Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott R. StroudScott R. Stroud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA.

When Kairos, the god of opportunity, passes by, Metanoia is left in his wake. At first glance, Metanoia is the embodiment of regret, a sorrowful woman cowering under the weight of remorse. However, there is more to the concept of metanoia than feelings of regret. This article looks to the long-standing partnership between kairos and metanoia as a way to better understand the affective and transformative dimension of kairos. The kairos and metanoia partnership can take shape as a personal learning process, a pedagogical tool, and a rhetorical device. Kairos and metanoia stimulate transformations of belief, large and small, that can advance personal understanding and lead to more empathetic responses. As such, this article argues for further exploration of the kairos and metanoia partnership in rhetorical theory and practice.

Christopher Tindale has for some time been a not-particularly-dark champion of the proposition that the rhetorical dimension of argumentation cannot be ignored. Books such as Acts of Arguing (1999)...

Drawing on a long tradition of teaching rhetoric that extends back to the late antique and even Hellenistic periods, the Byzantine rhetorical commentaries offer a unique witness to a “syncretic” pedagogy, in which argument and language structure are taught as two sides of the same coin. This article examines the Byzantine commentaries on four figures from the Hermogenic corpus, the standard “textbook” used in rhetorical education in Byzantium. Somewhat “untraditional,” these figures—known as period, pneuma, akmê, and antitheton—are assumed to have significant value in the invention and arrangement of arguments. Moreover, the commentaries indicate that teaching the figures presupposed lively peer work among the students as well as much interaction between the performing student and his classmates.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I thank Xing (Lucy) Lu, Arabella Lyon, and Bo Wang for reading early drafts of this essay, and for their highly constructive comments. Notes 1For starters, see Hum and Lyon, as well as Combs, Lipson, Lyon ("Rhetorical"), Mao ("Studying"), Wang, Wu, and You. 2I assume we are not disputing the singular contributions his work has made to comparative rhetoric. 3Hum and Lyon also point out the danger of conducting comparative rhetoric through the lens of one's own tradition without reflection, and they further discuss the importance of crossing borders and acknowledging one's (partial) standpoint (155–156; 159–160). 4In fact, Hum and Lyon have explicitly discussed four different approaches—including feminist approaches to Chinese rhetoric—that scholars have developed in the past in carrying out their comparative rhetorical work. They have also called for a need to develop revisionist readings and to recover lost perspectives (157–161). 5Lu also recognizes and indeed discusses the interdependence of description and appropriation or what she refers to as historical and scriptural hermeneutics (Rhetoric 21). 6Lipson also reminds us of the difficulty of casting aside "both the theoretical lens and related values and apparatus through which Western scholars have come to view human communication" (3). In the same essay, drawing on Steven Mailloux's work Lipson also proposes using the term "cultural rhetoric" to underscore the importance of culture and to focus on the rhetorics of different cultures (22–24). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuMing Mao LuMing Mao is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program at Miami University, 356F Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.

Scholars in rhetoric are increasingly attentive to the power of places and spaces to shape rhetorical performance. This article takes up the connection between ethos and location identified by several recent scholars, arguing that affiliation with and representation of material environments plays a crucial role in ethos. Ethos strategies are further shaped by genres, which are theorized as locations and environments in order to capture a fundamental dynamic between strategy and social norm. To demonstrate the strengths of understanding ethos in relation to both geographical and genre location, I analyze the ethos-maneuvers of Mary Austin, prominent early twentieth-century feminist, activist, and nature writer whose thirty-year public career merits attention from rhetorical scholars. In articulating how genre shapes Austin's efforts to develop her location in the deserts of the American West into a persuasive public ethos, I argue that ethos emerges in genre-specific formations.

This article examines the work of anthropologist Franz Boas who, in the early twentieth century, argued against the existence of the stability of the cephalic index, a measure of head shape, and its relation to the mental and moral capacities of human races. The article claims that Boas successfully shifted the burden of proof to his opponents and set the stage for the scientific rejection of belief in innate racial differences in intelligence. The article urges rhetorical scholars to attend to the notions of burden of proof and presumption in scientific controversies over neurological differences.

Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communication. Rhetoricians may be attracted to neuroscience research that uses imaging tools (such as fMRI) to draw inferences about rhetorical concepts, such as emotion, reason, or empathy. Yet this interdisciplinary effort poses challenges to rhetorical scholars. Accordingly, research in neurorhetorics should be two-sided: not only should researchers question the neuroscience of rhetoric (the brain functions related to persuasion and argument), but they should also inquire into the rhetoric of neuroscience (how neuroscience research findings are framed rhetorically). This two-sided approach can help rhetoric scholars to use neuroscience insights in a responsible manner, minimizing analytical pitfalls. These two approaches can be combined to examine neuroscience discussions about methodology, research, and emotion, and studies of autism and empathy, with a rhetorical as well as scientific lens. Such an approach yields productive insights into rhetoric while minimizing potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.

Recent rhetorical accounts of mental illness tend to suggest that psychiatric disability limits rhetorical participation. This article extends that research by examining how one group of the psychiatrically disabled—those diagnosed with mood disorders—is using a particular narrative genre to engender participation, what I call the mood memoir. I argue here that mood memoirs can be read as narrative-based responses to the rhetorical exclusion suffered by the psychiatrically disabled. This study employs narrative and genre theory to reveal mood memoirists’ tactics for generating ethos in the face of the stigma of mental illness.

In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton revealed to the American public that he had been hospitalized for depression on three occasions. The revelation seriously damaged the campaign of his running mate, George McGovern, and eventually led to Eagleton's dismissal from the ticket. This article seeks to understand the Eagleton Affair by showing how the stigma of mental illness functions as a form of rhetorical disability. Using a reading of stigma in ancient Greece and the work of Erving Goffman, this article argues that stigma can be viewed as a constitutive rhetorical act that also produces a disabling rhetorical effect: kakoethos, or bad character.

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.

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

That a single author creates a rhetorical artifact is fundamental to traditional genre theory. This article draws on posthumanist notions of linguistic “citationality” in order to divest the epideictic rhetoric of the Minuteman Project of the fantasy of the original author. We argue that, in epideictic engagements, language is reinvigorated; it recurs and circulates infinitely, accumulating meaning in each new instantiation. Using a text with considerable ethical complexity, we examine three themes of particular interest to posthumanism: accountability/responsibility, the potential for (political) resistance, and community. Epideictic discourses tell us not only who to be, but how to be; from a posthumanist point of view, those constructs, we claim, are enfoldments of the exterior. By positing citationality as key dimensions of genre, and following the theoretical works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, we explicate the significance of subjectivity as a rhetorical outcome of the social.

Situations calling for judgment give impetus to rhetoric's ability to “bring before the eyes” absent or unapparent persons, places, or things. Rhetoricians often attribute this aspect of rhetoric's power to phantasia, the capacity through which images of stimuli past, passing, or to come are generated and made present. This article proposes and pursues a conceptualization of “rhetorical transport” predicated on civic phantasia, a mode of distance collapse whereby rhetors move subjects or objects so as to enable or impede particular judgments. Rhetorical transport abounds in rhetorical practice, but this article focuses on its presence in Gorgias, Cicero, and Thomas Paine.

In its six chapters, Ryan Stark's monograph argues for a “paradigm shift” in “philosophical” views of rhetoric across the seventeenth century. Stark finds signs of this shift in the many well-known...

The vibrancy and health of political culture in democratic societies increasingly depends on the publicity and resolution of public scientific controversies. However, creating a framework for analysis that avoids reductive categorization remains a difficult task. This essay proposes a Habermasian framework of analysis for public scientific controversies and draws out its rhetorical implications. We argue that the roots of public scientific controversies are found in moments of urgency that call forth contested scientific theories into the public realm. These controversies embed epistemological disputes over knowledge-claims within pragmatic contexts, thus forcing interested parties to achieve some level of intersubjective consensus on the legitimacy of broad-based policies that fuse politics, ethics, and science. These controversies thus provide the situational grounds that make possible, if not always actual, the interaction among citizens, scientists, and legislators through rhetorical forums that feature the discursive interplay among epistemological concerns, aesthetic experience, moral valuation, and practical judgment.

Abstract While traditional rhetoric missed opportunities for potent change in the New World, alternative rhetorical theory nonetheless existed. This essay argues that a play by renowned nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a source of protofeminist, New World rhetoric, prompted by multicultural seventeenth-century New Spain. Immensely respected by the dominant powers of Church and state, Sor Juana was also attuned to issues of nondominance because she was criolla and female. Her religiously orthodox Divine Narcissus is simultaneously a rhetoric of listening that rewrites classical rhetoric's focus on speaking within a community to attend to people at odds with one another. It highlights the need for Spaniards, criollas, and Mesoamericans to go beyond talking at one another, and instead listen with care. The Divine Narcissus is an important text in rhetorical theory, concerned with dominant and nondominant rhetors and audiences in early Mexican society. Notes 1See Merrim and Kirkpatrick on the echo; Stroud's Lacanian reading; Gonzalez, Granger-Carrasco, and Kirk on theology; and Merrim on narcissism. Like me, Ackerman emphasizes the theme of utterance and hearing voices, but stresses this as a means of encouraging an "interpretive devotion to Christ" (73). 2Work on rhetoric and listening is now being explored by rhetoricians such as Royster, Krista Ratcliffe (see "Cassandra," Rhetorical Listening), Michelle Ballif, and Gemma Fiumara. Wayne Booth is one of the few scholars to posit listening as an overlooked but traditional part of rhetoric. See also Cynthia Selfe's recent argument for composition studies to reclaim "aurality," "the reception and production of aural communications" (646, note 1). 3Naming indigenous groups is a fraught endeavor. Current scholarly practice favors using an ethnic group's name for itself when feasible; the specific group Sor Juana refers to here are the Mexica. I use Nahua (of which Mexica are a prominent subgroup) to refer to a wider group of Nahuatl speakers and their religious practices, and I use Mesoamerican as a general term for indigenous peoples of central Mexico and environs. While sensitive to the history of associating native with pejoratives like primitive, I use native as a neutral term for connoting indigenous inhabitants. 4For example, Flower suggests that in composition studies we teach students how to "speak up" and "speak against" but not "how to speak with others" (2). Her rhetoric of public engagement aims for intercultural dialogue in urban settings, often through "hybrid discourse" or nontraditional delivery (32). Ratcliffe investigates rhetorical listening as "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges" (Rhetorical Listening 1). Glenn examines how nondominant groups use silence, "as a rhetoric, a constellation of symbolic strategies" (xi). 5As an auto sacramental, The Divine Narcissus is a one-act play with a prefatory loa. While both are divided into scenes, the numbering of lines is consecutive throughout each respective unit, so my citations specify loa or auto and the line number only. This and subsequent citations from The Divine Narcissus (hereafter abbreviated DN in parenthetical citations) are from the first and only full English translation of the play, by Patricia Peters and Renée Domeier, now out of print. 6For poems in which Mesoamericans speak Nahuatl and Blacks speak their own dialect of Spanish and an African language, see Obras completas 2.14 (translated into English in Trueblood 125), 26, 39, 71, 94, and 138. Sor Juana's use of Nahuatl in these poems reflects a concern for native speakers that is also a rhetorical device, making parishioners feel the Church was also theirs. 7See Pratt's discussion of Guaman Poma's letter ("Arts"). 8Méndez Plancarte, one of the two twentieth-century editors of Sor Juana's collected works, argues against the possibility that this auto was used to explain doctrine or that it had a missionary goal of educating indigenous groups (Juana, OC 3.511). 9 Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical, and which typically during this period honored the Eucharist (Granger-Carrasco Ch. 1). 10Between 1691 and 1725, The Divine Narcissus was published in Spain several times in collections of Sor Juana's works. It was not reprinted again until 1924, in Mexico. 11Echo plays the part of "Angelic nature, fallen from grace." 12New Spain's literary scene was determined by Spain, where Narcissus was a "ubiquitous" literary presence from the fifteenth century on (Méndez Plancarte in Juana, OC 3.514). Both Méndez Plancarte and Paz aver that Sor Juana's play is not only different from but also far superior to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play (Juana, OC 3.lxxiv; Paz 351). 14 Yo iré también, que me inclina la piedad a llegar (antes que tu furor lo embista) a convidarlos, de paz, a que mi culto reciban. I offer my own translation because Peters's and Domeier's is quite off the mark: "And I, in peace, will also go/(before your fury lays them low)/for justice must with mercy kiss;/I shall invite them to arise/from superstitious depths to faith." Sor Juana's Spanish is more generous. There is no mention of "superstitious depths"; both Nahua and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf. Loa 95, 178). 13My reading contrasts with Gerard Flynn's: "All in all, her attitude towards the Conquest seems neutral. She shows no recrimination for Zeal, and yet the pagan Occident and America are not ugly…. Sor Juana assents to both that which is Spanish and that which is Indian. The Conquest happened, and she accepts it" (74). 15Octavio Paz views Sor Juana's works as crucial to the early formation of criollo identity. It is only recently, though, that Sor Juana's works have been classified as literature of Mexico, not Spain (Granger-Carrasco 15). 16A similar multiplicity of identity is what Gloria Anzaldúa capitalizes on in her twentieth-century rhetorical theory for Mexican Americans. 17The Requerimiento demands allegiance to the Church as supreme ruler, but also tells Mesoamericans that Spaniards "shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith" (Washburn 308). 18It is this aspect of language that Moraña attributes to Sor Juana, claiming that her "rhetoric of silence" (the capacity for words to persuade beyond their overt reference) is affiliated with the sublime (176). 19Sor Juana seems to be conflating rituals that apply to two different Nahua gods, Huitzilopochtli (god of the seeds) and Quetzalcoatl (to whom human sacrifices were made) (Sabat de Rivers 290–291). 20The incident is quite possibly apocryphal, and at the very least, sculpted to resonate with the stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the young Jesus in Luke 2:46–47. 21"An attitude of complete receptivity, of openness to 'any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously wants to advance,' still puts a woman, I believe, in a dangerous stance," Susan Jarratt cautions, quoting Peter Elbow (117). 22"Why is the Devil a woman?," Merrim asks of the play, and reconciles the dilemma by finding parallels between Satan and Sor Juana, who must also dissimilate because divine authorities restrict her voice (114). 23In Spanish, the last line cited here (line 1300) reads, "Suene tu voz a mi oído": "Make your voice sound within my hearing." Sor Juana is playing upon verse 2.14 of the Song of Songs: "Let thy voice sound in my ears" (Douay-Rheims version). The English translation given by Peters and Domeier does not change the meaning, and the use of pour manages to allude to the fountain into which Narcissus gazes. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJulie A. Bokser Julie A. Bokser is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University, 802 W. Belden, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

Recently, scholars have argued that oral poetry helped lay the groundwork for the development of rhetorical theory and practice in archaic Greece. I propose that oral poetry played a similar role in archaic Israel. First, I describe the ritual and rhetorical contexts in which psalms were composed and performed in ancient Israel. Second, I analyze two psalms (Ps 22 and Ps 116) to show that treating the psalms as deliberative argument posed by Israelites to God can explain otherwise perplexing problems in interpretation and translation. Finally, I argue that positing an active locus for rhetoric in ancient Israelite culture raises interesting cross-cultural comparisons with ancient Athens regarding the striving for social status and public influence.

Deanna Sellnow's new textbook is Brummett-lite, equal parts rhetorical theory sampler and criticism handbook for popular culture. In both of these parts, it is a valuable book to teach from, with s...

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.

Kevin Porter's Meaning, Language, and Time is a fine contribution to scholarship, well worth reading, for a number of reasons. It is well worth reading if only because in the fields of rhetoric, communication, and composition, books that explore fundamental concepts and premises—particularly books that put such concepts and premises into historical perspective and into relationships with alternative theories—have become far too rare. But Porter's book is also well worth reading because the concept it explores is arguably the one most fundamental to rhetoric, communication, and composition—the concept of “meaning.”

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.

Identity, as a term and category of investigation, has come under critique in various theoretical circles, and thus has become almost a taboo topic in scholarship: it is seen as an ontological myst...

This essay critiques and creates metaphoric genetic rhetoric by examining metaphors for genes used by representatives of the lay American public. We assess these metaphors with a new rhetorical orientation that we developed by building onto work by Robert Ivie and social scientific qualitative studies of audiences. Specifically, our analysis reveals three themes of genetic metaphors, with the first two appearing most frequently: 1) genes as a disease or problem 2) genes as fire or bomb, and 3) genes as gambling. We not only discuss the problems and untapped potential of these metaphors, but also we suggest metaphorically understanding genes interacting with the environment as a dance or a band. This essay has implications for rhetorical criticism, science studies, and public health.

“Grand Convergence” introduces Mexican colonial rhetoric by way of a short text that is partial to clerical ideology and that eclipses a rich tradition of Amerindian medical rhetoric. Noting distinctions between Burke's theory of the representative anecdote and New Historicist uses of the “detail,” it explores the suitability of the text as an introduction to Latin American rhetoric historiography. Part two of the article examines contemporary scholarship on colonial Mexican rhetoric for its reductions and deflections.

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, language authorities in the United States were distressed by what they saw as a pervasive misuse of words. A particular type of language authority, the verbal critic, attempted to mitigate misuse by establishing and insisting upon "correct" meanings of words, and the writing of these verbal critics were remarkably popular at the time. Verbal critics' goals are not always clear-cut: they often lament the ignorance of those who "abuse" words, and at other times, they express their purpose as offering instruction in how to speak properly. Indeed, verbal criticism is full of contradictions, which this article explains in terms of a widespread crisis in representation, a crisis that seemed to threaten speakers' ability to communicate, affected late-nineteenth-century social structure, and mirrored political and economic debates over monetary policy, as well. Acknowledgment I thank the editor and anonymous readers for RSQ for their helpful comments and suggestions, which enriched this article, as well as my thinking about verbal criticism. A number of references cited or discussed in footnotes were brought to my attention by the readers. Notes 1Edward Finegan discusses Mathews's professorship (71), and Kenneth Cmiel tabulates the publication history of this and other such works (263–266). The number of copies in print comes from the title page to the 1896 edition. 2See Finegan, passim and Baron, 188–225 for more on this distinction between doctrines of correctness and usage. Plato's Cratylus offers the classical articulation of this distinction, with Cratylus arguing for correctness or "naturalism," described by Hermogenes as words with "a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians" (383b), and Hermogenes arguing for usage or "conventionalism." 3As Assistant Keeper of the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1838–50, Garnett composed a number of essays on philology that were later collected by his son (also Richard Garnett) as The Philological Essays of the Late Rev. Richard Garnett (Citation1859). The younger Garnett prefaced the collection with a "Memoir" explaining that Garnett aspired to join the clergy, in preparation for which he was required to "obtain a thorough acquaintance with Latin, of which he knew little, and with Greek, of which he knew nothing" (ii). Although, his son notes, Garnett's learning about Latin and Greek was "especially Scriptural," he nevertheless, in 1829, "entered upon an entirely new sphere of social intercourse and literary activity": writing about philology. As his son observes, Garnett "entered upon his new career at the most auspicious period imaginable, when Rask and Grimm and W. Humboldt" had begun writing about linguistics (x). However, Garnett's contributions to the discipline have gone largely unnoted by contemporary linguists, revealing perhaps that Garnett's "acuteness" derives more from his service to Mathews than it does from his service to more general studies of language. 4See p. 313. Cmiel studies eight newspapers: "the four refined papers were the Boston Daily Advertiser, The New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune. The four popular papers were the Boston Herald, the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and the Chicago Times." 5This way of approaching the debate between critics and scholars (the scholars were as elitist as the critics) turns out to be a way of missing another important similarity that I will consider later: the critics too had a democratic impulse. After all, given verbal criticism's immense popularity, what should we infer? Did readers consume books that merely made them feel inferior? Or did they find in these texts instruction for speaking in more refined or cultured ways? Cmiel has shown that Ayres and White, after publishing for refined newspapers in the 1860s and '70s, had their columns picked up by populist newspapers in the 1880s, and verbal criticism became "a part of popular adult education" (146). Adams Sherman Hill's Our English, for example, originated as a series of Chautauqua lectures. 6Plato's distinction between belief in beautiful things and beauty itself (Republic 476c) usefully distinguishes nominalists from realists (as well as particulars from universals). 7This is not to say that no one compared words to money prior to the nineteenth century. At least as early as John Locke, philosophers were noting the imprecision of words' representation of ideas and money's representation of value. (For Locke on language, see Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly chapters II, "On the Signification of Words" and IX, "Of the Imperfection of Words"; on money, see Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.) However, discussing language as money (as opposed to language and money or language and/as a precious metal) does seem to have been rare until the nineteenth century. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen's New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (Citation1999) collects a number of works attempting "to rediscover the contact points among literature, culture, and economics" (9). Although the essays in the collection are primarily concerned with how critics informed by economics can approach the study of literature, the editors' introduction, particularly pp. 10–17, provides a helpful review of what they call economic criticism, recent attempts by theorists to link literature and language to money and economics. 8Although this evolution of the trope suggests it "had shifted from its earlier appreciation of beautiful coins," presumably to appreciation of a medium of exchange, the important point for Carr is that the trope's repetition demonstrates that "the history of nineteenth-century readers is marked by borrowing and adaptation, and by the persistence of traditional associations and definitions that nevertheless adapt to changing times and values" (145). But finding the same kind of value in language that one finds in money, I am arguing, has a particular significance in the late nineteenth century. 9Mathews cites Farrar on this point, coincidentally on his own page 261. 10The point for Painter is that inflationary policy hurt workers and farmers, giving rise to Populist resentment. Milton Friedman ultimately agrees, albeit from a much different orientation, that deflation was devastating. More concerned with economic growth than with the effect on the working classes, Friedman concludes that "Whether or not a verdict of guilty would have been appropriate in a court of law for 'the crime of 1873,' that verdict is appropriate in the court of history" because a "bimetallic standard … would have produced a considerably steadier price level than did the gold standard that was adopted" (78, 76). 11The other significant plank of the Populists' platform was an endorsement of direct election of U.S. senators. For more on Populism as a response to monetary policy, see Trachtenberg 175. 12Ritter's conservative and antimonopolist positions map neatly onto the deflationist and inflationist positions I have been discussing. An excellent history of the "financial question" during the period 1865–96, Goldbugs and Greenbacks argues that existing scholarship has managed to recognize "the significance of the farmer-labor tradition" without accounting for the "prominence the antimonopolists gave to the financial question." Even "common citizens" were invested in debates about money, Ritter argues, because these debates concerned "the belief that the preservation of economic opportunity was essential for meaningful democracy" (ix–x). 13This question over the role of persuasion in Marxism, of course, has everything to do with rhetoric. James Aune's Rhetoric and Marxism is concerned with just this issue, in only a slightly different register. For instance, Aune asks how rhetoricians might bridge the theoretical gap between structure and struggle—that is, the difference between rhetoric being a tool for interesting, but finally defeatist, analysis and being a tool for producing discourse that might effect real change (13). 14Even earlier political economists (Smith and Ricardo) recognized the existence of surplus-value—the unpaid portion of production—but what "they had regarded as a solution" Marx "considered but a problem" (149–151). 15Production must itself be understood as more complex than the mere set of steps individual workers take to generate a product if we are to understand how it effects class positions that come to be occupied by workers. Production comprises the labor process and relations of production, the former of which is a material condition of production (which, Althusser argues, means "a denial of every 'humanist' conception of human labour as pure creativity"). The relations of production entail foremost "relations between men and things, such that the relations between men and men are defined by the precise relations existing between men and the material elements of the production process" (171–175). Moreover, insofar as these relations include "agents of production," we must distinguish between "direct agents," whose labor power directly and materially infuses the product with use-value, and non-direct agents—the owners of the means of production—whose "labour power is not used in the production process." The arrangement of these agents and their instruments of production designates "a certain political configuration." And it is this political configuration that has a structural effect on other elements (e.g., the economic and the cultural) in the social totality: "the nature of the relations of production … establishes the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality." In other words, what we have here is not a pre-existing arrangement of levels in the social totality. Rather, the mode of production is the name we give to the "site" and "extension" of each structural element (176–177). 16In this sense, Kenneth Cmiel misses the point when he writes, "The very success of verbal criticism was undermining the original goals" (139), since the goals of verbal criticism included giving readers the verbal tools for upward mobility. 17The tragedy has, nevertheless, been feared and even predicted on numerous occasions. Locke's theory of language allowed not only for the "Imperfection of Words" (Book III, Chapter IX of Essay Concerning Human Understanding), but also—as a result—for the "Abuse of Words" (Chapter X), proposing "Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfection and Abuses" (Chapter XI). As recently as 2004, Samuel Huntington warned that the "persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." Such linguistic anxieties, and there have been plenty in the intervening years, tend to correspond to other cultural changes. Huntington was responding to increased immigration, Locke the coinage crisis of the 1690s. Locke's case is similar to the late nineteenth century's insofar as he too was concerned with theories of representation for both language and money. In a fascinating reading that brings together these theories, Carol Pech shows that Locke identifies the value of money through metonymy and also (elsewhere) describes the problems of language as beginning with metaphor and synecdoche. "That Locke goes on to examine the problems posed by synecdoche through the example of a precious metal (i.e., gold) is significant to understanding his writings on money" (283). These writings reveal, Pech ultimately argues, that Locke fetishizes precious metals in order to "disavow the ways in which symbolic modes of signification have begun to sever the connections between currency and natural substances" (286). Additional informationNotes on contributorsWilliam Rodney Herring William Rodney Herring is a Lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver, 2150 E. Evans Ave., Penrose Library Room 202, Denver, CO 80208-5203.

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.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment The authors thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Notes 1There are quibbles, however, as there are ample passages in Agrippa's work to suggest that words let us "hack" reality, as it were, when we understand they are symbolic articulations of the virtues/essences of things. For example, see Agrippa 208–213. For a more nuanced, book-length reading of Agrippa's understanding of language, see Lehrich. 2See Leff and Sachs. 3It is instructive to underscore how Vickers opens the essay that Miles argues outlines the "assumptions" Burke, Covino, and Gunn apparently also share: "It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods, and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather, in many instances, especially the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points…" (Vickers 95). Such remarks are hardly an index of a vulgar, "binary opposition" that Miles argues is common to all the authors he critiques. Owing to the fact that each author critiques different eras of the occult tradition toward very different ends, it also seems to us rather uncharitable to assert Vickers's "assumptions" are channeling Burke, Covino, and Gunn (Miles, "Occult Retraction" 449). 4The critique, of course, is Derrida's. See especially pages 1–73. 5This is a common reading of Derrida's view. See, for example, Howells (128). Derrida says "as much"—or if you prefer, "as little" (18–26). Covino and Gunn's books begin and conclude with similar observations, respectively. See Covino (9) and Gunn (229). 6Miles has argued similarly elsewhere. In Modern Occult Rhetoric, Gunn argues that the rhetorical dynamics of occultism changed dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a consequence of mass media technologies. In a book review, however, Miles indicts Gunn for failing to examine Agrippa's philosophy—a system developed three centuries before Gunn's period of study. See Miles, "Rev. of." 7Miles's conclusion, for example, first appears in Lehrich's study in the context of a discussion of Derrida's philosophy: "…it is not intrinsically odd that the sixteenth century philosophical movement which was almost entirely destroyed by modern philosophy and science—I refer of course to magic—still haunts the margins of philosophical memory…. It is worth considering the periodic surfacing of magical thought in philosophy after Descartes…, which might provoke us to wonder whether magic has always played the role of modernism's ghostly other" (Lehrich 222). 8For example, Miles argues that Agrippa's rhetoric is better characterized as employing "instructional paradox" rather than Gunn's discussion of a "generative paradox" (which do not seem mutually exclusive), and he concludes drawing on Burke's discussion of paradox. 9See Stark. 10As Burke clearly was. See Burke, Rhetoric of Religion. 11For a recent, exemplary work investigating the occult stranger within, see Lehrich, Citation2009. The authors would like to thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Morgan Reitmeyer Morgan Reitmeyer is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University David Blakesley David Blakesley is a Professor of English at Purdue University William A. Covino William A. Covino is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the California State University, Stanislaus.

Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles), like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed their identification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous, African, and mixed-race lower classes; the Enlightenment brought new fervor for scientific exploration and gave intellectual heft to the desire for independence, yet also facilitated administrative reforms that increased the Spanish monarchy's intervention in its subjects' lives. In the midst of this ferment, there appeared a popular but short-lived genre of art whose depictions of life in New Spain provide a powerful image of the rhetorical role of the colonial body. This article examines how that genre, casta painting, used topoi of family, publicity, and science to constitute and comment upon its moments' racialized common sense. The article suggests that taking seriously the rhetorical contribution of these artifacts contributes to a more complex understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly in the Spanish Americas.

As rhetorical scholars increasingly investigate traditions and texts from other cultures, new challenges arise as to what method one ought to follow when practicing what is called comparative rhetoric. In this article, I argue that pragmatism offers a framework for a methodology of comparative rhetoric that allows for the plurality of purposes involved on all sides of the encounter between a critic and a text. I will explore how pragmatism gives primacy to the plurality of purposes in human communicative endeavors, as well as what this means for how one can practice comparative rhetoric. I conclude by analyzing a case study in comparative rhetoric involving experiential rhetorical tactics in classical Indian and European philosophical texts.

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...

Abstract Drawing upon published and unpublished texts from Kenneth Burke, this article argues that A Rhetoric of Motives represents the first, “Upward” half of his project on rhetoric. Emphasizing this unexpected connection between Burke and Plato, the article offers a dialectical rereading of the text, one that locates the ultimate rhetorical motive not in identification, but pure in persuasion. Interpreting the latter as a “‘mythic image,”’ it emerges as a non-empirical, imagistic portrayal of the formal conditions underlying persuasion, the origin of rhetoric. Rhetoric, dialectically redefined in terms of pure persuasion, produces the divisions that we humans would (paradoxically) discursively bridge. Notes 1This is from a letter contained in the Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The author expresses gratitude to Phoebe Pettingell Hyman for her permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “SH.” 2This manuscript is drawn from a folder in the Kenneth Burke Papers labeled: “R of M Drafts. Including final draft.” Apart from “The Rhetorical Radiance of the ‘Divine'” (and some scattered deletions in pencil), the manuscript indicated as the text's “final draft” is identical to the published version of the Rhetoric—and its 430 typed pages even include a table of contents. Thus it is quite clear that this was, until quite late in the process, the complete text of the Rhetoric. This material is taken from the archives of The Kenneth Burke Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. The author is grateful to Sandra Stelts, Jeannette Sabre, the Penn State Libraries, and the Burke Literary Trust for their help and for permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. 3Another appears during discussion of “timely topics” and the press: “We pass over it hastily here, as we plan to consider the two major aspects of it in later sections of this project (when we shall consider the new level of ‘reality’ which journalistic timeliness establishes, and shall study the relation between transient and permanent factors of appeal by taking the cartoons in The New Yorker as a test case)” (Rhetoric 63). 4Authorial intentions provide notoriously controversial evidence for reinterpretation. However, as the above-quoted header makes clear, Burke altered his initial plan late in the publication process. Although other Burkean texts were altered during composition (for example, the pentad was a later addition to the Grammar), the Rhetoric project is different; the material with which Burke began was postponed, not supplemented, as in the case of the Grammar. Most significantly, Burke's papers reveal an organizational framework linking the excised material to that which remained; thus, examination of Burke's original vision for the project as a whole sheds new light on the version of the Rhetoric that was published. 5This quote is from a letter from Burke to Cowley dated 26 January 1947, housed in the Burke Papers. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “KB.” 6Judging from this description, it seems that some of this material was published in Burke's essay, “Rhetoric: Old and New” (see especially the discussion of blandness [69–75]). 7Additionally, such interpretations of Burke's text often produce an artificial separation between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic. Having sharpened this difference into a distinction, effort is required to explain their connection (e.g., Crusius, “A Case,” “Orality”; Ercolini). 8Here one might object, also citing Burke's essay on the “new” rhetoric, whose “key term” is identification (“Rhetoric” 62–63). However, in both texts, identification is introduced in the first section (or “stage”), but is transcended by other sections/stages. Further, in the Rhetoric, Burke describes persuasion and identification as his “two interrelated themes” (x), and discusses his “generating principles,” “persuasion and/or identification” (169; emphasis added)—a point he later reaffirmed in letters to Cowley (e.g., Williams 12). Identification is undeniably important in Burke's rhetorical theory, but I contend it must be contextualized within Burke's foundational claim about the nature of rhetoric. 9See also “Rhetoric: Old and New,” which contains a dialogue patterned after the Platonic dialectic—including the character “Socraticus” and references to the “Upward” and “Downward Way” (63–66). 10Although I have not altered any quotations, contemporary scholarship recognizes that the masculine is not a universal, and so my own usage reflects this philosophical commitment. 11Although there is extensive debate regarding Platonic dialectic (e.g., Kahn; Benson), Gonzalez is cited here to demonstrate two things: that appropriation of Plato is not necessarily the adoption of Platonist metaphysics and that Burke's definition is neither idiosyncratic nor outdated. Gonzalez's recent study does not cite Burke, but is distinctly Burkean in its rejection of Platonist metaphysics, and its refusal to divorce Plato's dialectic from the dramatic form of the dialogues. Further, Gonzalez emphasizes the role played by ideas and images in Plato's dialectic (e.g., 129), echoing the book cited within the Rhetoric's discussion of Plato: Stewart's The Myths of Plato. 12These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth,” housed in the Kenneth Burke Papers. 14Here I draw on this essay because Burke identifies it as the foundation for this portion of the Rhetoric (e.g., Burke to Hyman, January 26, 1948, SH). 13Moreover, he argues that Mannheim's perspective gains much of its appeal—including “the feel of an ultimate order”—from its furtive resemblance to the Platonic dialectic, and (in its ambiguous concept of “Utopia”) an implicit foundation in chiliastic myth (A Rhetoric 200; cf. Burke, “Ideology” 306). 15These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth” in the Burke Papers. 16These notes are also from the “Myth” folder (but: cf. A Rhetoric 203; “Ideology” 306–307). 17Said another way, by retaining our myth's connection to the Platonic dialectic, we will recognize the narrative order of myth as an imagistic portrayal of a logical order—and not as an accurate, objective account of origins (cf. Grammar 430–440). 18Which is not to say that Burke rejects Kafka; Burke's account is designed to place Kafka's (and Kierkegaard's) vocabulary within a broader whole, not dismiss it. Although I cannot here respond to a recent essay by Ercolini, disputing Burke's interpretation of Fear and Trembling, I feel Ercolini misses the point of Burke's reading of Kierkegaard. Here Burke is moving toward dialectical transcendence, and thus his critique of Kierkegaard focuses on the difference between empirical and mythic images of courtship. 19For this reason, I would argue that the definitions of pure persuasion in the scholarly literature—designed for critical use—fail to see its ultimate, mythic significance (e.g., Hagen; Lee; Olson & Olson; Sweeney). 20This is again why, for Burke, Mannheim's approach falls short; Burke argues that unlike his own approach, Mannheim's sociology cannot provide an “ultimate ground of motivation” (Rhetoric 201). 21Of course, Biesecker is not the only scholar to draw on such statements to equate identification and pure persuasion. Robert Wess likewise does not recognize pure persuasion as a mythic image, and thus his formulation of it as the “identification of identifications” subordinates it to the latter concept (e.g., 214). Similarly, although Zappen's introduction to Burke's “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry” insists on the importance of the third section of the Rhetoric, he ultimately does not connect dialectic, “pure persuasion,” and “ultimate identification” (e.g., 334). 22For this reason, I would argue (pace Wess and Biesecker) that identification cannot be equated with pure persuasion; identification presumes a preexisting distance between persons, unlike pure persuasion, which symbolically introduces and maintains distance. This is, I would argue, a more rounded interpretation of Burke's famous statement—early in the Rhetoric, I would add, prior to arriving at his mythic image—that “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token, to confront the implications of division” (Rhetoric 22; Burke's emphasis). Thus, Burke's oft-cited discussion of the interrelation of identification and division in rhetoric follows from pure persuasion's more primary, ontological shattering of unity. This is also, I believe, why Burke later describes the most profound variant of identification as the partisan carving up of a situation through terminological means (see Burke, “The Rhetorical” 271). 23As per the “paradox of purity,” these would be identical (e.g., Grammar 35–36). 24For others beginning with symbols as introduction of division rather than unity, see Anton, Thayer, and Wilden. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBryan Crable Bryan Crable is Associate Professor

The purpose of this article is to advance the discussion of kairos by developing it as a theory of divine timing. While some critics have noted kairos' potential for understanding “God's time,” we lack a grounding of this interpretation in the close analysis of religious texts. This paper does so and asserts that kairos can be understood not only as a hermeneutic for considering temporal constraints, but also as a theory for the production of revelatory discourse and its political implications. Ultimately, the article tries to enrich our comprehension of kairos (a figure we thought we had understood) by examining an unknown text from Martin Luther King Jr. (an orator we thought we had read) as a foray into an area of our discipline that we have neglected to develop: the rhetoric of revelation.

In 1838, Mary Gove (Nichols) began lecturing on anatomy and physiology, a rhetorical act that was both new and risky because public discussion of the human body and disease was believed inappropriate for women. In order to protect her ethos, Gove used her ostensibly informative lectures to promote her reform agenda, by implying that her audience already shared her beliefs in women's right to physiological knowledge and their obligation to use that knowledge to reform society. Rather than relying only on the conventional advice to construct one's ethos based on the audience's existing values, Gove also crafted her audience's ethos, describing her listeners in ways that emphasized values conducive to her reform agenda. Her use of this strategy suggests that an audience's acceptance of nontraditional speakers is not simply a matter of “letting” them speak; it also means, to some degree, acknowledging the alternative values they represent.

This study of the “cyberspace incrementum” adapts Jeanne Fahnestock's argument-oriented theory of rhetorical figuration, applying it to a case in technology development. It identifies a key series argument in the development of a failed cyberspace technology, namely VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). The analysis describes how differing forms of argumentation helped advance VRML as a project. Interpreting the figure, this article suggests “communicative abundance” as the problematic situation to which VRML responded.

This paper argues that, for many people and in many circumstances, public deliberation is about group identity rather than argumentation. Research on ingroup and outgroup thinking in social psychology helps to explain why thinking in terms of group identity is so powerful. The power comes from the promise that the world is a stable and easily known place, made up of discrete and transparent groups.

Abstract Anxiety about the deliberative abilities of ordinary citizens, feared to be too easily influenced by the powers of rhetoric, has accompanied democracy since its birth. This anxiety is reflected in critiques of the American jury system. This article examines efforts in the middle of the twentieth century to rationalize jury decision making through the use of mathematical probability. These efforts—one a trial in which a prosecutor used dubious statistics to help convict a couple of a robbery and the other a call for juries to use formulas for assessing the likelihood of guilt—reflect a desire to simultaneously harness and contain the dangerousness of rhetoric. More significantly, proposals to mathematize jury decision making individualize deliberation and privilege expert over everyday knowledge, signaling a threat not only to this important feature of American democracy but also to the ability of citizens to deliberate collectively in debates increasingly dominated by statistical reasoning. Acknowledgments Many thanks to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as to Greg Goodale, Bonnie Jefferson, David Kellogg, Chuck Morris, Elizabeth Shea, and Patricia Sullivan for helpfully commenting on drafts of this article at various stages. Thanks to Alyson Wilson and Greg Wilson for conversations about subjective probability; any remaining misconceptions in this article are entirely my own. I am grateful to Hugh Baxter, Ellen Cushman, Cassandra Jackson, and John Schaeffer for conceptual help, and to Greg Clark, Kathleen Kelly, Marina Leslie, Bernadette Longo, John Monberg, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jeff Strobel, and Christine Wolff for encouragement. Notes 1Interestingly, although Tribe was a Harvard law professor at the time he challenged Finkelstein and Fairley's proposal, he had been a law clerk on the California Supreme Court when People v. Collins was heard. An undergraduate math major, Tribe had drafted much of the opinion but had left the court months before it was issued. He did not disclose his role in the Collins opinion until 2004. See Fisher. 2As of this writing, Tribe's article has been cited in 84 state and federal cases. See, for example, United States v. Massey, 594 F.2d 676 (1979), which quotes extensively from Tribe in support of reversing the conviction of a man convicted of robbery based on probability data about hair samples. A more recent case, United States v. Veysey, 334 F.3d 600 (2003), contains an extensive discussion of legal commentary, including Tribe's 1971 article, but rules in favor of admitting statistical evidence. 3In the federal court system, jury verdicts must be unanimous in civil trials unless otherwise agreed to by the litigating parties and must always be unanimous in criminal trials. See the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. In all state courts, jury verdicts must be unanimous in criminal trials. The number required in civil trials varies by state. See United States Department of Justice 233.

This article extends the work of conceptual revision of the narrative paradigm in order to more directly and completely account for the inventional possibilities of new narratives, the rhetorical revision of old narratives, and the appeal and acceptance of improbable narrative accounts. It does so by reconceptualizing Burke's concept of identification in the narrative paradigm by expanding identification's critical range. Reconceptualizing identification in the narrative paradigm further expands narrative rationality beyond “the logic of good reasons,” provides a theoretical mechanism that accounts for and complements prior theoretical extensions advanced in revision of the narrative paradigm, and provides greater conceptual flexibility for the critical use of narrative in light of poststructuralism. Reconceptualizing the role of identification in the narrative paradigm enriches our understanding of how narratives foster beliefs, attitudes, and actions by accounting more fully for the range of the symbolic resources and processes of identification.

Alfonso Arbib-Costa's 1909 Arbib-Costa , Alfonoso . Manuale di Corrispondenza Commercial, Familiare, e Amorose Italiana-Inglese . New York : Italian Book Company , 1909 . [Google Scholar] Manuale di Corrispondenza Commerciale, Familiare, e Amorose Italiana-Inglese offered letter-writing instruction to Italian immigrants hoping to succeed in American business and social circles. The book contained some theory, but was primarily a collection of model letters, or formulary. This article identifies the text as one of a distinct type of bilingual, bicultural letter-writing handbooks for immigrants that arose in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, situates it in the American parlor rhetoric tradition, and analyzes its theoretical content and models. Although formularies are often overlooked by scholars, they are rich texts that reveal important connections between rhetoric and culture. Formularies for immigrants are particularly interesting because they clearly demonstrate how attempts at social engineering may be embedded in rhetorical pedagogy. The study concludes with a call for additional research into this area of rhetorical history, which remains largely unknown.

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...

Abstract Scholars of rhetoric have veered away from non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in the classical period. In this article I examine the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace, as one such overlooked rhetorical artifact. I argue the altar, although constructed as a war monument, shapes public memory to persuade the people of Rome to accept the dynastic succession of Augustus's heir. In addition, I show a variety of rhetorical theories operate on the altar in visual form including amplification, imitation, and enthymeme. Ultimately I contend that by focusing on non-traditional rhetorical artifacts, we can deepen our understanding of the rhetorical tradition in a period in which rhetoric is generally believed to have faded away. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen LampKathleen Lamp is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., 244 Lincoln Hall, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: lamp@uiuc.edu

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.

In the spirit of the book's title, I admit I was tempted to begin this review with a refusal of my own. As I sat at my desk, I pondered in what ways might I successfully break the conventions of th...

This article makes a two-part argument. First, I show how a dispute over authentic Jewish identity demonstrates the limits of The New Rhetoric's “dissociation” and “universal audience” as tools for the expansion of existing identities, communicating across particular audiences, or resolving conflict when identity is the issue at stake. Through careful analysis of the 1971 Black Jewish identity conflict, I then develop a new theoretical concept, “dissociative disruption,” which names and theorizes an interim step between “breaking the links” and full “dissociative restructuring” to better account for the ways power and authority affect the relative rhetorical possibilities for particular rhetors and audiences.