This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

Martial arts organizations can become Foucaultian institutions that discipline and punish practitioner bodies to enact ideologies of violence. In this article, I describe how these institutions function by examining the rhetorical history of one specific martial art, Taekwondo. My analysis extends Hawhee’s examination of Ancient Greek athletics to include modern martial bodies and the associated non-Western rhetorical traditions underpinning these practices. Martial arts institutions operate in the following ways: (1) Invent traditions for rhetorical purposes, intended audiences, and desired effects; (2) produce discursive systems of control (like training manuals) to communicate institutional standards, expectations, and authorized methods of practice; (3) ascribe rhetorical/symbolic significance to body types and martial techniques; (4) and persuade global audiences through mass media and embodied performance.

This article examines connections between rhetoric, race, and place. Using archival research to examine Westlake Terrace, the author asks how the rhetorics of places like Westlake racialize the place and its people. The article shows that these rhetorics perpetuate the agenda of structural racism, and the material consequences of these rhetorics. It is argued that looking at the history of Westlake reveals a process of rhetorical invention that imbues the place with rhetorical and racial tensions. Attending to these moments of invention can both reveal ways that inequalities are built into places and help us work toward more equitable places.

Some critics have theorized redemption in prison memoir as capitulation to prison’s disciplinary gaze. But a closer look at African-American memoirs emerging from the War on Drugs reveals that redemption is not an artifice of oppression or a singular destination but a topic for rhetorical invention. This essay shows how two memoirists—Jeff Henderson and Susan Burton—formed narrative identity from traumatic experiences and oppressive conditions of poverty and racism that led to crime and incarceration. Redemption begins when they question interpretations of that experience and create new narrative identities in the social worlds of upward mobility, recovery, and emancipation. Inventing redemption does not relieve them from the burdens of their histories but gives them new ways of relating to their histories and, in this way, new hope in controlling their futures. The rhetoric of redemption in African-American prison memoir is a powerful counterweight to the rhetoric of mass incarceration depicting African-Americans as unredeemable.

This article examines the rhetorical productivity of ambiguity in the context of a loosely-defined mood disorder formally known as dysthymia, referred to colloquially as mild depression. First, the article offers a rhetorical history of the unusual institutional conditions under which this definitionally ambiguous diagnostic entity was constructed prior to its debut in the DSM-III. Second, the article explores how dysthymia’s definitional ambiguity functions as a rhetorical resource in the context of contemporary online health interactions.

Composition-rhetoric is experiencing a surge in research examining how the material is rhetorically consequential, sometimes termed new materialism. However, much of this research is future-oriented, leaving intact traditional disciplinary values. This article offers a hauntological re-reading of our disciplinary history from a materialist perspective wherein we are always-already material. By examining three canonical articles where the original research is haunted by the rhetoricity of matter, the field’s traditional history and, concomitantly, current-future identities are left radically open and unsettled. New adjacent possibilities are available for realization only if/when we render our past-present-future selves unfamiliar.

Agency in prison writing is often theorized as resistance to the material conditions of incarceration and the ideological forces of the State. Situating agency in the larger history of mass incarceration (1970 – 2010) and in the memoirs of those who lived through it, however, shifts the focus from the prison writer as subject resisting an oppressive system and toward the prison writer as rhetor navigating the changing discourses and material conditions of mass incarceration in registers of agency that include resistance, self-determination, and recovery.

The recently diagnosed “broadening imperative” in revisionary historiography is of special concern to feminist historians, for whom critique of traditional methodological presuppositions has been central to the feminist revisionary project. By examining the performative and figurative elements of feminist historiographical discourse, feminist historians and historiographers can both identify sites of feminist rhetorical resistance to traditional presuppositions, and gain an understanding of how feminist revisionary methodologies have been re-assimilated into traditional methodological and rhetorical paradigms.

Sylvia Rivera is a critical figure in queer and activist rhetorical history. At the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973, Rivera engaged in parrhesia to push the movement to include and amplify the voices and needs of the most vulnerable members of the gay community: drag queens, homeless youth, gay inmates in prison and jail, and transgender people. Her delivery, including voice, gesture, and interaction with the audience, emphasizes the truthfulness, frankness, and criticism of her truth. By analyzing Rivera’s delivery of parrhesia, this article draws attention to the body’s role in speaking the truth as an activist rhetorical act.

Despite pioneering reclamation efforts, feminist rhetoricians have only scratched the surface of the multilayered historical reception and representation of Aspasia, a fifth-century BCE Milesian woman famous for the company she kept. Aspasia's penchant for historical perseverance means that her recovery must extend far beyond the ancient world. Throughout the centuries roused by the so-called Woman Question, she was on the lips and brush-tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models or antimodels. Focusing on nineteenth-century Europe, we illustrate her powerful presence in art. Our discussion showcases Aspasia conversing (Nicolas-André Monsiau), instructing (Honoré Daumier), and contemplating (Henry Holiday). In their work Aspasia resists attempts to mute her colors and reemerges as a painted lady.

Mass-Observation’s archives and methodology offer insight for expanding the concept of network to assemblage through deterritorializing and reterritorializing rhetorical aspects of historiography and normative historical narratives. Reading M-O’s archives as “worlds expressing” rather than individual, subjective expressions of a world helps theorize rhetorical networks as less straightforward and accountable, provoking recognition of multiple rhetorical agents that coproduce ambient and reiterative rhythms of materiality.

Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

This book argues that education is fundamentally rhetorical, that rhetoric is key to social justice, and that doing rhetorical history is methodologically complicated. To make these arguments, Zosh...

Most historical research in rhetorical studies is underwritten by an imperative to “broaden” the field’s historical horizons—to seek out overlooked, underrepresented, or excluded subjects. This “broadening imperative” is commonly aligned with revisionary historiography, which became a tool for historians to critique disciplinary values during the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s. However, due to political and intellectual shifts in recent decades, “broadening” has become a preservative act to strengthen the field’s ideological values rather than a critical one to examine them. Ultimately, if historians value the radical perspective of “revisioning,” it is necessary to reinvest in critical historiography.

Though largely debarred from public rhetorical performance as adult women, young women in the nineteenth-century US received rhetorical training and performed their original compositions before large public audiences as high school students. Their access to the academic platform stemmed in part from their politically contained position as students and “girls” in this context. But students used these opportunities to intervene in political debates and to comment on their experiences as women and students. These rhetorical interventions represent an important part of our rhetorical history, shedding light on a significant rhetorical opportunity for many young women across the US.

This article argues for a framework of material methods, a forefronted material-rhetorical approach to archival research, applying material-methodological heuristics of rhetorical accretion and proximity. The article offers an extended example of archival research undertaken at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Such heuristic content generated by a material approach is valuable in two ways. First, it offers readable layers of rhetorical accretion that deserve examination and analysis as separate texts in order to make meaning of research processes. Second, such content makes archival methods more transparent while resisting an untroubled narrative arc of our stories of research.

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.

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.

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

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

Abstract Doug Peacock, known as the inspiration for Edward Abbey's George Hayduke in the environmentalist comedy The Monkey Wrench Gang, has published his own accounts of their relationship and his conservationist work. These memoirs recount his experiences with PTSD after serving in Vietnam and argue for grizzly bear conservation. By using trauma to establish identification with the audience, the texts encourage readers to value other species and their own while resisting the totalizing tendencies of Burkean consubstantiality. The texts build identification and preserve difference through narrative structure and appeals to collective memory that encourage empathy yet stress the specificity of personal experience. Notes 1 I thank RR peer reviewers Jeremy Engels and Randy Lake for their valuable suggestions and encouragement. 2 On the representation of My Lai in popular cinema and how collective memory of the war has evolved, see Owen.

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

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

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

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.

In rhetorical studies recent attention to the central role of pedagogy in the formation of disciplinary identity has obscured the disciplinary-based differences in the presentation of the history of rhetoric in English and communication classrooms. This essay surveys introductory rhetoric textbooks to contrast our presentations of rhetorical history.

This essay challenges accepted versions of rhetorical history by recovering the mythical figure of Hephaestus and the cunning rhetoric he embodied, metis. This critical retelling offers a new and more expansive perspective on history, rhetoric, and embodiment, as it lays bare many of our assumptions about the available means of persuasion. The author asserts that a cunning approach to rhetoric might allow for the celebration of all of our embodied differences.

Abstract This study offers scholars in composition and communication studies an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between feminists and rhetoric in the context of edited collections. The author first recasts recovery and gender critique as inventive arts for editors, and then analyzes a selection of edited collections' framing texts to demonstrate how editors compose their collections by mediating these arts. This work reveals that an early either/or relationship between the arts of recovery and gender critique gives way to a both/and approach that opens possibilities for multiple, rich avenues of inquiry in feminist rhetorical studies.

Through a review of some of the "daily themes" written by women at Radcliffe as well as scholarship on the history of coeducation, developments in pedagogy, the changing content of rhetoric textbooks, the influence of Harvard, and the work of scholars whose theories resisted the dominance of current-traditional rhetoric, this article challenges Robert J. Connors' assertion that coeducation contributed to the demise of agonistic rhetoric. The orientation of Connors' work suggests that while women's role in rhetorical history is slowly being recognized, their words and their experiences continue to receive less consideration than they warrant within the field.

Abstract This essay argues for the value of Confederate women's Civil War diaries to rhetorical history. As women faced the dangers and deprivations of war, they turned to their diaries to respond, using personal writing to rehearse and construct an effective ethos. By practicing "self-rhetorics," diarists prepared themselves to speak and act effectively in the contexts of war. One woman's diary, that of Priscilla "Mittie" Bond, serves as a case study.

This article combines feminist and historical rhetorical theories to analyze the rhetoric of US Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, who served in the House from 1944-1950 and was defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1950 race for US Senate. The article examines Gahagan Douglas's 1946 speech "My Democratic Credo" within the social and linguistic context of US political discourse of the late 1940s. Gahagan Douglas engaged in rhetorical "cross-dressing" to create a rhetorical space for herself in the male House by adopting a masculinist Enlightenment discourse to create her ethos as a rational, didactic representative.

In the spring of 1995, I inherited a diary that very few would care to read.1 It is boring, repetitious, and very, very bare. Annie Ray, my great great great-aunt and a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century, was clearly not invested in creating a out of her days. While the diary scholar Elizabeth Hampsten warns that often nothing happens in the diaries kept by nineteenth-century women, I was convinced that Annie's was a story that had to be heard. Following the lead of other diary scholars, I edited Annie's diary into a narrative of loss, crafting scant entries into dramas of infidelity and barrenness. While I think I moved my readers with the tale, I have only recently come to understand what remains in the wake of such a recovery. By turning what was ordinary into what was not, I lost sight of the fact that the inscription of nothing is as complicated a rhetorical act as the fabrication of something. We do not know how to read what I call ordinary writing: writing like Annie's that is not literary, writing that seems boring, barren, and plain. My initial reading was heavily influenced by the study of nineteenth-century diaries, a tradition that regards diaries as literary texts. More pointedly, my reading participated in a scholarly tradition that prefers reading only those diaries that exhibit literary features. I have outlined this tradition elsewhere and have argued that reading diaries through a literary lens privileges diaries that are coherent, crafted, and whole, excluding ordinary diaries like Annie's that define the diurnal form in their dailiness. Here my goal is to demonstrate what is gained by reading an ordinary diary through a lens that is shaped by the daily rather than the literary. Dailiness, the act of writing in the days rather than of the days, is the single quality that marks the diary as a distinct form of writing. It is what prevents the diary from being reflective and forces both writer and reader into the immediate present, a place from which the critical distance a reader/writer is typically taught to obtain and value is impossible. Dailiness means that the diary does not cohere around an organizing event or principle, but by documenting the everyday, makes these measured (and typically unmarked) moments available for the diarist's use. Dailiness also prevents the privileging of some events over othersinstead always resting in the middle. Schooled to appreciate occasioned texts

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests

(1989). Francis bacon and the historiography of scientific rhetoric. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 74-88.

(1989). Rhetorical history as a component of composition studies. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 230-240.

In a recent Festschrift for Edward P. J. Corbett, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede look dispassionately at the issues we now concern ourselves with in historical rhetoric, evaluate them, and conclude forcefully that much of Aristotle's work has been reduced to the unrecognizable.I They assert that much of the secondary work in Aristotle depends on misunderstandings that can occur when commentators ignore the fundamental connections among Aristotle's writings (41). Later in the same essay, in citing William Grimaldi's complex interconnections among Aristotle's works, Lunsford and Ede say, rational man of Aristotle's rhetoric is not a automaton, but a languageusing animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with others. Aristotle (and indeed, Plato and Isocrates as well) studied the power of the mind to gain meaning from the world and to share that meaning with others (43). The Aristotle as logic-chopping that Lunsford and Ede have named for us represents the inadequate and sometimes even wrong interpretation that a significant number of rhetorical scholars rely on in their presentations of classical rhetoric. The explication of Aristotle as automaton also provides us with a critique of the state of some scholarly work on classical rhetoric in American rhetoric and composition during the last twenty years. This formulaic view of rhetoric, which emerges eventually as a pattern, relies on reducing the intertwining theories that make up classical rhetoric and replacing them with simple categories. This kind of reductivism, a version of classical rhetoric that writers of the Heritage School (Welch 120) often use, hinders complex interpretation, such as the work of Walter Ong and James Kinneavy, and deprives classical rhetoric of its strength and its attractiveness. The Heritage School presentation of classical rhetoric primarily as a series of rules, dicta, and