Over the past few decades, Plato’s Phaedrus has become an important text for scholars interested in tracing new materialist approaches to the history of rhetoric and writing. Drawing on rhetoric and plant studies scholarship, this essay contributes to this conversation by arguing that trees disclose an important layer of irony in the dialogue, producing a deep, if not ambivalent, unity that brings together rhetoric, writing, and discourse. Through a study of trees in the dialogue, this essay demonstrates how the Phaedrus offers rich connections between spatial, nonhuman, and ecological dimensions of writing, rhetoric, and discourse.

The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a "created this way" discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Dialogism and dialectical knowledge making have long subtended theories of written discourse and therefore the design of rhetoric and writing curricula. As universities move toward interdisciplinary and applied disciplinary epistemologies, theories of written discourse based in the dialogical and dialectical tradition require new scrutiny. This article synthesizes scholarship from the rhetoric of science, written communication theory, and transdisciplinary theory to develop a new poly-logical and poly-lectical approach to written communication for interdisciplinary discourse. The article concludes with examples of hermeneutic and heuristic invention strategies for rhetoric and composition pedagogy that can encourage poly-logical and poly-lectical inquiry on contemporary interdisciplinary issues.

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.

I challenge an "English only" view of Paulo Freire in U.S. scholarship, arguing that an exclusive reading of the 1970 Myra Bergman Ramos English translation masks the dialogic and allusive dimensions of Freire's rhetoric. I trace Paulo Freire's use of situação-limite ("limit-situation") to Álvaro Viera Pinto's appropriation of the term in Consciência e realidade nacional from Karl Jaspers's concept of Grenzsituation in Philosophie, Existenzerhellung. A detailed illustration of the semantics of situação-limite is needed to correct for a "glass half full" terministic screen in Anglophone U.S. scholarship, which overly minimizes the term's profile of collective historical transcendence.

The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

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.

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 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.

While urban and suburban planning have received sustained scrutiny from rhetoric scholars in recent years, campus planning remains relatively unexplored. Enacting a framework for analyzing the conventional and unconventional planning discourse swirling around campuses, this article focuses on a specific case: the (in)effective provision of student housing at the University of California Irvine. The analysis juxtaposes formal planning documents tied to the post-WWII origins of UCI with historical and contemporary student-generated discourse to evaluate and exhibit the means by which inhabitants, as rhetoricians-in-residence, can participate in shaping the campus community.

In the 1990s, “Murphy Brown” mothers—often unwed, older, white, and professional—could embrace their alliance with stigmatized single mothers or mark their difference from them, while simultaneously demonstrating their alignment with the dominant discourse of “family values.” Many opted for the latter, gathering under the label “Single Mothers by Choice” (SMC). Using an intersectional cultural rhetorical methodology, this article identifies the axioms of “family values” and demonstrates how they shaped SMC’s efforts to legitimize themselves through an analysis of Jane Mattes’s 1994 guidebook, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular and prolific writer, is now perhaps best remembered as Victorian England’s foremost “propagandist of domesticity.” Ellis, in her Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) “domesticated” women’s elocution by situating it within the home. Although women occupied the private rather than the public sphere, they nevertheless were responsible for much of England’s national greatness—its distinctive “domestic character.” In The Young Ladies’ Reader, elocution becomes a domestic duty supporting the English home and nation. Ellis restricts women’s reading to the private domain thereby reinforcing rhetoric’s traditional separation of male and female discourse.

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

Analyzing the function of quasi-public intellectuals in debates over the Common Core State Standards helps us to understand why some publics in a networked public sphere have greater influence in policy-making than other publics. Granted authority because of privileged access to the state, quasi-public intellectuals introduced discourse into education publics that influenced reception of the Common Core, divided potential (counter)publics, and created an exigency that foreclosed possibilities for debating policy alternatives. Theorizing how these intellectuals manipulate debate allows us to recognize other arenas in which they operate and to develop strategies for inviting stakeholders to meaningfully participate in public deliberation.

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.

Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insider-outsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

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

Building on current theories of rhetorical agency, this essay analyzes two metaphors for aging found in public health information materials targeted to the elderly—aging is ageless and aging is pathology—concerning how these metaphors frame agency for older adults. The metaphors attribute limited agency to older adults by emphasizing short-term, biomedical solutions and expert knowledge and by not representing agency as situational, dynamic, and co-constructed. Exploring the limits of these metaphors both further exposes how public health discourse shapes the cultural perception of aging and offers an expanded understanding of older adults as dynamic rhetorical agents.

Much recent composition scholarship has focused on pedagogies of personal writing, championing students’ own languages, and discursive communities. In Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric...

The archetypal English trench poet, Siegfried Sassoon, employed the ironic techniques of satire and sarcasm to address the First World War’s absurdities. Yet, though his intentions are laudable, Sassoon’s methodologies are not ethical. Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics demands that readers be included in the construction of literary meaning; when ironies divide readers and writers, they miss their target. Despite readers’ sympathy for the war poet’s tragic position, poems such as “They,” “The Hero,” and “Blighters” present coercive rather than progressive rhetoric—negating the social good Sassoon intends by mimicking the unilateral bombasts of war.

Although rhetoric and city life have been closely aligned since ancient times, urban planning documents have received little attention as rhetorical texts shaping discourse about citizenship. The Plan of Chicago, a key document in the history of US urban planning, not only proposed improvements, but, more importantly, its visual and verbal language constructed an idealized and ideologically infused conception of the city and its citizens. By enacting what Burke called a representative anecdote, the Plan constitutes a specifically commercially oriented city and citizen, foregoing other possible identifications.

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

According to Mary Shelley’s 1831 Introduction, her great novel is her “hideous progeny.” This proclamation along with numerous birthing metaphors place her Introduction within the obstetric discourse field of the maternal imagination, a theory which claimed that pregnant women’s imaginations had the power to deform their fetuses. More importantly, the maternal imagination, and thus Mary Shelley’s Introduction, is a form of mêtic rhetoric with a distinctly maternal flavor.

AbstractYouTube allows activists to broadcast their missions and engage global audiences. “Mother’s Day for Peace,” a 2007 video, features American actresses who recite Julia Ward Howe’s radical 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation and describe their personal thoughts on mothering. Analyzing this video with transnational rhetoric and disability rhetoric frameworks not only illuminates the persuasive possibilities and drawbacks for the video’s normative feminine gender performance and the spectacle of a war-injured Iraqi girl but also models an approach that prompts rhetoricians to examine larger rhetorical concerns revealed by the intersections of disability, race, gender, and globalization. Notes1 I am greatly indebted to RR peer reviewers Anne Demo, who helped me sharpen my focus, and Jay Dolmage, who both illuminated the broader implications of my analysis and introduced me to Meekosha’s invaluable work. Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson, Maggie LaWare, and Jason Palmeri also provided feedback that benefited my analysis during earlier stages of this project.2 Led by President Robert Greenwald, BNF produces film projects with activist causes, addressing such issues as improving US worker safety, ending petroleum drilling, revealing the power of billionaire Koch brothers, and uncovering US military spending. Greenwald has directed and produced numerous short films with his company Brave New Films, including exposés of Fox News, Walmart, and more. BNF’s activist videos clearly showcase their intention to inspire and create change toward progressive causes.3 For the description I draw on here, see http://archive.is/0RFII. For NMV’s updated website, see http://www.nomorevictims.org/newsite/about/.4 According to holiday historian Jones, Mother’s Day has facilitated a variety of political and social action. For example, in 1933 President Roosevelt issued a proclamation on Mother’s Day that called attention to mothers and children living in poverty (216), and in 1968 Coretta Scott King led a Mother’s Day march to support poor children and their mothers (217). Regarding peace-related political action, a “Mother’s Peace Day” parade was held in 1938, and decades later in the 1980s, Helen Caldicott founded the Women’s Party for Survival, organized against nuclear arms and proliferation. The Party led demonstrations on Mother’s Day. Most recently, on May 2, 2012, supermodel Christy Turlington’s organization, Every Mother Counts, which focuses on maternal mortality, uploaded the video, “No Mothers Day,” prompting mothers to be silent and “disappear” on Mother’s Day in order to “help raise awareness about the hundreds of thousands of women who die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth” (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0w669fZBH8).5 Established in 2002, CodePink (http://www.codepink4peace.org/) identifies itself as a grassroots peace and social justice organization. While not exclusively, its approaches and strategies are women-initiated, women-led, and often based on traditionally feminine tropes such as the color pink.6 Attending to the massive influence of Mother’s Day as a major cultural event in the US is beyond the confines of this article, but I encourage readers to look out for activist events that coincide with the holiday.7 This photograph can be viewed online: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005018835/.8 Widely available online, the full document can be read at CodePink’s website: http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=217.9 As of this writing, the site includes broken links and brief information on 2010’s International Women’s Day, another example of a lack of using YouTube’s ability to maintain a presence and further the ongoing discourse regarding Mother’s Day’s potential for antiwar activism.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAbby M. DubisarAbby M. Dubisar is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies at Iowa State University, where she teaches classes on women’s/feminist rhetoric, gender and communication, and popular culture analysis. Her research analyzes the rhetorical strategies of women peace activists in a wide variety of contexts, from archival holdings to YouTube.

AbstractAtom Egoyan's film Ararat advances a rhetoric of mediated mourning that counters Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. His characters' mourning is mediated in two senses: First, it expresses itself through the production or analy‐sis of visual texts; second, those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community with whom they identify. while Ararat attempts to visualize the unquenchable urge toward consubstantiality with an ancestral collective, the movie deliberately resists absorption by discourses that render Armenian post-exiles answerable to skeptics and to privileged audiences who appropriate narratives of atrocity for personal catharsis. Notes1. 1I dedicate this essay to my father, Phillip Dwayne Carter (1952–2014). I would also like to thank RR reviewers David Blakesley and Nathaniel Rivers for their trenchant commentary, and Theresa Jarnagin Enos for her guidance and support.2. 2See Siraganian (134) and Parker (1047). What Parker sees as Egoyan's insistence on "intergenerational embrace" also enters into Saroyan's film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.3. 3Davis features the quoted passage from Burke's Language as Symbolic Action in her own Inessential Solidarity (33).4. 4See Romney (171) and Torchin (9) for discussions of Spielberg's translation of Holocaust testimony into epic spectacle.5. 5Theriault describes the circumstances of Gorky's emigration in Rethinking Arshile Gorky (15). She also observes that Gorky's ensuing work tended toward abstract experimentalism, as he experienced what Georgiana Banita describes as "an ambivalent relationship to figurative painting" (93). His simultaneous practice and suspicion of figurative representation make him an especially apt ally for Egoyan, who expresses a similar attitude toward mimetic film.6. 6See Inessential Solidarity 21. Although Davis elegantly describes Burke's grounding of identity in multiple, sometimes clashing affinities, she challenges his idea of a biological individual that precedes discourse and that engages in persuasion so as to overcome its originary division from other subjects (23–25). She posits intersubjective union as a constitutive condition rather than a frustrated aspiration.7. 7The Blanchot quotation appears in The Historiographic Perversion (10). In an intriguing turn in the same work, Nichanian also refuses to describe events in Armenia as genocide. He does so, however, from a position deeply opposed to the one adopted by Ali. Nichanian details how historians have demanded copious archival testimony to support the claim of genocide, yet argues that such testimony could never encompass the horror of what took place in Van during and after 1915. Insofar as the idea of genocide makes an intellectual commodity of unrepresentable violence, he finds it inadequate to a Catastrophe that has not ended but continues in the form of concerted denial by the government whose predecessors brought it about.Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher CarterChristopher Carter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as Composition Director. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, and College English, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. His second book, Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography, will be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.

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.

AbstractArtist Andrea Desző’s embroideries, inspired by the Romanian traditional sampler, belong to the material turn in cultural and feminist studies. Based on a comparison with first-wave feminist ideas in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Women and Economics, this analysis interrogates what embroidery—as a form of discourse—tells about the little-known Eastern-European woman’s condition. In the region significantly different from Western Europe in both postcolonialist and post-Marxist analyses, these artifacts reveal the ambivalent condition of women situated at the intersection of tradition, feminist thought, and Marxist practice, after Marxist-led governments had provided women with a workplace and equality, at least in theory. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdriana Cordali GradeaAdriana Gradea is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University, specializing in rhetoric and cultural theory. She graduated from “Romulus Ladea” Visual Arts High School in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has a BA from “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a Graduate Certificate in Advanced International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, and an MA in English from Bradley University. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist and visual rhetorics, as well as Marxism, postcolonialism, and posttotalitarian approaches.

Composition studies has recently increasingly engaged with economic concerns, as evidenced by the 2012 Watson Conference on “Economies of Writing” and a corresponding special issue of JAC. However, that increased engagement has not reflected an increased engagement with economic scholarship, resulting in a rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or a metaphor for non-economic phenomenon. Attention to economic scholarship can provide composition studies with a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.

Nineteenth-century AME preacher Julia Foote self-published her spiritual autobiography twice during her itinerancy; the text—a blend of personal and collective narrative and sermonic rhetoric—enabled her to enter the more public, political discourse of religious activism. Foote engages in national sociopolitical debates, uses publically available histories, and manipulates genre to create a de facto church service over which she can preside. In essence, Foote’s text is a performative subgenre of the spiritual autobiography—the itinerant book—that literally circulates in print culture as an activist text and figuratively circulates within the psychic fervor of late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

Abstract Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is a well-known and much-analyzed speech. But one prominent feature, its use of chiasmus (or inverse repetition), has gone largely unremarked, as it has gone largely unremarked in analyses of Lincoln's thought and language more generally. If chiasmus was important for Lincoln, however, it is curiously absent at a key moment in the Second Inaugural—the end of the third paragraph. Why? To answer that question is to understand something important about Lincoln's political and rhetorical ideology. Notes 1Thank you to RR reviewers Barbara Warnick and Andrew King and Editor Theresa Enos for their comments and encouragement regarding this essay. 2Michiko Kakutani, “Lincoln as the Visionary with His Eye on the Prize,” The New York Times, October 25, 2005. 3Nathan Neely Fleming was brother of my great-great-grandfather, John Giles Fleming, and namesake of my great-grandfather, his nephew. 4 Speech of N. N. Fleming, Esq., of Rowan, on the convention question, delivered in Committee of the Whole in the House of Commons of North-Carolina, January 16th, 1861 (Raleigh, NC: 1861). Available in The North Carolina Collection of the UNC Libraries, Chapel Hill, NC. I am grateful to Julie Oliver Fleming for locating and copying this speech. 5Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 6White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 7White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 151. 8See images of the manuscript in Lincoln's hand at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/pin2202page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. I take my text from this manuscript, adding my own paragraph and sentence numbers (e.g., 2.4). A full version of the text with my lineation can be found at http://people.umass.edu/dfleming/english550-lincoln.html. 9White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech, is a good source on the background of the speech. 10Ibid. 165. 11The whole speech in fact is highly monosyllabic: 505 of 703 words are monosyllables according to White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 48. 12Cf. “government of the people, by the people, for the people” from the Gettysburg Address. 13Lincoln may have learned this formulation from Daniel Webster's 1830 speech against Hayne, with its call for “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable” (Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 83, 113). 14Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, 123. 15Dr. Mardy Grothe, Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You (New York: Penguin, 1999). 16I take the example from Gideon Burton's “Forest of Rhetoric” website: http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm. 17Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 123. 18John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961. 19Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 135. 20“Chiasmus seems to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together, as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first… . The ABBA form seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument, as when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author with, ‘Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’” (Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1991]: 33). 21PBS NewsHour, October 15, 2008. 22David Brooks, “Thinking About Obama,” The New York Times, October 17, 2008. 23Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 122 (quoting Elton Trueblood). 24A useful analysis of the different effects of chiasmus can be found in Clark, “‘Measure for Measure.’” 25As Kraemer notes (“‘It May Seem Strange’”), Garry Wills interpreted the Gettysburg Address chiastically, claiming that Lincoln turned the dedicatory function of the occasion upside down: “We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us” (Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 63; see also 68). As far as I can tell, however, Wills never actually uses the word chiasmus in either his book-length treatment of that speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, or the more pointed discussion of it in his article on the Second Inaugural (“Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”). Kraemer, however, does use the word chiasmus to talk about sentence 3.9 of the Second Inaugural, which I'll also examine below. But, as for more sustained treatments of chiasmus in Lincoln or in the Second Inaugural, Gardner's essay is the only example I could find, other than my own; his treatment, both of chiasmus and of the Second Inaugural, is so different from mine, however, that they are difficult to reconcile. The lack of attention to Lincoln's use of chiasmus in general, and its role in the Second Inaugural in particular, is curious given the detailed rhetorical analysis that is a staple of Lincoln scholarship (for examples of such analysis in terms of the Second Inaugural, see, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; and Wills's “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”—none of which mentions chiasmus). Of course, many analysts have pointed out the balance and symmetry that characterize much of this speech, and several have further noted the tension here between a kind of New Testament discourse of charity and an Old Testament one of retribution. 26Ronald White (Lincoln's Greatest Speech) repeats a contemporary journalistic report that has Lincoln pausing significantly before sentence 2.5 (79). In support of that reading is the layout of Lincoln's actual delivery text (see Wilson's Lincoln's Sword), which can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/-pin2202page.db&recNum=5&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. 27On the combination of chiasmus and paralipsis here, see also Kraemer, “‘It may seem strange.’” 28Miller, Lincoln's Virtue 275. 29Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 6:409. 30White, The Eloquent President 125–52, 363–64, emphasis in original. 31They are, interestingly enough, arranged chiastically: OT NT NT OT. 32White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 101 33Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 241. 34Ibid. 243. 35Interestingly, this is the first and only mention of “North” and “South” in the speech. 36Menand, Metaphysical Club 56. 37Among the killed: a confederate officer from North Carolina named Nathan Neely Fleming. 38Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 39These words were probably uttered very slowly. (In Lincoln's August 1863 letter to James Cook Conkling, which accompanied his written remarks for a Springfield rally, he had suggested, “Read it very slowly” [see White, The Eloquent President 193].) 40Don E. Fehrenbacher, qtd. in Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 38. 41David Herbert Donald, Lincoln 567. 42Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 138. 43Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 146. 44White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 162. 45Carwardine, Lincoln 246. 46Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 242. 47Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 148. 48Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 141–43. “In Joshua Wolf Shenk's telling metaphor, Lincoln [saw clearly] by the summer of 1864 that he was NOT really the captain of the ship; but neither did he regard himself as an ‘idle passenger. [He was rather] a sailor on deck with a job to do’” (Wilson, Lincoln's Sword 261). 49A paraphrase of Lincoln's April 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges, qtd. in Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 66. 50See, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 51Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 64. 52Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 252–72. 53Abraham Lincoln, Speeches & Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 689, emphasis added; see also Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 144; and Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 8:356. 54This ability of Lincoln to effect moral power without being moralizing is treated eloquently in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues, passim. 55Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 59. 56Thomas Mallon, “Set in Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Memory,” The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 2008: 143. 57Wilson, “The Old Stone House” 130. 58White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 93–94. 59Ward, Burns, and Burns, The Civil War 360.

In 2010, during the Google-China dispute, the Chinese Communist Party deployed a rhetoric imbued with the strong pathos of the "century of humiliation" (guochi) that China suffered at the hands of imperialists and used the Google incident to reaffirm its guardianship of the Chinese nation = state. As a case study, this discursive analysis of the Google dispute illustrates the rhetorical techniques and processes the Chinese Communist Party utilized to cement its legitimacy. Relying on the resistance-to-imperialism narrative template, the Chinese Government has circulated discourse that resonates with a public who continue to fear foreign infringement of sovereignty.

Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

In the same vein as my Burkean Parlor essay (2011), another ready classical discourse form useful for learning rhetoric and for non-academic speaking and writing opportunities is the encomium. This...

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.

The continent of Africa is rich with rhetorical traditions that remain largely unexamined. One such African context is Botswana, which means literally “land of the Tswana people.” A look into two sites of Tswana rhetoric—the traditional village meeting place known at the kgotla and traditional Tswana praise poetry—reveals much about the discursive practices of the Tswana and what such practices convey about Tswana life.

Charles Abrams and Robert Moses engaged in a decades-long rhetorical skirmish regarding urban housing and planning in New York City. Despite Abrams's stylistic efforts to alter the physical permanent plans of Moses, his efforts for the most part failed to overcome institutionalized power and its ability to cement the public terms of debate, especially slum. Yet Abrams's sensitivity to multiple factors of urban use illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived social problems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complex issues with an orthos logos perspective.

Kelly Ritter's book, Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse, part of Hampton Press's New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Series, would at first glance appear to be writt...

This article examines a series of essays published in 1830 that were instrumental in the founding of Haverford School, the first Quaker liberal arts college, where a literary, language-oriented curriculum would be taught despite the Friends' long antipathy toward higher learning. The essays successfully persuade by deploying commonplaces that bridged the disparate spheres of Quaker discourse of experience and elite, mainstream discourses of taste. The findings are significant to rhetoricians interested in how social change can be mediated even in entrenched discursive traditions, especially faith traditions that are deeply felt and strongly held.

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.

In The Long Road of Woman's Memory, Addams develops a theory of memory that accounts for the rhetorical function of reminiscence. Drawing on I. A. Richards's conception of rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding, this essay offers an analysis of Addams's theory in relationship to her attempts at rational discourse with a group of immigrant women who believed there was a “Devil Baby” in residence at Hull House. Her successes and failures during these conversations prompted Addams to consider the rhetorical function of memory as a theoretical tool both to understand and remedy discursive conflict.

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.

Deconstructing the praxis involved in the collecting of discourse in late nineteenth-century American autograph albums, this essay links the socially based practices involved in middle-class young women's (re)inscription of messages of friendship within such spaces to Jacques Derrida's theory of différance. While the commonplace language contained within such objects often has a conservative orientation, its circulation within communities through customary practices of exchange opened up opportunities for rhetorical invention. The opportunity to write in these locations also represented access to new discursive arenas, participation which likely played a part in women's gradually increasing access to the public sphere.