While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

AbstractEquitable access to fertility care remains precarious and often dependent upon definitional rhetoric of infertility, which insurance policies and state legislators use to determine access to alternative family building options. This article builds upon prior rhetorical scholarship on infertility by applying an embodied rhetorics framework to capture the resilience infertile persons exhibit when faced with barriers to build their family. To do this, I share a series of texts self-identified infertile advocates produced as they reflected on their encounters with barriers to accessing care and building their families. As a disease that requires self-disclosure as a form of advocacy, I analyze the visual and written texts produced through an embodied rhetorics framework. These texts are forms of public advocacy in that they make visible the multiple embodied misconceptions infertile persons navigate when trying to build one’s family. I discuss these texts as illustrating “misconception fatigue” which is affective toll that accumulates when advocating for one’s reproductive right to have a family. I conclude by encouraging other rhetorical scholars committed to reproductive justice to adopt an embodied rhetorics framework to their scholarship and develop participatory research projects to support the advocacy needs of marginalized reproductive health communities. Notes1 I would like to express thanks to Megan Faver Hartline, Katie Manthey, and Phil Bratta who took time to read this article and provide generous feedback. A heartfelt thank you to RR reviewers Michelle Eble and the two other blind reviewers who took time to engage with the ideas of this piece and construct helpful reviews. Finally, additional gratitude must also be extended to the infertility advocates who decided to participate in this photovoice project and make visible vulnerable moments in their infertility journeys.2 One IVF cycle is defined as ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and embryo transfer. The cost of those procedures varies by the individual’s insurance coverage, provider, and medication needs. Hence, the range of costs. See Marissa Conrad’s article “How Much Does IVF Cost?” Forbes Health, 28 Sept. 2021.3 RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association offers the most accurate reporting of state-by-state insurance coverage for fertility treatment. For instance, the organization offers up-to-date data on insurance coverage per state on their website under the page “Insurance Coverage by State.”4 The ACA does not cover fertility related treatments as reported by health insurance reporter Louise Norris.5 Alternative family building refers to other methods of conception and/or accessing options such as adoption or surrogacy to have a family. Alternative family building options may be needed for heterosexual couples experiencing infertility but also include queer couples and single parents by choice.6 The Institute for Women’s Policy Research defines reproductive rights as “having the ability to decide whether and when to have children” (n.p.). This definition asserts that there is a fundamental right to have a family/child, if one so desires. This assertion is also supported in a reproductive justice framework which includes the right to a family as one of its three tenets.7 The World Health Organization defines infertility as “a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine defines infertility as “the result of a disease (an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs) of the male or female reproductive tract which prevents the conception of a child or the ability to carry a pregnancy to delivery.”8 To be clear, I am not suggesting embodied identity and embodied rhetoric as interchangeable terms. Rather, my use of embodied identity is informed from how Knoblauch and Moeller define “embodiment”. For them, “embodiment is more than ‘simply’ the experience of being with a body but is instead the experience of orienting one’s body in space and among others…the result of objects and being acting with and upon each other” (8). Embodied identity, in the context of infertility, is the meaning-making of coming to learn/see oneself as infertile. Embodied rhetoric, however, examines the potential actions and production of knowledge that is exerted because one sees identifies as infertile.9 Advocacy Day is an event coordinated by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association where the infertility community talks to Members of Congress about increasing family building options and access to care (“Advocacy Day,” RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, 2022).10 All photovoice submissions analyzed for this article are included in the appendix.11 I would like to note the distinctions between reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice to be accountable to the individual histories of each term: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. My use of the term ‘right to have a family’ is informed from Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger’s definition of reproductive justice that asserts “reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right now to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have [in safe communities and conditions]” (9). When I use the term the ‘right to have a family’ it is drawing upon these three tenets central to reproductive justice and acknowledges the history in advocating for the reproductive experiences of women of color and other multiply marginalized individuals.12 It should be noted that other infertility stakeholders have more recently adopted a reproductive justice approach to discussions of infertility. For instance, the March 2023 publication of Fertility and Sterility focused explicitly on moving beyond recognizing the racial and ethnic disparities in women’s reproductive health and have pushed for more action-oriented approaches that seek to align with the reproductive justice movement.13 By collective fatigue, I refer to the multiple experiences of fatigue represented the photovoice submissions. These include financial, emotional, and even physical fatigue. Collectively, they produce the experience of misconception fatigue.14 The toll of various treatments, doctor appointments, and time devoted to attempting to become pregnant can physically impact an infertile person and contribute to fatigue.15 A 2020 Forbes article written by Pragya Agarwal documents the retaliation some women in the workforce face when actively attempting to become a parent and how discrimination is heightened for women who need assisted reproductive technology to become pregnant.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaria NovotnyMaria Novotny is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research considers how reproductive health patients advocate for health care through her collaborations with The ART of Infertility. Her co-edited collection Infertilities, A Curation portrays the myriad voices and perspectives of individuals who experience infertility and difficulty in family building using art and writing as mediums for personal expression. Other scholarship related to the intersections of infertility, rhetoric, and advocacy has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brain, rhetorical figures emerge through embodied experiences within an environment, crystallizing material patterns and bringing elements of a cognitive ecology into relief. In particular, figures of repetition coordinate regularities in the environment, linking repeated items into relational relationships. Figures of description such as enargeia enact sensory education, making salient aspects of the environment perceptible. A situated example involving a controversy over wind turbine installation in Canada shows how rural community members use these figures to coordinate sensory information and persuade others to understand the issue differently.

The author theorizes a rhetoric of disconnect, defined as exigencies and becomings of rhetorical energies in the event of an abrupt, institutionally enforced disruption of digitally networked circulatory routes. A rhetoric of disconnect destabilizes current frameworks for analyzing digital rhetorical circulation and compels us to rethink the interplay between material rhetoricity, circulatory dimensions, and the public’s rhetorical adaptability in a transnational context. The theorization is accompanied by an analysis of the switched-off rhetorical circulation and “rhetorical rerouting” during the extended period of internet shutdown in Xinjiang, China in 2009 and 2010 that lasted 312 days. The author concludes by urging digital rhetoric and new media scholars to reassess assumptions of “always-on” digital connectivity and consider the fragility of digital rhetorical circulation under different forms of global information governmentality.

Despite a tradition of theorizing rhetorical aspects that have only recently become popular in the field (for example, embodiment, materiality, spatiality, ecologies), African and African American rhetorics (A/AAR) are infrequently invoked in the U.S. Four tenets of A/AAR—that rhetoric is ecological, communal, embodied, and generative—capture dynamic and often overlooked qualities of public memory places. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum International Civil Rights Center and Museum. “About.” Sit-In Movement, 2018. Web. [Google Scholar]in Greensboro, North Carolina employs these tenets to create a powerful experience and encourage visitors’ social engagement. A/AAR counter hegemonic rhetorical traditions and rearticulate public memory as integral to social justice.

This essay develops the concept of material inertia, a lens for studying artifacts of material and spatial rhetorics with a focus on long durations. The essay uses the case study of the DeWitt Clinton High School building, constructed in 1906 in New York City and still in use at CUNY John Jay College, to demonstrate how friction between the building’s design and use is exacerbated over decades. The essay argues for reading long-lived spaces via material inertia to understand the rhetorical force of non-human actors across time, and calls for scholarship in material rhetorics to take specifically durational approaches.

Rhetorical scholars have long regarded identification as a concept central to Kenneth Burke’s work. However, a close reading of Burke’s work of the 1930s locates the early incarnations of identification in the dialectical relationship between human embodiment and symbolicity. By restoring the complications neglected by a largely symbolic approach to identification through increased attention to the body and the material consequences of symbolicity, a revised understanding of Burkean identification captures more effectively the complex material and symbolic divisions that characterize human social life and prescribes means of negotiating these divisions.

Ada Metcalf’s 1876 memoir, Lunatic Asylums and How I Became an Inmate of One, is an early feminist articulation of embodied experience and agency. In this article, I develop a socially situated understanding of this memoir’s historical significance through the layering of four types of data onto the archival material: bureaucratic records, genealogical tracing, intertextual tracing, and field observations. I describe each of these forms of data and their contributions to understanding the significance of Ada’s taking back agency over her body through her public argument for women’s control over their own bodies.

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 our attention to the rhetorics of everyday queer people by routing queer notions of embodiment through queer and feminist work on rhetorical silence. I argue that the queer body engages speech and silence simultaneously, troubling any binary division between the two rhetorical forms. I call for, instead, a continuum model of rhetorical silence that ties together verbal silence with other forms of rhetorical action such as material silence, visual silence, and embodied silence. To show how the continuum model functions, I offer an analysis of Grindr profiles. The social networking app—marketed primarily toward gay and bisexual men—serves as an example for how rhetorical silence is adapted and deployed by queer people. Exploring these profiles allows us to consider the rhetorical action of people who may not live openly queer, those whose claim to queerness is limited to a pixelated square inch of pectoral flesh.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKCNMM) must balance respectful remembrance with broad education about the 1995 terrorist attack that killed one hundred and sixty-eight people. Epideictic and material rhetorics prevail throughout the OKCNMM, communicating uplifting messages about the effects of the bombing while also prompting visitors to create their own complex, productively uncomfortable pathways toward understanding. In this process, civic engagement through rhetorical processes is encouraged; the museum models and creates space to practice reflective dwelling, critical thinking, discussion, and composition, offering a rhetorical education that can circulate far beyond this single site.

This article analyzes several popular news media narratives that describe the events surrounding Eric Garner’s death in 2014, including the circumstances of his arrest and the acquittal of the police officer who placed him in a banned chokehold. This piece problematizes the constraints that vernacular understandings of race impose upon verbal and embodied rhetorical agency. Ultimately, this work illuminates the ways in which color-blind racist rhetorics mobilize narrative proxies to render these constraints invisible.

In the recently declared “Stylistic (Re)Turn” in rhetoric and composition, several scholars reference pages fifty-eight and fifty-nine of A Rhetoric of Motives as being important to style studies. These pages, given Kenneth Burke’s perplexity, require further discussion. The rhetorical figures antithesis and gradatio are used on these pages as representative anecdotes of the figures’ capacity as forms to induce identification. Antithesis and gradatio illustrate a concept of somatic rhetorical figuration based on a rhetorical aesthetic which is summarized on page fifty-eight. Figures, or formal patterns, overlap and point to the continued relevance of classical rhetoric as a way of discussing style across disciplines.

Integral captions and subtitles are specific forms of captions and subtitles that are designed to be essential elements of videos in coordination with sound, signs, and other modes of communication. Integral captions reflect the importance of embodied rhetorics in Deaf culture, particularly in the kinetic language of ASL and Deaf Space design practices. Designing a (Deaf) space for integral captions that embody multimodal and multilingual communication is an essential multimodal literacy practice that benefits d/Deaf and hearing composers and viewers. Five criteria that characterize integral captions provide instructors and scholars with a tool for captions and embodied rhetorics.

Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to material symbolic communication in analyzing rhetoric of the body, focusing primarily on the linguistic or on nonsymbolic materiality. Yet the body communicates via a range of material symbolic practices. Delivery offers an analytical framework for understanding the ways that performing bodies communicate in multiple symbolic codes. Through analysis of neo-burlesque, the essay argues that delivery as a critical method for embodied rhetoric highlights the complex interplay between spaces and bodies and audiences that construct particular genres, providing a wider rhetorical vocabulary to critiques of neo-burlesque and other contested sites of women’s erotic performance.

If bodies and discourse are always interpenetrated and mutually influencing, rhetoricians need ways to consider how it is possible to evoke embodied effects with rhetorical force via discursive tools. This article discusses how the use of somatic metaphors, metaphors crafted to revive remembered embodied experience in the mover’s consciousness, allows access to the ideological, political, and affective ties formed in the original embodied performance. Repeated exposure to this metaphoric resurrection of the past creates a kairotic awareness where remembered embodiments are viewed as potential rhetorical resources.

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

Abstract RateMyProfessors.com has received critical reception in the academy: While some college teachers and administrators express support for the site, others complain that it invades their privacy and impinges on their academic freedom. This essay looks closely at one response to Rate My Professors, a weblog titled Rate Your Students that was founded in 2005. The site offers a compelling example of how Rate My Professors—and the movement to commodify higher education that it represents—affects public discourse between students and teachers. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Duane Roen and Edward White as well as Dana Anderson, Theresa Enos, Christine Farris, Joan Pong Linton, and John Schilb, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 2With a masthead that reads "Plagiarism, misery, colleagues, absinthe, snowflakes, ennui," Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com has hosted academic complaints about students multiple times a week since 2005. As of June 2010, the site closed down after five years, citing insufficient staffing as the primary cause. The original website still maintains a limited archive of its first five years. A spin-off site called CollegeMisery.com opened its doors at the same time. Both sites regularly accept and post reader comments about the drudgeries of academia, peppering them with bits of news and commentary related to higher education. Although the site's content is now somewhat more diverse than it was in the earlier years (not all posters are now attacking students, and some even defend them) the blog's initial inflammatory rhetoric has attracted attention and even inspired debate. However, the site itself is still strongly framed as a space for virulent and personalized critiques of students. 3In this essay I organize my thinking about publics according to Michael Warner's three definitions: the public as social totality (what Elizabeth Ervin terms in Public Literacy as the national public), the public as concrete audience, and the "public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation" (Warner 50). Warner focuses on the third type of public, as will I in this essay. A textual public is self-organized through discourse and operates independently of structuring institutions such as the state or church. Such a public is maintained through the circulation of discourse, and one can become, even temporarily, a part of that public simply by accepting its address (61). There is then not just one public but many that overlap and intersect at local, national, and global levels. Publics represent a heterogeneous range of context and group-specific interests and values, and they are maintained through the circulation of discourse that is both personal and impersonal—that addresses us (if we accept the address) and some group of imagined strangers beyond us. 4While I want to adopt this textual understanding of public formation for the purposes of this essay, I also do not want to lose sight of what David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki recently refer to in their analysis of the Arab-American press as the material embodiment of counterpublics (50). Drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, Kaufer and Al-Malki remind us that oppressed groups generate resistant and/or self-protective rhetoric in counterpublic spaces, offering insight into how power differentials between groups structure the terms of their participation in publics. Based on this understanding, I also define publics in this essay as not purely textual but also importantly connected to embodied experience and unequally positioned in relationship to cultural power, often in ways that place them in a contested relation to one another. However, as my analysis of the interaction of RMP and RYS indicates, public power differentials do not always manifest directly in the embodied presence of the actors involved; rather, power dynamics are written into the structures that mediate a public's textual circulation. 5The exaggeratedly caustic and insulting rhetorical postures of participants in RYS are certainly legible as a kind of Menippean satire, one that indirectly buffoons student rhetoric on Rate My Professors and the attitudes it implies. By returning the volley of character assassination begun by RMP, posters reveal some measure of the childish irresponsibility inherent in the rhetoric itself. Yet, while I do think there is certainly a relationship of subtle satire at work in the interaction between these two sites, I do not choose to concentrate on this relationship in my analysis but rather to look beneath it at the more lasting and meaningful public investment that posters on RYS seem to be expressing in their work. 6Nancy Fraser provides a crucial foundation for this point in her critique of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the public sphere. Fraser contends that Habermas's concept of the universal public actually emerged in conflict with a variety of counterpublics, which themselves represented the interests of oppressed groups who could not meet the minimal expectations of property ownership and disembodiment, which were requirements for participation in the so-called liberal bourgeoisie public sphere. In imposing dominant interests as universal and seeking to delimit the terms of what could be civilly debated (and in what language), the bourgeois liberal public sphere in fact represented a larger shift from more openly autocratic to hegemonic forms of social control (Fraser 62). While Fraser is most often credited for rendering Habermas's concept of the public as a plural one, her critical intervention more pointedly challenges the vaguely positive connotations usually associated with public dialogue. Far from being an open forum for meaningful civic discussion, Fraser finds that the so-called public sphere is a veil of rationality that kept more divisive forms of social conflict out of view. 7In her article Welch persuasively argues that we err as teachers when we present public writing and rhetoric as an individual activity. According to Welch, seeing public action as individual dangerously isolates students and makes them less able to effectively confront the complexities of privatized public space. 8My analysis of the site layout was written in the spring of 2007, and the homepage of RateMyProfessors has since changed. 9The method of purposeful sampling is, I maintain, appropriate to the site and my inquiry alike. Obtaining a random sample from a site like RMP would be not just impossible but unnecessary, since I do not aim to make generalizable claims about the broader student population as a result of my analysis. I do want to make claims about how the site structures a kind of public discourse through consumerism, and a purposeful sample is more than adequate to that task.

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.

This essay examines the annotated description of a quilt produced by one woman to memorialize her mother who died in 1902. The quilt's function is analyzed in relationship to nineteenth-century mourning rituals and to other mnemonic aides produced and used in the nineteenth-century domestic sphere to remember-like scrapbooks and, later, photography. This study promotes memory-making as a rhetorical end and suggests a study of technologies employed in the nineteenth-century domestic sphere might reshape our conception of mnemonic activity and also a perceived separation between the rhetorical canons.

Abstract This essay examines the question of the body as it appears in Burke's texts. Drawing upon a rereading of-and friendly amendment to-Burke's action/motion writings, I argue that other terminologies of embodiment suffer from a lack of complexity and therefore offer not dialectics but rhetorics of embodiment. After briefly applying this reading of Burke to discourse on race and racial identity, the essay concludes that his action/motion polarity can be used as a critical instrument of sorts, prompting us to greater vigilance regarding the vocabularies of embodiment we employ, the terms we impose upon our bodies and ourselves.

Bill Clinton can be seen as a perfect embodiment of the contradictory tensions in capitalist ideology between production and consumption that were described by the sociologist Daniel Bell in 1976. Kenneth Burke's scapegoat paradigm explains why Clinton, as representative of this central flaw in capitalism, was marked for vehement attack and ultimate casting out. Examining the House Managers' choice of Clinton as scapegoat illuminates the danger inherent in any attempt to construct an ideologically consistent Order such as "the rule of law" and thereby seize the high moral ground.

Rita Copeland, a medievalist, reminds us that rhetoric is a the real world, circumstance, shifting and fragmented experience; in other words, a the itself (Framing Medieval Bodies 155). It is this discourse the body that concerns me here, translating temporality, circumstance, shifting interests into the following: time, space, weight. These three are the terms I will pursue, focusing on the work Milan Kundera and the late Andre Dubus as examples. They bring the bodies their characters into existence using space, weight, and time; that is, they write the body-inscribe it, mold it, shape it, give it material presence-just as dancers do. I want to suggest a rhetorical theory of the body in terms space, weight, and time and then to demonstrate how that theory might fruitfully inform our interpretation texts-not only literary texts like those Kundera or Dubus but also non-literary texts, such as journals, diaries, letters.1 The terms I am using come from Rudolf Laban, who developed a complex system movement analysis, a part which is called Effort/Shape. He worked first with ballet in Central Europe and later studied motion among British factory workers during World War II (efficiency studies). Many moder dancers have adopted his insights about movement and talk about space, weight, and time as characteristics choreography and their own bodies. They judge a good dance by its use space, weight, and time (these aren't the only criteria, course); they train their bodies first to understand its idiosyncratic preferences for using space, weight, and time and second to understand their bodies in relation to these three.

Mina Shaughnessy has long been revered as leader, even founder, of basic-writing movement, which emerged from open-admissions educational policies of egalitarian 1960s. Throughout 1970s, 80s, and 90s, most professionals in have accepted role of basic writing as defined by Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and as enacted in classrooms of City University of New York, where action of book took place. Indeed, Jeanne Gunner calls Shaughnessy's work the starting point of reference for these professionals (28); seldom does a discussion of basic writing not referand defer-to Shaughnessy.' In spite of almost universal acclaim for Shaughnessy, some articles about work have appeared with contradictory, even negative, visions: Paul Hunter describes Shaughnessy as radical for caring so much about and believing in students, most of whom were minorities; Min-Zhan Lu describes as conservative-and a gatekeeper and accommodationist-for wanting to acculturate them. And while no doubt both Hunter and Lu have captured truths about Shaughnessy, CCNY's Patricia Laurence argues that historical dimension is missing from many such analyses, that they set Shaughnessy adrift on educational raft-unmoored from [her] times, [her] institution, [her] field (880). In essay describing these intra-community conflict[s] (26), Gunner argues that literature about Shaughnessy can be categorized into two forms of discourse: iconic and critical. In iconic discourse Shaughnessy is invoked as a figure and symbol with meaning beyond identity as historic person (26). Time editor Stephen Koepp, in issue on heroes and icons, defines icon as an embodiment of ideal that affects way we live act, for better worse. Only possibility of or worse, in fact, really differentiates Koepp's icon from his hero-one who changes society for better by shatter[ing] a limitation convention (6). Certainly, iconic literature of basic writing invokes Shaughnessy as positive icon-as a hero. The imagery in eulogies describing Shaughnessy shortly after death set tone for this type of literature: Irving Howe spoke of the brightness of her (102); E. D. Hirsch, Jr., described how human influence radiated out (96); Adrienne Rich stressed way work illuminates (102).

The history of literary societies in academia has been little studied. The few discussions of the societies have centered primarily around eastern universities and have marked the societies' decline as coming in the mid-to-late 1800s. However, the literary societies survived at many Midwestern colleges, both public and private, for several decades into the twentieth century. The societies embody rhetoric-in-practice and are interesting in terms of their social structure, their intellectual activities, and what they tell us about the position of rhetoric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their eventual decline is brought about by a number of forces, some predictable and some not. Academic literary societies, which existed in strength in the Midwest from about 1830 to 1920, centered around the writing and performance of essays, debates, orations, and sometimes poetry. Over time, some of the groups expanded their activities into performances of music and dramas, with these elements sometimes overtaking the rhetorical aspects. As has been noted elsewhere, the societies declined with the coming of fraternities and sororities, the blossoming of disciplinary clubs, the general lack of interest in rhetoric, and the influx of students seeking a public education. Other less-examined factors include the extent of institutional support, the strength of rhetoric in the

From its origins in ancient Greece, Western rhetoric has been embodied in city life. Save for his walk with Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates only practiced his dialectical rhetoric within the walls of Athens and then only for the ennoblement of the republic. So in the Apology, Socrates defends one version of life in the city against another, explaining that in his talk with others, he had been trying to persuade each of you not to have a greater concern for anything you have than for yourselves, that each of you may be the best and wisest person possible, nor to consider the affairs of the city in preference to the well-being of the city itself' (36c5-9; trans. in Kennedy 44). For Plato the one best hope for Athens was embodied in cultivating the character of its citizens. Cultivation of self and the well-being of the city were so closely linked, a link so prominent in classical rhetoric, that Cicero could monumentalize rhetoric's civic dimensions through the figure of the orator's open hand: a gesture of conciliation and cooperation, of civic responsibility and democratic possibility. The open hand of the Ciceronian orator still has hold of imaginations, embodying hopes of communitarianism, democracy, and mutuality. Thomas Farrell, for example, has explained rhetoric's open-handedness as our partisanship for the familiar and, from within the world of the local and particular, movement toward the other (279). Ideally we would always approach others with outstretched arms and open hands. Yet open-handedness no longer embodies the rhetorical activities, perspectives, and values of persons who share life in cities. In the United States, material conditions and mass media representations of postindustrial urban space, as well as expressions of difference, questions of identity, and conflicts over multiculturalism, have overwhelmed the figure's resonance. Suburban sprawl, the proliferation of privatized consumer spaces, and the fortification of inner cities materialize inequalities that empty the open-handed appeal of its genuineness; at the same time, mass media representations of urban spaces as dangerous, decaying, and violent fuel suspicion and caution people against open-handed appeal. Informed by the material and representational realities of cities, the global sameness and commonalty suggested by the open-handed gesture become expressions of a