...

When students write incoherent sentences, it is common—instinctive, even—for a teacher to translate those sentences, to make them conform to the expectations of readers wanting clarity, or to banish them altogether. In this article, we consider how incoherence might instead be a site of possibility, of invention, of nuance.

There is little to nothing rhetoric can teach us about Donald J. Trump. That’s fake news. Don’t get me wrong. Rhetoric has a lot to teach us about many things. Indeed, I am a teacher of rhetoric my...

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.

Nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt’s attention to the complex interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism deepens our understanding of “romantic” rhetoric as reflexive and politically engaged. In sketches of orators and authors, Hazlitt criticizes their moribund deployments of classical rhetoric and its damaging consequences on British parliamentary politics, literature, and society. However, he also reworks classical rhetorical exercises and revives their civic potential in his dynamic prose.

Recently, I heard a radio ad for The New York Times that shook me. The ad sold the paper via Truth: buy the paper, get the Truth. Facts as raw goods. Sandwiched between ads for Chevrolet trucks and...

This article positions the progymnasmata, an ancient sequence of rhetorical exercises, as a rich resource for contemporary scholarship on rhetoric and sound. Drawing on work at the intersection of rhetoric and sound studies as well as scholarship that repurposes ancient rhetorical concepts to study digital media, I argue that refiguring the progymnasmata can significantly expand rhetorical studies of digital sound. I ground my argument in podcasts, a popular sonic medium that has garnered attention in rhetoric and writing scholarship, ending with a series of six exercises designed to help students learn to make podcasts.

Ada Metcalf’s 1876 memoir, Lunatic Asylums and How I Became an Inmate of One, is an early feminist articulation of embodied experience and agency. In this article, I develop a socially situated understanding of this memoir’s historical significance through the layering of four types of data onto the archival material: bureaucratic records, genealogical tracing, intertextual tracing, and field observations. I describe each of these forms of data and their contributions to understanding the significance of Ada’s taking back agency over her body through her public argument for women’s control over their own bodies.

This article proposes keeping with as a rhetorical practice used by communities to maintain cultural heritages in unfamiliar or unwelcoming settings. Grounded in interviews from participatory research with urban Appalachian advocates in Cincinnati, Ohio, the article provides a view of cultural rhetorics in action at points of community crisis. The article argues that keeping with is a rhetorical migration practice that helps account for a range of rhetorical practices rhetors use to maintain cultural connections to homes and heritages.

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.

Ellen CushmanNortheastern UniversityThose of us gathered in these pages met at a Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute with the goal of creating knowledge that would help to re-place the mat...

In the past decade, industrial wind installations, or what we commonly call wind farms, have proliferated across the U.S. along with talk of a constellation of illness symptoms known as Wind Turbine Syndrome. Despite widespread efforts to debunk claims that wind turbines make people sick, the syndrome has achieved a rhetorical virulence in the deliberative sphere, where it “catches” among residents who live hundreds of miles away from wind turbines. Here, where wind installations exist only in the deliberative imagination, Wind Turbine Syndrome presents as a civic affliction with serious consequences for the trajectory of municipal debate.

“Autism is typically characterized as that which contrasts—as that which contrasts with language, humanness, empathy, self-knowledge, understanding, and rhetoricity,” Melanie Yergeau writes in Auth...

This essay examines the work of Genevieve Stebbins (1857-1934), an author, teacher, and proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. Specifically, I examine Stebbins’s concept of “artistic” statue posing, a practice fraught with contradictory arguments and tensions among late nineteenth-century commentators and other elocutionists who discussed appropriate forms of female embodied display. This study asserts that Stebbins drew on the rhetorical strategy of contradiction to perform an ethos of complexity and boundary innovation in advocating for female embodied rhetorical performance. Her work reveals the conflicts women have attempted to negotiate in considering rhetoric as embodied practice.

This essay draws our attention to the rhetorics of everyday queer people by routing queer notions of embodiment through queer and feminist work on rhetorical silence. I argue that the queer body engages speech and silence simultaneously, troubling any binary division between the two rhetorical forms. I call for, instead, a continuum model of rhetorical silence that ties together verbal silence with other forms of rhetorical action such as material silence, visual silence, and embodied silence. To show how the continuum model functions, I offer an analysis of Grindr profiles. The social networking app—marketed primarily toward gay and bisexual men—serves as an example for how rhetorical silence is adapted and deployed by queer people. Exploring these profiles allows us to consider the rhetorical action of people who may not live openly queer, those whose claim to queerness is limited to a pixelated square inch of pectoral flesh.

David Holmes’s Where the Sacred and Secular Harmonize asks readers to attend to the frequently overlooked rhetoric of key speakers during the 1963 Birmingham mass meetings that contributed to the s...

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKCNMM) must balance respectful remembrance with broad education about the 1995 terrorist attack that killed one hundred and sixty-eight people. Epideictic and material rhetorics prevail throughout the OKCNMM, communicating uplifting messages about the effects of the bombing while also prompting visitors to create their own complex, productively uncomfortable pathways toward understanding. In this process, civic engagement through rhetorical processes is encouraged; the museum models and creates space to practice reflective dwelling, critical thinking, discussion, and composition, offering a rhetorical education that can circulate far beyond this single site.

John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew’s Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century is an important, much needed, closely reasoned, and ...

In her position as both teacher and administrator in the late nineteenth century, Mary Church Terrell navigated the racism and sexism of an increasingly bureaucratic educational landscape to emerge as a powerful, activist voice for children. Through a closer look at the strategies she and others used to advocate for social uplift via children and the home, we can continue to uncover the uneven rhetorical terrain black women navigated as they advocated for youth within an environment that constructed black children as outside of normative conceptions of childhood.

In this essay, we extend prior discussions of user interactions with wearable devices, framing these interactions in the context of identification and rhetorical invention. We identify the limitations of the preset identifications made available by the logic of what we term screened wearing, a representationalist framework for understanding wearable devices and the data they produce. In contrast to these logics, we identify the inventional opportunities for wearables enabled by what we term diffractive wearing, an open-ended approach to wearables that situates data within larger systems of activity.

This essay draws on letters, bulletins, photographs, and newspaper articles to give an account of the Hull House Settlement in Chicago in the 1890s and examines the rhetoric it engendered. The space of Hull House, I argue, communicated its founders’ Jane Addams’s and Ellen Gates Starr’s femininity, wealth, and knowledge of the wider world. Through an extended example of a garment workers’ labor meeting that took place in Hull House, I show how Hull House’s cosmopolitan aesthetic offered women and men from varying class, ethnic, and national backgrounds rhetorical resources for constructing ethos, and also provided constraints to communicating across differences.

This article analyzes several popular news media narratives that describe the events surrounding Eric Garner’s death in 2014, including the circumstances of his arrest and the acquittal of the police officer who placed him in a banned chokehold. This piece problematizes the constraints that vernacular understandings of race impose upon verbal and embodied rhetorical agency. Ultimately, this work illuminates the ways in which color-blind racist rhetorics mobilize narrative proxies to render these constraints invisible.

As the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl, I am intimately familiar with the commonplace that “getting pregnant as a teenager will ruin your life.” I’ve probably said these exact words, or somethin...

I sit down to write this review at a fraught moment for talking about class, and especially the working class. On Facebook, many friends are discussing a recent Equality of Opportunity Project repo...

This article refers to:The Stolen Property of Whiteness: A Case Study in Critical Intersectional Rhetorics of Race and Disability

By now, the statistics that illustrate the scope of mass incarceration play like a haunting and familiar refrain: the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world, and a disproportio...

This essay compares the public memory narratives surrounding two key players in the invention of one important mid-twentieth century innovation: the disposable diaper. Although Procter and Gamble’s Victor Mills and the entrepreneurial inventor Marion Donovan have each been hailed as success stories in the history of invention, their stories have often been framed differently in popular media, such as website blurbs, newspaper articles, and obituaries. The essay considers how four gendered tropes surrounding the act of invention—space, motive, training and preparation, and scope—contribute to this differential remembering and, relatedly, to a tacit demarcation between high-status masculine invention and its amateur counterpart, feminine ingenuity.