Rhetoricians and compositionists of all persuasions—and rhetoricians of science in particular—have much to celebrate with the publication of Leah Ceccarelli’s On the Frontier of Science: An America...

Composition studies has recently increasingly engaged with economic concerns, as evidenced by the 2012 Watson Conference on “Economies of Writing” and a corresponding special issue of JAC. However, that increased engagement has not reflected an increased engagement with economic scholarship, resulting in a rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or a metaphor for non-economic phenomenon. Attention to economic scholarship can provide composition studies with a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

Oral history projects about rhetorical studies contribute to transdisciplinary histories by creating living texts that reflect the dynamism of scholarly cultures. Through interviews conducted at the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST), we chart the organizational and intellectual history of a field, its contributions to science studies, and its potential future directions. These digitized, archived oral histories serve as an articulation point for transdisciplinary reflection, but they also represent an important strand of digital humanities work that creates living texts and keeps them open for future articulations.

Historians of rhetoric characterize the Ciceronian Period of the Republic as the highlight of rhetoric at Rome. By contrast, the Augustan Period of the Early Empire immediately following this “gold...

Nineteenth-century AME preacher Julia Foote self-published her spiritual autobiography twice during her itinerancy; the text—a blend of personal and collective narrative and sermonic rhetoric—enabled her to enter the more public, political discourse of religious activism. Foote engages in national sociopolitical debates, uses publically available histories, and manipulates genre to create a de facto church service over which she can preside. In essence, Foote’s text is a performative subgenre of the spiritual autobiography—the itinerant book—that literally circulates in print culture as an activist text and figuratively circulates within the psychic fervor of late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

First-year composition emerged at Harvard largely because of administrative attempts to address institutional, as opposed to pedagogical, issues. In particular, Harvard administrators sought to improve articulation with public high schools in order to increase enrollments, attract new populations of students, and retain matriculants. First-year composition provided a mechanism for doing so. Because of first-year composition’s value for articulation, it was endorsed by accreditation associations and consequently spread across the country as accreditation did. Articulation and accreditation were not expressly concerned with writing instruction, but they ultimately had profound effects on the development of writing instruction in American higher education.

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.

Rhetorical approaches to identification have tended to favor it over its counterpart, division. However, compensatory divisions can be rhetorically productive for protest movements that challenge the state. An analysis of the use of these divisions in the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the use of the human microphone and computer networking—shows that these technologies aid in enacting divisions between protestors and the dominant social structures that they challenge, thus creating the potential for rhetorically productive sociality.

A reconstruction of the required two-year course in composition and rhetoric for all incoming students at Bryn Mawr College at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on archival sources such as college catalogs and related documents, administrative correspondence, and student papers—specifically those by Margery Scattergood, who entered Bryn Mawr in 1913—shows an adherence to the belletristic tradition. The course provided practice in criticism in the Arnoldian sense of the word. The focus on the role of the writer as critic provided Bryn Mawr students with opportunities to engage with issues of public interest.

Historians of rhetoric have provided research over the last three decades that has significantly advanced our knowledge of women in the rhetorical tradition. These achievements, while often stunning, have also exposed the need for more primary research, particularly in classical rhetoric where a wealth of evidence awaits study. Such evidence is frequently found in nontraditional sources and, correspondingly, calls for nontraditional methods of analysis. The need and merits of this view are presented in two ways. First, an overview of nontraditional sources offers new insights to the literacy of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan women. Second, a more specific and detailed illustration of the research potential of this perspective is presented by deciphering an inscription from Teos, a small but important Greek city that is now a part of Turkey. The epigraphical evidence available from the archaeological site at Teos reveals that young women had systematic education in advanced stages of writing. Such findings challenge traditional characterizations of ancient women as nonliterate. The intent of this work is to reveal the need for more primary fieldwork in order to attain a more accurate understanding of women and the range of their manifestations of literacy in the ancient world.

Antinarcissistic rhetoric refers to the ways in which women rhetors appropriate patriarchal discourses in order to create an ethos with their audience. This rhetoric often reinforces the social inequities that require women's silence in the first place. A look to the rhetoric of two historical women, Hortensia and Queen Elizabeth I, theorizes antinarcissistic rhetoric in three parts: the dual gender performance, the use of psogos, and the dismissal of the corporeal body.

The epideictic genre of rhetoric has traditionally included public, ceremonial types of rhetoric, such as eulogies and public speeches, that affirm communities. Public memorials and even lyric poetry, however, also epideictically constitute personal and communal identities. When read through the theoretical lenses of Kenneth Burke and Emmanuel Levinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” seems to evoke a public, communal attitude in readers. This epideictic effect challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private audiences, inviting us to think more broadly about epideictic rhetoric and its audiences.

Abstract Disability disclosures in academic scholarship raise questions about possibilities of rhetorical agency. This article engages performances of disability disclosure and recent theories of rhetorical agency to show such disclosures as the culmination of recurring processes in which past experiences are brought to bear on a present moment as people recognize opportune moments for action. Notes 1 Thanks to Scot Barnett, Brenda Brueggemann, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Margaret Price, and Amy Vidali for helping me develop this project. Especial thanks to Theresa Enos for her editorial guidance and to RR reviewers Jay Dolmage and Debra Hawhee for their thoughtful and valuable reviewers' reports. 2 I mean this in two ways: both literally in a different place—at different institutions and locations in different parts of the country—but also in terms of my place in scholarly experience, ranging from graduate school to being in my fifth year as an assistant professor. 3 Importantly, Price has recently revised her discussion of "kairotic space" to include what she calls "tele/presence" in order to acknowledge exchanges that occur even when participants are not physically present with one another (Yergeau et al., "Multimodality"). 4 This essay also appears in a slightly revised form as chapter 5 in Mad at School.

I am one of those kooks who believe that when I kneel down by my bedside at night to pray, my ill-formed, spontaneous, and largely unuttered thoughts somehow project out into the universe and into ...

In recent years multimodal and multimedia have become buzzwords with substantial cache in composition circles. As Clair Lauer outlines in “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in th...

Abstract Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is a well-known and much-analyzed speech. But one prominent feature, its use of chiasmus (or inverse repetition), has gone largely unremarked, as it has gone largely unremarked in analyses of Lincoln's thought and language more generally. If chiasmus was important for Lincoln, however, it is curiously absent at a key moment in the Second Inaugural—the end of the third paragraph. Why? To answer that question is to understand something important about Lincoln's political and rhetorical ideology. Notes 1Thank you to RR reviewers Barbara Warnick and Andrew King and Editor Theresa Enos for their comments and encouragement regarding this essay. 2Michiko Kakutani, “Lincoln as the Visionary with His Eye on the Prize,” The New York Times, October 25, 2005. 3Nathan Neely Fleming was brother of my great-great-grandfather, John Giles Fleming, and namesake of my great-grandfather, his nephew. 4 Speech of N. N. Fleming, Esq., of Rowan, on the convention question, delivered in Committee of the Whole in the House of Commons of North-Carolina, January 16th, 1861 (Raleigh, NC: 1861). Available in The North Carolina Collection of the UNC Libraries, Chapel Hill, NC. I am grateful to Julie Oliver Fleming for locating and copying this speech. 5Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 6White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 7White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 151. 8See images of the manuscript in Lincoln's hand at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/pin2202page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. I take my text from this manuscript, adding my own paragraph and sentence numbers (e.g., 2.4). A full version of the text with my lineation can be found at http://people.umass.edu/dfleming/english550-lincoln.html. 9White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech, is a good source on the background of the speech. 10Ibid. 165. 11The whole speech in fact is highly monosyllabic: 505 of 703 words are monosyllables according to White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 48. 12Cf. “government of the people, by the people, for the people” from the Gettysburg Address. 13Lincoln may have learned this formulation from Daniel Webster's 1830 speech against Hayne, with its call for “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable” (Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 83, 113). 14Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, 123. 15Dr. Mardy Grothe, Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You (New York: Penguin, 1999). 16I take the example from Gideon Burton's “Forest of Rhetoric” website: http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm. 17Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 123. 18John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961. 19Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 135. 20“Chiasmus seems to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together, as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first… . The ABBA form seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument, as when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author with, ‘Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’” (Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1991]: 33). 21PBS NewsHour, October 15, 2008. 22David Brooks, “Thinking About Obama,” The New York Times, October 17, 2008. 23Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 122 (quoting Elton Trueblood). 24A useful analysis of the different effects of chiasmus can be found in Clark, “‘Measure for Measure.’” 25As Kraemer notes (“‘It May Seem Strange’”), Garry Wills interpreted the Gettysburg Address chiastically, claiming that Lincoln turned the dedicatory function of the occasion upside down: “We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us” (Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 63; see also 68). As far as I can tell, however, Wills never actually uses the word chiasmus in either his book-length treatment of that speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, or the more pointed discussion of it in his article on the Second Inaugural (“Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”). Kraemer, however, does use the word chiasmus to talk about sentence 3.9 of the Second Inaugural, which I'll also examine below. But, as for more sustained treatments of chiasmus in Lincoln or in the Second Inaugural, Gardner's essay is the only example I could find, other than my own; his treatment, both of chiasmus and of the Second Inaugural, is so different from mine, however, that they are difficult to reconcile. The lack of attention to Lincoln's use of chiasmus in general, and its role in the Second Inaugural in particular, is curious given the detailed rhetorical analysis that is a staple of Lincoln scholarship (for examples of such analysis in terms of the Second Inaugural, see, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; and Wills's “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”—none of which mentions chiasmus). Of course, many analysts have pointed out the balance and symmetry that characterize much of this speech, and several have further noted the tension here between a kind of New Testament discourse of charity and an Old Testament one of retribution. 26Ronald White (Lincoln's Greatest Speech) repeats a contemporary journalistic report that has Lincoln pausing significantly before sentence 2.5 (79). In support of that reading is the layout of Lincoln's actual delivery text (see Wilson's Lincoln's Sword), which can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/-pin2202page.db&recNum=5&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. 27On the combination of chiasmus and paralipsis here, see also Kraemer, “‘It may seem strange.’” 28Miller, Lincoln's Virtue 275. 29Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 6:409. 30White, The Eloquent President 125–52, 363–64, emphasis in original. 31They are, interestingly enough, arranged chiastically: OT NT NT OT. 32White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 101 33Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 241. 34Ibid. 243. 35Interestingly, this is the first and only mention of “North” and “South” in the speech. 36Menand, Metaphysical Club 56. 37Among the killed: a confederate officer from North Carolina named Nathan Neely Fleming. 38Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 39These words were probably uttered very slowly. (In Lincoln's August 1863 letter to James Cook Conkling, which accompanied his written remarks for a Springfield rally, he had suggested, “Read it very slowly” [see White, The Eloquent President 193].) 40Don E. Fehrenbacher, qtd. in Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 38. 41David Herbert Donald, Lincoln 567. 42Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 138. 43Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 146. 44White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 162. 45Carwardine, Lincoln 246. 46Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 242. 47Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 148. 48Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 141–43. “In Joshua Wolf Shenk's telling metaphor, Lincoln [saw clearly] by the summer of 1864 that he was NOT really the captain of the ship; but neither did he regard himself as an ‘idle passenger. [He was rather] a sailor on deck with a job to do’” (Wilson, Lincoln's Sword 261). 49A paraphrase of Lincoln's April 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges, qtd. in Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 66. 50See, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 51Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 64. 52Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 252–72. 53Abraham Lincoln, Speeches & Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 689, emphasis added; see also Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 144; and Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 8:356. 54This ability of Lincoln to effect moral power without being moralizing is treated eloquently in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues, passim. 55Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 59. 56Thomas Mallon, “Set in Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Memory,” The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 2008: 143. 57Wilson, “The Old Stone House” 130. 58White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 93–94. 59Ward, Burns, and Burns, The Civil War 360.

The Red Hat Society, an international social club for women over age fifty, offers its members a social outlet during aging. Departing from a common focus on members' emotional health, a rhetorical lens on the red and purple hats and costumes the women wear offers a new consideration of the groups' value. Particularly, the creation and donning of “regalia” by members of a Rhode Island chapter constitute instances of material rhetoric, or texts that challenge public perceptions of aging women and provide rhetorical opportunities that aging women take to change the conditions of their own and other women's lives.

Artist Graham Robertson referred to British performer Ellen Terry (1847–1928) as the “Painter's Actress.” Many nineteenth-century female performers benefited from relationships with fine art, using the image on the canvas as a vehicle for combatting stereotypes surrounding women in the theater. In aligning herself with the bohemian Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, Terry established respectability through fine art and offered a feminine persona that was a powerful alternative to domesticity. Cultivating this persona not only through paintings but also through photographs and textual representations, Terry suggests the ways in which women could employ multimodal arguments to secure their place in the public sphere.

Though South Africa's interim constitution—one of the key documents in facilitating the country's passage from apartheid to democracy—was ratified nearly two decades ago, the country's transition c...

Abstract Rhetoric-composition's turn toward posthumanism and complexity theory promises to help the field grasp contemporary writing. However, the turn's promise is undermined by its disregard for history, overvaluation of complexity, and unwillingness to engage the field's common sense. Giambattista Vico's theories of rhetoric and human development not only challenge the turn's representation of Enlightenment humanism but also point to the turn's inability to help writers participate in today's complex institutions. Vichian ingenium can serve as a touchstone for critical humanist scholarship and pedagogies that seek to chart a course between a bourgeois humanism and a barbaric posthumanism. Notes 1For the helpful comments and criticisms, many thanks go out to the two RR peer reviewers, Louise Phelps and Jeremy Engels, and Timothy Brennan.

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.

As America entered the twentieth century, a number of women contributed to the popular elocution movement through their publication of compilations of recitation, dialogues, tableaux, and other elocutionary genres. An examination of woman-authored elocutionary compilations reveals a nascent feminism: Through their selection of pieces that examine women's changing roles and celebrate women's accomplishments—both within and beyond the domestic sphere—women compilers encouraged novice women speakers to rethink their gendered societal roles.

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.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

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.