Applying a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters circulated transnationally from 1859–1866 by the leadership of the revolutionary Irish nationalist Fenian movement, this essay argues that constitutive rhetorical theory's assumed ideological effects must be modified to account for the transnational rhetorical practices of movements like the Fenians. The essay first traces how Fenian identification practices seek to fix the entire diaspora as the "Irish people" and Ireland as the true homeland. It then examines how the movement transcodes its constitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United States and Ireland, and how these strategies hamper the organization's ability to sustain the unity required for success. While the constituted Irish Revolutionary remained in each national context, their strategies for fulfilling the constitutive narrative had splintered, helping to doom the cause. The Fenian case demonstrates the need to render constitutive rhetorical theory in more dialogic terms, especially for transnational audiences.

Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement, by Eric King Watts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 246 pp. $39.95 (cloth).The Insistent Call: Rhe...

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.

Professor Hauser’s Prisoners of Conscience is a book that explores how disempowered individuals use a variety of modes of resistance—parrhesia, indirection, passive aggression, bodily performances,...

As postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking continue to intersect with the field of rhetorical studies, two primary aims are articulated. The first aim speaks to how language, knowledge, and rh...

This essay performs a comparative analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of versions of the socialist anthem the “Internationale” in divergent historical contexts. Based on literature on the rhetoric of music in social movements and theories of affect and emotion, our study of two historical iterations of the “Internationale” demonstrates the differences between class-conscious and nationalist-populist mobilization of feeling. In versions faithful to working class experience, the anthem names a basic class antagonism, unites an audience in affective musical practice resonant with working class experience and aspirations, and explicitly demonstrates how reason and revolt, in the words and sounds of the song, may thunder together.

In the last twenty-five years, researchers from diverse fields of inquiry, including rhetoric and communication studies, have sought to “mine contemporary discourse and dominant logics that often b...

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 article refers to:Legitimizing Leadership: Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s 2007 Inaugural Address

There is no entity that holds the essence of America, nothing blessed with this peculiar sense or significance. A real, true, literal America does not exist as such even though a mass of unsubmerge...

This article uses a short reflection on the life and work of Father António Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony’s impact on the teaching, theory, and practice of rhetoric since 1492. Specifically, my reflection focuses on Vieira’s Le Lacrime d’Eraclito, a text that suggests that for rhetorical theory and practice the colonial encounter had ramifications on the European continent as profound as those on the American. We cannot speak of an American or Western rhetorical tradition and history without considering this interplay in which the American colonies were active participants, not passive subjects.

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.

Because evanescent oral phenomena present hermeneutical and representational dilemmas, orality remains an elusive and underestimated force in histories of rhetoric. This essay raises the profile of orality by attending to its cultural value and political resonance in historical and modern Latin America. In the encounter period, both the indigenous and the Europeans express preferences for the oral in legal, religious, and political contexts. In the modern period, a progressive political class adopts the oral as medium of choice for strengthening and diversifying civil society. Following theorists Diane Davis, Steven Mailloux, and Walter Ong, this essay treats orality as a relational phenomenon potentially instructive in a twenty-first century climate where recognizing the “presence” of Latin America is a political and ethical priority.

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.

This article examines Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate Manzano’s reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it. This reception is briefly situated in the context of contemporary receptions of belletristic rhetoric within the Cuban literary circle that solicited Manzano’s life story. Additionally, the article brings rhetorical terminology to what critics have observed as Manzano’s developing agency through the process of writing his narrative and selecting its content. Providing a view of rhetoric from the margins, Manzano’s narrative offers a critique of the complex relationship between oral and written discourse and the slave’s ability to be seen as truthful.

In this essay, I examine how Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner used her 2007 inaugural address to legitimize her political leadership. Placing the address within Argentina’s political climate and working in light of the fact that Fernández de Kirchner’s spouse was the out-going president, I use theories of political ethos to examine the challenges Fernández de Kirchner faced in inaugurating her presidency. I suggest that she constructed a hybrid ethos, combining multiple presidential images to reconcile competing concerns. I treat in depth three elements of that hybrid ethos: the ethos of a presidential couple that positioned Fernández de Kirchner alongside her popular husband; the ethos of a woman president building on a tradition of other influential Argentine women; and the ethos of a teacher-expert whose knowledge authorized national leadership. Enacting these varied ethoi, I argue, Fernández de Kirchner turned political challenges to her advantage and crafted the presidency she would assume.

This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.

Rhetoricians have paid increasing attention to the influence of materiality and context on rhetorical action. However, such attention has yet to infiltrate discussions of constitutive rhetoric. This essay examines Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development. This metaphor allows scholars to better account for the historical and material contexts that shape rhetorical efforts. Through analyses of Child’s and other contemporary cookbooks, as well as rigorous attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural forces at play in midcentury American life, I argue that Child’s success is not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the product of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.

From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.

African Diaspora rhetorics and vernaculars are neither shadowy thugs perpetrating drive-bys on Western Civ, nor viruses that corrupt and destroy the purity of superior forms. African Diaspora rheto...

Historical and heritage tourism is a booming industry across the United States, and southern states in particular offer tourists the chance to walk the streets where some of the United States’ most dramatic racial conflicts unfolded. In these contexts, publics are invited to remember slavery in strategic ways. This essay enriches rhetorical studies’ understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments. We do so through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina’s historical tourism industry.

Inquiry’s place in rhetorical studies has long been contentious. Critics argue that academic professionalism and the rise of criticism and theory have diminished rhetoric as a pragmatic art. The recent trend in higher education toward greater restrictions on academic inquiry poses new problems for rhetorical studies, particularly where those restrictions exacerbate existing educational inequities. In the effort to address those inequities, a distinction needs to be made between old concerns with inquiry and the new issues any reorganization of inquiry will present. The generic support for inquiry that universities provide benefits rhetorical studies by lending structure to inquiry processes fraught with uncertainty and marked by impermanency. That support allows for the kind of careful engagement with possibility that rhetorical invention requires. The 2009 documentary film Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist illustrates the value to inquiry of professional conventions and other forms of generic support. Those same conventions serve rhetorical studies in similar ways.

To write on William James, you must become like William James. By this, I mean that one must embody his sort of pluralistic attitude and literary artfulness to do justice to this pragmatist thinker...

Recent scholarship has called for the study of mixed metaphors wherein two or more phrases (i.e., vehicles) are enlisted to describe a single underlying idea (i.e., tenor). In this essay, I delineate the rhetorical predecessors of (in)fertility, a term that constitutes both a metaphor in and of itself and a tenor that has been explained in terms of mixed metaphorical discourses of the past. Through an initial analysis of the evolution of reproductive metaphors in texts spanning the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and then a follow-up analysis of those metaphors as they mixed together in early twentieth-century discourses, I illustrate how the interaction of a mixed metaphor’s distinct vehicles is dependent on those metaphors’ historical uses. My findings are considered in terms of their implications for positioning individual women—both in the past and more recently—as more or less at-fault for their lack of children.

Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by demonstrating how a wider range of materials can produce more complex, compelling accounts of an individual’s contributions to theory or pedagogy.

In the spirit of apologia, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be better understood when set in relation to the black vernacular tradition of Signification or signifyin(g), the Racial Contract, and Whiteness. A sustained contextualization of Wright’s “controversial statements” reveals a complex performative rhetoric that is highly dependent on elements of delivery, especially tone. We argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright’s rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.

Under headings that include rhetoric of assent, critical understanding, pluralism, rhetorology, and listening-rhetoric, Wayne Booth’s scholarly work for over thirty-five years hinged on a simple question: “How can I get each side to understand the other?” Booth’s imbroglio with Kenneth Burke demonstrates that “understanding”—Booth’s key concept—is not confined, as Booth had suggested, to respecting opposing views, searching for common ground, and finding reasons that warrant shared assent. Understanding is also enabled and obstructed by a number of factors, including six I examine: form, process, emotion, differences, power, and additional rhetorical/material constraints. Analyzing Booth and Burke’s published exchange in Critical Inquiry (1974), along with their correspondence from 1972 to 1983, reveals how their disagreement evolved; how their prolonged dispute highlights limitations in Booth’s theory; and how Booth’s engagement with Burke, along with Booth’s subsequent reflections on their exchange, extends Booth’s project to offer a more rhetorically robust theory of understanding.

Scholars exploring the history of collaboration between English and Speech have studied the “communication courses” that emerged in the twentieth century and combined instruction in speaking and writing. The history of the Verbal Expression course at the University of Illinois challenges our dominant narratives about the origins of these courses. For example, while most scholars pinpoint their origins to World War Two, our study of the Illinois course shows that it emerged as a result of the Great Depression and the general education movement. We offer a corrective to previous histories by showing how local, institutional structures and pressures often have as much influence on pedagogy and collaboration as do external disciplinary structures. We argue that such correctives are especially valuable at a moment when rhetoricians in English and Speech are becoming more invested in combing the past for ideas about how best to collaborate in the present.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Chaim Perelman's work showed the Platonic roots of Modernist thought; see especially The Realm of Rhetoric. Latour's work is strong in terms of Modernism's impact on understandings of science.2 See Robert Hariman; Reyes, "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."3 I draw mostly on Rotman's more recent Mathematics as Sign because there one finds the clearest articulation of his approach.4 The issue of the relationship between informal and formal mathematical discourse, the discursive/argumentative strategies within each, and the rhetorical purposes of each remains an unexplored and potentially rich area for rhetorical analysis. See the "Potentialities" section that follows.5 For others who make this argument see William P. Thurston; Lakoff and Núñez; Imre Lakatos.6 This is, of course, a major issue in the mathematics education literature, where studies of student perspectives on math reveal two consistent themes: students perceive math as (1) abstract and (2) rule-driven. The point that we are building toward is that mathematics is not abstract or rule-driven by nature, but it can and often is taught as an abstract form of logical (rule-driven) reasoning. This pedagogical approach, it has been shown, does not allow the majority of students to identify with mathematics (see Boaler). Regarding computers and mathematics, an interesting phenomenon has emerged in the twenty-first century: powerful computers are analyzing enormous data sets and are producing complex mathematical formulas out of those data sets that even the best mathematicians cannot understand—they know they work to predict certain phenomena in the data set but they cannot give meaning to those predictions. The fact that computers can generate novel mathematical formulae significantly undermines the Platonic view of mathematics. See Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, 126–128.7 Lakatos's work reveals the importance of historical context and the dynamics of argumentation in mathematical innovation. See Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations.8 For insightful accounts of the emergence of Greek geometry and its debt to empirical, material features of the world see Michel Serres; Reviel Netz.9 To the skeptical reader who thinks math is only metaphorical at the basic level: Nearly half of Where Mathematics Comes From addresses more complex mathematics, offering analyses of the concept of infinity and of Euler's classic equation eπi = −1. A full treatment of these analyses is beyond the scope of this essay.10 Rhetoric of science scholars have extended Latour's argument in various ways. The number of scholars is too long to list here but one might profitably begin with John A. Lynch and Chantal Benoit-Barné.11 Analysis of rhetoric as constitutive has increased in many areas of rhetorical studies but remains a minority approach to the study of mathematical discourse. I develop this point in "The Rhetoric in Mathematics."12 These works build of course on previous scholarship on mathematics as deployed in other domains, including especially the domains of economics and statistics.13 Bernhard Riemann's concept of manifold, for example, comes to mind as a potentially beneficial way to advance our thinking about polysemy and subjectivity, for it emphasizes not only the discrete differentiations of meaning and identity but also their layered and continuous features. See Arkady Plotnitsky.

Commonsense beliefs about the mind are routinely operative in human discourse, where they serve as prolific resources from which to generate discourse/understanding while often remaining in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the realm of the undiscussed.” As a study of how mind-related beliefs serve as a resource for rhetorical invention, this essay (1) provides insight into an important and pervasive category of doxastic beliefs and (2) brings into focus the powerful undertow of doxa’s routine discursive work. It does so, in part, by analyzing Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling child-rearing manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, together with reactions it elicited from readers. These show how mind-related beliefs can generate discourse while being suppressed in the discursive iteration, resulting in fragments, enthymemes, implications, and presences/absences. Moreover, published in multiple editions over many years, Spock’s book demonstrates the inventional implications of historical changes in widely shared beliefs about the mind.

AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

If there are rhetoricians who still profess The Rhetorical Tradition as a singular frame for the study of rhetoric, Alejandra Vitale and Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s collection, Rhetoric in South Amer...

AbstractThis essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s theories of performativity to explore how a performance by Lenny Bruce dramatizes the positive productive potentials of language’s breaking force. Because this performance dramatizes how Bruce’s comedy act gets reinscribed and reinvented in multiple contexts that produce a wide array of effects, it provides a way to look at how language, in this case, humorous appeals in the form of jokes, is always already interrupted by its future instantiations and can never fully be contained in a given context, not even the context of the intentions of the human consciousness. This performance shows us that persuasive appeals do not emerge from a fully realized self-present subject and, therefore, gives us reason to question who or what is at the center of the rhetorical situation if it is no longer a stable human subject. Notes1 The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”2 Derrida’s intervention intends to demonstrate that, in fact, the same risks that have been long associated with writing also apply to speech/gesture and all other forms of communication. Derrida’s claim is that all language—speech, gesture, writing—along with all experience, including the experience of being itself, is structured like writing. Writing is not a subservient tool to speech/gesture that carries “a continuous and homogenous reparation and modification of presence in the representation,” but is rather a “break in presence” (“Signature” 5). This breaking force occurs at the moment of inscription of any form of communication, suggesting that all language forms are structurally susceptible to the same risks Plato wanted to only apply to writing.3 Similarly, contemporary rhetoricians Diane Davis and Bradford J. Vivian have written on various aspects of language’s asignifying force. Davis calls attention to the importance of the often overlooked “non-hermeneutical dimension” of rhetoric, a dimension “that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up signification to comprehension” (“Addressing Alterity” 192). For Davis, this dimension deals not in the aspect of language that “opens itself up to interpretation,” a position she equates with J.L. Austin’s constative speech act and Levinas’s concept of the “said,” but rather in the “saying,” the dimension of language that “necessarily unsettles what is congealed in the already-said” and, in Austin’s terms, “indicates a performative” (192–193). Vivian likewise moves away essentialist notions of the human subject in asking whether it would be possible to conceive of rhetoric without first appealing to an essential subject. Vivian does not intend to replace one ontology of the subject with another, as a mere inversion of the system would again do nothing to disrupt the organizing principles of the system itself. He intends to move towards a conception of the subject in such a way that it no longer governs the entire scene and system of the rhetorical process, but rather becomes a “rhetoric beyond representation—one no longer organized, that is, by the representation of moral truth or transcendental reason nor representative of an ideal conception of human being, however explicit or implicit it may be” (13–14).4 Even as Austin undertakes rigorous efforts to define a clear distinction between serious and non-serious contexts, his text itself works against the limitations he wishes to define. For example, when he uses slang expressions like “cock a snook” (119) and self-deprecating humor like, “Of course, this is bound to be a little boring and dry to listen to and digest; not nearly so much so as to think and write” (164) to make his points about the need to sequester jokes, poetry, and plays from serious communication, he is in effect using performative utterances to make constative claims. Considering How To Do Things With Words was originally delivered as a series of lectures, Austin’s text ultimately performs its very purpose; it becomes about what it does and not necessarily about what it says (119). Ultimately, Austin’s openness toward his own methodology leads him to accept that there is a little bit of the constative and a little bit of the performative in any utterance: “we found sufficient indications that unhappiness nevertheless seems to characterize both kinds of utterance, not merely the performative; and that the requirement of conforming or bearing some relation to the facts … seems to characterize performatives” (91).5 Bruce appears to take particular offense to this part of the transcript, because such accusations, if true, would harm his standing in the eyes of his more sophisticated female audience members: “I would never make gestures of masturbation, cause, I like … I, I’m concerned with my, image, in that, I, I know it offends chicks. And I, you know, it frightens them, it’s ugly to them, and, Dorothy Killgallen is not going to see some crotch grabbing hooligan. I would just never do anything like that. It’s offensive.”6 Before Bruce exits the club to the street outside in the final seconds of The Lenny Bruce Performance Film—the second to last performance he would make before his death—his last words spoken on camera were vintage Lenny Bruce—irreverent, odd, sincere, funny: “I really dug working with you, and good night, and as Will Rogers said, I never met a dyke I didn’t like, and, good night.”7 Lenny Bruce died on August 3, 1966, a victim of an accidental overdose of morphine. His efforts to perform his act before the courts were never realized. Bruce was found guilty of obscenity in the New York case he defends in this film, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal for review. However, on December 23, 2003, Governor George Pataki posthumously pardoned him, the first such pardon in the history of the state (Kifner). The last lines of journalist Dick Schaap’s eulogy to Lenny Bruce in Playboy magazine were as follows: “One last four-letter word for Lenny. Dead. At 40. That’s obscene” (qtd. in Collins and Skover 370).Additional informationNotes on contributorsKevin CasperKevin Casper is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia, 1601 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118, USA. kcasper@westga.edu

The historical actors at the center of Kimberly Harrison’s The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion are not easy figures to identify with, but they are worth studyi...

This essay explores how the powerful system of cultural references in the architecture of Alexandria is disrupted by Roman visual rhetoric. Specifically, the essay closely analyzes Diocletian’s Victory Column, a monument to the third-century Roman ruler who put down an Alexandrian uprising. The authors argue that Rome employed a visual rhetoric of spectacular disruption as a means to insert itself into the city’s historical identity even after its siege created widespread disease and starvation. The essay builds on the substantial scholarship on public memory by describing a kind of rhetoric that poses a political, existential challenge to a reigning cultural identity. As rhetorical scholars continue to study public memory and the persuasive powers of designed space, the concept of megethos appears to be uniquely and increasingly relevant.

Since the 1960s, invention theory has reinvented itself. This essay aims to map and advance that process. It provides a window into the recent intellectual history of rhetorical studies and advocates continued development of sociologically informed rhetorical theories open to culture, materiality, and post-humanist understandings. I argue that invention theory has productively organized itself around two sets of dialectical tensions but remains constrained by two longstanding prejudices. The productive tensions revolve around (a) breaking with and affirming inherited rhetorical traditions and (b) conceiving invention as emplaced or dispersed. The prejudices consist of a continued logophilia and normative privileging of creativity and newness. I map the dialectics and prejudices across modern, premodern, and postmodern orientations. I then provide a revised definition and heuristic framework revolving around a concept, inventional media, which aims to capture invention’s simultaneous emplacement and dispersal across processes of discovery, creativity, and rhetorical reproduction.