This essay applies Wood’s process model of emotional memory synchronization to better understand how public memory of the Battle of Culloden, an integral event in Scottish history, is created through two exhibits at the Culloden Visitor Centre. These exhibits create a shared experience by engaging audiences through immersive exhibits that utilize sensory elements. This use of immersive, sensory-laden, and emotion-provoking exhibits may be useful in the creation of public memory of historical events that did not happen within living memory.

As I compose this book review, the 2020 presidential primary field is shrinking as fundraising targets are hit and missed and candidates who remain are promising to make medical care affordable for...

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library’s potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere’s viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

Abstract This study examines applications for two professorial positions in English. Applicants’ responses to advertised requirements reveal three major issues: reading transformation, writing anxiety, and arithmetical paralysis. Scores based upon the author's formula, in itself a process of discovery, may assist in filling these positions. Appropriate tables are appended.