While much research has considered women’s rhetorical practices in the later part of the nineteenth century, less is known about the practices of women at the beginning of the century. Indeed, the faulty binary of public and private, and the resultant ideological separation of these spaces, has led scholars to devalue such women’s rhetorical practices. Yet in 1805 an elite group of young women formed the Boston Gleaning Circle in order to continue their education, and the content of the Circle’s archive indicates that deliberative rhetoric was an essential aspect of women’s relationships during this time period.

New insights emerge in rereading Plato’s Phaedrus using a material-epistemic methodology. From this perspective one discovers how the material conditions of Plato’s time, discursively composed, specifically outline constructed beliefs about the world. As a result, this analysis exposes how the setting and the myths shared play an active role in how the three speeches unfold, which reframes how one observes Plato’s version of rhetoric. Beyond the Phaedrus, this methodology opens up new questions to consider with both historic and contemporary texts—questions that address how our everyday signifying practices are influenced by historically situated material conditions.

Building on current theories of rhetorical agency, this essay analyzes two metaphors for aging found in public health information materials targeted to the elderly—aging is ageless and aging is pathology—concerning how these metaphors frame agency for older adults. The metaphors attribute limited agency to older adults by emphasizing short-term, biomedical solutions and expert knowledge and by not representing agency as situational, dynamic, and co-constructed. Exploring the limits of these metaphors both further exposes how public health discourse shapes the cultural perception of aging and offers an expanded understanding of older adults as dynamic rhetorical agents.

Rethinking Ethos extends feminist scholarship on ethos by reflecting the development in feminist philosophy from locational toward relational thinking. While the introduction extensively outlines L...

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to material symbolic communication in analyzing rhetoric of the body, focusing primarily on the linguistic or on nonsymbolic materiality. Yet the body communicates via a range of material symbolic practices. Delivery offers an analytical framework for understanding the ways that performing bodies communicate in multiple symbolic codes. Through analysis of neo-burlesque, the essay argues that delivery as a critical method for embodied rhetoric highlights the complex interplay between spaces and bodies and audiences that construct particular genres, providing a wider rhetorical vocabulary to critiques of neo-burlesque and other contested sites of women’s erotic performance.

While numerous histories have been published over the past quarter of a century that have challenged and enriched our understanding of the emergence and development of rhetoric and composition stud...

Much recent composition scholarship has focused on pedagogies of personal writing, championing students’ own languages, and discursive communities. In Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric...

Satire is a popular form of comedic social critique frequently theorized in terms of Kenneth Burke’s comic frame. While its humor and unexpected combination of incongruous elements can reduce tension that surrounds controversial issues to make new perspectives more accessible, audience response to satire can vary tremendously—including the very negative as well as the very positive. Teaching satire should include exposure to rhetorical theory and audience reception analysis to better prepare students as consumers and creators of satires. With a complex, layered pedagogy, satire can be an important component of the twenty-first-century rhetor’s toolkit.

The idea of the rhetorical tradition continues to trouble scholars, in part because it is often conflated with the Western rhetorical canon. The current way we use the word tradition is tied to nineteenth-century ideas of inheritance and continuity, which reinforce the canon. Using folklore scholarship to redefine tradition as something we continuously make and take responsibility for moves away from the canon while still allowing for creative use of past rhetorical practices and theories. Redefining tradition as something we make and pass on responsibility for should inform our teaching and reform the syllabi we create for our rhetoric courses.

The archetypal English trench poet, Siegfried Sassoon, employed the ironic techniques of satire and sarcasm to address the First World War’s absurdities. Yet, though his intentions are laudable, Sassoon’s methodologies are not ethical. Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics demands that readers be included in the construction of literary meaning; when ironies divide readers and writers, they miss their target. Despite readers’ sympathy for the war poet’s tragic position, poems such as “They,” “The Hero,” and “Blighters” present coercive rather than progressive rhetoric—negating the social good Sassoon intends by mimicking the unilateral bombasts of war.

Civil rights activist Sarah Patton Boyle initially encountered great difficulty when communicating about race and enacting civil rights resistance as a privileged white Southerner. This essay reveals how Boyle overcame this rhetorical failure by turning to the spiritual memoir and in so doing remade her career as a writer and a speaker. Through the concepts of confession and conversion inherent in this spiritual genre, Boyle successfully identified with white and black audiences who had previously ignored or criticized her, created a viable ethos, and delivered a sophisticated faith-based argument for social change.

"Party-Feeling: Richard Whately and the 2016 United States Election." Rhetoric Review, 35(4), pp. 374–375

Traditionally, the role of metaphor in rhetoric has been seen as recasting the unknown into the realm of the known. Metaphor as explication has been well documented in scholarship of the rhetoric of science. This article argues that scholars interested in the rhetoric of technology should view metaphor as akin to “black boxes.” Relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “conceptual metaphor,” it analyzes one episode in the so-called “Smart Phone Patent Wars,” focusing on two metaphors: “ecosystem” and “patent war.” Ultimately, the article finds that as black boxes, these metaphors constrain the possible options that people see for their relationships with technology.

Rhetoric and poetics have a long historical relationship; however, there is a dearth of literature in contemporary rhetorical studies that analyzes poems as forms of democratic dissent. This article begins with an assessment of John F. Kennedy’s eulogy of Robert Frost, followed with an analysis of Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” a poem that both supports and challenges Kennedy’s defense of poetry. Ultimately, this paper makes an argument for why critics might pay closer attention to poetry as both a medium for expressing dissenting messages and as an example of how language play itself can function as valuable democratic dissent.

Susan B. Anthony once proclaimed that the bicycle did “more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world” (168). Sarah Hallenbeck’s Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Techn...

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

Throughout history rhetoricians have referenced and relied upon theatrical practices and philosophies to enhance the understanding of rhetorical principles. Considering the affinities between rhetoric and performance can also be useful today, as writers and speakers must understand how to effectively navigate multiple performances in multiple arenas and genres.

Mass-Observation’s archives and methodology offer insight for expanding the concept of network to assemblage through deterritorializing and reterritorializing rhetorical aspects of historiography and normative historical narratives. Reading M-O’s archives as “worlds expressing” rather than individual, subjective expressions of a world helps theorize rhetorical networks as less straightforward and accountable, provoking recognition of multiple rhetorical agents that coproduce ambient and reiterative rhythms of materiality.

Book review of In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools, by Lori Ostergaard and Henrietta Rix Wood. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2015. 235 pages. $27.95 paperback

Neuroscience findings employed in professional and academic fields can construct new avenues of inquiry, provide evidence for existing theories, or bolster less-recognized fields of study with exciting research from the brain sciences. However, the strategic, rhetorical alignments or disjunctions that enable those fields to incorporate or reject interpretations of neuroscience data have not yet undergone much discussion. This paper examines how phenomenologists construct the means to contest interpretations of mirror neurons coming from the cognitive neurosciences. The analysis ultimately expands neurorhetorics, demonstrating that rhetorical scholars need not privilege neuroscientific conceptions but can continually “re-invent” the brain, foregrounding multiple ontologies, pursuing alternative rhetorical alignments and performances.

Although rhetoric and city life have been closely aligned since ancient times, urban planning documents have received little attention as rhetorical texts shaping discourse about citizenship. The Plan of Chicago, a key document in the history of US urban planning, not only proposed improvements, but, more importantly, its visual and verbal language constructed an idealized and ideologically infused conception of the city and its citizens. By enacting what Burke called a representative anecdote, the Plan constitutes a specifically commercially oriented city and citizen, foregoing other possible identifications.

“God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots” analyzes the most consequential correspondence of these Renaissance women rulers—letters begging for mercy in the face of death. This analysis uncovers the similar rhetorical techniques of these documents composed in the heightened exigency of literal life and death situations, when these royal women turned to the community of which they were members to invoke pity and ask for mercy in their unique positions as inheritors of a male history in order to create strategies for the rhetoric of women rulers providing an historical exemplar of a kairotic rhetorical response.

Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

Look: a Painted Stick, a Spoon, a Conch Shell, a Dirty Sock, and a Can o’ Beans were traveling in an Airstream turkey to Jerusalem. This is not the gambit to a joke. Instead, it is a basis for appr...

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

Previvors, women with a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, blog in response to the rhetorical needs of their community, needs that are fillable only in writing, for a specific audience, and to engage that audience to act. Previvor bloggers have created a rhetorical community in response to specific kairotic moments and have fulfilled three common rhetorical needs: to educate others, to advocate for more research into BRCA mutations and/or breast cancer research in general, and to support others in the BRCA+ community toward the main purpose of social action.

Philip Eubanks’s The Troubled Rhetoric and Communication of Climate Change: The Argumentative Situation is the first book-length treatment of climate change by a scholar of rhetoric. As such, it fi...

Because of its temporal and vibrational qualities, sound is a particularly useful rhetorical resource for communicating our currently volatile experiences of climate change and extinction. A critical sonic rhetoric moves us from a disembodied marketplace of ideas to an immersive, interdependent soundscape. This move is exemplified in the work of sound artists Susan Philipsz and Bernie Krause, which provides experiences of surface time (sounds arising and decaying) and what climate change scholars call “deep time” (species coming and going from the earth), along with the affective dimensions of nostalgia and grief that saturate these experiences with individual and cultural meaning.

Edward Schiappa published a series of articles and a book in 1990 and 1991 that, collectively, challenged the dominant narrative concerning the Older Sophists and early Greek Rhetorical Theory as well as calling into question certain revisionist historical accounts. In this essay the author provides a narrative about those projects and the responses they elicited in the hope that it provides insights about the production of those publications, as well as an opportunity to revisit certain theoretical and methodological concerns that continue to be relevant to historians of rhetoric and philosophy.

"Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, Jim A. Kuypers, ed.." Rhetoric Review, 35(1), pp. 70–71

This book argues that education is fundamentally rhetorical, that rhetoric is key to social justice, and that doing rhetorical history is methodologically complicated. To make these arguments, Zosh...

The US Navy admitted women into the submarine force in 2010, then one of the last male-only professions remaining in the Armed Forces. Examining rhetorical ecologies surrounding the integration decision, this essay charts the contextual forces and stakeholder discourses that shaped submarine assignment policy over a critical fifteen-year period. It also traces shifting assumptions about gender and space within that policy and their consequences for women. Time, then, is a vital component of policy analysis, permitting feminist rhetoricians to identify gendering processes in the workplace and discursive patterns of organizational change.

The field of rhetoric and composition has a complex relationship with critical theorists outside our discipline. On the one hand, a field that claims Plato and Aristotle often has difficulty achiev...

The Burke Museum exhibit, Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China displayed several pieces of ethnic art originally designed by the Nuosu, an indigenous group in Liangshan, China. Through an analysis of the reflective narratives published by the exhibit curators, the artifacts used to represent the Nuosu, and visitor responses to the exhibit, this essay suggests that doing representational work in comparative rhetoric often entails borrowing from the methodologies and practices of social scientists to attend to the ethics of speaking for and about the other.

The natural inclination of writers is toward mindlessness or inattention to the present moment despite the benefits understanding the present can bring to writing. Although temporal consciousness is apparent in notions of writing as a process or of writing as situated in a rhetorical context, these ideas largely overlook the present. Buddhist Mindfulness can help with the development of kairotic or present-moment specific practice by including impermanence in the rhetorical context, by emphasizing real time in composing, and by providing access to intrapersonal rhetoric. Increased understanding of the temporal factors of writing calls for an Eastern-mind progymnasmata in rhetorical praxis.

Charlotte Hoggaa Texas Christian UniversityCharlotte Hogg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Texas Christian University. Her publications include From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (U of Nebraska P, 2006), Rural Literacies, coauthored with Kim Donehower and Eileen E. Schell (SIUP, 2007), and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, coedited with Donehower and Schell (SIUP, 2012), and scholarly and creative work in Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century, Western American Literature, Great Plains Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on sorority rhetorics.

In his bestselling book The Prayer of Jabez, Bruce Wilkinson claims that believers can reap guaranteed blessings from God by praying an obscure biblical prayer. But for many evangelicals, Wilkinson’s book teaches magic not prayer. At issue is the appropriate use of this biblical prayer. How might rhetoricians and other scholars of religion analyze this biblical debate? This article argues that the legal or interpretive stases, a neglected part of stasis theory, constitute an important rhetorical method for analyzing arguments over the meaning of texts, religious or not, thereby shedding light on the nature, motivations, and implications of such debates.

This article analyzes the rhetorical practices at a nineteenth-century Catholic school run by women religious for young women of all faiths. This school, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, embraced its motto “virtue and knowledge combined” to achieve its goal of establishing the French religious spirit in a country with anti-Catholic biases. Teaching lessons based on their French traditions, the sisters replaced lessons in religion with ones on morality and virtue. Thus the sisters promoted their French religious spirit without appearing to proselytize; even without converting students to Catholicism, the sisters succeeded in helping to establish the “French religious spirit” in Indiana.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

Treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder aims to integrate diverse narratives into a coherent whole. However, no compelling reason exists to privilege a cohesive narrative; in fact, treatment may at times introduce false memories in an attempt to construct such a narrative. This essay critically examines dominant conceptions of memory and consciousness based on logic and coherence in order to argue for the value and validity of fragmented narratives as a legitimate rhetoric.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

Joseph Bizup's BEAM schema establishes a rhetorical approach to research writing pedagogy, articulating four distinct ways writers use sources: for background, exhibit, argument, and method. This article rechristens the framework I-BEAM, identifying a fifth category: instance source use, a constitutive function that establishes the need for the writer's argument. Instance source moves appear in numerous locations––introductions, textual asides, footnotes/endnotes, and epigraphs––and can situate the writing in both academic and popular contexts. Attention to this exigency move highlights the problem of authenticity in school-based writing and raises questions about sources formative to the writer but invisible to the reader.