In 2010, during the Google-China dispute, the Chinese Communist Party deployed a rhetoric imbued with the strong pathos of the "century of humiliation" (guochi) that China suffered at the hands of imperialists and used the Google incident to reaffirm its guardianship of the Chinese nation = state. As a case study, this discursive analysis of the Google dispute illustrates the rhetorical techniques and processes the Chinese Communist Party utilized to cement its legitimacy. Relying on the resistance-to-imperialism narrative template, the Chinese Government has circulated discourse that resonates with a public who continue to fear foreign infringement of sovereignty.

Due to its favorable reception circa 1970, the essay “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has solidified Nietzsche's monumental status within the field of rhetoric and writing studies, allowing those inheriting this perspective to put the essay to use without attending to its intertextual background. This article argues that examining the intertextual reception of Nietzsche's essay will not only disclose an invisible, and hence unacknowledged rhetor—Arthur Schopenhauer—hiding in the shadows of Nietzsche's fragmentary essay; doing so will also reveal to what degree this monument's preservation requires its background to remain forgotten.

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in everyday online activities, arguing that scholarship in digital rhetoric can be informed by Raymond Williams's theory of media flow. Turning to Martin Heidegger and John Poulakos, I argue that the Web's rhetoric of the possible encourages a momentum of text consumption by which users are tempted to further immerse themselves in a “flowing” media experience. As digital technologies provide new opportunities for the surveillance and personalization of our Web practices, this article concludes by encouraging scholars to be critical of the tempting possibilities—and possible selves—crafted by this rhetoric.

In carving out space in rhetorical history for people with disabilities, this article interprets “asylum-school” curriculum through rhetorical practices involving the art of becoming, the body, and civic participation. Rhetorical practice is understood as it manifests within imposed constraints. So while for some, work as a seamstress might not qualify as the civic life Cicero thought to be rhetoric's ultimate goal, that work is indeed civically vital. By disrupting the social versus civic opposition, rhetoric includes practices other than just the political and is considered across a spectrum of difference.

Composition studies has accepted a reductive view of dogma as an acritical commitment to received knowledge that precludes inquiry. As a result, composition gives short shrift to the role that basic beliefs play in any act of inquiry. But certain forms of humble dogma can and do serve as essential starting places for asking questions—even for skepticism and doubt. The writings of St. Augustine and Lesslie Newbigin exemplify such approaches to dogma and offer rhetorical educators a new terministic screen through which to value the role that beliefs play in inquiry.

While popular and scholarly literature on Zen Buddhism abounds, few works directly address Zen rhetoric (Mark McPhail, Zen in the Art of Rhetoric, Albany: SUNY P, 1996; Dale Wright, “Rethinking Tra...

By exploring two perspectives on civility—the invitational and confrontational approaches—this article argues for revising the neoclassical model of rhetoric commonly found in introductory writing and speaking textbooks. This article further claims that a revised conception of civility—here termed “situated civility”—can help rhetors communicate ethically and practically about and across political, cultural, and personal differences.

Although it has been ten years since Sharon Crowley called for Richard M. Weaver's exclusion from the canon of rhetorical history, Weaver's rhetorical positions have never been stronger, utilized in movements such as the Tea Party and current conservative rhetoric. While Crowley (2001) Crowley, Sharon. 2001. When Ideology Motivates Theory: The Case of the Man From Weaverville. Rhetoric Review, 20: 66–93. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] argued that Weaver's Platonism came from his reaction to Roosevelt's politics, this archival study suggests that Weaver was much more pragmatic than his political pronouncements have led scholars, such as Crowley, to believe. Before Weaver wrote polemical works such as “To Write the Truth,” he operated within the constraints of the philosophically rigid institutional culture of neo-Aristotelianism, and the archival record demonstrates his attenuation to this rhetorical situation. The implications for these findings diminish the effectiveness of his appropriation by political movements that are based in foundationalistic rhetoric. These implications also demonstrate how rhetorical scholarship has utilized the polemical nature of Weaver's writings in the advancement of the professionalization of the discipline.

In the first sentence of his History, Peter Mack states, “This is the first comprehensive history of renaissance rhetoric” (1). This sounds like a bold statement, but it is one that Mack proceeds t...

During the early twentieth century, Illinois State Normal University Professor June Rose Colby employed a number of discreet rhetorical strategies to counteract the moral panic over the feminization of education on her own university campus. In particular, this article analyzes how Colby used a women's literary society—the Sapphonian Society—to prepare her women students to confront the rhetoric of a perceived “woman peril in education” (Chadwick 109). Colby's “discreet rhetoric” suggests the continuing need for historical scholarship that may reveal the often tacit, yet wholly subversive, rhetorical strategies of “silent” academic feminists.

Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

In the same vein as my Burkean Parlor essay (2011), another ready classical discourse form useful for learning rhetoric and for non-academic speaking and writing opportunities is the encomium. This...

Did nineteenth-century newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst manipulate representations of Evangelina Cosío y Cisneros, a young Cuban woman, in order to spark the Spanish-American War? Hearst's arguments for American intervention in Cuba represented a deceptively uncomplicated public opinion, a consensus that only appeared to have been attained through rational deliberation. Situating this event in public spheres studies, this article demonstrates how the Hearst Corporation used representations of Cisneros to disrupt boundaries between political and commercial realms.

Abstract From Aristotelian logic and sensate perception to Lakoffian rational and experiential meaning-making, I merge theories: Metaphor is emotive change, a use of language that expresses emotion and evokes emotion, which can inform behavior and persuade. The power of metaphor is in the physiological relationship between reason and emotion in the brain, supported by recent research from Alice Flaherty, neurologist and writer. Metaphors are sensory experiences, images brought-before-the-eye, which effect persuasion as rhetorical tools in argument. I argue that emotion-language-thought is in dialectical relationship, expressed by metaphor. Notes 1I appreciate RR reviewers Pat Hoy and Duane Roen for reviewing and offering suggestions for revision of my manuscript. Additionally, many thanks to Sara Newman for her patience and response to my inquiries. With her support and guidance, the relativity of rhetoric in everyday life continues to be seen and studied. Lastly, thank you to Theresa Enos and others at Rhetoric Review who have taken the time to allow this work publication. 2Recently, I read about being a sheep or goat from an Orthodox Christian perspective. The message was developed from a verse in the New Testament: "All nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blesses of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'" (Mat. 25:32). Interestingly, the article that follows attributes negative characteristics to those who are like goats as ones who: take, exploit, hoard, fear, judge, mock, and as ones who are unsatisfied, selfish, and distrusting of others. With this context, I understand anew the reference that my in-laws made to the goat in my kitchen. Meaning changes as one's knowledge base shifts over time, and metaphorical expressions evolve, even after they've been spoken.

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.

Writing centers have long been rich sites of critical inquiry into individualized instructional styles and methods. One of the great writing center debates involves directive versus nondirective tutoring styles and methods. While many writing center scholars have discussed the intricacies of directive or interventionist versus nondirective or minimalist pedagogical methods, few have examined the rhetorical implications of this important debate in relation to more classroom-based peer collaborations. This article rhetorically analyzes the literature on directive/nondirective methods and various approaches to tutoring writing, drawing pedagogical and rhetorical connections and implications useful for all teachers of writing and rhetoric.

Shakespeare's stage-practice may have been influenced by several texts on rhetoric that would have been accessible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, and which consider the implications, philosophical and practical, contained in the construction and reception of openings in oratory. By alluding, for example, to the concern of the orator in engaging audiences and to the mechanics of ordering oratorical material to influence audience reception from the outset, the treatises and handbooks of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, for instance, may offer important dimensions for understanding the construction of Shakespeare's openings, even though the media are markedly different.

Reading Julian of Norwich through an Augustinian lens allows us to position her within extant rhetorical tradition while showing ways she revised that tradition. Engaging the Augustinian rhetoric of memory by focusing on the interpretive moves that Julian made to produce her texts reveals the important role of both memory and time in Julian's compositional process. Read this way, we see that Julian provided us with a hermeneutic for reading her texts within the vernacular tradition that reconceptualizes Augustine's generative theory of memory.

During the Middle Ages, rhetoric and literature were thoroughly intertwined, whereas current notions of disciplinarity, in which literature and rhetoric are constructed as separate traditions, muddy our understanding of medieval practice. This essay reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous fourteenth-century poem, as engaged in a Ciceronian debate over the ramifications of legislative rhetoric on civic decision-making. Because of the paucity of information on medieval rhetorical practice, it concludes, literature is a resource that illuminates this neglected and misunderstood historical period.

During World War II, government and individual industries opened childcare centers across the country to support working mothers entering the war plant. At war's end, leaders moved to close these centers, prompting great debate. This essay explores the wartime discussion and postwar debate over the WWII childcare center by analyzing how the gendered ideograph <home> was deployed in ways that both praised and blamed not only the childcare center but also working mothers. While the primary work of the essay is to mine ideographic uses of <home>, it also aims to elaborate on feminist engagements with rhetorical historiography.

Recent legislative action invites teachers of rhetoric to revisit Isocrates' Antidosis from a perspective suggested by Jean Baudrillard. A Baudrillardian perspective positions this ancient text as a rhetorical offensive against the conventional value systems that affix very particular meanings to certain types of education and educators.

I was raised beneath the Big Sky, and my students are, almost exclusively, the children of loggers and miners, laborers and low-level managers—students, many both attending school and working fullt...

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson's research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson's medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

The continent of Africa is rich with rhetorical traditions that remain largely unexamined. One such African context is Botswana, which means literally “land of the Tswana people.” A look into two sites of Tswana rhetoric—the traditional village meeting place known at the kgotla and traditional Tswana praise poetry—reveals much about the discursive practices of the Tswana and what such practices convey about Tswana life.

Charles Abrams and Robert Moses engaged in a decades-long rhetorical skirmish regarding urban housing and planning in New York City. Despite Abrams's stylistic efforts to alter the physical permanent plans of Moses, his efforts for the most part failed to overcome institutionalized power and its ability to cement the public terms of debate, especially slum. Yet Abrams's sensitivity to multiple factors of urban use illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived social problems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complex issues with an orthos logos perspective.

This article compares economic and rhetorical writings by examining two nineteenth-century American rhetorician-economists, Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill. Both men directed both their rhetorical and their economic writings toward a common purpose—making citizens comfortable with new and uncertain instruments of (monetary and linguistic) representation. Considering the economic and rhetorical writings on representation, we come to understand how rhetoric (both theory and pedagogy) fits into the emerging and quickly morphing capitalism of industrializing and financializing America.

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

Urban slave life in ancient Rome was unlike the absolute bondage and physical labor historically associated with the term slavery. Cicero's administrative slave Tiro was a literary collaborator, a debt collector, a superintendent of sorts, a secretary, a financial overseer, a political strategist, a recipient and content-generator of Cicero's famed practice of letter-writing, and a connected component of Cicero's social scheming. Cicero's correspondence with Tiro praises him for his value and loyalty, but it also shows previously unrevealed rhetorical aspects of the ancient orator and his relationship with his slave, colleague, and friend.

Abstract Humor that addresses race can easily backfire. This article engages in an analysis of The Boondocks, an adult cartoon, to investigate how humor about race and racism can function not only to generate laughter through satiric rejection of long-held racist stereotypes in the American context but also to encourage new perspectives. The analysis makes use of rhetorical concepts drawn from theorist Kenneth Burke to analyze the rhetorical and comedic functioning of the dialogue, the use of music, and the visual features of the show. Notes 1We thank two extremely helpful RR reviewers, Richard Marback and Adela Licona. The quotation in the title comes from Glenda R. Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 15. 2As an example, CitationVidmar and Rokeach (1974) examined audience interpretations of the humor in All in the Family. They found that while some viewers laughed at the overt racism in the comments of Archie Bunker, others laughed at his hippie son-in-law Michael, who portrayed a racially enlightened person. 3McGruder has also published his comic strips in a series of books including The Boondocks: Because I Know you Don't Read the Newspapers, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel (2000); A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, New York: Three Rivers P (2003); Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection, New York: Three Rivers P (2005); and All the Rage: The Boondocks Past and Present, New York: Three Rivers P (2007). 4Readers interested in the media portrayal of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers will find the following works helpful: Pearson, Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America; and Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. The Party is seen to have continued the militant and nationalistic efforts of Malcolm X. Huey Newton, who earned a PhD in Social History from the University of California at Santa Cruz, also continued the intellectual legacy of Malcolm X. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1967, but this was overturned two years later. He and the Black Panther Party later adopted a nonviolent creed and focused on providing food, housing, and basic social services to black Americans in need. He later faced another charge for murder, but this did not result in a conviction. In 1989, after a conviction and short jail sentence for the misuse of public funds, he was murdered in Oakland, apparently participating in a drug deal that went bad. 5All quotations from episodes of The Boondocks, season one and season two. 6Anime is a uniquely Japanese visual art form that began in the early twentieth century. In the United States, the form became popular in the 1960s when a Japanese comic book, Aru Machikado, was made into a television show, Astro Boy. Other anime television shows followed in the midsixties including Gigantor, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion. The art form often includes children as main characters and heroes. The form also presents human emotion in a very visual manner and highlights the role of emotion in human interaction: "In anime the feelings of the characters play an important role in shaping their actions, much more so than in most American products, live or animated" (Poitras 55).

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscure memory of their sophisticated persuasive techniques and political campaigns. Such has been the case with Geneva Smitherman, the noted sociolinguist and scholar activist. This essay analyzes the persuasive choices in a corpus of her earliest essays as a rhetorical campaign to situate her innovative use of antagonism and analysis within a tradition of African-American women scholars and activists who have used essay-writing as a means of sociopolitical action and to model a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of their efforts.

Journalists and political pundits have described Barack Obama's beliefs and political style with the label pragmatism. This essay answers the following questions: What is the meaning of this label? What specific strands of the pragmatist tradition resonate through Obama's presidency? What effect does the label have on Obama's rhetorical practices? To answer these questions, this essay argues that Obama's rhetoric extends Jane Addams's political philosophy and Alain Locke's philosophy of race and that Addams and Locke are important resources for understanding Obama's pragmatism. Moreover, Obama develops a rhetorical pragmatism embodied in the form and style of his speeches.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded the first global rhetorical curriculum. Jesuit educators founded schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America—all ordered on their 1599 Ratio Studiorum. Yet this organizational and educational achievement faced several challenges. The Ratio reveals an attempt to reconcile the medieval education that shaped the early Jesuits and the classical humanism that excited later generations. The Jesuits articulated a reconciliation of humanistic and Christian virtue for the vita activa. These accomplishments mark Jesuit rhetoric as a distinct tradition worthy of deeper study by contemporary rhetoricians.

While a number of scholars have discussed a need to retheorize the fifth canon in the age of the digital (K. Welch; Trimbur; DeVoss and Porter), the field lacks empirical research on rhetorical delivery itself (Rude). By examining one case example from a larger research project, this article explores how practitioner stories can challenge and expand existing theoretical frameworks of rhetorical delivery to include insights from practitioners' knowledge. This article argues that gathering qualitative case examples is a useful, though by no means exhaustive, methodological research framework for studying rhetorical delivery.

Abstract This article, drawing on Aristotle's concept of technê, develops a framework for exploring rhetoric in the process of scientific inquiry. The Aristotelian "causes" specifically highlight the technical procedures through which scientists carry out their work and the visual representations they deploy to generate meaningful accounts, "bring forth" new findings, and contribute to the existing field of knowledge. The author argues that a technê-based framework makes it possible to maintain a focus on rhetoric as a productive art while broadening the object of rhetorical analysis to include practices and modes of representation that contribute to knowledge production in the physical sciences. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Nola Heidlebaugh and James Zappen for their careful and constructive readings of my manuscript. I would also like to thank Trey Bagwell for his assistance in bringing the project to fruition. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. 2I obtained permission for this project through the University Institutional Review Board and from the scientists themselves. Names have been changed to protect participants' confidentiality.

As rhetoric and composition teacher-researchers, we know how paradoxical and, at times, ambivalent the relationship between our work and social action can be. On one hand, many of us are brought to...

Two paragraphs into Diane Davis's most recent undertaking and the attentive reader will recognize a work that is grand in scope. Davis's aim “to expose an ordinary rhetoricity—an affectability or persuadability—[as] the condition for symbolic action” is calling for no less than an acceptance of a new rhetorical philosophy and theory of a rhetoric that affects (and effects) all communication practices—a new philosophy that in turn demands an ethical paradigm shift in rhetoric studies (2). Her critique reveals the less-than-static foundations of the agent in contemporary rhetorical theories and, instead or alongside with, offers an “ecstatic” theory of “response-ability” that resituates the character of the rhetorical agent away from the concept of the self-interested individual, the free-willing agent. Such critiques require in-depth ontological and epistemological considerations, and Davis is up to the task.

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

Abstract The subjective model of empathy, as used in Susan Miller's reading of Morris Young's Minor Re/Visions, is rooted in the prevailing misconceptions of emotion as personal and intrinsic to an isolated and fixed Western subjectivity. It poses tremendous challenges to intercultural empathy: It allows readers to project their own emotions and framework of reference to others' emotions and creates an asymmetrical, passive subject-to-object reader–writer relationship. Conceiving emotions as an index to cultural and social relationships, the intersubjective rhetoric of empathy, contrarily, positions readers as fluid intersubjects, and consequently creates an active subject-to-subject relationship that potentially subverts the power imbalance in rhetorical borderlands. Notes 1I thank my RR reviewers LuMing Mao and Lucy Xing Lu for their patient review, incisive comments, and insightful suggestions, which significantly helped improve the clarity and focus of my argument.

This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.

This essay examines the role of rural citizens in the social fabric of ancient Italy and the redefinition of the rural by the mightiest orator of that time: Marcus Tullius Cicero. This redefinition created a novel form of ethos, a rural civic ethos, apparent in the valuing of Arpinum in The Laws and in the rural character of Sextus Roscius in Pro Sextus Roscius. Rural civic ethos is further developed through an analysis of Cicero's dual identity as rustic and urbane, trained according to the oratorical style of the city yet maintaining an allegiance to the landscapes and peoples of Arpinum.