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

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.

As I read and reread Young’s text for this review, I was struck by news of the activist and professor Cornel West stating, during an October 12 speech at the “Faith in Ferguson” rally, “I didn’t co...

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

A reconstruction of the required two-year course in composition and rhetoric for all incoming students at Bryn Mawr College at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on archival sources such as college catalogs and related documents, administrative correspondence, and student papers—specifically those by Margery Scattergood, who entered Bryn Mawr in 1913—shows an adherence to the belletristic tradition. The course provided practice in criticism in the Arnoldian sense of the word. The focus on the role of the writer as critic provided Bryn Mawr students with opportunities to engage with issues of public interest.

Focusing on the confluence of mirrors, manners, and ars dictaminis in the late Middle Ages, I argue that thirteenth-century civic engagement organized itself as a decorous spectacle: a well-mannered, highly codified visual performance that reflected and reinforced the structure of medieval Europe's stratified society. Marked by display, courtesy, and participation, decorous spectacle evolved from a groundswell of cultural factors including the emergence of mirror-making technologies, politesse, and, especially, ars dictaminis. Exploring this groundswell provides a way to understand the evolution of late Medieval decorous spectacle and a template for understanding the nature of civic engagement in any era.

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.