Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

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 examines the rhetoric of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump through a psychoanalytic reading of the Aristotelian enthymeme to highlight how conspiracy theories are underwritten by an absence that appeals to the desires and fantasies of audiences. It explores how conspiracy theories that seem irrational are often highly successful enthymematic appeals designed to capitalize on the suasive qualities of libidinal satisfaction, or jouissance. Instead of dismissing them, scholars should embrace an expanded theory of conspiracist discourse that accounts for the role of satisfaction in determining which claims audiences find convincing.

Discussion sections of research articles are important because they are where researchers make claims for advancing knowledge in their fields. There has been a growing interest in research articles focused on Discussions. However, only a few studies have centered on the role of arguments. What is missing in this literature is the potential for rhetoricians to identify specific, sentence-level arguments. The idea is that to analyze persuasion in Discussions, rhetoricians should be able to identify arguments contributing to persuasion. Toward that aim, I refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a catalyst for specific arguments and examples from thirty science research articles.

AbstractThis essay rhetorically analyzes stories about domestic gun violence from Everytown for Gun Safety’s website, “Moments That Survive.” These everyday writers challenge America’s dominant narrative of protection, offering a counternarrative of protection by asking readers to reimagine the perpetrators of gun violence, guns themselves, and moments of gun violence. Extending previous rhetorical scholarship, I demonstrate how and why “imagination” is an essential concept for rhetorical scholars seeking to understand gun violence rhetorics and advocates seeking to change them. Notes1 For their feedback on various stages of this project, thanks to Laura Michael Brown, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Anne Kretsinger-Harries, and Lori Peterson. Thanks as well to Rhetoric Review editor, Elise Hurley, and the reviewers, CitationJenny Andrus and a second reviewer who remains anonymous. I presented portions of this essay for a lecture at the College of Holy Cross’s McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture; thanks to Tom Landy for the invitation and the attendees for their feedback.2 For instance, gun suicides account for over half of all gun-related deaths each year (CitationSilver).3 This percentage is likely higher because it excludes the 48.9% of cases in which “the relationship between murder victims and offenders was unknown” by investigators. Only 9.9% of people were killed by confirmed strangers.4 Although I use “story” and “narrative” interchangeably in this essay, I acknowledge that literary scholars and sociologists, among others, have debated whether these terms mean different things. I use the term “counternarrative” here to indicate how narratives and stories can challenge one another. Counterstories, by contrast, are stories that “subscribe to CRT’s [Critical Race Theory] tenets, particularly in their critique of a dominant ideology (liberalism, whiteness, color blindness) and their sustained focus on social justice as an objective” (CitationMartinez 17). The “Moments That Survive” stories’ critique of dominant ideologies is at best implicit.5 For historical examples in rhetoric, see works by Aristotle and Quintilian (CitationKennerly). Beyond rhetoric, imagination has been usefully theorized by psychoanalysts and by social and political theorists, including postcolonialist, feminist, and queer theorists.6 My description of the “Moments That Survive” website borrows heavily from my earlier essay on stories about gun suicide (CitationRood, “Protection”).7 I have described how domestic violence is operationalized within these stories, but I want to acknowledge that there is disagreement over definitions (CitationSnyder 17). For instance, according to The National Council Against Domestic Violence, “[d]omestic violence is the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another” (“What”). Although their definition is expansive in several ways, it seems to exclude violence committed by family members and former partners.8 The FBI’s 2019 data show that 482 wives and 505 girlfriends were killed by their partner, whereas 85 husbands and 187 boyfriends were killed by their partner. Yet these data have several limitations. First, there is no space for nonbinary folks. Second, a “wife” or “husband” is presumed to be in a heterosexual relationship. A note at the bottom of the FBI’s chart reveals that “the category of acquaintance includes homosexual relationships and the composite category for other known to victim.”9 The labels “us” and “them” can be slippery. The dominant narrative of protection often assumes and perpetuates cultural biases (such as racism) so that “us” means white people and “them” means people of color. But depending on who is speaking, listeners might imagine themselves—or hear themselves being imagined—as an “us” or a “them.” For instance, even though the NRA’s account of protection regularly relies on racist appeals, a person of color might nonetheless hear themselves as an “us” rather than a “them.”In their counternarrative of protection, the “Moments That Survive” writers urge readers to consider danger not just from “them” but also from “us.” Depending on the context, “us” seems to refer to “(a) ourselves and our loved ones, (b) the exclusionary “us” common in gun rights advocacy (e.g., white men), and (c) a capacious account of “us” that includes people historically cast as literal or metaphoric outsiders” (CitationRood, “Protection” 35).10 I do not focus here on depictions of people subject to abuse, but CitationDonileen R. Loseke highlights how women subject to abuse—and organizations seeking to support them—face pressure to portray “morally pure victims” to garner sympathy and support even though such depictions are exclusionary, unrealistic, constraining, and ultimately beside the point—the problem is with the abuser, not the abused (679).11 CitationCaroline E. Light and CitationAngela Stroud thoroughly critique “stand-your-ground” laws and explain why the underlying appeal to self-defense is not available to everyone, particularly people who are not white men.12 Jennifer Andrus illustrates why these different accounts of agency matter. Police tend to assume that the abused have unrestricted agency (they can just leave) or nonagency (they will inevitably return to their abuser). Consequently, police are often ill prepared to understand let alone help the victims/survivors that they are called upon to protect.13 Paige L. Sweet traces how therapy has come to be the primary way of supporting women subject to abuse—or at least an obstacle to receiving other forms of support. While therapy can be useful, it might also suggest that blame lies within women (rather than the men who abused them). Many women desperately need other forms of support (money, housing, food, and so forth), but therapy nonetheless became politically popular because it was seen as distinct from welfare.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCraig RoodCraig Rood is an associate professor in the Department of English at Iowa State University. He is the author of After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock (Penn State UP, 2019).

AbstractThis article analyzes the epideictic practices Chicana rhetors use to reclaim the figure of Malintzin, a woman cast as a promiscuous traitor for her role in the Spanish conquest. Since the figure of la Malinche was used to shame Chicana feminists as the traitors of the Chicano movement, Chicanas responded by first rejecting the narrative of la Malinche through rhetorical delinking, reframing her story with the use of amplification and depreciation, and finally reclaiming Malintzin as an aspirational symbol for Chicana feminists. Chicana epideictic makes a political argument about the value and worth of Chicana feminists by praising the Malintzin figure. Chicana epideictic challenges and celebrates community values and blurs the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Notes1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Jaime Armin Mejía and Brigitte Mussack for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. Their guidance was immensely helpful.2 The works by del Castillo and Candelaria represent modern-day encomia to Malintzin since they focus heavily on her values and virtues. Gonzales and Sosa Riddell present an encomium to the Chicana and Alarcón falls somewhere in the middle.3 The events leading to the Cholula massacre remain a contested point among historians because some believe Cortés lied to cover the fact that the attack was meant to cement his alliance with the Tlaxcalan people (CitationTownsend 81-82).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMiriam L FernandezMiriam Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard Leo EnosRichard Leo Enos, Emeritus Piper Professor (State of Texas) Quondam Holder of the Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Texas Christian University.

This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.

Partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-era face-masking has reshuffled traditional stasis hierarchy, allowing the middle stases of definition and quality, which emphasize epideictic motives of cultural affirmation, to supersede conjectural questions of medical efficacy. Viral images positioning masks as metonymic approximations of “authoritarianicity” and government overreach illustrate how right-wing masking rhetoric circumvents scientific concerns, instead rooting discourse in questions of cultural essence. Science communicators, in response, must embrace the inherently tropological and epideictic dimensions of the mask and work to recode the symbol as a metonym for citizenship and personal responsibility.

A concept in Aristotle’s thought that is both politically and rhetorically significant for all life forms is a sign (sêmeion). Yet, scholarship has historically left underexplored how Aristotle positions the utility of a sign across human and nonhuman animal domains. Rereading his presentation of signs in the Rhetoric in light of his statements on the use of sign-inference through physiognomy in Prior Analytics elucidates how rhetoric’s interest in persuasive things makes use of a sign’s physicality. In so doing, Aristotle demonstrates how rhetoric enables political communities to grapple with an inescapable nonhuman status.

This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

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.

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

Nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt’s attention to the complex interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism deepens our understanding of “romantic” rhetoric as reflexive and politically engaged. In sketches of orators and authors, Hazlitt criticizes their moribund deployments of classical rhetoric and its damaging consequences on British parliamentary politics, literature, and society. However, he also reworks classical rhetorical exercises and revives their civic potential in his dynamic prose.

This article positions the progymnasmata, an ancient sequence of rhetorical exercises, as a rich resource for contemporary scholarship on rhetoric and sound. Drawing on work at the intersection of rhetoric and sound studies as well as scholarship that repurposes ancient rhetorical concepts to study digital media, I argue that refiguring the progymnasmata can significantly expand rhetorical studies of digital sound. I ground my argument in podcasts, a popular sonic medium that has garnered attention in rhetoric and writing scholarship, ending with a series of six exercises designed to help students learn to make podcasts.

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

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.

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.

The principate of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE) has been portrayed as a period of rhetorical decline, given the suppression of late-Republic fiery, Ciceronian oratory. Building from recent scholarship that complicates this narrative, this article considers public poetry as a site of rhetorical practice, enriching understandings of rhetoric’s metamorphosis during the principate. In particular, the Odes of Horace—public poetry with persuasive designs achieved through enthymematic argument—are one example of how poetry served as a form of “hidden” epideictic rhetoric during the reign of Augustus when traditional forms of oratory were suppressed.

While much research has considered women’s rhetorical practices in the later part of the nineteenth century, less is known about the practices of women at the beginning of the century. Indeed, the faulty binary of public and private, and the resultant ideological separation of these spaces, has led scholars to devalue such women’s rhetorical practices. Yet in 1805 an elite group of young women formed the Boston Gleaning Circle in order to continue their education, and the content of the Circle’s archive indicates that deliberative rhetoric was an essential aspect of women’s relationships during this time period.

Edward Schiappa published a series of articles and a book in 1990 and 1991 that, collectively, challenged the dominant narrative concerning the Older Sophists and early Greek Rhetorical Theory as well as calling into question certain revisionist historical accounts. In this essay the author provides a narrative about those projects and the responses they elicited in the hope that it provides insights about the production of those publications, as well as an opportunity to revisit certain theoretical and methodological concerns that continue to be relevant to historians of rhetoric and philosophy.

The field of rhetoric and composition has a complex relationship with critical theorists outside our discipline. On the one hand, a field that claims Plato and Aristotle often has difficulty achiev...

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.

In his bestselling book The Prayer of Jabez, Bruce Wilkinson claims that believers can reap guaranteed blessings from God by praying an obscure biblical prayer. But for many evangelicals, Wilkinson’s book teaches magic not prayer. At issue is the appropriate use of this biblical prayer. How might rhetoricians and other scholars of religion analyze this biblical debate? This article argues that the legal or interpretive stases, a neglected part of stasis theory, constitute an important rhetorical method for analyzing arguments over the meaning of texts, religious or not, thereby shedding light on the nature, motivations, and implications of such debates.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

This article broadens rhetoric’s scope by reclaiming a space for it in drama. It reviews rhetoric’s bodily beginnings in theatre to read contemporary plays, specifically Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, as rhetorical critique. As critique, Angels enacts the relationship among language, bodies, and power via Kushner’s dramatizing of the metaphoric constructions of AIDS and ideology. The play also performs the disruption and resignification of discourses that marginalize peripheral bodies on the sociopolitical stage. Consequently, Angels adopts a sophistic approach to rhetorical critique that demonstrates language’s mutability.

In Cicero’s great dialogue De Oratore, Antonius (one of the two main speakers) at one point delivers an instructive anecdote. I paraphrase:In his retirement Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian gen...

The lesson of Homer’s Iliad is that eloquence arises out of a confrontation with death. Perhaps the most dramatic of these confrontations is the death of Patroclus, an event that elicits epideictic speech by three parties: immortal horses, Xanthos and Balios; an immortal god, Zeus; and a mortal human, Patroclus. However, although the reaction of the horses and of Zeus reflect the pathos and logos of eloquence, respectively, this essay argues that true eloquence grows out of an experience of a divided self that heroically judges its own life meaningful—thereby constituting ethos through speech—in the face of death.

Historians of rhetoric have provided research over the last three decades that has significantly advanced our knowledge of women in the rhetorical tradition. These achievements, while often stunning, have also exposed the need for more primary research, particularly in classical rhetoric where a wealth of evidence awaits study. Such evidence is frequently found in nontraditional sources and, correspondingly, calls for nontraditional methods of analysis. The need and merits of this view are presented in two ways. First, an overview of nontraditional sources offers new insights to the literacy of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan women. Second, a more specific and detailed illustration of the research potential of this perspective is presented by deciphering an inscription from Teos, a small but important Greek city that is now a part of Turkey. The epigraphical evidence available from the archaeological site at Teos reveals that young women had systematic education in advanced stages of writing. Such findings challenge traditional characterizations of ancient women as nonliterate. The intent of this work is to reveal the need for more primary fieldwork in order to attain a more accurate understanding of women and the range of their manifestations of literacy in the ancient world.

The epideictic genre of rhetoric has traditionally included public, ceremonial types of rhetoric, such as eulogies and public speeches, that affirm communities. Public memorials and even lyric poetry, however, also epideictically constitute personal and communal identities. When read through the theoretical lenses of Kenneth Burke and Emmanuel Levinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” seems to evoke a public, communal attitude in readers. This epideictic effect challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private audiences, inviting us to think more broadly about epideictic rhetoric and its audiences.

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

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.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.

Shakespeare's stage-practice may have been influenced by several texts on rhetoric that would have been accessible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, and which consider the implications, philosophical and practical, contained in the construction and reception of openings in oratory. By alluding, for example, to the concern of the orator in engaging audiences and to the mechanics of ordering oratorical material to influence audience reception from the outset, the treatises and handbooks of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, for instance, may offer important dimensions for understanding the construction of Shakespeare's openings, even though the media are markedly different.

Recent legislative action invites teachers of rhetoric to revisit Isocrates' Antidosis from a perspective suggested by Jean Baudrillard. A Baudrillardian perspective positions this ancient text as a rhetorical offensive against the conventional value systems that affix very particular meanings to certain types of education and educators.

Urban slave life in ancient Rome was unlike the absolute bondage and physical labor historically associated with the term slavery. Cicero's administrative slave Tiro was a literary collaborator, a debt collector, a superintendent of sorts, a secretary, a financial overseer, a political strategist, a recipient and content-generator of Cicero's famed practice of letter-writing, and a connected component of Cicero's social scheming. Cicero's correspondence with Tiro praises him for his value and loyalty, but it also shows previously unrevealed rhetorical aspects of the ancient orator and his relationship with his slave, colleague, and friend.

Abstract This article, drawing on Aristotle's concept of technê, develops a framework for exploring rhetoric in the process of scientific inquiry. The Aristotelian "causes" specifically highlight the technical procedures through which scientists carry out their work and the visual representations they deploy to generate meaningful accounts, "bring forth" new findings, and contribute to the existing field of knowledge. The author argues that a technê-based framework makes it possible to maintain a focus on rhetoric as a productive art while broadening the object of rhetorical analysis to include practices and modes of representation that contribute to knowledge production in the physical sciences. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Nola Heidlebaugh and James Zappen for their careful and constructive readings of my manuscript. I would also like to thank Trey Bagwell for his assistance in bringing the project to fruition. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. 2I obtained permission for this project through the University Institutional Review Board and from the scientists themselves. Names have been changed to protect participants' confidentiality.

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.

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.

Contemporary Native American stand-up comedy is a form of epideictic rhetoric in the contact zone of the performance space, using generic conventions of stand-up comedy, traditional elements of Native humor, and Aristotelian strategies to challenge what audiences think they know about indigenous experiences in this land. Specifically, Howie Miller is one Native American stand-up comedian who constructs an epideictic performance in which entertainment, education, and assumptions collide.

Abstract As Crowley and Hawhee explain in Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, debate as we know it today is nothing more than "spat, 'mere' theater" because conceptions of "opinion-as-identity stands in the way of rhetorical exchange." However, in Foucault's "Self Writing" and in Montaigne's Essais, another version of subjectivity in writing is conceptualized and practiced—one where the subject is constituted in practices at work in the care of the self. In this version of subjectivity, the productive exchange of ideas would be possible. Notes 1Thanks very much to RR readers Peter Elbow and Edward Schiappa for their careful readings, thoughtful comments, and support in the revision and publication of this article. 2That said, my work meets with an interesting danger: Though I hope that in narrowing my focus to Montaigne's essays, I might avoid generalizing the essay as a genre, or writing as a practice, and instead exercise the kind of specific attentiveness that is far better mastered by Foucault, I find resisting that move to generalize difficult, if not in some cases impossible. Despite this potential/inevitable failure on my part, my purpose here is to provide a different conceptualization of subjectivity in writing, one that could prove to be another way of potentially engaging other writers'/essayists' work, perhaps by future scholars. 3Consequently, the concept of the writer-as-agent is disrupted in Foucault's work, and as such, one implication is that this version of subjectivity takes seriously the idea that the writer is one subject being subjected by a number of forces (acting on the body, for example) and that the subject-on-the-page is necessarily something different. 4Though perhaps obvious, it's worth pointing out here that reconceptualizing essay-writing as a complex of practices subverts the idea of the inspired or innately talented essayist. If we writing teachers want to take seriously the idea that it can be taught, then this theory of subjectivity gives us a way to teach it as a complex of practices, as something other than an expressive art that the student writer is innately "either good at or not." 5Specifically, correspondence is addressed to a particular reader (usually a close friend) in an attempt to make the writer present to that reader so that the text can act as a (often ethical) guide for the reader. At least in terms of Montaigne's work, the reader was more generally conceived, and his project involved more than writing to guide, though that certainly could have been part of his purpose. 6This is not to say that Foucault does not take seriously the ownership of texts by their authors. For example, in "What is an Author?" his study of the author function does not involve any assumptions about the author-as-creator of the text or about the author manifested in the text. Rather, Foucault is most interested in the historical operations that are part of the author function, a function that does not invoke the privileging of an author's agency over/in a text but an enunciation of how the author's name provides a mode of "existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses" (211). For example, a text with the name "Montaigne" attached to it can be expected to be a prototype of the essay. It can be expected to be written in a meandering, contemplative mode, to quote many important, classical authors, to incorporate personal experiences, and to be relentlessly skeptical of its own claims. 7The similarities here in Foucault's articulation of self writing and Montaigne's description of being made by his book are very likely due, at least in part, to the fact that Montaigne was such an avid reader of Seneca's work––a writer who was very much invested in the self-disciplining practices in self writing. Montaigne goes so far as to write about the "Seneca in [him]" in his essay "Of Books" (297), and in the same essay, he states that the books from which he learned "to arrange [his] humors and [his] ways" are those of Plutarch and Seneca. (It is worth noting, too, that in the 2003 Penguin Edition of Montaigne's essays, translator M. A. Screech uses the verb control instead of arrange. See Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. A. Screech. As Foucault points out, "[T]he theme of application of oneself to oneself is well known [in Antiquity]: it is to this activity … that a man must devote himself, to the exclusion of other occupations" (Care 46). Montaigne, too, takes this occupation as seriously as the writers of Antiquity. He states, "For those who go over themselves in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength" ("Of Giving" 504). 8I believe that this is a reference to a metaphor about beehives found in the opening paragraph of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, and this metaphor, perhaps unsurprisingly, also shows up in Seneca's writing. 9In "On Keeping a Notebook," Didion argues that we should use our notebooks to "keep in touch" with old selves, past experiences, seemingly fleeting ideas/images/feelings. She states, "It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about" (140).

Peripatetic critic Demetrius has received little attention in rhetorical scholarship, but at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of On Style sparked debate among the English faculty, whose neo-Aristotelianism significantly articulated departmental direction. This tension centered on the use of the “forcible” style, and the subsequent debate gave rise to a faction of Chicago faculty who were sympathetic to the “New Rhetoric” of Kenneth Burke, who lectured there in 1949. This article demonstrates the significance of institutional context in the creation of critical positions, that these positions are often rhetorical responses to administrative, pedagogical, and political problems.