Ethos is an inherent characteristic of persuasion in commonplace scenarios. The acceptance of everyday communicative practices compels belief and trust in language usage, often without question of simple statements. A more substantial understanding of the perceived ethical quality of language usage will afford a richer view of communicative acts, cultures, politics, and events. Three areas of language usage and appearance determine this ethical quality: communion, occasion, and occurrence. Combined, these areas suggest how the phenomena of language usage, particularly within epideictic rhetoric, is not inherently factual in-itself but projects the illusion that it is such.

This article participates in contemporary conversations about ethos by extending conceptions of ethos as dwelling places” or ecologies” to ethos as hospitality. Such extension involves attending to how three recent decolonial cookbook authors construct stable textual identities and ethos using rhetorics of healing, constitutive rhetoric, and utopian rhetoric. The cookbooks under analysis–Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry (2014), Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel (2015), and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)–offer readers knowledge of African American, Mesoamerican, and Native American ancestral foodways and encourage culturally-affiliated readers to embrace these foodways in order to reclaim their communities' physical and spiritual health. The authors demonstrate a complex engagement with ethos as they reconstitute the cultural identity of their primary audiences both literally, through the consumption of food as an act rooted in the body, and figuratively, through the ways food connects us to others.

The Lumosity games and subsequent “memory wars” illustrate the rhetorical power of statistics in public discourse. Defenders of Lumosity build upon discursive traces based in societal fears and arguments based in “science” supported through statistics and experimentation. Detractors of Lumosity argue that their experiments are faulty. A close rhetorical reading reveals that certain commonalities exist across defenders and detractors alike. Looking at the inventional strategies of the statistical analyst as rhetor demonstrates how statistical tools are granted agency to determine research outcomes. Displacement of rhetorical agency has ramifications for understanding popular scientific discourse and making decisions as a society.

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

Lula Pace (1868–1925), a Texas Baptist science professor, ultimately weathered an antievolution campaign that roiled her denomination. Responding to this controversy, Pace engaged in demarcation (that is, discursive boundary-work) regarding the relationship of science and religion. Pace employed ethos strategies that blended the scientist’s supposedly gender-neutral expertise, the engaged educator’s concern for students, and the sincere Christian’s exercise of those individual freedoms privileged in Baptist tradition. This blended ethos highlights how scientific expertise and religious identity may serve as resources for developing a personal rhetoric to negotiate diverse community values and how ethos strategies depend upon demarcation.

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

The #MeToo movement unveiled a shifting testimonial landscape available to victims of sexual assault, one that was able to apprehend the attention of vast public audiences unlike other protests before it. Through an analysis of published #MeToo tweets and public discussion of them, this essay argues that what happened during #MeToo reveals a feminist deployment of megethos. Theorizing what I term feminist megethos through the lens of listing extends theories of magnitude beyond the idea of cultivating coherence or amounting excessive detail, toward a theory that captures how megethos can puncture pervasive yet normalized attitudes that constrain efforts for justice.

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

This essay examines the work of Genevieve Stebbins (1857-1934), an author, teacher, and proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. Specifically, I examine Stebbins’s concept of “artistic” statue posing, a practice fraught with contradictory arguments and tensions among late nineteenth-century commentators and other elocutionists who discussed appropriate forms of female embodied display. This study asserts that Stebbins drew on the rhetorical strategy of contradiction to perform an ethos of complexity and boundary innovation in advocating for female embodied rhetorical performance. Her work reveals the conflicts women have attempted to negotiate in considering rhetoric as embodied practice.

This essay draws on letters, bulletins, photographs, and newspaper articles to give an account of the Hull House Settlement in Chicago in the 1890s and examines the rhetoric it engendered. The space of Hull House, I argue, communicated its founders’ Jane Addams’s and Ellen Gates Starr’s femininity, wealth, and knowledge of the wider world. Through an extended example of a garment workers’ labor meeting that took place in Hull House, I show how Hull House’s cosmopolitan aesthetic offered women and men from varying class, ethnic, and national backgrounds rhetorical resources for constructing ethos, and also provided constraints to communicating across differences.

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Rethinking Ethos extends feminist scholarship on ethos by reflecting the development in feminist philosophy from locational toward relational thinking. While the introduction extensively outlines L...

“God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots” analyzes the most consequential correspondence of these Renaissance women rulers—letters begging for mercy in the face of death. This analysis uncovers the similar rhetorical techniques of these documents composed in the heightened exigency of literal life and death situations, when these royal women turned to the community of which they were members to invoke pity and ask for mercy in their unique positions as inheritors of a male history in order to create strategies for the rhetoric of women rulers providing an historical exemplar of a kairotic rhetorical response.

The natural inclination of writers is toward mindlessness or inattention to the present moment despite the benefits understanding the present can bring to writing. Although temporal consciousness is apparent in notions of writing as a process or of writing as situated in a rhetorical context, these ideas largely overlook the present. Buddhist Mindfulness can help with the development of kairotic or present-moment specific practice by including impermanence in the rhetorical context, by emphasizing real time in composing, and by providing access to intrapersonal rhetoric. Increased understanding of the temporal factors of writing calls for an Eastern-mind progymnasmata in rhetorical praxis.

Carolyn Skinner’s Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America is an impressive work; her research is both exhaustive and comprehensive. In this carefully documented text, ...

This essay investigates ethical issues inherent in service learning through considering the dynamics of generative ethos, Jim Corder’s term for a process of becoming through writing. By closely examining the ethical issues involved in Phyllis Ryder’s Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics and tracing parallels between students’ experiences in Ryder’s course and Corder’s own idea of generative ethos, this essay argues that generative ethos can offer a productive lens into understanding how students navigate the ethically tenuous territory of service learning.

AbstractThis essay examines kairos and rhetorical situation theory in relation to scientific inquiry, particularly the quantitative and interpretive components of Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana. Morton’s text is a flashpoint of debate on the ability of the sciences to detach themselves from their social contexts. This essay seeks to elucidate the significant political and social influences on scientific practice by examining the impact of kairos on Morton’s data analysis, and thereby to demonstrate kairos as a model for analyzing the interplay of the subjective and objective elements in processes of scientific inquiry. Notes1 I thank RR reviewers Daniel Schowalter and James Zappen for their insightful and useful guidance. I am also grateful for the tremendous helpfulness of Theresa Enos and her staff.2 See http://plum.museum.upenn.edu/˜orsa/Welcome.html.3 See studies by Lyne and Howe and by Barahona and Cachon on the rhetorical dynamics of Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibria.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel ColeDaniel Cole is an assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Composition at Hofstra University. His research explores Native American rhetoric and resistance writing, especially during the era of Indian Removal. He also researches theory and practice in writing instruction.

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

This essay examines the role of rural citizens in the social fabric of ancient Italy and the redefinition of the rural by the mightiest orator of that time: Marcus Tullius Cicero. This redefinition created a novel form of ethos, a rural civic ethos, apparent in the valuing of Arpinum in The Laws and in the rural character of Sextus Roscius in Pro Sextus Roscius. Rural civic ethos is further developed through an analysis of Cicero's dual identity as rustic and urbane, trained according to the oratorical style of the city yet maintaining an allegiance to the landscapes and peoples of Arpinum.

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts creation of a stable ethos in her political tract, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and forwards liminality as a frame within which to understand ethos in this work.

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

As advice books on caring for the home become more popular, they become more specialized. This essay analyzes one target niche of domestic advice: cleaning books for men. The authors of books like Clean Like a Man adopt as their primary persuasive strategy an ethos that establishes their own masculinity and, by extension, affirms the masculinity of readers. Though they explicitly argue for more equitable sharing of domestic tasks, the ethos adopted by the authors reveals general ambivalence about the changing notions of masculinity associated with such behaviors.

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.

Homer's Iliad is an epic story about human character, which predates the Aristotelian lectures by some four hundred years. While classical scholars have always valued Aristotle's notion of ethos as a primary factor in persuasion, few have traced this concept to this earlier period. Following a close analysis of speeches in the Iliad, this examination attempts to reconstruct what Homer's theory of character might have looked like. While Aristotle seems to have understood character much differently than did Homer, enough evidence exists to suggest that Aristotle may have embraced Homer's Iliad and the story it tells about the importance of age, social convention, and the heroic.

In the spring of 1998, Richard Leo Enos, as chair of the Lorraine Sherley lecture series, invited James Kinneavy and Linda Ferreira-Buckley to speak to the faculty and students at Texas Christian University. As a graduate student working on a dissertation involving kairos and American literature, I saw in Professor Kinneavy's arrival a significant opportunity to clarify some of the ideas I had been considering. In particular, I had read Kinneavy's article on kairos as a Neglected Concept and saw in his ideas a great potential for the integration of literary and rhetorical studies. Nonetheless, I felt Professor Kinneavy had failed to address fully the transcendental aspect of kairos (best articulated by Paul Tillich) that, I felt, was central to the type of interdisciplinary work I was interested in pursuing. When I approached Kinneavy at TCU, then, I was, truth be told, on a naive mission to right a wrong I felt he had committed. Needless to say, I was quickly disabused of my perception. Professor Kinneavy and I began a conversation on the complexities of kairos, and he carefully illustrated the significance of the term to both rhetoric and literature. Most importantly Kinneavy asserted that kairos was transcendent in that it worked across culture lines and that it offered a subtle way of addressing the situations in which rhetoric is born. Indeed, kairos, he argued, actually explained how rhetoric was born. He felt the term expressed how certain cultural movements and conditions united with special moments to create ripe times for the rhetorical act. In this way kairos was a cornerstone for rhetoric. When Professor Kinneavy left TCU, he and I began a dialogue through email and phone that culminated in the interview printed here for the first time. The interview was conducted at his home in Austin, Texas, in August 1998 and was initially meant simply as background research for my dissertation and an article I was writing. My hope for the interview was that Professor Kinneavy would expand upon his idea of kairos and that he would clarify his position in relation to those of other theorists.

In 1835 the United States inherited the large estate of James Smithson, the natural son of a British nobleman. Smithson had written in his will, I bequeath the whole of my property . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men (Rhees i). The single, enigmatic statement in Smithson's will was the only instruction that Congress had; as a result, competing Congressmen were able to interpret Smithson's words according to their own political and civil agendas. The eight-year debate that ensued over the use of the money was a groundbreaking ideological struggle in the nation's pursuit of knowledge. During these early years of the nineteenth century, universities were only beginning to develop in the United States, and the German thrust for research had not yet made its mark on these new institutions. The rhetoric in the Smithsonian debate represents a uniquely American version of the longstanding struggle between ethos as a value system passed on through education and ethos as a value system embodied in the new science of discovery.1 The debate forced Congressmen and citizens to address directly the question of where intellectual authority should reside in the developing nation. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran argue that early nineteenth-century America was an oratorical culture: one in which a tradition of citizenship and public argument relied on tacit agreement about the commonality of knowledge. This oratorical culture, according to Clark and Halloran, underwent an individualistic transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Andrew Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1828. While the debate over the formation of the Smithsonian does not entirely support the theory of a rhetorical paradigm shift or transformation, it does dramatize a creative struggle between multiple ideological approaches. While the ethos of public education competed with the ethos of scientific discovery, a larger cultural context of traditional consensus vied with the new ideology of liberal individualism. Individual speakers often

(1999). Constructing essences: Ethos and the postmodern subject of feminism. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 82-91.

(1998). Rhetorical style and the formation of character: Ciceronian ethos in Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 93-106.

(1997). John Witherspoon's normalizing pedagogy of ethos. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 58-75.

Ethos is generally associated with individual rhetors.1 Certainly that's association Aristotle had in mind when he recorded most influential usage of term (Rhetoric 1356a). But there is ample warrant for moving to a broader level-the level adopted in this paper, a case study of outrageous of a group of generative linguists on cusp of sixties and seventies. There is ample warrant for identifying not simply with specific individuals in specific orations but also with identifiable communities. In ordinary language, for instance, has always been far more communal than individual: Ethos.... [ 1.] The characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; 'genius' of an institution or system (OED, 1933 reissue) . And it has a similar sense among our academic neighbors-in literary criticism, where books have titles like The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Schneider); in sociology, where books have titles like The Ethos of Hong Kong Chinese (Siu-Kai), or, more famously, in Merton's discussion of general ethos of science (268). Coming closer to home, consider Augustine's notion of a Christian ethos, which presupposes that rhetor stands for group values (De Doctrina 4.27-29). Consider similarly presupposing admonition of George Campbell about influence of party-spirit (97). Consider Black's above-epigramitized talk of patterned commitments and stylistic proclivities, which, as Halloran tells us, is essentially projection of to communal level (Black 85; Halloran, Molecular Biology 71). Elsewhere, Halloran tells us more: the word has both an individual and a collective meaning. It makes sense to speak of of this or that person, but it makes equally good sense to speak of of a particular

(1989). Mr. Darwin and his readers: Exploring interpersonal metadiscourse as a dimension of ethos. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 91-112.

(1989). Hunting for ethos where they say it can't be found. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 299-316.

(1988). Reader‐response and the pathos principle. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 152-166.