In 1939 Kenneth Burke's book review of Mein Kampf, in isolating how the “crude magic” of Nazism worked, called for rhetorical critics to enter the social and political scene of the day by resisting strongman rule wherever it appeared: “[A] people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic” (Philosophy 192). George W. Bush, who also had “crude magic,” used the Hitlerian rhetoric of a common enemy and a geographic center in order to realign post 9/11 attitudes sufficient to identify the non-Western other as a common enemy, to convert New York's fallen Twin Towers into a new and noneconomic symbol of US government, and to transform himself from a lazy cowboy into a medicine-man.

In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn (re)introduced the art of silence, and in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe (re)introduced the art of listen...

In one of many scenes Frances Ellen Watkins Harper developed between student and teacher in her works, the impulsive Annette Harcourt explains her conflict with an Irish-American peer to her teache...

Abstract The professional life of elocutionist Alvina Winker Paterson suggests that previous views about women being excluded from rhetorical activities in the earlier twentieth century need to be revised. Like many other contemporary women, Winkler Paterson was able to avail herself of private instruction in elocution and become a highly successful performer and educator in the Northeast. Her career casts considerable light on the nature of elocutionary performance, the course of elocutionary education, and feminine access to public arenas and power at the time. Notes 1 We owe thanks to RR reviewers Susan Kates, Andrew King, and RR editor Theresa Enos for significant help in revising this manuscript. We also owe thanks to Amber Davisson for using the scrapbooks to create a chronology of Winkler Paterson's performances that was useful in the writing of this article.

The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, takes its title from the theme of the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference. I vividly remember sitting i...

This article analyzes The Business of Being Born, a documentary that critiques dominant American childbirth practices, practitioners, and locations as overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.

The phenomenon of the Octalog came into being at the 1988 CCCC when James J. Murphy, with support from Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown, proposed and chaired a roundtable composed of eight distinguish...

Queen Mary I was crowned in 1553, becoming the first reigning queen of England. In order to provide a powerful image of female rule to her people, Queen Mary invented a rhetorical strategy that reflected her society's oppressive gender expectations of chaste silence so that she could become a powerfully voiced ruler. Her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth I, later mirrored Mary's strategy. England's first female monarchs created an image of female rule by employing the figures of the spouse, the mother, and the maiden, embodying conventional roles for women in Tudor society, and reclaiming them as images of power.

The biblical account of Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus is perhaps history's most repeated and influential telling of a spiritual transformation, and it is with this account that Dana Ander...

Abstract RateMyProfessors.com has received critical reception in the academy: While some college teachers and administrators express support for the site, others complain that it invades their privacy and impinges on their academic freedom. This essay looks closely at one response to Rate My Professors, a weblog titled Rate Your Students that was founded in 2005. The site offers a compelling example of how Rate My Professors—and the movement to commodify higher education that it represents—affects public discourse between students and teachers. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Duane Roen and Edward White as well as Dana Anderson, Theresa Enos, Christine Farris, Joan Pong Linton, and John Schilb, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 2With a masthead that reads "Plagiarism, misery, colleagues, absinthe, snowflakes, ennui," Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com has hosted academic complaints about students multiple times a week since 2005. As of June 2010, the site closed down after five years, citing insufficient staffing as the primary cause. The original website still maintains a limited archive of its first five years. A spin-off site called CollegeMisery.com opened its doors at the same time. Both sites regularly accept and post reader comments about the drudgeries of academia, peppering them with bits of news and commentary related to higher education. Although the site's content is now somewhat more diverse than it was in the earlier years (not all posters are now attacking students, and some even defend them) the blog's initial inflammatory rhetoric has attracted attention and even inspired debate. However, the site itself is still strongly framed as a space for virulent and personalized critiques of students. 3In this essay I organize my thinking about publics according to Michael Warner's three definitions: the public as social totality (what Elizabeth Ervin terms in Public Literacy as the national public), the public as concrete audience, and the "public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation" (Warner 50). Warner focuses on the third type of public, as will I in this essay. A textual public is self-organized through discourse and operates independently of structuring institutions such as the state or church. Such a public is maintained through the circulation of discourse, and one can become, even temporarily, a part of that public simply by accepting its address (61). There is then not just one public but many that overlap and intersect at local, national, and global levels. Publics represent a heterogeneous range of context and group-specific interests and values, and they are maintained through the circulation of discourse that is both personal and impersonal—that addresses us (if we accept the address) and some group of imagined strangers beyond us. 4While I want to adopt this textual understanding of public formation for the purposes of this essay, I also do not want to lose sight of what David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki recently refer to in their analysis of the Arab-American press as the material embodiment of counterpublics (50). Drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, Kaufer and Al-Malki remind us that oppressed groups generate resistant and/or self-protective rhetoric in counterpublic spaces, offering insight into how power differentials between groups structure the terms of their participation in publics. Based on this understanding, I also define publics in this essay as not purely textual but also importantly connected to embodied experience and unequally positioned in relationship to cultural power, often in ways that place them in a contested relation to one another. However, as my analysis of the interaction of RMP and RYS indicates, public power differentials do not always manifest directly in the embodied presence of the actors involved; rather, power dynamics are written into the structures that mediate a public's textual circulation. 5The exaggeratedly caustic and insulting rhetorical postures of participants in RYS are certainly legible as a kind of Menippean satire, one that indirectly buffoons student rhetoric on Rate My Professors and the attitudes it implies. By returning the volley of character assassination begun by RMP, posters reveal some measure of the childish irresponsibility inherent in the rhetoric itself. Yet, while I do think there is certainly a relationship of subtle satire at work in the interaction between these two sites, I do not choose to concentrate on this relationship in my analysis but rather to look beneath it at the more lasting and meaningful public investment that posters on RYS seem to be expressing in their work. 6Nancy Fraser provides a crucial foundation for this point in her critique of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the public sphere. Fraser contends that Habermas's concept of the universal public actually emerged in conflict with a variety of counterpublics, which themselves represented the interests of oppressed groups who could not meet the minimal expectations of property ownership and disembodiment, which were requirements for participation in the so-called liberal bourgeoisie public sphere. In imposing dominant interests as universal and seeking to delimit the terms of what could be civilly debated (and in what language), the bourgeois liberal public sphere in fact represented a larger shift from more openly autocratic to hegemonic forms of social control (Fraser 62). While Fraser is most often credited for rendering Habermas's concept of the public as a plural one, her critical intervention more pointedly challenges the vaguely positive connotations usually associated with public dialogue. Far from being an open forum for meaningful civic discussion, Fraser finds that the so-called public sphere is a veil of rationality that kept more divisive forms of social conflict out of view. 7In her article Welch persuasively argues that we err as teachers when we present public writing and rhetoric as an individual activity. According to Welch, seeing public action as individual dangerously isolates students and makes them less able to effectively confront the complexities of privatized public space. 8My analysis of the site layout was written in the spring of 2007, and the homepage of RateMyProfessors has since changed. 9The method of purposeful sampling is, I maintain, appropriate to the site and my inquiry alike. Obtaining a random sample from a site like RMP would be not just impossible but unnecessary, since I do not aim to make generalizable claims about the broader student population as a result of my analysis. I do want to make claims about how the site structures a kind of public discourse through consumerism, and a purposeful sample is more than adequate to that task.

In The Long Road of Woman's Memory, Addams develops a theory of memory that accounts for the rhetorical function of reminiscence. Drawing on I. A. Richards's conception of rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding, this essay offers an analysis of Addams's theory in relationship to her attempts at rational discourse with a group of immigrant women who believed there was a “Devil Baby” in residence at Hull House. Her successes and failures during these conversations prompted Addams to consider the rhetorical function of memory as a theoretical tool both to understand and remedy discursive conflict.

Abstract This essay draws on concepts developed by Kenneth Burke to examine how a rhetoric of national insecurity has saturated phishing research and antiphishing campaigns. In response to the widespread public dispersal of antiphishing campaigns, it calls for a new terminology that challenges the underlying racial violence that characterizes its current practices. Notes 1Jakobsson and Myers define phishing as "[a] form of social engineering in which an attacker, also known as a phisher, attempts to fraudulently retrieve legitimate users' confidential or sensitive credentials by mimicking electronic communications from a trustworthy or public organization in an automated fashion" (1). 2In July of 2009, Symantec observed a fifty-two percent increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. 3Robert C. Miller and Min Wu argue, "Phishing succeeds because of a gap between the user's mental model and the true implementation, so promising technical solutions should try to bridge this gap" (291). Note how the technology becomes the agent of intervention. 4See, for example, Gurak and Warnick. Later, I will discuss how phishers utilize peer networks to share components of phishing solicitations in order to make the process more efficient. This use of file-sharing technology complicates more sanguine perspectives on the role that collaboration and sharing play in digital networks (see Devoss and Porter; Moxley). I am not alone in pointing out the dangerous limitations of digital technologies such as emails and online forums (see Holdstein; Moses and Katz; Blair and Takayoshi). 5Jenkins writes, "New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments… . Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises" (27–28). 6I am grateful to RR reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Jim Zappen for their helpful feedback on this essay. Thank you RF, MM, and MH—you are indispensable.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 So, this phrase has gotten a lot of attention. First during and immediately after the Octalog panel in the Tweetstream, then in f2f and continuing social-media interactions after. Most younger scholars express excitement to hear someone say what they've been thinking all along; many "established" scholars express dismay at my lack of respect. Disciplinarity does do its job, does it not? 2 I will, however, offer my definition of rhetoric. Just for the record, when I use the word rhetoric, I am evoking a shorthand that encompasses thousands of years of intellectual production all over the globe—a set of productions that we have only just begun to understand—and that generally refers to systems of discourse through which meaning was, is, and continues to be made in a given culture. 3 In Signs Taken for Wonders, Homi Bhabha reminds us that "[t]here is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently" that it "inaugurates a literature of empire." That scene, he tells us, is always "played out in the wild and wordless wastes" of "the colonies" and consists entirely of the "fortuitous discovery of the English book" by colonized peoples; this scene marks the book as an "emblem," one of the colonizers' "signs taken for wonders" (29). 4 See especially Lisa Brooks; Joy Harjo; Thomas King; Nancy Shoemaker (ed.); Linda Tuhiwai Smith; Robert Warrior; and Shawn Wilson. 5 For an examination of "paracolonial," see Vizenor. 6 A totally unsatisfying and provocative opening into my current work that argues for situating specific rhetorical events in the continuum of rhetorical practices (alphabetic and non-alphabetic) that hold particular cultures together over time. 7 I take inspiration from Richard Graff and Michael Leff; Thomas Habinek; Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz; and Susan Miller. 8 See http://wealthforcommongood.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf for more information. 9 For Jim and Bob … Susan, Sharon, Richard, Jan, Nan, and Jerry (chair), Octalog, 1988, St. Louis. 10 Éthea, where animals belong, in their wildness. I'm using Charles Scott's The Question of Ethics for reading, as CS cites such in the Iliad (6.506–11). The horse wants to return to its Nomós, field, as opposed to Nómos, law (Scott 143). I've consulted Charles Chamberlain's "From Haunts to Character." 11 I would claim, therefore, that it is our responsibility to search out our other-abilities, our impotentialities, to address the other that is indefinite. I'm not referring to potentialities, that is, Techné or Dynamis. Rather, I am referring to what Aristotle notes only in passing as Adynamis, or Impotentiality (see Metaphysics 1046e, 25–32). This, then, would be the para-methodology of misology! As well as the wildness that I refer to! In reference, as Giorgio Agamben says, Adynamis, or Impotentiality, would address all that has NOT YET been intuited, thought, acted on in ethico-political lived experiences (see Potentialities). Or forgotten! At least, in our wide, impotentially wild field.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is experiencing a change in its core curricula as graduate programs are replacing a traditional set of core courses with a more customizable, elective plan of study that focuses on specializations. Graduate student dissertations predict the flow and direction of the field, determining curricular change. Programs are also being responsive to a trend in the listing of specialist positions in the MLA JIL. The 2000 and 2008 Rhetoric Review surveys of graduate curricula as well as the authors' most recent survey results reveal a change in values from general to more specialist curricula.

Contemporary Native American stand-up comedy is a form of epideictic rhetoric in the contact zone of the performance space, using generic conventions of stand-up comedy, traditional elements of Native humor, and Aristotelian strategies to challenge what audiences think they know about indigenous experiences in this land. Specifically, Howie Miller is one Native American stand-up comedian who constructs an epideictic performance in which entertainment, education, and assumptions collide.

Finally Persuaded: Rhetoric, History, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War This is certainly not the place to undertake a comprehensive and systematic new approach to Thucydides. But it...

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is often defined by binaries: rhetoric/composition, teaching/practice. Our doctoral programs, however, occupy space at both ends of the spectrum through the simultaneous emphasis on composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory. The changing curricula in doctoral programs offer a unique lens through which to interpret some of the forces that have shaped rhetoric and composition as it has developed in the past fifty years. Examining the curricula highlights how our disciplinary identity has been shaped, at least in part, by our various institutional locations.

Abstract The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century. Notes 1In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS. 2I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions. 3Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).

New York Times articles on environmental issues attempt to constitute an audience transcending gender, race, politics, and religion in its pursuit of environmentally sound behavior. While some articles' use of a rhetoric of sacrifice is undercut by fear appeals and an exclusionary narrative strategy, other NYT articles come closer to transforming the rhetoric of sacrifice into a widely inclusive, aesthetically grounded, and celebratory narrative strategy. Taken together, the articles seek to transform readers not so much into environmentalists as into what Foucault described late in his life as “artists of living.”

As stylistic study is revived within composition, figures of thought, a neglected subcategory of the larger category of figures, have a great deal to offer our student readers and writers. These figures can shift students' attention away from content and argument toward other equally important but often ignored aspects of prose, thereby enriching students' rhetorical repertoires. This focus on style also contributes to our understanding of composition as a discipline and its relationship to the field of rhetoric.

Abstract As Crowley and Hawhee explain in Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, debate as we know it today is nothing more than "spat, 'mere' theater" because conceptions of "opinion-as-identity stands in the way of rhetorical exchange." However, in Foucault's "Self Writing" and in Montaigne's Essais, another version of subjectivity in writing is conceptualized and practiced—one where the subject is constituted in practices at work in the care of the self. In this version of subjectivity, the productive exchange of ideas would be possible. Notes 1Thanks very much to RR readers Peter Elbow and Edward Schiappa for their careful readings, thoughtful comments, and support in the revision and publication of this article. 2That said, my work meets with an interesting danger: Though I hope that in narrowing my focus to Montaigne's essays, I might avoid generalizing the essay as a genre, or writing as a practice, and instead exercise the kind of specific attentiveness that is far better mastered by Foucault, I find resisting that move to generalize difficult, if not in some cases impossible. Despite this potential/inevitable failure on my part, my purpose here is to provide a different conceptualization of subjectivity in writing, one that could prove to be another way of potentially engaging other writers'/essayists' work, perhaps by future scholars. 3Consequently, the concept of the writer-as-agent is disrupted in Foucault's work, and as such, one implication is that this version of subjectivity takes seriously the idea that the writer is one subject being subjected by a number of forces (acting on the body, for example) and that the subject-on-the-page is necessarily something different. 4Though perhaps obvious, it's worth pointing out here that reconceptualizing essay-writing as a complex of practices subverts the idea of the inspired or innately talented essayist. If we writing teachers want to take seriously the idea that it can be taught, then this theory of subjectivity gives us a way to teach it as a complex of practices, as something other than an expressive art that the student writer is innately "either good at or not." 5Specifically, correspondence is addressed to a particular reader (usually a close friend) in an attempt to make the writer present to that reader so that the text can act as a (often ethical) guide for the reader. At least in terms of Montaigne's work, the reader was more generally conceived, and his project involved more than writing to guide, though that certainly could have been part of his purpose. 6This is not to say that Foucault does not take seriously the ownership of texts by their authors. For example, in "What is an Author?" his study of the author function does not involve any assumptions about the author-as-creator of the text or about the author manifested in the text. Rather, Foucault is most interested in the historical operations that are part of the author function, a function that does not invoke the privileging of an author's agency over/in a text but an enunciation of how the author's name provides a mode of "existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses" (211). For example, a text with the name "Montaigne" attached to it can be expected to be a prototype of the essay. It can be expected to be written in a meandering, contemplative mode, to quote many important, classical authors, to incorporate personal experiences, and to be relentlessly skeptical of its own claims. 7The similarities here in Foucault's articulation of self writing and Montaigne's description of being made by his book are very likely due, at least in part, to the fact that Montaigne was such an avid reader of Seneca's work––a writer who was very much invested in the self-disciplining practices in self writing. Montaigne goes so far as to write about the "Seneca in [him]" in his essay "Of Books" (297), and in the same essay, he states that the books from which he learned "to arrange [his] humors and [his] ways" are those of Plutarch and Seneca. (It is worth noting, too, that in the 2003 Penguin Edition of Montaigne's essays, translator M. A. Screech uses the verb control instead of arrange. See Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. A. Screech. As Foucault points out, "[T]he theme of application of oneself to oneself is well known [in Antiquity]: it is to this activity … that a man must devote himself, to the exclusion of other occupations" (Care 46). Montaigne, too, takes this occupation as seriously as the writers of Antiquity. He states, "For those who go over themselves in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength" ("Of Giving" 504). 8I believe that this is a reference to a metaphor about beehives found in the opening paragraph of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, and this metaphor, perhaps unsurprisingly, also shows up in Seneca's writing. 9In "On Keeping a Notebook," Didion argues that we should use our notebooks to "keep in touch" with old selves, past experiences, seemingly fleeting ideas/images/feelings. She states, "It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about" (140).

Following historian Deborah Lipstadt's 2000 victory over David Irving in a monumental libel lawsuit, Lipstadt declared that the Holocaust would henceforth reign uncontested as historical fact. Yet within the last five years Holocaust denial has grown exponentially, exacerbating the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as tensions between what the general public often defines as the Western and Muslim worlds. While Litvak and Webman's From Empathy to Denial directly engages scholarship in Holocaust and Middle Eastern studies on this issue, their important work also promises to inform ongoing discussions among rhetoricians about belief systems and intolerance. By framing Holocaust denial in Arab cultures as a distinct subject, Litvak and Webman have used place and time as vital tools for analyzing cultural beliefs underlying anti-Semitism in the Middle East. As a counterpoint, Elhanan Yakira's discussion of political philosophies in Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust seeks to restructure the dominant perception of Holocaust denial as hate speech by exploring how many Jewish intellectuals reference the Holocaust to support their own critiques of Israel rather than to justify its policies toward Palestinians. Within these texts lies an implicit notion of kairos, described by John Poulakos in Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (U of South Carolina P, 1995), as the ability to “address issues in their topicality and typicality” and “place a single case within a larger context, a context that helps render the case meaningful” (178). The rich contexts provided by Litvak and Webman and Yakira challenge Western ideological reactions toward Holocaust denial in order to foster more meaningful conversations.

The editors and eight other rhetorical critics have produced powerful critiques of public address with a special emphasis on the relationship between our rhetorical practices and moral issues. Thes...

As the plurals in the title, Rhetorics of the Americas, and dates drawn from the Epi-Olmec/Mayan calendar suggest, the scope of this anthology has been broadly conceived. By focusing on rhetorical ...

Deconstructing the praxis involved in the collecting of discourse in late nineteenth-century American autograph albums, this essay links the socially based practices involved in middle-class young women's (re)inscription of messages of friendship within such spaces to Jacques Derrida's theory of différance. While the commonplace language contained within such objects often has a conservative orientation, its circulation within communities through customary practices of exchange opened up opportunities for rhetorical invention. The opportunity to write in these locations also represented access to new discursive arenas, participation which likely played a part in women's gradually increasing access to the public sphere.

Over the last two decades, environmental rhetoric, ecocomposition, and related work in scientific and technical communication have developed at a steady, if overall unimpressive rate compared to th...

Peripatetic critic Demetrius has received little attention in rhetorical scholarship, but at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of On Style sparked debate among the English faculty, whose neo-Aristotelianism significantly articulated departmental direction. This tension centered on the use of the “forcible” style, and the subsequent debate gave rise to a faction of Chicago faculty who were sympathetic to the “New Rhetoric” of Kenneth Burke, who lectured there in 1949. This article demonstrates the significance of institutional context in the creation of critical positions, that these positions are often rhetorical responses to administrative, pedagogical, and political problems.

The online activist site TakingITGlobal offers teachers of rhetoric a pedagogical heuristic that enables us to rethink and revise rhetorical education. More specifically, the site raises questions concerning what the “civic” means inside a global rather than a national context. It revitalizes thinking about how students might “go public” in both online and offline spaces. And it challenges ideas about the traditional rhetorical practice in which an individual rhetor composes a single document for a specific audience.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is widely regarded as one of the most important women's rights orators of the nineteenth century. She is credited with opening new rhetorical spaces for women through brilliant rhetorical appeals. In her 1854 speech to the Legislature of New York, however, her brilliant rhetorical appeals were also appeals to the racist, classist, and paternalistic biases of her white male audience. A paradox of social reform is the need to simultaneously assert difference and sameness with the dominant classes, and Cady Stanton's efforts to negotiate this paradox ultimately reinforced the social hierarchy she hoped to undermine.

What's becoming of the history of composition? In previous decades we generally spoke in terms of “rhetoric and composition,” with “composition” understood to be about the teaching of writing. Hist...

Abstract In this essay we explicate notions of technology, self, and writing imbricated in new media responses to the Virginia Tech shootings. In our analysis we bring a consideration of affect and the normalization of emotional responses to bear on "aftermath texts" (online commentary on the shootings and on Cho's writing itself). We ultimately argue for a greater awareness of subjectivity and affect in our disciplinary and pedagogical explorations and narrations of technology. Notes 1We thank our RR peer reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Shane Borrowman for their insightful feedback as we worked on this essay. 2It is a sad reality that neither the Virginia Tech tragedy nor the human response to it is unique. Cell phones, texting, and amateur video have played a role in every major disaster since the technologies became readily available. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, for example, documented their plans for Columbine on videotapes, a number of which were found in Harris's bedroom after the massacre, and there are, literally, terabytes of digital archiving and commentary on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the 2005 London subway bombings, and roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our profession and others have responded to trauma and its implications for our work: Witness Shane Borrowman's 2005 collection Trauma and the Teaching of Writing; the 2004 two-volume issue of JAC focused on "Trauma and Rhetoric"; online discussions on the WPA listserv about using writing and the composition class to respond to institution-wide tragedies; and, of course, the burgeoning field of trauma studies. Indeed, the sad, simultaneous proliferation of technology and tragedy has offered much evidence of the epistemelogical power of writing; to write is to make sense, even if what we write about is, finally, senseless. 3See CNN.com for more information about the Columbine shooting and the shooters' use of video and other technology: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/US/12/12/columbine.tapes/index.html 4Dissenting views on the blogsite appeared scattered throughout the postings: 5Certainly, like many of our colleagues in English and writing studies across the country, we sympathized with our colleagues at Virginia Tech and understood that writing and literature courses would be among the primary places—given their size and the humanist content and subjects frequently taught in them—in which students (and faculty) would want to process such a terrifying and tragic experience. We also understood that Cho's status as an English major, and the fact that both his print and video texts were held up as objects of scrutiny and even as "explanations" for his behavior, demanded an accounting of the connections between violence, writing, and subjectivity. We know we are not alone in our continuing horror in response to that April morning in Virginia. We wonder, again, how we as a culture might prevent such violence, and we are keenly aware of the fundamental inability of academic texts to respond to such a tragedy. We thus offer this essay as an exploration of yet another explosive instance of what Lynn Worsham famously called "pedagogic violence." Indeed, such tragedies as the Virginia Tech murders pose seemingly unanswerable questions: Why would someone do such a thing? What kind of person is capable of killing so many others? What must his sense of self, his interior life, have been like? And how have his actions changed the interior and communal lives of others? Such questions cut to the heart of subjectivity, and they were frequently debated through a wide variety of electronic media. At the same time, such questions evoked Worsham's exploration of pedagogic violence in "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." Many of us wanted, as Worsham writes, to "be comforted by the view that violence is the unfortunate result of individual pathology" rather than an outlaw response to regimes of affect that are the "primary and most valuable product" of late consumer capitalism" (219). To some great extent, Cho's behavior up to and including his multiple murders offers us that comfort. It also points to larger issues of systemic violence, to the relative ease of gun possession, to institutional inabilities to prevent violence, and so forth, in ways that removed that comfort for us almost immediately. 6Some of our previous work has touched on this idea; specifically, see Jonathan's Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, which examines students' development of rhetorical savvy in the design of websites for a variety of purposes—personal, communal, and even political.

For it is only through speech finely spoken that deeds nobly done gain from their hearers the meed of memory and renown. Plato, Menexenus 237a Now when they saw the boldness [parrhesia] of Peter an...

In God's Politics evangelical minister Jim Wallis uses what I call “prophetic alchemy,” a strategy meant to reconcile and combine two opposing viewpoints—particularly liberal secularists and conservative Christians—into one progressive agenda for social change. Prophetic alchemy is magical thinking through argument, and as rhetorical strategy it participates in Kenneth Burke's alchemic tropes, particularly transcendence and division. In this article I review prophetic rhetoric as a genre, situate Wallis's rhetorical efforts in the timeline of the Protestant dialectic between progressive and conservative ideologies, and then analyze God's Politics as it participates in prophecy by attempting to reconcile opposing audiences through the symbolic power of prophetic alchemy.

Abstract Co-owning and writing for one of the world's largest private publishing houses in the 1920s and 1930s, Marcet Haldeman-Julius's (1887–1941) position should have guaranteed her a place in American women's literary history. Haldeman-Julius's socialist and feminist exigency, though, was elided by a complex and emotionally abusive marriage to her editor and publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, whose final approval represented her chance to effectively enter the public sphere. This study recovers Haldeman-Julius's work and traces her significant attempts to negotiate the paradox of writing as a feminist in ways rhetorically coded to escape certain audiences and to activate others. Notes 1I want to thank Catherine Hobbs for her meticulous reading of my manuscript and her insightful and charitable guidance in bringing this piece through the review stages. I would also like to thank Breon Mitchell at Indiana University's Lilly Library, as a portion of my research was made possible by a Helm Visiting Fellowship. Thanks also to Randy Roberts and Janette Mauk at the Leonard Axe Library at Pittsburg State University for their generous assistance during the research process as well as Teresa Coble at the Kansas State Historical Society. I would also like to publicly express my gratitude to Frank Farmer, Maryemma Graham, Brian Donovan, Amy Devitt, Susan Gubar, Bill Tuttle, Ann Schofield, and James Gunn for their guidance, time, and encouragement, at various stages of this process. In the end, though, I owe the most to Rebecca, Gus, Mae Hazel, Reba, and Steve for their patience, energy, and optimism.

In this essay I discuss and exemplify a wide range of nontraditional concepts and texts as they relate to the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to give teachers of writing and their students new strategies for understanding and producing discourse. More specifically, I hope to give readers new ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, invention, genre, arrangement, and audience.

The attentions given to textual production in composition scholarship have led to a neglect of the dynamics of textual reception. Renewed acquaintance with the discipline of hermeneutics will provide scholars and instructors with a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between interpretive processes and rhetorical strategies. Building on the work of Phelps, Mailloux, and Crusius, this article revisits Gadamer and Ricoeur, two of the more prominent scholars of modern hermeneutics, for the purpose of applying their principles to learning objectives and class assignments in college-level writing courses.

This essay argues that strong versions of rhetoric share with weak versions of rhetoric an aversion to vulnerability. Claiming that the shared aversion to vulnerability hinders a fuller articulation of a strong version of rhetoric, the essay goes on to argue for redefining vulnerability as a characteristic that enlarges rhetorical thinking. Vulnerability is described not as a weakness but as a strength, an attitude of care and concern that connects us to the world and to each other. The essay is written as a meditation and is meant to encourage the reader's active engagement with the argument.

Democracy is often described in terms of the aesthetics of multiplicity in uniformity, which celebrates the feeling of community of individuals coming together in difference. However, a more reliable mark of a healthy democratic society is the periodic presence of rhetorical singularities that challenge shared conventions and risk rhetorical failure for the sake of inspiring excellence in character. Like the prose of Emerson and Nietzsche, rhetorical singularities employ tragic ideals to expose the comic limitations of culture in order to transvaluate values and dare creative individuals to strive past limits and so advance society beyond the bounds of convention.

Abstract Relying on a rhetorical strategy known as the New Departure, Victoria Woodhull went before the House Judiciary Committee in 1871 to defend woman's suffrage. Although her address captured the respect of her contemporaries, Woodhull's contribution to the fight for woman's suffrage has yet to be recognized. As she displayed rhetorical competence in a once exclusively male rhetorical space, Woodhull embodied the subjectivity of a public woman for her immediate and extended audiences. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Susan Kates and Nan Johnson for their invaluable feedback. I am also grateful for Shirley Wilson Logan's direction as I worked on this essay for my MA Writing Project at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Rhetorical invention is the principal source of politics and ethics as contemporary theories from various disciplines demonstrate. The complex reflexive relationship among politics, ethics, and invention demands ethical responsibility, requiring rhetoricians (who hold a key to this subject) to acknowledge and attend to their ethos, used here in the classical sense of ethos as “gathering place.”