In the recently declared “Stylistic (Re)Turn” in rhetoric and composition, several scholars reference pages fifty-eight and fifty-nine of A Rhetoric of Motives as being important to style studies. These pages, given Kenneth Burke’s perplexity, require further discussion. The rhetorical figures antithesis and gradatio are used on these pages as representative anecdotes of the figures’ capacity as forms to induce identification. Antithesis and gradatio illustrate a concept of somatic rhetorical figuration based on a rhetorical aesthetic which is summarized on page fifty-eight. Figures, or formal patterns, overlap and point to the continued relevance of classical rhetoric as a way of discussing style across disciplines.

In the introduction to Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman, Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins acknowledge that Kenneth Burke and posthumanism may be an odd coupling. So we wonder:...

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

Integral captions and subtitles are specific forms of captions and subtitles that are designed to be essential elements of videos in coordination with sound, signs, and other modes of communication. Integral captions reflect the importance of embodied rhetorics in Deaf culture, particularly in the kinetic language of ASL and Deaf Space design practices. Designing a (Deaf) space for integral captions that embody multimodal and multilingual communication is an essential multimodal literacy practice that benefits d/Deaf and hearing composers and viewers. Five criteria that characterize integral captions provide instructors and scholars with a tool for captions and embodied rhetorics.

In 1964, the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a predominantly Black civil rights organization, recruited hundreds of volunteers, mostly white college students, to work with them in Mississippi for the summer with two goals in mind. First, they aimed to use the volunteers’ social connections in order to garner federal support for their work in Mississippi. Second, they aimed to collaborate across racial lines while maintaining Black leadership. While they worked toward both goals, they only achieved the first, which resulted in short-term gains and long-term damage.

Analyzing digital texts created by the activist group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, this article demonstrates how in some im/migrant activism, the nation is imagined as a familial home so that im/migrants framed as members of the heteropatriarchal family can argue for belonging. Although seemingly persuasive, such rhetoric reproduces the moralizing agenda of neoliberal ideology in terms of heteronormative family values. While im/migrant activism challenges the exclusion of undocumented im/migrants from the U.S. national imaginary, arguments based on family and home can also reproduce heteropatriarchal discourses that rationalize im/migrant discrimination at the intersections of race, gender, and sex.

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a disciplinary home. Next, they consider the varied ways in which “culture” and “rhetoric” interface in cultural rhetorics scholarship. The authors provide case studies of how cultural rhetorics inquiry shapes their scholarship across areas of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. Finally, they close by discussing the ethics of doing cultural rhetorics work.

Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy offers an insightful look into racialized identities within the university. Developed as a reaction to racist institutional effects and unaware instructors, the chap...

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, English physicians mobilized a rapidly expanding print culture to launch themselves into the thick of public debate with sharply worded pamphlets defending and denouncing the newly introduced practice of inoculation (the less effective forerunner of vaccination). This paper explores the new kind of medical rhetoric that flourished in the midst of this controversy, one that downplays medical authority and even disavows its own rhetorical character, much like the vaccination debates of today.

The principate of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE) has been portrayed as a period of rhetorical decline, given the suppression of late-Republic fiery, Ciceronian oratory. Building from recent scholarship that complicates this narrative, this article considers public poetry as a site of rhetorical practice, enriching understandings of rhetoric’s metamorphosis during the principate. In particular, the Odes of Horace—public poetry with persuasive designs achieved through enthymematic argument—are one example of how poetry served as a form of “hidden” epideictic rhetoric during the reign of Augustus when traditional forms of oratory were suppressed.

To teach food as a written art form is to teach a part of what it means to be human. Through the record of food traditions, culture and history are transmitted as well as transformed—practices of s...

Rhetoric and composition, as an academic discipline, argues for a strong link between scholarship and practice. However, restrictive publisher agreements, limited distribution channels, and perceptions about the value of open access among gatekeepers can limit access to scholarship and its potential for application. This study, through analysis of publishing policies and practices for rhetoric and composition journals as well as surveys and interviews with journal editors, examines the current state of open access in the field. Findings reveal the need for more consistent and widespread adoption of more open policies for publishing to extend the impact and value of scholarship in the field.

During the Vietnam era, the military recruited women by appropriating feminist language and simultaneously employing depictions of traditionally conservative feminine ideals. Using a rhetoric of circumlocution to yoke together these two contradictory images, military recruitment rhetoric ultimately reinstated women’s subordinate status.

Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

In 2012 The New York Times’s “Ethicist” column hosted a public writing contest, asking participants to defend eating meat. The contest sparked controversy due to its panel of judges—all white men. Analyzing this case study and the debate it catalyzed—a dynamic conversation about the problem of yoking animal ethics expertise to white masculine authority—issues calls for a feminist food rhetoric. Applying such an analytical lens illustrates both who may address food with authority and how such power is cultivated from gender stereotypes.

The study of technical communication yields discussions of agency and power—agency and power in writing and experience. In Living Chronic: Agency and Expertise in the Rhetoric of Diabetes, Lora Ard...

Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

Between 1942 and 1960, Robert T. Oliver, professor of speech at Pennsylvania State University, served as a ghostwriter and advisor for the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee. Celebrated as the founder of South Korea and condemned for human rights abuses and an irrepressible desire to wage war on North Korea, Rhee remains a controversial historical figure. In this essay, we use Lepora and Goodin’s theory of complicity to assess Oliver’s responsibility for the creation and effects of Rhee’s rhetoric.

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Women first entered East Coast fire departments through forming ladies auxiliary groups, where women provided critical support services—offering assistance at the fire, holding fundraising events for the department, and building community relationships—while maintaining conventional gender roles. Exploring auxiliary work through the lens of collaboration reveals feminist strategies for creating ethos in a highly gendered workplace; this approach for studying the complexities of women’s movement between background and foreground roles opens new avenues for considering women’s navigation of rhetorical barriers in professional spaces.

During her lifetime, Elise Tvede Waerenskjold achieved fame as a “father” of Norwegian emigration for her editing of the pro-emigration journal Norway and America and her publishing, both in Norway and the U.S., of many letters encouraging her compatriots to make the long voyage from Norway to settle in Texas. Waerenskjold’s letters represent a body of persuasive documents that I refer to as emigration propagation. Emigration propagation, generally, and Waerenskjold’s letters, in particular, reveals the persuasive strategies that entreated many millions to cross the Atlantic and begin new lives in a new place so far from home.

All too often in rhetorical studies, the term “violence” is left undefined or enthymematic—kept in play within a broad range of phenomena including instances such as the threat or risk of physical ...

Meta G. CarstarphenFigure 1: Screenshot of YouTube video depicting an image of Obama grinning with a gold dental grill and gold chain necklace (Downs).University of OklahomaKathleen E. WelchUnivers...

Do more with less. Such is the austere mantra to which Nancy Welch and Tony Scott’s edited collection Composition in the Age of Austerity responds. Extending broad critiques of neoliberal higher ed...

Some approaches to invention use a version of the classical topoi as a conceptual framework for rhetorical invention. Because of the close relationship that exists between the topoi and figurative language, this article theorizes that the four master tropes can provide a conceptual framework not only for rhetorical invention, but also as principles of selection for constructing entire discourses.

As music reviewer for The Nation in 1934, Kenneth Burke attended the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, a symphony that Burke felt had the dangerous potential to merge Nazi ideology with other dissenting German voices. Through this review and his introduction of the theoretical term “identification” in Attitudes Toward History, Burke joins a growing body of sonic rhetorics scholarship that investigates the semiotics of sound. Burke’s attention to sonic identifications reveals the fragile nature of sound, meaning, and division.

In Thomas R. Dunn’s view, GLBTQ advocates have “represented and contested” past and present GLBTQ histories in order to “influence or persuade the judgments by dominant, apparently heterosexual cit...

The recently diagnosed “broadening imperative” in revisionary historiography is of special concern to feminist historians, for whom critique of traditional methodological presuppositions has been central to the feminist revisionary project. By examining the performative and figurative elements of feminist historiographical discourse, feminist historians and historiographers can both identify sites of feminist rhetorical resistance to traditional presuppositions, and gain an understanding of how feminist revisionary methodologies have been re-assimilated into traditional methodological and rhetorical paradigms.

Recent historical scholarship in composition has sought balance between disciplinary histories that obscure institutions and local histories that obscure the discipline. Enter Ryan Skinnell’s monog...

This essay uses Michael McGee’s concept of the ideograph to discuss the ways that <motherhood>was used both by and against women in World War I. Regardless of whether women sided with the peace or the preparedness movements, their participation was defined by their status as mothers (either actual or metaphorical). Their participation was also conscribed by societal and governmental ideals of motherhood, conveyed through a shifting ideographic definition. Women’s rhetorical practices during the war were, therefore, both constrained and defined by notions of motherhood.

Sarojini Naidu’s platform rhetoric suggests that she functioned as the representative for Indian women due to her presence in the public sphere as first a poet, and then a nationalist leader. Naidu used her role as a jingoistic orator to persuade her audiences to believe that female equality was a necessary precursor to the independence of India. In her speeches, she reasoned with her listeners using the ancient Indian method of Nyaya and other various rhetorical techniques to strengthen her arguments.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the visual precepts of rhetoric’s fourth canon found themselves at odds with the iconoclasm of England’s Protestant elite. Under this negative influence, mnemonic imagery disappeared from rhetorical theory. Interest in the fourth canon declined, replaced with a Ramist conception of memory grounded in abstract (and imageless) order. A general outline of this history has been offered by several scholars—most notably, Frances Yates—but new bibliographic data along with recently digitized archives can verify its accuracy. Print, written culture, or “modernist” ideologies alone cannot explain the historical marginalization of the canon of memory.

On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

This essay examines the rhetoric of an organized group of mentally disabled speakers who share their stories with the public to fight the stigma that adheres to psychiatric diagnoses. Their “deep disclosure” of the sometimes disturbing details of their disability-related experiences can make the speakers and their audience members vulnerable in distinct ways. Vulnerability in these rhetorical situations need not only be viewed as threatening, however. Rather, the essay argues, it has the potential to be highly productive when it encourages the speaker and audience member’s openness to each other’s influence.

Sylvia Rivera is a critical figure in queer and activist rhetorical history. At the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973, Rivera engaged in parrhesia to push the movement to include and amplify the voices and needs of the most vulnerable members of the gay community: drag queens, homeless youth, gay inmates in prison and jail, and transgender people. Her delivery, including voice, gesture, and interaction with the audience, emphasizes the truthfulness, frankness, and criticism of her truth. By analyzing Rivera’s delivery of parrhesia, this article draws attention to the body’s role in speaking the truth as an activist rhetorical act.

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.

The myth of self-sacrifice is a belief in the value of caring and serving, regardless of personal cost, which characterizes attitudes toward women’s work in general and contingent faculty work in particular, especially writing instruction. “Women’s work” functions as a specific trope in the academy, particularly the high demand for such services, along with the unwillingness to pay for them. The comparison itself is not new; however, worth examining is how the very arguments proclaiming the value of women’s work in a capitalist system—and contingent work in the academy—are also used to undermine its value in that system.”

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.

Anne Bradstreet’s poems about her family and her life on the frontier rhetorically negotiated a place of stability for the author amid the theology/praxis tension of Puritan life. This article argues that Bradstreet’s poems function rhetorically to define godliness as a public performance of community-sanctioned, gendered action, an inherently Puritan way of understanding life. This definition of godliness allows Bradstreet’s poems to function as a catechism for outlining exactly how a Puritan individual should perform in order to contribute to material stability on the frontier and an assurance of eternal election.

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.

Style pedagogies, as many composition scholars have argued, have largely fallen out of favor in the last few decades. Those who have examined the decline have pointed to the deemphasis of the text prompted by the process movement as well as the subsequent social turn in composition studies. This article, in contrast, looks to the emergence of postmodernism and the ways in which it challenged and continues to complicate the theorizing and teaching of style. The author argues that embrace of a self-reflexive, “essayistic” voice would allow the instructor to exploit postmodernist impulses while revitalizing the teaching of style.