I have been looking forward to the publication of City of Rhetoric since I first heard David Fleming present his research on the rhetoric of gentrification several years ago. My anticipation was a ...

Edward Jerningham's “Impenitence” (1800)––a translation of Bossuet's “Sermon du mauvais riche” (1662)––is remarkably dissimilar to its French original. This article investigates the rhetorical reasons behind this discrepancy. These reasons concern the problems of promoting a French model of eloquence in a fiercely anti-French climate and––even more problematic––promoting a text whose main theme is a denunciation of the rich in a period of extreme counterrevolutionary fervor. Jerningham's text shows that in facing potentially resistant readers, the strategies of a translator are those of a rhetor.

Analysis of a collection of contemporary recommendation letters for admission to a PhD program in English studies revealed differences in length, level of specificity, and rhetorical appeals that applied much more strongly to candidates' acceptance status than to gender. Across both status and gender groupings, however, candidates were frequently appraised through economic metaphors, indicating a disciplinary culture that dually approaches graduate students as immediate sources of labor and as the future of the profession. Findings from these letters should promote continued conversation about disciplinary culture and clearer guidelines for those writing and requesting recommendation letters.

While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetorics, we lack methodologies that situate these factors—and the additional factor of time—in an integrated system. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “acts of institution” can help feminist rhetoricians to construct richer accounts of the gendering of the female body. The example of rhetorics surrounding women factory workers in World War II America demonstrates how rhetorical practices produce gender differences through embodied, spatiotemporal rhetorics. In this case wartime adjustments did not bring about long-term changes because they relied on a fundamental antithesis between men and women.

Abstract Lu Yin (1899–1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nüquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Mary Garrett and Xing (Lucy) Lu for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to CSU–Fresno for its support of this project with a Grant for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. 2On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Chinese government's humiliating policy toward Japan. There resulted a series of strikes and associated events amounting to a social and intellectual revolution. These events were soon dubbed by the students the May Fourth Movement, which acquired a broader meaning in later years. 3See Chinese Department at Jinan University, Zhongguo lidai shige mingpian shangxi. 180–83. 4Unless noted otherwise the passages quoted from the original texts are my translation. 5Lu Yin was well versed in classical Chinese; her view of writing was inevitably influenced by the ancient Chinese philosophers in terms of cosmology and epistemology. This sense of a unity with the whole of society and of the world comes from the Neo-Confucian tradition—the great learning paradigm grounded in the cosmological assumption of a unity of heaven and man—which claims that the outer world may be ordered by first cultivating the inherent goodness within the individual mind. 6Since the late Qing period, Chinese intellectuals and writers had engaged in the Baihua (Vernacular) Movement in which they translated various kinds of Western philosophical and literary works, experimented with new words, sentence structures, vernacular genres, and other baihua rhetorical devices to create a new culture. See Edward Gunn's Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. 7Lu Xun's short fiction "Diary of a Mad Man" was published in New Youth in May 1918. Ding Ling published "Diary of Miss Sophia" in Fiction Monthly in 1928.

How apt that I received Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis in January of 2009, a time now marked as National Mentoring Month. Rhetoric and composition as a discipline has long prided itself on...

Historians give John Pym due credit as a successful Parliamentarian; rhetorical critics examine Pym's prowess as an orator. Both perspectives focus on Pym's management of issues of the day and do not account for his masterful appropriation of political language. We conduct an ideographic analysis of twelve of his addresses to Parliament between 1640 and 1643. His discourse reveals a crucial reformulation of <law> in relation to subsidiary ideographs, including <religion>, <justice>, and <Parliamentary privilege>. These ideological innovations were instrumental in building Parliamentary opposition to Charles I and allowed for advances in democratic ideas made manifest in Anglo-American liberalism.

I offer a systematic account of the verbal-visual interaction on which presence depends in order to offer, in effect, a genealogy of presence. On the verbal side, I rely on linguistic and rhetorical analysis; on the visual, on Gestalt theory and Peirce's semiotics. To analyze verbal-visual interaction, I rely on Dual Coding Theory, borrowed from cognitive psychology. I contend that recourse to such a theory is essential if we are to explain the central mystery of Perelmanian presence, the transformation from the perceptual into the argumentative and narrative. I illustrate this transformation by analyzing a groundbreaking geological monograph.

Rhetorical theory is amply supplied with warnings against the seductive power of pleasure to persuade, but it has paid less attention to pleasure's role in resisting persuasion. Wordsworth, who is ...

What's not to trust? This commonplace rejoinder to an expression of skepticism is the sort of rhetorical question that is at issue in Susan Miller's latest book. She prefaces her study by questioni...

Looking back at a few memorable moments during the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Barry Brummett describes a discussion over whether a sweater Senator John McCain wore was “gay” as well as a c...

Abstract An allegoresis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida illuminates this drama as the playwright's act of mythopoesis that characterizes and interprets the second half of Elizabeth I's reign as an historical and political journey through adversities, crises, and conflict to a moment of unified redemption. Action and dialogue allegorically represent the diverse and disparate civic voices of this journey. The drama is Shakespeare's own civic voice morally and ethically arguing and assessing the period as an arrival to national unification, self-identity, and well-being. Notes 1I offer my gratitude to RR reviewers Mark Gellis and Andrew King for their insightful recommendations, and to Theresa Jarnagin Enos and Rhetoric Review for their patience. 2Allegory of typology as relying on well-established pre-texts—in this instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Homer's Iliad; allegory of reification as relying on allusive tropes such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, image, and personification that are culturally understood by the audience. See Quilligan (ad passim) and Barney (30–38). The two classes of allegory need not be mutually exclusive; they can be simultaneously incorporated into one allegorical work and can support each other to convey the author's perceptions. 3All quotations from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 4For a concise and comprehensive history of Commons' escalating voice and its rise to power, see J. E. Neale's introduction (15–29) and his conclusion (417–24) in Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581; and the conclusion (434–39) of Neale's Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601. Neale identifies the birth of Commons' evolving empowerment with Sir Thomas More's plea for parliamentary freedom of speech as early as 1523 during the reign of Henry VIII. 5Although probable sources, none of these names appear in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or in George Chapman's Iliad. Only one reference to the Dardan gate appears in Lydgate's Troy Book, in which it is synonymous with the famous Scaean Gate of Iliad fame. It was referred to as the Dardan gate because it faced northwest toward the Dardanelles. Only until the twentieth century did archaeological evidence at the Troy site in Hycarlic suggest other gateway entrances in Troy's walls. 6Ordish identifies seven gates in Elizabethan London: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgarte, Newgate, and Ludgate (5). However, Moorgate was considered a minor gate and originally a postern that would leave a total of six main gates for Elizabethan Londoners. The other six gates mentioned were the original six that descended from the Medieval Period. Another gate, adjacent to the Tower of London, had been demolished to construct the Tower, and only a pedestrian passageway remained. 7Graves uses an interesting turn of phrase for patronage recipients' commitment: "They also reinforced loyalty by pandering to self-interest" (114). 8The "pearl" metaphor as Elizabeth in this context in all probability held three significances for the Elizabethan audience: (1) At least from the time of the poetic works of the anonymous "Pearl Poet," the pearl signifies purity thereby affirming Elizabeth as the "Virgin Queen"; (2) Elizabeth's purity in relation to God and her Realm are divinely ordained; and (3) in like to "divine," she is ubiquitously felt yet distant and tenuous, one whose relation is not easily attained. Elizabeth's symbolic association with pearls is clearly depicted in her Pelican Portrait, c. 1575, and the Armada Portrait of 1588; her gowns and her hair are encrusted with pearls, and she is portrayed in both portraits with elaborate displays of pearl necklacing. From another perspective: In the Parliamentary session of 1597–98 when monopolies, granted under the authority of her Royal Prerogative, were being challenged by the House of Commons as lending to abuses affecting the welfare of the poor, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted her response in stating: "Her Majesty … hoped that her dutiful and loving subjects would not take away her Prerogative—which is the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem" (Neale, 1584–1601 355). 9Further exploration in identifying allegory as another separate and distinct mode of drama within the corpus of Shakespeare's plays appears viable. Preliminary examination of The Tempest has already indicated to me strong allegorical elements at work and consistent in execution with Troilus and Cressida. They lead me to consider the plays two pieces of a set as "allegory/drama"—a protracted legend of the Tudor Dynasty and its relinquishing evolution to the Stuarts. This preliminary thesis would also include Henry VIII as a necessary stage for Troilus and Tempest to complete the set as a dynastic work. 10… and possibly propaganda for Elizabeth's recent favor toward the House of Commons, also a positive assessment of her reign for the chronicles of history. 11See Dennis Slattery's discussion of mythopoesis as "the ground of narrative knowing" in Sophocles' Theban Plays and the journey from the profane to the sacred in his essay, "Oedipus at Colonus: Pilgrimage from Blight to Blessedness" (ad passim).

Paul Butler's Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Studies in Composition and Rhetoric enters into several contentious conversations taking place in and around composition studies today. Ostensibly,...

This article positions letters of recommendation as important and troubling indicators of faculty beliefs about diversity and access in higher education. I focus on the disclosure of disability, both by examining the history of disclosing stigmatized difference and by analyzing five letters of recommendation for an aspiring graduate student with a traumatic brain injury. I suggest that faculty must revise their letter-writing practices and engage in a type of rhetorical forecasting that questions well-intentioned disclosures of difference and imagines how various letters form a composite sketch of a candidate.

Why do the Chinese relate rhetoric only to stylistic devices in writing? This question, which has puzzled scholars for decades, is finally answered. Modern Chinese rhetoric began to form in the late 1800s when Chinese students learned Western rhetoric from their Japanese professors, who translated it into “the study of beautiful prose,” subsequently severing it from oratory. In the early twentieth century, scholars returning from Japan and the US integrated Japanese theories and Anglo-American figures of speech into Chinese literary and literacy traditions despite nativists' protests and appropriated them into a canon of aesthetics only for writing studies.

Abstract During WWII psychologist Carl Rogers introduced a verbal counseling technique that could be utilized by clergy, teachers, and USO workers to help veterans overcome problems of readjustment. Rogers's arhetorical principles were adapted for the writing classroom by Young, Becker, and Pike—an adaptation that later led composition historian James Berlin to misinterpret the implementation of Rogers's principles in his study of a WWII communication program. These misinterpretations of Rogers's original intent have resulted in debate over the rhetorical or arhetorical nature of Rogerian rhetoric and have led to an inaccurate association between Rogerian rhetoric and expressivist and therapeutic writing. Notes 1My thanks to RR reviewers Paul Bator and Janice Lauer for their detailed and helpful revision recommendations, and to my colleagues Robin Veder and Mary Richards for their generous advice on early drafts. 2 Rhetoric and Reality is required reading for many PhD programs in rhetoric and composition and as such has informed, and continues to inform, a majority of scholars in the field. Sharon Crowley cites Rhetoric and Reality as the source for her statement that "[o]ne truly radical communication skills program … was implemented at the University of Denver" (Composition 172). And David Russell refers to Rhetoric and Reality several times in support of his treatment of communications courses and expressivist writing instruction. 3Although Young, Becker, and Pike defer to Anatol Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates as a foundation for their theory, Rapoport is rarely mentioned as the initiator of either the strategies for or the terms Rogerian argument or Rogerian rhetoric. 4See Halasek; Bator; Hairston; and Ede. 5It is now (many years following the publication of the Rogers and Young et al.'s discussion) possible for Rogers's strategy of "listening" to a reader's point of view to succeed in a synchronous online chat environment, where a writer has a present/absent audience, and the reader is capable of presenting immediate feedback to the writer. 6Young, Becker, and Pike insist that the other two prongs of their Rogerian argument strategy for writers are an alternative to conventional argument, but their proposal of delineating "the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid" and convincing the reader that he and the writer have "moral qualities (honesty, integrity, and good will)" in common seem little more than a watered-down version of Aristotle's very conventional appeal to ethos (275). 7Rogers did later validate his person-centered approach through the formation of the Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, an organization that helped ease social tensions in such troubled areas as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America. Perhaps it was this successful approach to social and political conflict resolution that initially attracted Young et al. to Rogers's principles and convinced them to attempt an adaptation of those same principles as an alternative to the agonistic type of argument taught in the writing classroom. 8The conventions of the Institute of General Semantics state that the term general semantics is not capitalized. 9In his introductory chapter to Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin does identify the use of general semantics as "a device for propaganda analysis" (10) and does give Denver credit for promoting "cooperative rather then competitive thinking" (101). 10Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke conducted a study for the War Department in the spring of 1943 and concluded that "nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations" due to "a thing called psychoneurosis" (11). By 1946 at least 40 percent of men receiving pensions for a physical disability were labeled as psychoneurotics, but only 10 percent of that 40 percent had seen combat. 11Archival evidence from the University of Denver reveals that enrollment rose "by 57 percent compared to the pre-war enrollments of 1939" and "the percent of Veterans on campus rose to 60 percent" (Zazzarino). 12Elbow sees the terms expressivist or expressionist as problematic and credits them both as terms of "disapproval" coined by Berlin. In defining the terms as "writing that expresses what I feel, see, think," Elbow concludes that they are "indistinguishable from any other kind of writing" ("Binary Thinking" 20). 13See also Halasek for an insightful analysis of ways in which Elbow's "Believing Game" can be applied to Rogerian principles.

An Inconvenient Truth has inspired a wave of public concern about global warming. The film's environmental rhetoric invokes a millennial apocalypticism inherited from canonical works like Silent Spring. However, Truth moderates its apocalyptic tendencies with scientific rationalism and constructions of audience agency. In so doing, Truth offers a tempered apocalypticism that embraces the affect of a more fiery tradition while maintaining an authoritative voice, thereby appealing to a broader audience. Truth makes clear that there can be no singular environmental rhetoric, but a mixture of rhetorics that mirrors the contentious climate of environmental politics.

Abstract The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms. Notes 1I thank generous RR reviewers Richard Enos and Michelle Ballif for their advice and assistance with this essay. 2In Grosz's words, "[T]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory" (Volatile 3). The body then becomes "what is not mind … implicitly defined as unruly, disruptive, in need of direction or judgment, merely incidental … a brute givenness which requires overcoming" (Volatile 3–4). 3Thanks to Richard Enos for his thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript. 4Disability studies scholars use the term normate to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. The word normative also converts the idea of normalcy into an active process—norms "are" but they also "act"—we live in a culture in which norms are enforced, a normative society. It can—and has—been argued that in antiquity there was not a concept of normalcy per se. But as Lennard Davis writes, although the word normal appeared in English only in the mid-nineteenth century, "before the rise of the concept of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word ideal. … [I]n the culture of the ideal, physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body" (Enforcing 105). Yet Aristotle had more than one concept of ideality—he expounded on the idea of the mean, for instance. He outlined the idea of both an absolute mean, a method for measuring humans against one another, and a relative mean, a system for disciplining oneself (Nicomachean Ethics II 6–7). I would argue that the commingling of these imperatives results in a normative culture or society—both the upheld fiction of perfection and the systematic self- and Other-surveillance and bodily discipline of normative processes. 5This is true for women particularly, but the stigma of femininity is also applied to men. For instance, Demosthenes was said to have been soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overly feminine demeanor. Physical disability is mingled with femininity to discredit him—see his exchanges with Meidias in particular and Cicero's investigation of Demosthenes' self-education in De Oratore. The story of Demosthenes that has been popularized holds that through rhetorical practice Demosthenes overcame these "impediments" to become a great orator (see Hawhee; Fredal). The possibility that Demosthenes' difference could have queered his bodily/rhetorical performance in a generative sense is not addressed—indeed, any such transgressive possibility is ignored, despite that fact that other historians convincingly challenge the narratives of overcoming and passing that have been ascribed to Demosthenes (see Martha Rose). 6In contrast, an abstract, flawless (male) body becomes a tool for norming. As (Plato wrote and) Socrates said in the Phaedrus, "[A]ny discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128). 7In the Phaedrus, Plato could be seen to change positions slightly, suggesting that certain forms of more "scientific" and therefore "noble" rhetoric might be acceptable (see White; Ramsay; McAdon; Solmsen for a range of readings). 8I gesture here to the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, foundational in disability studies. Garland-Thomson was one of the first scholars to show that "seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications" ("The New Disability Studies" 19). These premises are also the premises of this essay. 9Hawhee's linkages between mêtis and wrestling, and then between wrestling and rhetoric, provide an interesting image for this form of intelligence: "the corporeality of mêtis" as "struggle" or "the swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs" (46, 45). 10In Randy Lee Eickhoff's recent translation of the Odyssey, he points out that Odysseus, considered to be another exemplar of mêtis, uses the name me tis or "no man" as a pun (n4; 404). 11 Mêtis has the practical advantage (and perhaps theoretical disadvantage) of "disappearing into its own action [so that] it has no image of itself" (de Certeau 82). Mêtis cannot be contextualized or schematized because each time it occurs in a context, it shifts that context, and each sequence it is inserted into is distorted (de Certeau 83–84). 12In the classical context, Homer, the mythical seer Tiresias, Oedipus, the great orator Demosthenes, Paris's killer Philoctetes, Croesus's deaf son, and others form our view of disability. In these stories, typically, disability impels narrative through the themes of overcoming, compensation, divine punishment, and charity. 13As I have previously argued, we can also view mythical discourse as, in the words of Susan Jarratt, "capable of containing the beginnings of … public argument and internal debate" (35). Despite the idea, advanced by Eric Havelock in particular, that myth was rote and didactic, we might see myth as being connected to the body, as being highly rhetorical, as being an arena for mêtis—thus my retellings hopefully honor this spirit (see also Slatkin). 14The myth of Metis can be traced as far back as Hesiod (Theogony lines 886–900). 15It is worth noting that these ableist accents on the denunciation of mêtis are also accompanied by a distinct ethnocentrism and even xenophobia. The word metic meant immigrant in ancient Athens. The word is a compound of the words change (meta) and house (oikos), and literally meant someone who changed houses. Many of Plato's attacks on the flexibility, malleability, and the bodily materiality of rhetoric are aimed at the Sophists, metic non-Athenians, and are part and parcel with a larger ideological agenda. 16 Techne was similarly made practical. As Janet Atwill explains in Rhetoric Re-Claimed, techne, when it is allied with mêtis (as it is by the Sophists), "deforms limits into new paths in order to reach—or, better yet, to produce—an alternative destination" (69). Yet we now refer to technai, handbooks full of sets of rules and examples, when we think of techne. William Covino argues that "reactions against the Sophists contributed to the establishment of rhetoric as techne without magic" (20). This distortion is similar to the attempt to ally mêtis only with the forms of knowledge Plato and Aristotle most highly value—to make it precise, a science, as Aristotle does. 17When defining phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle never truly rules out the idea that one would need some form of cunning intelligence to have "prudence," and the version of phronesis he outlines is certainly an abstract form of knowledge. He suggests that to have prudence one must understand particulars as well as universals. Yet the version of phronesis that was later adopted—for instance as one of the Medieval four cardinal virtues—sheds much of this uncertainty and avoids reference to cunning intelligence. 18There also may have been a familial connection between Hephaestus and Medusa—in some myths the two are sexual partners. Their child, Cacus, was said to be a fire-breathing giant. Cacus was said to eat human flesh and nail human heads to his door. Killing him was one of Heracles's twelve labors (Graves, The Greek Myths 158). This link is not made by all scholars, though the story shows up in Ovid and in Virgil's Aeneid. 19Often, Medusa wasseen to symbolize "artful eloquence." For instance, Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century and Nancy Vickers in the twenty-first both argue for this reading. As Salutati suggests, the snakes on her head might be seen as "rhetorical ornaments … instruments of wisdom" because snakes are "reported to be the most cunning" (55). In this interpretation Medusa turns an audience to stone not because of her looks but because of her rhetorical power—her audience "so convinced of what they have been persuaded that they may be said to have acquired a stony quality" (56). Vickers goes further, sourcing this connection back to Plato (254). She also argues that Medusa's "stoning" be seen as a rhetorical power, an ability to change the audience's state of mind, accompanied by a somatic effect. Finally, she suggests that Medusa's rhetorical power might represent the freezing of us all before the specter of the feminine—and she asks what we might do to reverse a legacy of neutralization and appropriation of the Other. 20As an example of the ways that myths crucially disagree with one another, we can see that in Homer's version of the story, Medusa comes into the world with her head of snakes. I think such differences reveal quite marked transitions in and contestations of signification. 21Of course it matters very much whether Medusa was raped or not. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin has argued, this rape has often been elided, and responsibility for it shifted away from Poseiden to Athena. She suggests that this shifting of responsibility essentially excuses men's violence toward women and thus silences women further. 22Detienne and Vernant write that mêtis was often symbolized by the octopus. Thus this connection to the octopus of mêtis may not have been coincidental. Certainly the original Medusa myth relied upon a reference to the dangerous, trapping "knot made up of a thousand arms" that the octopus represented and that conveyed a sense of the powerful double-ness and unpredictability of mêtis (38). 23Graves writes that vials of Medusa's blood were widely distributed: The blood had the power both to kill and to cure (Greek Myths 175). There are many contradictory stories about who received the blood, who distributed it, and who used it for good, who for bad (Greek Myths 175). 24The myth may also express a male fear of Medusa's creative power—she is so "procreative" that her children Chrysaor and Pegasus spring from her dead body (Graves, Greek Myths 127). 25I would argue that as teachers, we need to avoid the temptation to "eat" mêtis and wrest control over knowledge away from students. Students' cunning strategies and divergent expressions may threaten us or challenge us, but we cannot believe that mêtis is something we use on students, that we can be the sole tricksters, holding student bodies captive. Nor can we use the brute force of Zeus or Perseus to coopt their power when it threatens us, to subordinate their thinking bodies. 26The French word métis is related to the Spanish word mestizo, both coming from the Latin word mixtus, the past participle of the verb to mix and connoting mixed blood. 27In critical theory the concept of metissage also locates and interrogates the ways that certain forms of knowledge have been relegated to the margins, and thus this concept links usefully to the stories I have been reanimating. Metissage, obviously etymologically linked to mêtis and meaning mixture or miscegenation, has been used as a critical lens through which one might observe issues of identity, resistance, exclusion, and intersectionality. Relying upon metaphors of mixture that are biological and cultural, this concept of metissage both is like and is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she writes about mestiza consciousness. (See Steinberg and Kincheloe; Hardt and Negri; Gruzinski; Glissant.) 28Coatlalopeuh later becomes conflated with the Virgin of Guadalupe after the Spanish Roman Catholic conquest of Mexico. 29Carrie McMaster also suggests that we might learn from Anzaldúa's writing about her own bodily difference—having experienced congenital disease, chronic illness, disability—to "draw non-homogenizing parallels between various embodied identities" ("Negotiating" 103). In Anzaldúa's own words, "[T]hose experiences [with disability] kept me from being a 'normal' person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out there in the world was shaped by my responses to physical and emotional pain" ("Last Words?" 289). From this we can make some suggestions about the epistemological entailments of mestiza knowledge—it comes from unique, never "normal," bodied experiences. The "leap" that should be encouraged, then, is to see such situated knowledge as vital and perhaps even central to human experience. The "abnormal" body is not something given to women symbolically as a form of derogation; it is an engine for understanding and thus has serious rhetorical power.

Sizing Up Rhetoric is a collection of thirty papers from the 2006 biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, held in Memphis that May. As such, it presents a challenge for the book rev...

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.

In a previous discussion in the Burkean Parlor, I argued that Mark Smith's book, The Right Talk (2007), was boring and largely unhelpful to rhetorical scholars because it explained the contemporary...

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.

Abstract Notes 1The 2007 Survey of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition was approved by the New Mexico State University Institutional Review Board on April 18, 2007, Human Subject Application #219 (Exempt Pre). 2Consistent with earlier surveys, we use the term rhetoric and composition as a commonplace to signify the variety of programs profiled, including those that emphasize technical and professional communication or those that offer an English degree with emphasis in rhetoric and composition. 3The 1994 survey included two Canadian programs (Simon Fraser University and University of Waterloo). Neither appear in the 2000 nor the 2007 surveys.

The development of the rhetorical tradition in the West owes a largely unacknowledged debt to Islamic scholars. Between 711 and 1492 CE, Muslim-controlled Spain became a significant site of scholarly inquiry into the European Classical heritage—often involving the efforts of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers. One of the luminaries of this scholarly tradition is Ibn Rushd (known more generally by his Latinized name, Averroes), known to Medieval thinkers as “The Commentator” for his vast, multifaceted corpus of work on Aristotle, The Master of Those Who Know.

A lawyer and a rhetorician pose and endeavor to answer from two perspectives the following question: How has the United States Supreme Court managed to endure and to maintain legitimacy for over two hundred years, given the potentially destabilizing cases it has had to decide? In this exploratory, interdisciplinary essay, the lawyer first examines the way the Court has been grounded, historically, in a common-law tradition and how its reliance on stare decisis seems to be amenable to most Americans. The rhetorician continues the exploration by linking the Court's common-law practice to issues of interpretive power, ethos, dialogism, and pragmatic philosophy and practice.

Many medieval women mystics undermined misogyny with persuasive eloquence. This essay does a comparative rhetorical analysis of Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Riwle, positing that the fourteenth-century English mystic knew the twelfth-century text and developed her theology, in part, as a corrective to its Augustinian dogma.

By relying on Oliver Wendell Holmes's decisions as a Supreme Court Justice, I argue that aphorisms employ enthymematic reasoning and that enthymemes are best conveyed through aphorisms. Such an argument requires that I classify Holmes's decisions as aphorisms and show how Holmes explicitly rejects formal, legal rhetoric. These two moves are most clear in his First Amendment decisions, and it is these decisions that demonstrate how Holmes rethinks, broadly, the relationship between rhetoric and law. Holmes's position on the First Amendment, informed by the relationship between aphorisms and enthymemes, helps show how style is constitutive of reason.

This article analyzes the conceptual metaphor Corporations Are Governments in order to demonstrate the integral relationship between the unconscious operations of metaphor emphasized by conceptual metaphor theory and explicit rhetorical influences such as linguistic choices, patterns of rhetorical response, and overarching narratives that are used to organize and evaluate evidence. It argues that conceptual metaphors are shaped significantly by a give-and-take among ideologically accented and often deliberately considered metaphors, metonymies, and narratives.

In 1834 the Richmond Whig declared with alarm that “the Republic has degenerated into a Democracy” (Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy. New York: Norton, 2005. 425). What they meant was t...

Socrates: But I do think you will agree to this, that every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a...

Robert Danisch's book, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, brings together the traditions of rhetoric, as it was practiced and theorized in Classical Greece, and pragmatism, as it...

Troubled when none of her students “had ever heard the story” of American GI Forum founder Dr. Hector P. Garcia, and dismayed that his long, effective campaign against discrimination had been large...

In this essay I analyze the plain style as conceived of and used by the Lollards, a late fourteenth-century religious group. I argue that the same practices that set Lollard reading and writing apart from orthodox discourse were foundational to the Lollards' departures from orthodox belief, theorizing language and style in such a way that meaning was free from priestly mediation. This demonstrates the importance of the Lollard plain style as both a marker of heresy and a precursor to subsequent notions of plainness.

Editor Linda K. Fuller in her introduction clearly situates Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations within the interdisciplinary field of sports studies by hi...

Some years ago I saw a video of a motivational speech in which IBM CEO Lou Gerstner spoke of a then-new unit of time, a “Web year,” which he defined as equivalent to about six months of the Gregori...

Abstract Of the sharp judgment of the South in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, prior scholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy—a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with God's purposes. This view of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his address obliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcing their affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which is then followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. This strategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Reconstruction: the Radical Republicans. Notes 1Many thanks to Rhetoric Review's two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose careful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me read Lincoln in the first place.

Who Says? is a collection of essays that ranges widely over rhetorics of work and the working class. In his introduction the editor of the collection, William DeGenaro, points out the lack of atten...

Abstract St. Patrick of Ireland's legend suggests that he was a great rhetor: After all, he drove the snakes out of Ireland. As is often the case, however, the actual story is far more interesting and compelling than the myth. Born to an aristocratic family in fourth-century Britain, Patrick should have studied rhetoric in the Roman system. But when he was fifteen, he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. As a result, he received a different sort of rhetorical education than his peers in Britain, an education that made him uniquely suited to evangelize Ireland. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers William Covino and George Kennedy for their suggestions for this manuscript. I also extend thanks to Richard Johnson-Sheehan and the members of the Rhetoric Reading Group for their close reading and valuable insight. 2Augustine and Patrick were not exact contemporaries. Augustine was born about thirty years before Patrick in 354. According to Hanson, Patrick was born somewhere between 388 and 408 (Origins and Career 179). St. Augustine died in 430; the earliest date of death that has been suggested for Patrick is about 460, and the latest is about 490. 3His name—cognate with patrician—hints at his station: His father, Calpornius, was both decurion, a city councilor and tax collector, and a church deacon; his grandfather, Potitus, was priest (before the rule of priestly celibacy was firmly established). It appears that though their lineage produced a saint, their service to the church may have been less than saintly. When Constantine became emperor, he exempted church officials from the taxation duties associated with the curiales. (If the curiales failed to raise the required taxes, he was required to pay them out his own pocket.) Thus, Patrick's father's position as deacon, or decurion, may have indicated an unwillingness to pay taxes more than a willingness to serve the Church. This loophole soon proved too costly to maintain, but it also proved difficult to close, especially as far away as Britain. The same was true for the rule of priestly celibacy, upon which the popes of the time were beginning to insist. Given the dates of the changing ordination and celibacy rules, Hanson suggests that we can date Patrick's birth no sooner than 388 and no later than 408 (Origins and Career 179). 4Patrick arrived in Ireland as the island's second bishop. Preceding him was Palladius, who was perhaps a Gaul. The fact that Ireland already had a bishop means that the Christian community in Ireland was large enough to require one. At this time, bishops were assigned at the request of the particular community. Traditionally, Palladius's bishopric was supposed to have ended in about 430, and Patrick's was supposed to have begun in 431. However, O'Rahilly argues that Palladius's tenure was shortened by hagiographers who could not deny Palladius's existence but wanted to make Patrick the “first” bishop nonetheless (15–16). O'Rahilly puts the end of Palladius's bishopric at about 461 and the years of Patrick's at about 461 until his death in 492 (8). It may also be possible that hagiographers blended Palladius—who, O'Rahilly argues, also went by the name Patricius—with the second Patricius, the Briton who became Ireland's patron saint (15). Nevertheless, no scholar doubts that the second Patricius was the author of the Confession and the Letter to Coroticus. 5Freeman's surmise may be supported by a detail offered in the Letter to Coroticus, in which Patrick describes Christians he had just baptized as “still in their white dress” (sec 3). 6In some ways it is hard to understand precisely why Patrick had such trouble writing Latin. The obvious answer is his slavery, but he would have had to make up his lost education in order to become a priest. Why, then, did that education not make him a better writer? His prose problems may have the result of disuse after so many years of speaking Irish. Latin also might have been Patrick's second language to begin with. While some historians suggest that Patrick would have spoken Latin as a first language (Thompson 40), others, like Freeman (10) and Charles Thomas (308), suggest that Patrick, as a Roman Britan, would most likely have spoken British as his first language and studied Latin in school. O'Rahilly offers a slightly different thesis, arguing that “his admittedly imperfect command of Latin suggests that he came, not from a fully Latinized district, but rather from one in which, while the official language was Latin, British was the common language of the mass of the population” (33). Mohrmann, on the other hand, suggests that Patrick would have grown up bilingual, but that “his six years of captivity . . . weakened his command of Latin very seriously” (45–46). Finally, it may be that Patrick dictated the Confession to a secretary. It's even possible that he dictated it in Irish and that the transcription and translation hampered the style. The high number of biblical quotations, however, suggest that the Letter was first composed, whether orally or chirographically, in Latin. As to his Irish, Patrick may have known a little before he ever set foot in Ireland. Patrick's family owned slaves, as did most wealthy families. Ironically enough, it is quite possible that some of their slaves were from Ireland; therefore, Patrick might have known a few words of Irish when he was kidnapped. Whatever his levels of fluency in either British or Latin, Patrick would have learned much more Irish during his slavery than he could have picked up from his family's slaves, thus gaining a skill that would later set him apart from his clerical peers. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of Patrick's life, the question of his language is clouded in mystery. 7Kennedy writes, “There is no ‘zero degree’ rhetoric in any utterance because there would be no utterance without a rhetorical impulse” (Comparative 5). 8Throughout the essay I rely on Hanson's translation in The Life and Writings of Saint Patrick (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983). I do not follow his practice of italicizing quotations that Patrick takes from scripture. Though Hanson also capitalizes the first word of these quotations, I have followed normal rules of English capitalization. 9For more on Irish mythology and its relation to rhetoric, see Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul Lynch, “Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: Ancient Irish Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 233–52. 10I have taken this quotation from the Catholic Study Bible (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). In his note to his translation of the Confession, Hanson writes, “I have refrained from consistently reproducing in my translation of Patrick's quotations from the Bible any contemporary English translation of it, because Patrick's biblical text corresponds to no text which has appeared in an English translation. He was in fact reproducing (sometimes from memory) for the most part a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament and a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew (and the Aramaic) of the Old Testament. His Bible therefore differed considerably in some details from ours” (Life and Writings 57). 11All Latin quotations come from A. B. E. Hood's St. Patrick: His Writings and His Life (London: Phillimore, 1978). 12There has been some dispute about whether the original text is corrupted in this place. The passage may read either as dominicati rhetorici or domini cati rhetorici, and scholars are unsure to whom Patrick was referring (Hanson, Origins 109–12). A. B. E. Hood translates the phrase as “clerical intellectuals” (43); Hanson, on the other hand, argues that it means “masters, cunning ones, rhetoricians” (Origins 109). 13Patrick manages to disguise admonitions to his audience in admonitions to himself in other sections, too. In Section 7 he writes, “I am not ignorant of the witness of my Lord who testifies in the psalm, thou shalt cause those who speak falsehood to perish. And in another place it says the mouth which tells lies kills the soul. And the same Lord says in the gospel the idle word which men shall have spoken they shall give an account for it in the day of judgment” (sec. 7). At first glance this passage seems straightforward enough: Patrick reminds his opponents that if they bear false witness against him, it is they who will be punished. However, the context dictates otherwise. In the previous two sections, Patrick has said, “For [God] said through the prophet, call upon me in the day of your trouble and I will deliver you and you will glorify me, and elsewhere it says now it is honorable to display and confess the works of God. However though I am unsatisfactory in many points, I want my brothers and relations to know what I am like, so they can perceive the desire of my soul” (sec. 5 and 6). If Patrick is reminding his audience of the stricture against false witness, he is doing it through the guise of reminding himself.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Bob Scott, my PhD adviser, uses this phrase to describe relatively uninteresting, scientistic, or cookie-cutter modes of rhetorical criticism. 2Ronald Walter Greene, for example, has been critiquing the neoliberal rhetoric that concerns Smith for some years (see “Rhetorical Capital”; “Rhetoric and Capitalism”). 3I think we could even argue that in the twentieth century, rhetorical studies adopted such a one-sided approach until Burke was taken up and rhetoric-as-seduction eclipsed argumentation, the supplication of good reasons, and so forth. Even so, attempts to more directly engage emotional appeals and affect have been met with some derision (for example, Brockriede; Corder). For a recent, excellent attempt to engage the affect of rhetoric, see Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment.

A frequent rhetorical technique in classical Greek oratory, especially in ­judicial speeches where it is used both by prosecution and defense, is the speaker's allegation that his opponents and the...

In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

Abstract This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons "dying well," specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life. Notes 1I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay. 2Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister. 3Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151). 4Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton. 5These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada. 6It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways. 7Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855. Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.

Using the Victorian writer Samuel Butler's response to Darwin's Origin of Species as an example, I argue for a method of reading characterized by the process of fascination and seduction. Such an antimethodical method not only requires a different kind of agency on the part of the reader, but it also resituates rhetoric as an art of response to the dynamic flux of the communicating world.