ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

ABSTRACTWhat exactly is the Church? Is it primarily an institution? Or is it the people in its pews? And depending on the answer, what obligations do the people who constitute it in the present have toward the past? This essay utilizes the Pennsylvania State Legislative debate over clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a way to explore how communal commonplaces are activated in public argument and used to shift the dominant meanings of a community. Communal commonplaces act as a shorthand to bring audiences to a place of shared understanding while managing opposing lines of argument, images, and tropes. Understanding the Church as a communal commonplace illuminates how divergent meanings can be activated for wildly different and materially consequential purposes. Analyzing the Church helps us to understand how other communal commonplaces— the nation, for instance—manage opposing images of a community.KEYWORDS: Catholic Churchcommunitymetaphortropes Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 There is considerable debate over the terms used to refer to individuals who have experienced sexual violence. The term victim is often used in legal contexts, whereas survivor is common in antisexual violence advocacy circles (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network [RAINN]). Some individuals who have experienced sexual violence prefer one term over another (or neither), and that preference may change over time and in different contexts (Williamson and Serna). Throughout the essay, in an attempt to honor the terms individuals have chosen for themselves, I use whatever term appears in the text I am most recently quoting or analyzing. Otherwise, I follow RAINN’s practice of referring to individuals as victims when referring to their relationship to the criminal or civil legal system.2 While a partial Statute of Limitations reform bill was signed into Pennsylvania law in 2019, Rozzi’s look-back window was taken out of the bill and put forth as a constitutional amendment. Due to several significant setbacks, the question of the look-back window remains unresolved.3 Both within legal and academic circles, the idea of institutions expressing corporate agency is a contested one. This idea is a part of an ongoing debate over whether groups can exhibit the capacities and actions associated with theories of individual agency, such as the capacity for thought, intention, and moral blameworthiness (Smiley). In both its legal and public use, it is oftentimes used to capture both the tendency for institutions to be the subject of moral reproach, and the idea that individuals both share and enable each other’s actions within specific group structures (Williams). My use of corporate agency within this essay is meant to capture the sentiment of the Rozzi coalition, and their insistence that the structures of the Church enabled the concerted actions of multiple individuals, and thus that the institution could be held legally and morally responsible.

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

After the catastrophic Wenchuan Earthquake occurred in Sichuan, China in May 2008, a memorial was built to commemorate the disaster. This essay aims to study how the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial, as a rhetorical space, creates a national image of tenacious rebirth through the rhetorical reconstruction of the trauma. Analysis shows that the memorial selectively remembers the disaster, publicizes the collectivist spirit and the Communist Party’s leadership for their role in disaster relief and reconstruction of the disaster areas, conveys the rhetoric of hope for the people in the disaster areas and the nation, but ignores the controversies surrounding the quality of school buildings and student victims through silence and alternative presentation. As a political carrier and a tool for educating visitors, the memorial has become a politicized space and transformed from a natural historical site to a political memory space, thus realizing the penetration of politics into people’s daily life.

This essay draws on theories of rhetorical ability to analyze public discourse on sexual consent. By emphasizing the rhetoricity of disability, these theories underscore the environmental conditions of communication. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding a controversial legal case, the author develops a rhetorical theory of consent that calls attention to the way that arrangements of power enable and constrain the communicative conditions that facilitate the possibility of consent.

This essay presents a theory of rhetorical decay, a rhetorical state that results from argumentative gestures that “derail” and suppress productive discourse (i.e., exchanges that produce new understandings, consensus, or “legitimate dissensus” between members of a public). Reviewing works from critical race studies, rhetorical criticism, and feminist rhetorical studies, the author identifies several individual preexisting concepts that can be classified as individual rhetorical decay–fostering practices. However, a gap remains in theorizing the larger category and understanding the outcomes of such rhetorics; this essay intervenes in this space by creating the metatheory of rhetorical decay, characterizing the family of gestures, examining affiliate concepts, providing an example of rhetorical decay in a contemporary public argument (over lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender marriage), and identifying precedents for mitigating such practices.

In September 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing inviting comments on the regulation of human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products. This essay uses Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecularization to show the rhetorical conflicts that emerged between lay public arguments and biomedical experts’ claims about the limits of personal autonomy, ownership, and the definition of cells and tissues as products. By analyzing how public actors negotiate the regulation of human tissues, I argue that a rhetorical account of molecularization shows how and for whom bodies are commodified and physically distributed. Through this rhetorical account of molecularization, I move between the molecular level of the body (the micro) and the situatedness of human bodies (the macro) to rethink the ways bodies are defined, even at the level of the cell.

In public discourse, lay cognitive precepts are invoked at every turn. People regularly speak of believing, thinking, knowing, and so forth, ascribing those states to themselves and others alike. This essay identifies the cognitive vernacular as a discernible dimension of public discourse, one that includes such regularly deployed lay precepts as well as popularized psychological and neuroscientific ideas. The cognitive vernacular may find expression in focal texts (e.g., a self-help book on positive thinking), but also pervasively, and somewhat elusively, takes shape in discussions that are otherwise overtly concerned. This essay takes the public discussion regarding the discovery of a teenage heroin ring in Centreville, Virginia, in 2008, a single episode within the large-scale and enduring American opioid crisis, as a focal site to investigate the cognitive vernacular. In doing so, it discerns how lay precepts concerning choice and knowledge are wielded as rhetorical resources to both cast and mitigate blame.

This essay investigates the extent to which an “ecological turn” in rhetorical studies—a turn toward systemic understandings of circulation and material interrelation—enables us to understand the ways that rhetors transform the networked public sphere. The essay argues that while ecological models have helped attune us to the complex, ever-shifting interrelations that constitute networked environments, they have demonstrated limitations. Specifically, ecological models have deemphasized (1) the historical specificity of rhetorical ecologies, (2) the role that social imaginaries play in structuring rhetorical ecologies, and (3) the ways that rhetors collectively invest in transforming rhetorical ecologies. Drawing on a qualitative study of activism on Twitter, this essay advocates the development of an infrastructural politics, an approach that emphasizes the ecological qualities of public rhetoric—dispersion, complexity, and emergence—while also attuning us to the collective and ethical dimensions of practicing rhetoric in today’s networked public sphere.

Marching in public, as members of a public meant to be seen in public, has been one of the most frequently deployed forms of collective social protest in the United States. For people with disabilities, however, this type of rhetorical action is fraught with normative assumptions that go beyond presumed needs for accommodation, access, and alternative modes of participation. This essay identifies the far less visible constraints created by previous historic and rhetorical practices, including some of the discourse of other progressive social activists. Both the prospect and the practice of marching as a rhetorical form of performative public argument are thus complex for people with disabilities who are too often not seen as equal citizens. The trouble with marching is thus ableism and its sustained invisibility.

This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video "This Is America," artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of "appropriate" kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst's own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

This essay explores “viral circulation” and “slow circulation” as two alternate ethics for rhetorical decision making in civic settings. I analyze interviews with media producers from civic organizations in central Appalachia in order to illustrate the ways community and regional-based rhetorics strive for slow circulation through strategies of “rhetorical persistence” in public discourses. I argue that framing “viral” or “slow” circulation as ethical models helps us understand speed of circulation as both an ethical and rhetorical choice. The essay concludes with a discussion of ways that slow circulation offers an ethic better suited to the circulation of civic rhetorics in some community advocacy contexts.

During the 1960s, when departments of English had little knowledge of or regard for “rhetoric,” a small community of “autodidacts,” including Richard Young, Ross Winterowd, Edward P. J. Corbett, James Kinneavy, and Richard Ohmann, gathered to foster rhetorical knowledge. The group was joined by other scholars in academic fields, such as speech communications, philosophy, and linguistics (including Donald C. Bryan and George Yoos), similarly interested in rhetorical studies. Having grown organically and informally—with an interdisciplinary interest—the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) currently has approximately 1,500 members. The organization held its first, formal meeting at the 1968 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Minneapolis, the year it began publishing its Rhetoric Society Newsletter. In 1975, the Newsletter became the academic journal, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and in 1984, the Society held its first RSA conference. This essay, drawing on anecdotal accounts, details the history of the organization’s origins and growth.

This essay makes sense of rhetorical scholarship on publics by interpreting publics as networks of relationships. I begin by considering how the concept of relationship has circulated as a prominent theme in the foundational scholarship on which contemporary scholars often draw. I then discuss how scholarship on multiple public spheres and counterpublics explores advocates’ efforts to reconstruct relationships in pursuit of inclusion, justice, and equality. I conclude by explicating neoliberal publics as a prominent contemporary challenge to robust relationships and critical public engagement. Against contemporary scholarship and practice that emphasizes fluidity, diversity, and transformation, a neoliberal public asserts its own universality, claiming that market relations represent an intrinsic, common orientation to public engagement and that markets treat everyone the same.

Recent attempts to brand US President Donald J. Trump as a psychotic or fascist have failed because such labels do not capture the double character of his appeal. In this essay, I argue Jacques Lacan’s understanding of perversion better captures Trump’s peculiar brand of political rhetoric.

This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

Adding to the ongoing reconsideration of nineteenth-century oratorical theory, this essay recovers an influential evangelical theory and method of extemporaneous delivery that contributed to the rise of extemporaneous speech in America. The “inspiration of delivery,” articulated by Southern Baptist homiletician John A. Broadus in his 1870 preaching manual, posits a process of ongoing invention during extemporaneous delivery. Although it works to accomplish evangelical purposes, Broadus’ theory of delivery is a primarily secular synthesis of the classical canon of delivery with naturalistic elocutionary theory. Through its wide and persistent circulation, this theory of delivery continues to shape American expectations for performing authenticity in public oratory.

This essay argues that public debating societies that emerged in Britain in the later eighteenth century functioned as sites of invention where citizens could develop dispositions associated with a more inclusive form of democracy. I locate the generative aspects of these forums in the principle of decorum. I argue that this principle functioned as a means for participants to negotiate traditional codes of conduct and standards of speech that constrained interactions among various constituents of the body politic. To illustrate this claim, I focus on the clash of codes exemplified in an encounter between a Quaker woman and a member of Parliament in a public debating forum. By highlighting these discursive interactions, this essay extends current conversations in public sphere theory that call for a focus on the processes and forms of rhetorical engagement among diverse publics.

This essay draws attention to the vital role that the "other" America has played in the creation of (U.S.) American rhetorics. It examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world. In 1823, when James Monroe articulated what became the "Monroe Doctrine," the idea that the United States had a two-continent sphere of influence was novel at best. Over time, however, U.S. public discourse developed a ubiquitous common sense in which U.S. strength, security, and even national being have a hemispheric basis. From Monroe's assertion that actions against any American state would manifest "an unfriendly disposition toward the United States" to Theodore Roosevelt's lionized national virility and into the present moment, the figure of Latin America—present and absent—has become powerfully definitive for U.S. national image.

This essay uses the specter of Mexican presidential rhetoric (specifically, Plutarco Elías Calles’ 1928 informe) to remark on the nationalistic limitations of U.S. presidential rhetoric scholarship as a whole. Such limitations can lead to possible mis- and under-readings that can hinder the applicability of U.S. scholarship to other “American” places. These observations are then followed by a reading of Calles’ informe that argues for a wider hemispheric approach to our understanding of “American” presidential rhetoric. Such an approach aims to push our collective gaze beyond the territory of the United States to the point where the rhetorical histories of Latin America rub uncomfortably but productively against our own U.S.-centrism.

In this essay, a peacock represents an “untimely” agent of transformation in an Aristotelian-based rhetoric. The peacock refers to a fragment attributed to Antiphon. This essay identifies and develops two untimely historiographical ways for pursuing an answer to the question, how can sophistical fragments in general and Antiphon’s fragment in particular be employed to generate attractive spaces for the future of rhetoric as an art of civic discourse? The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a methodological introduction to untimely ways of doing historiography followed by a discussion of the fragment about the peacocks. The third part situates the fragment in a “laboratory” where “equipment” is set up to explore the fragment with untimely ways. The last part of the essay describes how if the peacock’s wing were left alone, rhetoric would be better prepared to look outside of itself into new forms for new functions.

This essay complements and complicates research on immigration discourse by intersecting two post-humanist understandings of “face.” Analyzing post-9/11 news media's enfacements of the “Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern immigrant,” I employ the works of Paul de Man and Emmanuel Levinas to explicate, on one hand, the inscription of subjectivity onto alterity, and, on the other, the slippage of this inscription. I demonstrate that figurations of immigrants rely on the tandem rhetorical operations of apostrophe and prosopopeia, the giving of voice and face. Public rhetorics impose a mask, an intelligible signifier onto the unknowable Other. Inevitably, however, alterity speaks, and “face” in another sense breaks through; the mask that mediates immigrants in public culture is exceeded. The essay concludes with implications for a posthumanist immigration ethics, not motivated by a personal commitment to the Other, but discoverable in the Leviansian conversation and the “experience” of exposedness.

Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

This essay examines how three of the most popular public speaking textbooks address rhetorical invention. The essay argues that textbooks minimize the discursive space shared by speakers and audiences in public speaking classrooms. As a consequence, topic and argument invention is framed largely as an internal affair that occurs prior to the speaker's interaction with the audience. The essay concludes with recommendations for teaching invention by reframing the public speaking classroom as a protopublic space.

Abstract This essay analyzes one moment that has forced a reconsideration of the historical public sphere: the debate between John Stubbs and Queen Elizabeth I of England over her proposed marriage to the French Duke of Alençon. Stubbs adopted an argumentative strategy in which scripture served as a source of universal truth on which to base arguments about politics. Unable to allow such a strategy to undermine her own authority, Elizabeth's response asserted the communicative, rather than transcendent, nature of argument. Reading the debate in this way, in turn, calls into question a historical, developmental model of rationality and the public sphere. Ultimately, I argue, the public sphere does not develop as a radical emergence to be documented, but instead operates as a rearticulation of argumentative positions that are consistently and always available. Notes 1There are a number of discussions of the political possibility of the public sphere specific to the field of rhetoric; a review essay by Tanni Hass, and a special issue of Communication Theory edited by Michael Huspek, give a good indication of the directions of these discussions. Gerard Hauser is explicit in describing the possibility of reforming politics through rethinking the public sphere, while David G. Levassuer and Diana B. Carlin exemplify the assumption of the “public sphere” as a thing with a real historical existence that can be measured and examined. 2Other scholars have discussed the controversy between Elizabeth and Stubbs in terms of more thematic strategies without directly discussing questions of contemporary rhetorical theory. Jacqueline Vanhoutte considers this debate as demonstrating the emergence of a rhetoric of nationalism by both Stubbs and Elizabeth, while Debra Barrett-Graves sees Elizabeth and other politicians as employing a rhetoric focused specifically on the concept of honor. Illona Bell's argument is that the queen “was less outraged by Stubbs’ militant Protestantism … than by his overt paternalism and barely concealed antifeminism” (101). Peter Mack, Janet M. Green, and Allison Heisch have treated Elizabeth's rhetoric in terms of contemporary formal practice, such as her handling of schemes and tropes, while Cheryl Glenn and Janel Mueller have discussed how Elizabeth adapted her rhetoric in light of her position as a woman monarch. 3Although he had already become Duke of Anjou by the time of his courtship with Elizabeth, I follow the scholarly convention of referring to him by his first title, Duke of Alençon, though Elizabeth refers to him at times as Anjou. 4All of these scholars were connected with what has been variously called the Leicester faction or the Sidney circle—that group of political and literary figures associated with Leicester and the Sidney family, and with the reformist Protestantism (among other reforms) generated out of Cambridge University throughout the sjxteenth century. 5As defined by Dudley Fenner in 1584: “Methode is the judgement of more axioms, whereby many and divers axioms being framed according to the properties of an axiome perfectly or exactly judged, are so ordered as the easiest and most generall be set downe first, the harder are less generall next, until the whole matter be covered, as all the partes may best agree with themselves & be best kept in memorie. For as we consider in an axiome truth or falsehood, in a sillogisme, necessary following or not following, so in Methode the best and perfectest, the worst and troublesomest way to handle a matter” (Fenner 167). 6He commissioned Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawier's Logike, for example. 7Although it should be pointed out that this is in practice only—in theory scriptural understanding was available to all. But divines such as Knox, because of their training and study, were often better equipped, so the thinking went, to help people come to an understanding of the truth of scripture. 8Wallace MacCaffrey sums up both the views of faction and of Stubbs's pamphlet as produced at the bidding of others: “Its central arguments were shrewdly considered, comprehensive, and very knowledgeable. Indeed, they were so well informed—and so close in content to the actual council debates—that the Queen had some ground for her suspicion that someone in the Council was behind Stubbs” (Making 256). 9It is impossible to say in fact that Elizabeth authored this proclamation; however, a number of factors suggest authorship, while the nature of proclamations themselves is such that to discuss them as belonging to the monarch is not erroneous. Frederic A. Youngs has noted this proclamation is one of the lengthiest issued under Elizabeth; it is also one of her only proclamations to do more than simply issue an agenda or reiterate a legal ruling, but actually engage an opponent. The exact legal nature of proclamations under the Tudors has been the source of much debate, in their day and in our own, but it seems most likely that under Elizabeth they were issued primarily to call attention to an existing law, and as such served mainly, due to their widespread distribution, as an educational or, in a different sense, propagandistic tool. These would be sent to local authorities throughout the country and in cities, and their contents would be disseminated and enforced by those officials—so that their effectiveness in implementation depended on the crown's relationship to the particular localities. In other words, while their legal status was uncertain, they are effective gauges of the intentions of the monarchy. More than this, these proclamations can be seen as attempts to intervene into public discourse by setting the terms of that discourse—they are efforts to shape the ways in which the world under the monarch is thought of—both in the sense that they serve as reminders of the presence and authority of the monarch, as well as in the sense that they connect a particular understanding of the world to that authority. In considering this as an expression of Elizabeth's political will that is fully implicated in her rhetoric, it is useful to point to Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, who collected the proclamations into the definitive anthology. They define a Tudor royal proclamation as “a public ordinance issued by the sovereign in virtue of the royal prerogative, with the advice of the Privy Council, under the Great Seal, by royal writ” (xvii). Whether or not they were in fact authored by a monarch's hand, proclamations were definitely authored as though by intention of the monarch, and always reflective of the monarch's interests; so Hughes calls the proclamation (vol 1, p. xxvii): “a literary form psychologically gauged to elicit from the subject an obedient response, favorable to the will and interests of the crown.” Given the personal nature of this particular proclamation, and given its unique features, to call the proclamation Elizabeth's seems to me warranted.

Following George Whitefield's 1739 New England tour, debate erupted among colonial clergy over the perceived threats and benefits of his itinerant preaching, continuing well into his 1744 return. This exchange is indicative of broader concerns among protestant clergy over waning influence in colonial America as well as a shift in colonists’ expectations about the form and function of public oratory. Questions of what constitutes good preaching, who is fit to preach, and suitable audiences demonstrate that itinerancy served as a powerful point of contention among ministers struggling to maintain power in the new nation. Focusing on Reverend Whitefield's efforts, this essay explores the competing conceptions and examines trends in form, function, and audiences for religious rhetoric that inform both our understanding of popular expectations of civic leaders’ discourse and emerging positions on the proper enactment of the rhetorical leadership within the new nation.

Phonographic or verbatim reports, in claiming to replicate extemporaneous speeches, offer a version of interactions that occurred in public settings. The "technology" of record represented the dialogic nature of abolitionist oratory, creating a discursive space for identification for attending and reading publics. Authorized by an appeal to accuracy, full-text reproductions of speeches were both a reflection and a performance of publicness. Full-text records represented abolitionists as truthful (offering an alternative to proslavery designations of "fanatic"), while also facilitating the circulation of the sounds of abolitionist events, using the means of mass production. The rhetorical force of these records depended on their assertions of accuracy, as well as the aural and embodied public presence that they implied. The narrative created by the phonographer, operating in the transitional space between fixed and unfixed text, emphasizes the rational, inclusive nature of abolitionist public discourse, simultaneously creating and representing an abolitionist public sphere.

The victimage ritual is a familiar concept to rhetorical scholars. Victimage, as understood by Kenneth Burke and Robert L. Ivie, is a curative rhetoric aimed at easing the guilt associated with symbolic life. By putting Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the victimage ritual as enumerated in On the Genealogy of Morals in conversation with Burke and Ivie, this essay expands received wisdom by arguing that victimage in presidential rhetoric is often as much about prolonging resentment and guilt as it is at easing these emotions.

This article examines the claim that rhetoric declined precipitously, and perhaps even “died,” sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. While various causes have been proposed for the presumed demise, the rise of both Romanticism and nationalism has been advanced as destructive of the rhetorical tradition. Nationalism, in particular, is said to be incompatible with rhetoric because it replaced an older, universal, Latinate culture and thus displaced the classical tradition of which rhetoric was a key part. Contrary to such claims, I argue that the rise of British nationalism certainly influenced rhetoric, but did so in ways that benefited the development of modern rhetoric in Britain. I argue further that classicism and nationalism functioned, not in opposition, but in concert, contributing to a resurgence of rhetoric, elocution, and oratory in Britain in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Abstract We live in a world of risks that lurk everywhere, in the food and water we consume, in the viruses and bacteria we encounter, and in the global political scene that seems more and more volatile. This article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, I use the concept of risk, and specifically the work of Ulrich Beck, to show how the relationship between science, politics, and rhetoric is being transformed from earlier, politically progressive, twentieth-century conceptions of the role of science in public culture. Second, I try to explain how the concept of risk has altered political culture and requires a different form of prudence for political rhetoric. These two lines of inquiry work to demonstrate how uncertainty and contingency are now the products of techno-scientific rationality. This way of thinking about contingency changes how we understand the practices of political rhetoric and the constitution of public culture. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert Danisch Robert Danisch is Assistant Professor in the General Studies Unit at Concordia University, 1455 De Maisonneuve West EV-6.233, Montreal, Quebec H2S 2E3, Canada.

Herbert Marcuse's relationship to the student-activists of the 1960s not only required a different form of discourse from that of his colleague, Theodor W. Adorno, but also indicated the range of conditions that govern political discourse in the academy. Whereas Adorno restricted his political activity almost exclusively to the pursuit of dialectical theory, Marcuse's insistence upon speaking to audiences of activists occasioned a contemporary manifestation of ancient debates over the discursive forms of rhetoric and dialectic. This essay analyzes two different kinds of discourses: (1) a dialectical conversation between Marcuse and Adorno, and (2) a rhetorical address that Marcuse presented to activists. Taken together, these texts reveal the dependence of the academy on more than one form of discourse and suggest that even under our contemporary circumstances, the ancient categories of rhetoric and dialectic continue to operate as counterparts.

Nineteenth-century presses delighted in reporting on the “spectacle” of the Amana Society, playing up the contrast between this pious communistic community of German immigrants and its “ambitious” individualistic American counterparts. These accounts employed a rhetoric of containment, a form of rhetorical imagining that contains the threat of a non-normative community. Three characteristics of this rhetoric are evident in the Amana descriptions: (1) a particular gaze that views the community as a picture; (2) a degree of praise that is simultaneously undermined by a nostalgic attitude toward the community; and (3) an assertion that the benefits of this lifestyle require an unthinkable sacrifice incompatible with the imagining audience's nature or values. Containment rhetoric neutralizes the threat of the imagined group—often by circulating its tropes and images to more public, powerful venues—and implicitly defines the group as peripheral to the larger public.

Abstract The 1930s in America abounded with debates about language and communication. Interest in the effects of propaganda and the problems of miscommunication prompted the development of organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937) and Count Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics (1938). Albeit in different ways, each of these groups aimed to increase the public's awareness of the effects of language and to improve its ability to communicate. But the assumptions about language and communication held by these organizations would ultimately render them short-lived in terms of public and scholarly attention. This article examines the work of these organizations in relation to that of Kenneth Burke, and demonstrates how Burke developed his rhetorically oriented theories of communication against and in response to this rich background. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Selzer for his encouragement and advice on earlier drafts of this article (as well as for inspiration, as in its original version this was written for his Kenneth Burke graduate seminar at Penn State). Thanks also to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1For more thorough elaborations and further discussions, see, for example, Crowley; Sproule; George and Selzer. 2See, for instance, “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The Journal of Philosophy 31 (February 1, 1934): 80–81; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” International Journal of Ethics 44 (April 1934): 377–384; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The New Republic 79 (August 1, 1934): 327; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” Supplement to Nature (October 20, 1934): 617. 3Korzybski has a curious predilection for not capitalizing names of systems (the aristotelian, newtonian, and euclidian being the most commonly used). Because most adherents to General Semantics use the same convention, I will follow it as well in this article. 4Of course, “orientation” is also a key word for Burke, especially in Permanence and Change. Burke's idea of “orientation” appears to have come directly from Korzybski: “Orientation can go wrong. Consider, for instance, what conquest over the environment we have attained through our powers of abstraction, of generalization; and then consider the stupid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these abstractions were mistaken for realities” (6). Burke's term, via Veblen, for problematic orientations is “trained incapacities,” or, as he defines it more completely, “a faulty selection of means due to a faulty theory of causal relationships” (9), as, for example, chickens who have been trained to eat when a bell rings will still come running when the bell signals punishment instead of food. 5In an unpublished manuscript (recently discovered, edited, and published by James Zappen), Burke notes that Korzybski's structural differential “is valuable for calling attention to an important abstractive process of language, but cannot of itself replace a mature linguistic analysis.” 6Also, while the IPA definitely experienced failure as an organization (although certainly, as I pointed out earlier, communication departments and composition programs still find value in the seven propaganda devices), it should be noted here that contrary to Condit's assertion that “I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir” (“Post-Burke” 350), in fact the Institute of General Semantics is still quite active, and has been varyingly influential in the fields of cognitive psychology, popular psychology, linguistics, and education. Inarguably, though, it has lost most of its credibility (and even name recognition) with scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition and communication. 7In the same letter, Burke explains to Josephson that he was going to attend one of Korzybski's General Semantics seminars in Chicago upon the offer of the “Semanticists” to pay his expenses, but decided against it because it would have consumed nearly two weeks. He writes, “Hated to pass it up—for these are the days when one yearns for his band of the like-minded—and Hayakawa writes me: ‘Both the students of General Semantics of my acquaintance and the students of linguistics are enthusiastic about your work.' Hayakawa teaches at a school in Chicago that recently offered me a job, though alas! at no such handsome salary as I could easily imagine” (Burke to Josephson 17 Dec. Citation1941). In a letter of several years earlier, Burke had complained to Richard McKeon about Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words (which he was then writing the review for); he quips, “how he does tyrannize with words!” Burke goes on to write, “Rule of thumb: Anyone who takes Korzybski's ‘Science and Sanity’ for anything more than half a book on the subject of semantics is a public calamity. Taken as half a book, it is excellent. Taken as a whole book, it is far worse than no book at all, far inferior to naïve words uttered at random” (Burke to McKeon 13 Dec. 1937). Perhaps reviewing Chase's book (which presented a fairly skewed view of Korzybski's ideas) helped to highlight for Burke the problems with General Semantics. Both of these statements taken together, though, indicate fairly clearly that Burke saw himself not so much rejecting General Semantics, perhaps, as negotiating with it. 8Although he focuses explicitly on the “semanticists” here, Burke is also implicitly responding to the New Critics, a fact suggested by the initial appearance of the essay in The Southern Review, a journal colonized at the time by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. Burke's double purpose can be ascertained in small jabs elsewhere in The Philosophy of Literary Form; for instance, he remarks, “It is ‘poetic’ to develop method; it is ‘scientific’ to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a ‘scientific’ ideal.)” (130). As Ann George and Jack Selzer point out, “That distinction between scientific and poetic language, based on the Agrarian distrust of science and on the positivist assumption that science and poetry lead to two different and complementary approaches to knowledge and derived at least in part from I.A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), was fast becoming a central tenet of the nascent New Criticism, as the movement would officially be dubbed by Ransom in his 1941 book of that name” (Kenneth Burke 193). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441102, Moscow, ID 83844-1102, USA.

David Fleming's City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America is a timely monograph in at least three respects. In the wake of the election of Barack Obama, City of Rheto...

In 1925 Everett Lee Hunt contributed “Plato and Aristotle on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians” to Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James A. Winans. He approvingly noted the work of Ferd...

Articles signed with female pseudonyms and contributed to the newspaper The Massachusetts Spy (1770–1775) demonstrate that female editorialists warranted their public-sphere participation with a wide variety of rhetorical methods. Choice of topic, degree of assent or dissent from male writers, and manipulation of tone, especially humor, assisted in women's public-sphere participation during the Revolutionary period when conventions regarding writerly authority were in flux. In turn, male rhetors used religious and medical warrants to control female public sphere participation. Although women's disagreement about overtly political issues was not tolerated, subtle declarations of patriotic behavior more obviously connected with feminine topics and behavior allowed women authors to write publicly when they aligned their contributions with republican notions of sympathy and concern for the common good. In the end, republicanism rendered women's bodies contested ground, both warranting their public-sphere participation and increasing surveillance over them.

This article analyzes five of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's catechisms for the Children of the Confederacy dating from 1904 to 1934. Of particular interest are the ways the women constructed collective memories for their young readers. It is my contention that the UDC crafted four collective memories of the South's past by drawing on the mythical rhetorical context of the post-war era and by employing eight interdependent rhetorical strategies. Identifying the material and strategies of collective memory illuminates the rhetorical choices that must take place in order for memories to become successfully employed in public discourse.

This article argues that the history of the speech field is best understood by examining the primary sources for its institutional and pedagogical origins, and that public speaking instruction originates in a complex understanding of the civic implications of speech pedagogy.

Why is it that discussion of the sophists and sophistic activity routinely mentions the fees they charged, but never explores why the sophists might have charged fees and why this rather mundane detail would warrant such regular reiteration? I argue that the sophists charged fees to demystify the ways in which gift-exchange made it possible to naturalize culturally established values and misrecognize power relations as relations of generosity and friendship. By charging fees, the sophists showed that trade in skillful political discourse was always tied to the pursuit of advantage and power. This critical practice was rejected by Socrates, so that when his students needed a way to highlight the distinctions between their master and other teachers and schools (since in the popular mind all alike were sophists), they fixated upon the fees the sophists charged as a distinguishing trait. As a result, it took on the form of a stigma, and has been remained a defining charge against the sophists ever since.

Nineteenth-century orator Elizabeth Cady Stanton frequently spoke to groups of male legislators. In examining the ways in which she met this challenge, scholars have tended to focus on how she “argued like a man” via logical appeals. In this article, I discuss Stanton's equally strong reliance on an emotional appeal: namely, that of sympathy. The practices and theories of Stanton's peer, the well-known preacher Henry Ward Beecher, as well as the moral and rhetorical thought of eighteenth-century Scotsman Adam Smith illuminate Stanton's own practices of sympathy. This study yields both a fresh interpretation of Stanton's oratory and an expanded understanding of sympathy's role in the rhetoric of the marginalized.

The work of the German political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, provides the framework for the analysis of the formation of national identities in the public sphere, and their erosion by means of systematically distorted communication. The object of this article is an exhibit that traveled throughout Germany, one designed to undermine a myth concerning Germany's “unmasterable” past, the legacy of its brutal conduct in World War Two. The history of the exhibit and its reception trace a path from courageous confrontation to prudent retreat in the face of systematically distorted communication. The article concludes by reflecting on the rhetorical significance of systematically distorted communication.

ABSTRACT African-American rhetoric of the early Republic has been largely unexplored by rhetorical scholars. Addressing this gap in the scholarship, this study analyzes two intricately related forms of discourse: late eighteenth-century petitions and speeches celebrating the 1808 abolition of the international slave trade to the United States. Both sets of texts contribute to the expression of an African-American public voice, build upon and critique American ideals while retaining a proud sense of African heritage, exploit the available generic conventions, develop increasingly radical appeals, and feature arguments that transcend local issues to engage general questions of identity and history. Notes 1. Exceptions include Bacon, “Rhetoric”; Condit and Lucaites; Gordon; Ray. 2. Historical and/or literary treatments of the texts of this period include Bethel; Brooks; Bruce; Davis; Kachun; Saillant; Waldstreicher. 3. A petition of January 30, 1797, from four free African Americans living in Philadelphia is the first extant petition from African Americans to Congress (CitationAptheker 39–44; CitationKaplan and Kaplan 267–72). 4. Rosavich indicates that this petition, which was signed by slaves Prime and Prince (about whom little is known) and which describes itself as “The Petition of the Negroes in the Towns of Stratford and Fairfield,” was written in the hand of attorney Jonathan Sturges (80–82). Yet Rosavich remarks that the existence of other petitions of Connecticut African Americans “should caution us against overestimating the role of Sturges and underestimating that of Prime and Prince in drafting this document” (81–82). 5. This law gave rise to kidnappings of African Americans by allowing a master to seize a alleged fugitive slave anywhere in the country without a warrant, present him or her to a judge, and—if the master could “prove” that the person in question had escaped—take him or her into custody. The texts of the petitions are published in the following sources and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: the 1777 petition to the Massachusetts General Court is found in Collections and will be cited parenthetically as P1; the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut, is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P2; the 1779 New Hampshire petition is found in Hammond and will be cited as P3; the 1780 Connecticut petition is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P4; the 1780 Dartmouth petition is found in Nell and will be cited as P5; the 1799 petition to the President and the United States Congress is found in Kaplan and Kaplan and will be cited parenthetically as P6. Readers interested in historical information beyond that we provide here should consult the sources cited in this note. 6. Rosavich's transcriptions of the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut (P2), and the 1780 Connecticut petition (P4) include words that were erased or crossed out and indicate where words were added to the text. We omit these editorial notations in our quotes from the petitions. 7. Gates notes that the use of such rhetorical strategies is not “the exclusive province of black people” (Signifying 90). However, it assumes particular importance for African Americans, who often must use “double-voiced words,” create “double-voiced discourse,” and rely on “formal revision” and “intertextual relation[s]” (Signifying 50–51). For further discussion, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty,” 273–74. 8. On the general resonance of natural law for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century African Americans, see also Finseth 350; Gordon 93. 9. Scholars have established that African-American discourse often takes place within black counterpublics or alternative public spheres that are fundamentally connected to community civic, educational, and religious institutions; see Bacon, Humblest 10; Baker 13–26; Dawson 210–11; McClish 60. 10. The texts of the speeches featured in this section are published in Porter and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: Absalom Jones's sermon as S1; Peter Williams's oration as S2; Joseph Sidney's speech as S3; William Hamilton's 1809 oration as S4, Henry Sipkins's speech as S5; George Lawrence's address as S6; Russell Parrott's oration as S7; and William Hamilton's 1815 speech as S8. Several other speeches from this period celebrating the abolition of the slave trade are extant, including orations by William Miller, Adam Carman, and Henry Johnson. These significant texts include many of the same elements prevalent in the other eight; space limitations, however, do not permit us to feature them here. Finally, we note that although speeches celebrating the abolition of the slave trade were delivered for decades, we have featured orations written before 1816 in order to demonstrate the early manifestation of key components of African-American rhetoric. 11. For further discussion of Hamilton's signifying, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty” 278–79. 12. Miller in his 1810 address (8) and Carman in his 1811 speech (14) also marshal biblical parallels between African Americans and ancient Israel to suggest black nationhood.

Abstract Whereas earlier work on rhetorical situation focuses upon, the elements of audience, exigence, and constraints, this article argues that rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling. Placing the rhetorical “elements” within this wider context destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation. As an example of this wider context, this article explores the public rhetoric surrounding issues of urban sprawl in Austin, Texas. While public rhetorical movements can be seen as a response to the “exigence” of overdevelopment, it is also possible to situate the exigence's evocation within a wider context of affective ecologies comprised of material experiences and public feelings.

Abstract This article adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship critiquing Robert J. Connors’ assertion that the entrance of women into higher education in the nineteenth century contributed to the decline of oratory and debate. It contradicts and complicates Connors’ claim by highlighting the efforts of Mary Yost, who taught English at Vassar College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yost promoted debate both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and she crafted a feminist theory of argument quite distinct from the traditional type of argument that Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education.

Abstract Rhetorical conceptions of the public sphere emphasize conversation as central to democracy, yet the salience of conversation to public life is being diminished by changes in the forms and formats of information that U.S. publics receive. A proliferation of reflexive representations across genres, and changed media practices, contribute to a climate in which rhetorical deliberation is undermined and various U.S. publics’ ability to discern what to believe is greatly decreased. Manufactured risks illustrate the significance of these changes and they suggest that further scrutiny of media practices and advocacy of information that serves public interests is crucial for sustaining democracy.

Abstract Chaim Perelman's concept of presence is extended and enriched by applying it to a historical museum exhibit that commemorated a watershed of Austrian history, the Anschluss of 1938. To understand the argumentative effect of presence in this exhibit, new rhetorical categories are deployed: foreground and background, space, and time. These are managed in the interest of an ideological position: to free the Austrian conscience and consciousness from the burden of memory created by the disproportionate participation of Austrians in the Holocaust. Finally, a basic problem with presence is addressed: its apparent incompatibility with any form of rational argumentation.