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.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 As I detail in the book I’m writing, Hitler received intensive, rhetorical training in public speaking and propaganda in the German military’s demobilization force after the First World War.2 He actually says there are six elements of eloquence, but the fifth entry in his enumeration is just a list of analogies he thinks are incontrovertible.

Rhetoricians of science often (rightly) demarcate as antiscientific the way creationists engage with, manipulate, and circulate scientific knowledge. Though this demarcation work is essential for understanding how creationists manipulate science in the public sphere, relying on demarcation analysis closes off rhetorical inquiry. By analyzing Answers Research Journal, a creationist scientific journal, this essay contends the way creationist authors engage with scientific knowledge production offers a more nuanced way of seeing how scientific meaning-making has rhetorical capacity, which offers new avenues by which rhetoricians of science can investigate the power of scientific methodologies.

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.

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.

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.

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

This essay examines 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.

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, English physicians mobilized a rapidly expanding print culture to launch themselves into the thick of public debate with sharply worded pamphlets defending and denouncing the newly introduced practice of inoculation (the less effective forerunner of vaccination). This paper explores the new kind of medical rhetoric that flourished in the midst of this controversy, one that downplays medical authority and even disavows its own rhetorical character, much like the vaccination debates of today.

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.

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.”

Sarojini Naidu’s platform rhetoric suggests that she functioned as the representative for Indian women due to her presence in the public sphere as first a poet, and then a nationalist leader. Naidu used her role as a jingoistic orator to persuade her audiences to believe that female equality was a necessary precursor to the independence of India. In her speeches, she reasoned with her listeners using the ancient Indian method of Nyaya and other various rhetorical techniques to strengthen her arguments.

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.

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.

Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library’s potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere’s viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.

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

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.

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

Did nineteenth-century newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst manipulate representations of Evangelina Cosío y Cisneros, a young Cuban woman, in order to spark the Spanish-American War? Hearst's arguments for American intervention in Cuba represented a deceptively uncomplicated public opinion, a consensus that only appeared to have been attained through rational deliberation. Situating this event in public spheres studies, this article demonstrates how the Hearst Corporation used representations of Cisneros to disrupt boundaries between political and commercial realms.

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

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.

In 1939 Kenneth Burke's book review of Mein Kampf, in isolating how the “crude magic” of Nazism worked, called for rhetorical critics to enter the social and political scene of the day by resisting strongman rule wherever it appeared: “[A] people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic” (Philosophy 192). George W. Bush, who also had “crude magic,” used the Hitlerian rhetoric of a common enemy and a geographic center in order to realign post 9/11 attitudes sufficient to identify the non-Western other as a common enemy, to convert New York's fallen Twin Towers into a new and noneconomic symbol of US government, and to transform himself from a lazy cowboy into a medicine-man.

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.

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.

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

I have been looking forward to the publication of City of Rhetoric since I first heard David Fleming present his research on the rhetoric of gentrification several years ago. My anticipation was a ...

Abstract An allegoresis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida illuminates this drama as the playwright's act of mythopoesis that characterizes and interprets the second half of Elizabeth I's reign as an historical and political journey through adversities, crises, and conflict to a moment of unified redemption. Action and dialogue allegorically represent the diverse and disparate civic voices of this journey. The drama is Shakespeare's own civic voice morally and ethically arguing and assessing the period as an arrival to national unification, self-identity, and well-being. Notes 1I offer my gratitude to RR reviewers Mark Gellis and Andrew King for their insightful recommendations, and to Theresa Jarnagin Enos and Rhetoric Review for their patience. 2Allegory of typology as relying on well-established pre-texts—in this instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Homer's Iliad; allegory of reification as relying on allusive tropes such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, image, and personification that are culturally understood by the audience. See Quilligan (ad passim) and Barney (30–38). The two classes of allegory need not be mutually exclusive; they can be simultaneously incorporated into one allegorical work and can support each other to convey the author's perceptions. 3All quotations from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 4For a concise and comprehensive history of Commons' escalating voice and its rise to power, see J. E. Neale's introduction (15–29) and his conclusion (417–24) in Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581; and the conclusion (434–39) of Neale's Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601. Neale identifies the birth of Commons' evolving empowerment with Sir Thomas More's plea for parliamentary freedom of speech as early as 1523 during the reign of Henry VIII. 5Although probable sources, none of these names appear in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or in George Chapman's Iliad. Only one reference to the Dardan gate appears in Lydgate's Troy Book, in which it is synonymous with the famous Scaean Gate of Iliad fame. It was referred to as the Dardan gate because it faced northwest toward the Dardanelles. Only until the twentieth century did archaeological evidence at the Troy site in Hycarlic suggest other gateway entrances in Troy's walls. 6Ordish identifies seven gates in Elizabethan London: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgarte, Newgate, and Ludgate (5). However, Moorgate was considered a minor gate and originally a postern that would leave a total of six main gates for Elizabethan Londoners. The other six gates mentioned were the original six that descended from the Medieval Period. Another gate, adjacent to the Tower of London, had been demolished to construct the Tower, and only a pedestrian passageway remained. 7Graves uses an interesting turn of phrase for patronage recipients' commitment: "They also reinforced loyalty by pandering to self-interest" (114). 8The "pearl" metaphor as Elizabeth in this context in all probability held three significances for the Elizabethan audience: (1) At least from the time of the poetic works of the anonymous "Pearl Poet," the pearl signifies purity thereby affirming Elizabeth as the "Virgin Queen"; (2) Elizabeth's purity in relation to God and her Realm are divinely ordained; and (3) in like to "divine," she is ubiquitously felt yet distant and tenuous, one whose relation is not easily attained. Elizabeth's symbolic association with pearls is clearly depicted in her Pelican Portrait, c. 1575, and the Armada Portrait of 1588; her gowns and her hair are encrusted with pearls, and she is portrayed in both portraits with elaborate displays of pearl necklacing. From another perspective: In the Parliamentary session of 1597–98 when monopolies, granted under the authority of her Royal Prerogative, were being challenged by the House of Commons as lending to abuses affecting the welfare of the poor, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted her response in stating: "Her Majesty … hoped that her dutiful and loving subjects would not take away her Prerogative—which is the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem" (Neale, 1584–1601 355). 9Further exploration in identifying allegory as another separate and distinct mode of drama within the corpus of Shakespeare's plays appears viable. Preliminary examination of The Tempest has already indicated to me strong allegorical elements at work and consistent in execution with Troilus and Cressida. They lead me to consider the plays two pieces of a set as "allegory/drama"—a protracted legend of the Tudor Dynasty and its relinquishing evolution to the Stuarts. This preliminary thesis would also include Henry VIII as a necessary stage for Troilus and Tempest to complete the set as a dynastic work. 10… and possibly propaganda for Elizabeth's recent favor toward the House of Commons, also a positive assessment of her reign for the chronicles of history. 11See Dennis Slattery's discussion of mythopoesis as "the ground of narrative knowing" in Sophocles' Theban Plays and the journey from the profane to the sacred in his essay, "Oedipus at Colonus: Pilgrimage from Blight to Blessedness" (ad passim).

Why do the Chinese relate rhetoric only to stylistic devices in writing? This question, which has puzzled scholars for decades, is finally answered. Modern Chinese rhetoric began to form in the late 1800s when Chinese students learned Western rhetoric from their Japanese professors, who translated it into “the study of beautiful prose,” subsequently severing it from oratory. In the early twentieth century, scholars returning from Japan and the US integrated Japanese theories and Anglo-American figures of speech into Chinese literary and literacy traditions despite nativists' protests and appropriated them into a canon of aesthetics only for writing studies.

Abstract During WWII psychologist Carl Rogers introduced a verbal counseling technique that could be utilized by clergy, teachers, and USO workers to help veterans overcome problems of readjustment. Rogers's arhetorical principles were adapted for the writing classroom by Young, Becker, and Pike—an adaptation that later led composition historian James Berlin to misinterpret the implementation of Rogers's principles in his study of a WWII communication program. These misinterpretations of Rogers's original intent have resulted in debate over the rhetorical or arhetorical nature of Rogerian rhetoric and have led to an inaccurate association between Rogerian rhetoric and expressivist and therapeutic writing. Notes 1My thanks to RR reviewers Paul Bator and Janice Lauer for their detailed and helpful revision recommendations, and to my colleagues Robin Veder and Mary Richards for their generous advice on early drafts. 2 Rhetoric and Reality is required reading for many PhD programs in rhetoric and composition and as such has informed, and continues to inform, a majority of scholars in the field. Sharon Crowley cites Rhetoric and Reality as the source for her statement that "[o]ne truly radical communication skills program … was implemented at the University of Denver" (Composition 172). And David Russell refers to Rhetoric and Reality several times in support of his treatment of communications courses and expressivist writing instruction. 3Although Young, Becker, and Pike defer to Anatol Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates as a foundation for their theory, Rapoport is rarely mentioned as the initiator of either the strategies for or the terms Rogerian argument or Rogerian rhetoric. 4See Halasek; Bator; Hairston; and Ede. 5It is now (many years following the publication of the Rogers and Young et al.'s discussion) possible for Rogers's strategy of "listening" to a reader's point of view to succeed in a synchronous online chat environment, where a writer has a present/absent audience, and the reader is capable of presenting immediate feedback to the writer. 6Young, Becker, and Pike insist that the other two prongs of their Rogerian argument strategy for writers are an alternative to conventional argument, but their proposal of delineating "the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid" and convincing the reader that he and the writer have "moral qualities (honesty, integrity, and good will)" in common seem little more than a watered-down version of Aristotle's very conventional appeal to ethos (275). 7Rogers did later validate his person-centered approach through the formation of the Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, an organization that helped ease social tensions in such troubled areas as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America. Perhaps it was this successful approach to social and political conflict resolution that initially attracted Young et al. to Rogers's principles and convinced them to attempt an adaptation of those same principles as an alternative to the agonistic type of argument taught in the writing classroom. 8The conventions of the Institute of General Semantics state that the term general semantics is not capitalized. 9In his introductory chapter to Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin does identify the use of general semantics as "a device for propaganda analysis" (10) and does give Denver credit for promoting "cooperative rather then competitive thinking" (101). 10Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke conducted a study for the War Department in the spring of 1943 and concluded that "nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations" due to "a thing called psychoneurosis" (11). By 1946 at least 40 percent of men receiving pensions for a physical disability were labeled as psychoneurotics, but only 10 percent of that 40 percent had seen combat. 11Archival evidence from the University of Denver reveals that enrollment rose "by 57 percent compared to the pre-war enrollments of 1939" and "the percent of Veterans on campus rose to 60 percent" (Zazzarino). 12Elbow sees the terms expressivist or expressionist as problematic and credits them both as terms of "disapproval" coined by Berlin. In defining the terms as "writing that expresses what I feel, see, think," Elbow concludes that they are "indistinguishable from any other kind of writing" ("Binary Thinking" 20). 13See also Halasek for an insightful analysis of ways in which Elbow's "Believing Game" can be applied to Rogerian principles.

Abstract The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms. Notes 1I thank generous RR reviewers Richard Enos and Michelle Ballif for their advice and assistance with this essay. 2In Grosz's words, "[T]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory" (Volatile 3). The body then becomes "what is not mind … implicitly defined as unruly, disruptive, in need of direction or judgment, merely incidental … a brute givenness which requires overcoming" (Volatile 3–4). 3Thanks to Richard Enos for his thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript. 4Disability studies scholars use the term normate to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. The word normative also converts the idea of normalcy into an active process—norms "are" but they also "act"—we live in a culture in which norms are enforced, a normative society. It can—and has—been argued that in antiquity there was not a concept of normalcy per se. But as Lennard Davis writes, although the word normal appeared in English only in the mid-nineteenth century, "before the rise of the concept of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word ideal. … [I]n the culture of the ideal, physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body" (Enforcing 105). Yet Aristotle had more than one concept of ideality—he expounded on the idea of the mean, for instance. He outlined the idea of both an absolute mean, a method for measuring humans against one another, and a relative mean, a system for disciplining oneself (Nicomachean Ethics II 6–7). I would argue that the commingling of these imperatives results in a normative culture or society—both the upheld fiction of perfection and the systematic self- and Other-surveillance and bodily discipline of normative processes. 5This is true for women particularly, but the stigma of femininity is also applied to men. For instance, Demosthenes was said to have been soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overly feminine demeanor. Physical disability is mingled with femininity to discredit him—see his exchanges with Meidias in particular and Cicero's investigation of Demosthenes' self-education in De Oratore. The story of Demosthenes that has been popularized holds that through rhetorical practice Demosthenes overcame these "impediments" to become a great orator (see Hawhee; Fredal). The possibility that Demosthenes' difference could have queered his bodily/rhetorical performance in a generative sense is not addressed—indeed, any such transgressive possibility is ignored, despite that fact that other historians convincingly challenge the narratives of overcoming and passing that have been ascribed to Demosthenes (see Martha Rose). 6In contrast, an abstract, flawless (male) body becomes a tool for norming. As (Plato wrote and) Socrates said in the Phaedrus, "[A]ny discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128). 7In the Phaedrus, Plato could be seen to change positions slightly, suggesting that certain forms of more "scientific" and therefore "noble" rhetoric might be acceptable (see White; Ramsay; McAdon; Solmsen for a range of readings). 8I gesture here to the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, foundational in disability studies. Garland-Thomson was one of the first scholars to show that "seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications" ("The New Disability Studies" 19). These premises are also the premises of this essay. 9Hawhee's linkages between mêtis and wrestling, and then between wrestling and rhetoric, provide an interesting image for this form of intelligence: "the corporeality of mêtis" as "struggle" or "the swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs" (46, 45). 10In Randy Lee Eickhoff's recent translation of the Odyssey, he points out that Odysseus, considered to be another exemplar of mêtis, uses the name me tis or "no man" as a pun (n4; 404). 11 Mêtis has the practical advantage (and perhaps theoretical disadvantage) of "disappearing into its own action [so that] it has no image of itself" (de Certeau 82). Mêtis cannot be contextualized or schematized because each time it occurs in a context, it shifts that context, and each sequence it is inserted into is distorted (de Certeau 83–84). 12In the classical context, Homer, the mythical seer Tiresias, Oedipus, the great orator Demosthenes, Paris's killer Philoctetes, Croesus's deaf son, and others form our view of disability. In these stories, typically, disability impels narrative through the themes of overcoming, compensation, divine punishment, and charity. 13As I have previously argued, we can also view mythical discourse as, in the words of Susan Jarratt, "capable of containing the beginnings of … public argument and internal debate" (35). Despite the idea, advanced by Eric Havelock in particular, that myth was rote and didactic, we might see myth as being connected to the body, as being highly rhetorical, as being an arena for mêtis—thus my retellings hopefully honor this spirit (see also Slatkin). 14The myth of Metis can be traced as far back as Hesiod (Theogony lines 886–900). 15It is worth noting that these ableist accents on the denunciation of mêtis are also accompanied by a distinct ethnocentrism and even xenophobia. The word metic meant immigrant in ancient Athens. The word is a compound of the words change (meta) and house (oikos), and literally meant someone who changed houses. Many of Plato's attacks on the flexibility, malleability, and the bodily materiality of rhetoric are aimed at the Sophists, metic non-Athenians, and are part and parcel with a larger ideological agenda. 16 Techne was similarly made practical. As Janet Atwill explains in Rhetoric Re-Claimed, techne, when it is allied with mêtis (as it is by the Sophists), "deforms limits into new paths in order to reach—or, better yet, to produce—an alternative destination" (69). Yet we now refer to technai, handbooks full of sets of rules and examples, when we think of techne. William Covino argues that "reactions against the Sophists contributed to the establishment of rhetoric as techne without magic" (20). This distortion is similar to the attempt to ally mêtis only with the forms of knowledge Plato and Aristotle most highly value—to make it precise, a science, as Aristotle does. 17When defining phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle never truly rules out the idea that one would need some form of cunning intelligence to have "prudence," and the version of phronesis he outlines is certainly an abstract form of knowledge. He suggests that to have prudence one must understand particulars as well as universals. Yet the version of phronesis that was later adopted—for instance as one of the Medieval four cardinal virtues—sheds much of this uncertainty and avoids reference to cunning intelligence. 18There also may have been a familial connection between Hephaestus and Medusa—in some myths the two are sexual partners. Their child, Cacus, was said to be a fire-breathing giant. Cacus was said to eat human flesh and nail human heads to his door. Killing him was one of Heracles's twelve labors (Graves, The Greek Myths 158). This link is not made by all scholars, though the story shows up in Ovid and in Virgil's Aeneid. 19Often, Medusa wasseen to symbolize "artful eloquence." For instance, Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century and Nancy Vickers in the twenty-first both argue for this reading. As Salutati suggests, the snakes on her head might be seen as "rhetorical ornaments … instruments of wisdom" because snakes are "reported to be the most cunning" (55). In this interpretation Medusa turns an audience to stone not because of her looks but because of her rhetorical power—her audience "so convinced of what they have been persuaded that they may be said to have acquired a stony quality" (56). Vickers goes further, sourcing this connection back to Plato (254). She also argues that Medusa's "stoning" be seen as a rhetorical power, an ability to change the audience's state of mind, accompanied by a somatic effect. Finally, she suggests that Medusa's rhetorical power might represent the freezing of us all before the specter of the feminine—and she asks what we might do to reverse a legacy of neutralization and appropriation of the Other. 20As an example of the ways that myths crucially disagree with one another, we can see that in Homer's version of the story, Medusa comes into the world with her head of snakes. I think such differences reveal quite marked transitions in and contestations of signification. 21Of course it matters very much whether Medusa was raped or not. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin has argued, this rape has often been elided, and responsibility for it shifted away from Poseiden to Athena. She suggests that this shifting of responsibility essentially excuses men's violence toward women and thus silences women further. 22Detienne and Vernant write that mêtis was often symbolized by the octopus. Thus this connection to the octopus of mêtis may not have been coincidental. Certainly the original Medusa myth relied upon a reference to the dangerous, trapping "knot made up of a thousand arms" that the octopus represented and that conveyed a sense of the powerful double-ness and unpredictability of mêtis (38). 23Graves writes that vials of Medusa's blood were widely distributed: The blood had the power both to kill and to cure (Greek Myths 175). There are many contradictory stories about who received the blood, who distributed it, and who used it for good, who for bad (Greek Myths 175). 24The myth may also express a male fear of Medusa's creative power—she is so "procreative" that her children Chrysaor and Pegasus spring from her dead body (Graves, Greek Myths 127). 25I would argue that as teachers, we need to avoid the temptation to "eat" mêtis and wrest control over knowledge away from students. Students' cunning strategies and divergent expressions may threaten us or challenge us, but we cannot believe that mêtis is something we use on students, that we can be the sole tricksters, holding student bodies captive. Nor can we use the brute force of Zeus or Perseus to coopt their power when it threatens us, to subordinate their thinking bodies. 26The French word métis is related to the Spanish word mestizo, both coming from the Latin word mixtus, the past participle of the verb to mix and connoting mixed blood. 27In critical theory the concept of metissage also locates and interrogates the ways that certain forms of knowledge have been relegated to the margins, and thus this concept links usefully to the stories I have been reanimating. Metissage, obviously etymologically linked to mêtis and meaning mixture or miscegenation, has been used as a critical lens through which one might observe issues of identity, resistance, exclusion, and intersectionality. Relying upon metaphors of mixture that are biological and cultural, this concept of metissage both is like and is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she writes about mestiza consciousness. (See Steinberg and Kincheloe; Hardt and Negri; Gruzinski; Glissant.) 28Coatlalopeuh later becomes conflated with the Virgin of Guadalupe after the Spanish Roman Catholic conquest of Mexico. 29Carrie McMaster also suggests that we might learn from Anzaldúa's writing about her own bodily difference—having experienced congenital disease, chronic illness, disability—to "draw non-homogenizing parallels between various embodied identities" ("Negotiating" 103). In Anzaldúa's own words, "[T]hose experiences [with disability] kept me from being a 'normal' person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out there in the world was shaped by my responses to physical and emotional pain" ("Last Words?" 289). From this we can make some suggestions about the epistemological entailments of mestiza knowledge—it comes from unique, never "normal," bodied experiences. The "leap" that should be encouraged, then, is to see such situated knowledge as vital and perhaps even central to human experience. The "abnormal" body is not something given to women symbolically as a form of derogation; it is an engine for understanding and thus has serious rhetorical power.

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.

Pedagogical materials from the early twentieth-century Americanization movement functioned rhetorically as responses to public discourse, which was highly critical of immigrants' language practices. In teachers' journals and language textbooks, educators engaged in a dialogue with the public, seeking to establish themselves as proponents of social progress and cultural stability. They framed English instruction as a tool for a refashioning of the nation and embraced monolingualism as a unifying force within that nation. As educators sought to engage native-born Americans and immigrants alike in the creation of this ideal nation, assumptions about national identity became embedded into pedagogical practices.

The Rate My Professors (RMP) online student discourse community shapes and defines current public rhetorics of pedagogy. RMP is a cultural phenomenon indicative of a larger movement in extra-institutional discourse toward ranking and assessing people and products. More important than the postings on RMP, however, or their measurable accuracy, is how RMP reflects the increasingly convergent interests of consumer culture and academic culture, shaping the ways that pedagogy is valued and assessed by students within the public domain. Faculty therefore must consider RMP's effect on public discourse about pedagogy in order to help students understand evaluation as a tool for civic exchange.

In 1834 the Richmond Whig declared with alarm that “the Republic has degenerated into a Democracy” (Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy. New York: Norton, 2005. 425). What they meant was t...

A frequent rhetorical technique in classical Greek oratory, especially in ­judicial speeches where it is used both by prosecution and defense, is the speaker's allegation that his opponents and the...

Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly cited the Bible, no one has seriously examined his rhetoric as biblical hermeneutic. Here I argue that in “I Have a Dream,” King explodes closed memories of the Exodus by reconceptualizing a hermeneutic of (Second) Isaiah as he interprets African-Americans' experience of oppression and exile in Babylon/America and their hope for a new Exodus. Drawing on African-American political rhetoric, King spotlights biblical writers' dialogue with each other and extends the arc of biblical narrative into the present. He also anticipates certain forms of liberation theology of the 1970s and beyond.

In addition to the need to correct a significant number of typographical errors, a few factual mistakes, and a few translation omissions, Kennedy explains in his “Prooemion” that the impetus for th...

Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term “color blindness” to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness.

Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term "color blindness" to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness. Notes 1I appreciate Lorien Goodman, Steven Mailloux, Catherine Prendergast, Jacqueline Jones-Royster, and Victor Villanueva for making comments on a rough draft of this essay. I wish to especially acknowledge RR reviewers Keith Miller and Barbara Warnick for their insightful suggestions. 2Though it has been well documented that many blacks switched allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, many others remained loyal to the GOP. Of particular note here were the two preconvention meetings that the NAACP sponsored in 1960, one in Los Angeles for the Democrats and the other in Chicago for the Republicans. Of the combined 14,500 who attended these meetings, 7,500 attended the pre-Republican convention. According to Roy Wilkins, the NAACP was determined to remain nonpartisan. Aside from this, several prominent African Americans, according to Taylor Branch, wanted Democrats other than Kennedy to receive the presidential nomination. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, for example, initially supported Lyndon Johnson. Baseball great Jackie Robinson, a Republican, supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey during the primaries. Robinson said he would support Nixon if Kennedy were nominated, and Powell, as the third Kennedy-Nixon Debate reveals, eventually made some outlandish statements in support of the Democratic frontrunner. Powell's support, if not these statements themselves, may be attributable to the bribe Powell sought and received from the Kennedy camp. See The Crisis, August-September issue of 1960 and Branch's critically acclaimed Parting the Waters. 3While Nixon alludes to Lincoln five times in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in July 1960, he does not invoke his name at all during the four debates. Kennedy alluded to Lincoln twice during his acceptance speech and four times during the debates. Though both men referred to how slavery supposedly fueled Lincoln's moral fervor for the Union's cause, all of the references gloss over the inequities that African Americans were experiencing during the 1960s, and only one of these references, ironically, identifies their race. Equally important, domestic freedom became a synecdoche for America's international agenda. Lincoln's larger-than-life status as a harbinger of freedom for blacks has been well researched and critiqued. For a fairly recent, provocative analysis, see Lerone Bennett's Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. 4The Republican and Democratic respective civil rights planks of 1960 are worthy of rhetorical analysis aside from this study. As might be expected, both parties appealed to the spiritual, legal, and moral implications for civil rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence supposedly suggest. More surprisingly, each plank condemns racial discrimination as a practice that extends beyond southern borders. Both planks also appeal to the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960 as the foundation and impetus for racial progress. While the Democratic platform set a deadline of 1963 (an acknowledged link to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation) to comply with the Brown decision, the Republican platform rejects this specific timetable, believing that it would actually encourage delays in school desegregation. Under proposals to ensure voting enfranchisement, the Republican platform proposes that "completion of six primary grades in a state accredited school is conclusive evidence of literacy for voting purposes." In contrast, the Democratic platform promises to "support whatever action is necessary to eliminate literacy tests and the payment of poll taxes as requirements for voting." These passages underscore a fascinating ironic twist, for it was the Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) who started and protected literacy tests as one way of disenfranchising black voters; yet the Republican proposal could be viewed as an appeasement to the Southern Democrats' constituency. 5The widely recognized birth date for the Sit-in Movement is February 1, 1960. Only nine days later, according to Lerone Bennett, "the movement had spread to fifteen Southern cities in five states." By March 22, "more than one thousand blacks had been arrested in sit-in demonstrations." No wonder Nixon felt compelled to say a word about this movement. Curiously, he did not say more. More curiously, Kennedy says nothing on this topic during the debates. 6Kennedy admits during this debate that he borrows the phrase "moral leader" from Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Platform also uses the expression. In reality, Kennedy, according to Mary Dudziak among others, would not become fully convinced about civil rights until after the Birmingham campaign of April and May 1963, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in September would transform him into a full-fledged moral leader. 7At the close of the fourth debate, Nixon asserted that with regard to "civil rights," the Republican Party had made "more progress in the past 8 years than in the whole 80 years before." The Republican platform, from which Nixon lifts this statement almost verbatim, specifies what "progress" Nixon may be alluding to, namely the civil rights legislation passed in 1957 and 1960. 8King had little tolerance for permutations of "liberalism" that were not radically progressive on the issue of racial justice. Two stellar examples of this posture are his speeches, "Give Us the Ballot," delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, and the other, "The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness," delivered at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League in 1960. Both speeches contain sections that challenge Northern liberals to examine their motives behind fears about achieving racial justice. See The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, editor. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid G. Holmes David G. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Hu-manities at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, composition, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance. His most recent essays have appeared in College English and in the anthology Calling Cards. His research interests include epistemologies and rhetorics of racism, theories of ethos, and the civil rights movement mass meetings.

While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim: Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication de partments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we con sider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this care ful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism. However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical crit icism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim?Shirley Wilson Logan's We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken McAllister's Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture con ducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason that rhetorical criticism has historically belonged to speech communication may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our own scholarship. Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which com prise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those

Through an analysis of the April 2000 IMF/World Bank protests in Washington DC, I identify an expanded repertoire of the creative arts of the contact zone in an era of global capitalism. I argue that three theories of deliberation are at play in the events: a rhetoric of benevolent capitalism, a rhetoric of a rational public sphere developed through supranational organizations, and an emerging rhetoric of grassroots globalization. I conclude that grassroots democratic globalization may provide a new model of the public sphere—a site of rhetorical deliberation where strangers meet to imagine the world they will create.

This article examines issues surrounding the maternal rhetor in public spaces through a case study of Anne Hutchinson, a leading figure in the antinomian controversy that divided the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late 1630s. It details how Puritans employed Hutchinson's fertility and malformed offspring to discredit her, silence her supporters, and consolidate secular and religious power. Their argumentative uses of Hutchinson's pregnancy and childbirth constitute a form of maternal rhetoric, a set of gendered obstacles, opportunities, and persuasive means that arise at the junction of maternity and public discourse.

Mainstream and movement rhetorics interact as political actors and struggle to control meaning in ways that are not evident from single-site analysis. This article examines how three speakers in southern Arizona give meaning to "sustainable ranching." The vir bonus is used to understand meanings developed in face-to-face deliberative forums. Social movement framing theory, briefly reviewed, is used to analyze activist rhetoric and limits of the vir bonus model. Finally, Gerard Hauser's "reticulate public sphere" is used to account for invention as a dialogic response to rhetorics from multiple sites.

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

This essay examines rhetorical instruction and student writing at Texas Woman's University, a public women's college. Unlike their peers at elite, private women's colleges in the East, students at TWU were consistently encouraged to write and speak in public forums, to take part in political discourse, and to think of themselves as rhetors. The vocational focus of the school meant that the campus could never serve as a cloister, and the ever-present support of activist clubwomen gave students powerful role models for participating in the public sphere.

Abstract The study of emotion has regained prominence in the fields of psychology and rhetoric. Despite this interest, little has been written about the art of making an emotional appeal. This essay focuses on the writing of Quintilian, in particular Book VI of his Institutes of Oratory, in an effort to describe his theory of emotional appeal, and to see whether it has relevance today. The essay presents Quintilian's theory in the form of "rules."

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