In loving memory of Janice Hocker Rushing Operating within the tension created by two antithetical readings of the Phaedrus, I argue that neither view fully captures Plato's final word on memory, myth, or rhetoric. Using the entire dialogue as a model, I discover a conversational form of rhetoric as “living myth” that leads Socrates and Phaedrus, as well as readers of the dialogue, towards self-knowledge of the soul. To reach these conclusions, I operate with a decidedly spiritual framework, and argue that such a critical perspective may well be useful in interpreting meanings in other important rhetorical texts.

Robert Ivie is well known to readers of this journal for his work on the rhetoric of war. Nurtured in the context of the discourse of the Cold War and its downward spiral into the pointless maelstr...

The “invention” of the alphabet is widely seen as the defining characteristic of literacy in Greece. This article examines the development of written rhetoric; that is, how alphabetic writing was structured for a variety of functions, and how such functions reveal the heuristics that were developed. The article argues that the paragraph is the earliest and dominant feature of an alphabetic rhetoric, and the source for understanding the recursive dynamics of oral and written expression that contributed to the development of a literate rhetoric in Greece.

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

This article argues that the Institutio Oratoria is Quintilian's Quintilian . The Orator's Education [Institutio Oratoria] . 5 Vols. Trans. Donald A. Russell . Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 2001 . [Google Scholar] attempt to provide an education in moral philosophy through the teaching of rhetoric as a technê. In contrast to the way Quintilian is typically portrayed, this paper presents him as a political opportunist who hoped to benefit from the Flavian emperors' distrust of philosophy by presenting a curriculum that would tame moral philosophy by teaching it in the context of rhetoric. As a demonstration of how Quintilian envisioned rhetoric's transformation of moral philosophy, the article analyzes the treatment of the relationship between the moral and the expedient in the Institutes, contrasting Quintilian's rhetorical treatment to that in philosophy, particularly in Cicero's Cicero . De Officiis . Trans., Walter Miller . Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 1913 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] De Officiis. This analysis of the Institutes has implication for our understanding of how Quintilian's appropriation of philosophy enabled rhetoric, a practical, skills-oriented discipline, to become also the means for character formation within Roman schools and beyond.

The publication of this edition of Blair's Lectures makes an important text in the history of rhetoric, long out of print, again available to scholars and students at a reasonable price ($75; $35 p...

17th- and 18th-century philosophical separation of the reflecting mind from reality often resulted in a hostility towards rhetoric. However, this article demonstrates that American idealism yielded a rich conversation about rhetoric's place in the search for divine knowledge. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of attitudes' linguistic dialectical constitution, this article closely analyzes two 18th-century idealist philosophies (those of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Johnson of Connecticut) and their related rhetorical theories. Seeing the interaction between the American idealist philosophical and rhetorical traditions leads us to reconsider the impact of idealist philosophy on the entire tradition of American rhetorical practice and theory.

This article reflects on potential pedagogical implications of Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece by connecting it with other recent publications on rhetoric's rhetoric, space, mobility, as instantiated in everyday practices. The resulting account considers words, images, and bodies as part of the rhetorical enterprise.

ABSTRACT Starting from a chance quotation in William Dean Howells' “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading,” this essay reflects on the differences (and relations) between what classical tradition would call “grammatical” and “rhetorical” approaches to discourse—and, likewise, what might be called “hermeneutic” and “productive” approaches to rhetoric. The grammatical/hermeneutic approach is oriented towards reaching an understanding of what a text says or means, or what its argument is, while the rhetorical/productive approach is characterized by the questions, How was it done? and How can I do that? It is this latter approach—the orientation toward the cultivation of productive discursive skill—that disciplinarily makes rhetoric, as opposed to a variety of philosophy or literary criticism. This notion is further aligned, on one hand, with a revisionist “sophist's history of rhetoric,” and, on the other hand, with a “sophistic” approach to rhetorical education derived from the tradition of Isocrates.

Abstract In these reflections on the symposium as an event, the author speculates about change and continuity in rhetorical scholarship over the last two decades and ponders the relationship between rhetorics of performance and citizenship. Notes 1. In Rhetoric and Poetics, Walker carefully delineates the histories of rhetoric as an instrumental or pragmatic art against which he posits his vision of rhetoric as a much older and more pervasive epideictic practices.

This essay argues that classical Greek rhetoric was informed by the ethic of competition and the aesthetic of exhibition and performance. It proposes that this rhetoric can be profitably studied in the terms of the Sophistical, Platonic, Isocratean, and Aristotelian perspectives. The essay recalls the author's early experiences with rhetoric and articulates the logic of his Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. At the same time, it promises a theatrical play (in the spirit of Plato's Symposium) that illustrates the four perspectives.

Early in my career I studied the history of topical invention in order to discover the basis for a distinctive, substantive, and coherent theory of rhetorical argumentation. The effort reflected the dominant academic assumptions of the time, and it proved both frustrating and instructive. Eventually, I concluded that my objective was misdirected. When theoretical coherence became the goal of topical invention (as in Boethius), the topics lost connection with rhetorical interests and applications and became part of a self-contained scholastic enterprise. But when treated more loosely as precepts that helped develop a capacity for action and performance in a particular case (as in Quintilian), the topics emerged not only as more useful but as more directly connected to the distinctive characteristics of rhetorical art. This shift in emphasis for “substance” and “theory” to “action” and “performance” corresponds to a general change in attitudes toward rhetoric that has occurred during the last three decades. This change may lead to a revisionism that extends beyond the teaching of individual courses and encourages consideration of rhetoric as a curriculum.

ABSTRACT In the introduction to this special issue, Hawhee sets the stage for the scholarly performances featured at the 2005 Pittsburgh symposium on ancient rhetoric by describing the context and foregrounding the lectures/essays contained in this issue. She notes the shift to questions of performing rhetoric and considers that shift in relation to disciplinary identities which, she asserts, function performatively.

Abstract This essay examines several disciplinary and pedagogical assumptions behind Aristotle's centrality in the classical rhetorical canon and calls for a reconsideration of the established hierarchical relation of Aristotle to Isocrates. Notes 1. For recent works in English see, for example, Terry Papillon; Takis Poulakos; Takis Poulakos and David Depew; Robert G. Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”); and Yun Lee Too. One must also mention a new two-volume translation of Isocrates' extant works by Mirhady and Too (volume 1) and Papillon (volume 2), published by the University of Texas Press. 2. See articles by Rummel, Papillon, and Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”). 3. For a more elaborate version of this argument, see chapter 2 in my Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle. 4. See David Depew's “The Inscription of Isocrates into Aristotle's Practical Philosophy” for a cogent explanation of Aristotle's hierarchical subordination of praxis to theoria and of techne to praxis. 5. A good example of scholarship in this vein is Andrea Nightingale's study Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy.

ABSTRACT Though many sophists were interested in the nature and power of logos, there were strong reasons for them not to set up as teachers of the art of verbal manipulation. Whatever Aristophanes and Plato may imply, sophists would have been foolish to advertise a persuasive skill divorced from knowledge and moral authority. “Sophists without Rhetoric” Andrew Ford The aim of this chapter is to examine a particular rhetoric of socialization which has in the latter part of the twentieth century fallen from view despite its significance in Hellenic antiquity, that of Athenian law. “Legal Instruction in Classical Athens” Yun Lee Too This paper suggests a view of ancient Greek rhetoric that embraces multiple media and that emphasizes rhetorical interaction as a form of cultural reproduction through visual and spatial means, and it illustrates the importance of these elements with reference to the ancient Athenian assembly place, the Pnyx and the Greek concept of eusynoptos .

Abstract This article examines points of convergence between Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the habitus and ancient and modern depictions of art as a model of knowledge. My discussion of art is intended to engage on-going conversations on rhetorical invention and to raise new questions concerning the relationship between invention and cultural critique. Notes 1. See Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. 2. Young maintained heuristics could be used “for carrying out many phases of composing, from the formulation of problems to various kinds of editing…” (135). 3. See Young and Becker's “Toward a Modern Theory of Rhetoric: A Tagmemic Contribution” and Lauer's exchanges with Berthoff. 4. Bourdieu provides the following definition of the habitus: “The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an expressive mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (72). 5. Using the analogy of the game, Bourdieu explains that “those who are caught up in them have little interest in seeing the game objectified.” The paradox, Bourdieu observes, is that those who are not caught up in the game “are often ill-placed to experience and feel everything that can only be learned and understood when one takes part in the game…” (189). See also p. 164. 6. “The truth of doxa is only ever fully revealed when negatively constituted by the constitution of a field of opinion, the locus of the confrontation of competing discourses—whose political truth may be overtly declared or may remain hidden, even from the eyes of those engaged in it. … The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subject structures and the objective structures, destroys self-evidence practically” (Bourdieu 168–169).

ABSTRACT Applying a theory of homology to rhetorical pedagogy, this article suggests that Plato's and Augustine's discursive methods—dialectic and hermeneutics/homiletics respectively—function as unlocking devices via their formal structures. Dialectics unlock the discourses produced in/about the sensory world to reveal a higher level of material reality; hermeneutics/homiletics unlock Biblical ambiguities to produce a truer level of insight. Unlocking discourses, thus, give access to knowledge that would otherwise lie beyond reach for the untrained. The attention to form permits a different perspective on interpretation and pedagogy than more traditional approaches because it emphasizes audience's cognitive and “erotic” response to form and style.

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

ABSTRACT Scholars who have been writing recently about the unity and composition of Aristotle's Rhetoric make either brief or no mention of the transmission and editorial history of Aristotle's texts. This essay addresses this void by first presenting and discussing Strabo's, Plutarch's, and Porphyry's accounts of the transmission and editorial history of Aristotle's and Theophrastus' texts in conjunction with discussing the list of works that Diogenes Laertius ascribes to both authors. Once the transmission and editorial history is considered, evidence is presented from the Rhetoric that may indicate two important points—the extent to which the text is a compilation of previously independent texts that were ascribed to both Aristotle and Theophrastus and that Andronicus, rather than Aristotle, may be responsible for the text as we have it.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. This emphasis on pedagogy is consistent with the consensus formed at the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies Conference held in Evanston, Illinois, summed up in Jeffrey Walker's statement there, “What makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition.” For more on this position, see the essays in the Summer 2004 (volume 34, issue 3) issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, especially Gerard A. Hauser's Hauser , Gerard A. “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn't Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 ( 2004 ): 39 – 53 . [CSA] [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn't Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism.”

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

Abstract Focusing on a seacoast New Hampshire African American burying ground and the grave of a white woman buried in a Massachusetts rural cemetery, this article considers how the essential nature of the cemetery makes it both a very usual and unusual memory place. Considering de Certeau's distinctions between space and place as well as Foucault's definition of a heterotopia, this paper argues that the paradoxes of the heterotopia combined with the symbolism and materiality of the grave make the cemetery a particularly potent lieu de mémoire for those otherwise forgotten in public memory.

In responding to Gunn and Lundberg's critique of her report on rhetorical agency, Geisler uses their Ouija Board metaphor to undertake an analysis of what it might mean to teach the post‐modern rhetor. In particular, once the autonomous agent has been denaturalized, members of the profession of rhetoric have plenty to do in helping students first to engage with and then to participate in a more appropriately theorized rhetoric. Like the Ouija Board player, we may not be able to know how the results of our classroom teaching are related to our intentions. But—like every other rhetor—we need to recognize the costs of walking away from the game.

The United States of America: Imagine that Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address, by Stephen Howard Browne. College Station: Texas A& M Press, 2003. 155 pp. Benjamin Franklin's Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology, by Lester C. Olson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 323 pp. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, by Cheryl Glenn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 220 + xxii pp. Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility, by Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 101 pp. Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost. University of Virginia Press, 2004. 346 + xiii pp.

Abstract This essay responds to Cheryl Geisler's “report” on the discussions about the concept of agency at the 2003 Alliance of Rhetorical Societies conference. We argue that Geisler's report inaccurately and unfairly describes the wide‐ranging positions discussed at the conference, particularly by collapsing subjectivity and agency and by advancing a strawperson argument about “postmodernism.” In contrast to the humanist understanding, we recommend and describe a negative theology of the subject that adopts a more hospitable posture of uncertainty toward the agent and agency.

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

Abstract This essay is divided into two parts, the first part showing how certain disciplinary and historiographical habits and ideologies have formed obstacles to rhetorical reading of Plato by many scholars in rhetoric. The second part reads rhetorically a dramatically related group of four Platonic dialogues, Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, and Statesman, arguing that Plato's commitment to Heraclitean ontology determines certain rhetorical, temporal, and argumentative patterns of these works.

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

Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2004. 245 + xvi pp. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, by Gregory Clark. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 181 pp. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, by Scott Consigny. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 242 pp.

Abstract “Survival Stories” examines the Chicana sterilization abuse case Madrigal v. Quilligan by taking up four historiographic approaches— three are recognized in feminist rhetorical scholarship; the fourth offers a methodological strategy to the field. Through this process, this essay makes several contributions to rhetorical study. It presents an example of Chicana feminist rhetoric and an inroad to this rhetorical tradition. It contextualizes the arguments made by the women in Madrigal v. Quilligan and exposes the strategies used by the judge to dismiss their claims. Finally, this essay proposes a historiographic practice that presses the limits of the rhetorical situation and investigates how these Chicanas’ rhetorics survived.

Abstract This article challenges the common assumption that Chaim Perelman's concept of the universal audience ought to be thought of primarily as a rational standard for argumentation. I argue instead that it has more interesting implications for political critique than for practical reason and that it can be used to draw attention to how social constructions of universality circulate in various contexts of symbolic production. To extend the reach of Perelman's insight, I relate it to four concepts in critical theory and suggest ways that the universal audience might be reconfigured as an instrument for politically conscious rhetorical criticism.

Abstract This essay offers a phenomenological assessment of the moral and rhetorical nature of acknowledgment. The dynamics of acknowledgment arise with the ontological structure of human existence, with our way of being spatial and temporal creatures whose existence, in an epideictic display, opens us to the future. From out of this openness comes a call of conscience, an evocation and a provocation that speaks to us of the importance of an essential vocation: teaching. Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie is offered as a case study of this entire process.

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication by Wayne Booth. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 206 + xv pp. Proteus Unmasked: Sixteenth‐Century Rhetoric and the Art of Shakespeare by Trevor McNeely. Bethlehem, London: Lehigh University Press, Associated University Presses, 2004. 369 pp. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks by Carol S. Lipson & Roberta A. Binkley, editors. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. 267 pp. The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition by James P. Zappen. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. 229 + viii pp.

Abstract This study provides substantive evidence that in composing / Corinthians Paul made conscious use of the Complete Argument as reported in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. This cross‐cultural strategy of reasoning, in combination with Semitic structures of symmetrical reasoning, is employed to analyze the argument of / Corinthians 14, providing methodological criteria for accepting the modern tradition‐critical thesis that the admonition silencing women in Corinth (/ Cor. 14 33b‐35) is not original to Paul's epistolary argumentation. The study suggests the need for greater attention to the role of the Complete Argument as a strategy of cross‐cultural persuasion in Greco‐Roman epistolary literature while also providing an example of rhetorical criticism employed in the evaluative task of tradition‐textual criticism.

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

For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief by Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 272 + xi pp. Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation by Bradford Vivian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 229 + xiv pp. Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 263 + x pp. Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers by Karyn L. Hollis. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 192 + xiii pp.

Abstract To assess how rhetoric is positioned in English and communications programs, I review surveys of undergraduate majors, including my own survey of a stratified sample of one hundred four‐year institutions. I also analyze the statements of purposes from varied departments. While discussions of rhetorical studies tend to be defined in terms of departmentalized disciplines, the relations between fields such as English and communications vary by types of institutions, with joint programs more common in smaller colleges and rhetoric and composition courses more pervasive in public institutions. Such situational factors need to be assessed in order to develop a more rhetorical stance on the collaborative capacities of rhetorical studies in English and communications. The pragmatics of the two disciplines differ in ways worth noting if rhetoricians in the two fields are to collaborate more productively.

Abstract I identify three modern approaches used to theorize epideictic rhetoric and suggest that each approach has difficulty dealing with the category of presence assigned to the genre by Aristotle. Drawing on Thucydides and, through him, Pericles' funeral oration, I suggest that Jacques Derrida's funeral speeches provide a way of rethinking the epideictic genre's presence as rhetorical ethics. More specifically, I argue that the function of presence in epideictic rhetoric is to provide an ethical interruption, and that Derrida, as one of our most accomplished funeral orators, helps us clarify the category of presence as it is described in Aristotle's and Thucydides' discussions of epideictic oratory.

Abstract The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates’ writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a “philosopher” vis‐à‐vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of “philosophy” and discourses of their culture.

Many scholars have argued that rhetorical theory and pedagogy should return to the neo‐classical and agonistic theory and pedagogy of the antebellum era. The ability of proslavery ideology to dominate political and rhetorical practice, however, troubles any easy equation between that pedagogy and practice. This article argues that agonism was hindered by the rhetoric of the improbable cause, a tragic metanarrative of novels like Nick of the Woods, which served as a defense of slavery and slaveocracy, without even mentioning the word, through reinforcing a foundation for that system. This view served to rationalize a system that had a dreamy, noble, and tragic ethos that was actually protected and supported by a brutal practicality; left out is something in the middle, the practical but principled argument about long‐term politics.

Abstract This study explores the rhetoric of African‐American educator and abolitionist William Grant Allen through an analysis of "Orators and Oratory," an address delivered to the Dialexian Society of New York Central College. I feature Allen's effort to meld a variety of traditions and approaches to enlist his student audience in the cause of abolition. Further, I take up two related, but distinct components of "Orators and Oratory": the emphasis on appeals to the emotions and the portrayal of violence. More generally, I suggest ways in which Allen's speech serves as a window onto the rhetoric of marginalized abolitionist rhetors.

Abstract Between August of 1939 and February of 1942 Kenneth Burke maintained a vigorous correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, the editor of the Kenyon Review. The conversation between the two men delved repeatedly into the intersections of rhetoric and epistemology, and took as its point of departure an influential essay written by Burke and published by Ransom: “Four Master Tropes.” In this article, I contextualize “Four Master Tropes” against the author‐editor conversation in order to clarify the Burkean relationship between rhetoric and knowledge. I argue that Burke understands rhetoric as a core epistemological practice operative in every discovery of “truth.”

Abstract This essay suggests that the Platonic question “Is Rhetoric a technê?” aims to interrogate rhetoric as a re‐productive “art,” specifically by inquiring whether rhetoric engenders anything and, if so, by what reproductive methodology. Further, this infamous question aims to identify the legitimacy of rhetorical intercourse and its resulting offspring, by subjecting rhetorical practices to genealogical scrutiny for eugenic purposes: to produce “words of the right sort"—those which establish a proper social and symbolic order.

Abstract Although conventional views about nineteenth‐century rhetoric highlight a shift from oratory to composition and from classical rhetoric with origins in Cicero and Quintilian to a "new" rhetoric with origins in Campbell, Blair, and Whately (with an attendant loss of scholarship and quality), William C. Robinson's Forensic Oratory (1893) can be grouped with a growing number of works that complicate such views. Robinson continues to emphasize oratory and to derive his theory from Cicero and Quintilian, using a complex of ideas called "uniformitarianism" to justify his direct appropriation of classical ideas. The resulting rhetoric lacks neither responsible scholarship nor high quality.

Strategies of Remembrances: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction by M. Lane Bruner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 176 pp. Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, edited by John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003. 634 pp. + xxxviii. Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle by Ekaterina V. Haskins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 172 + xiii pp. Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music (and Why We Should, Like, Care) by John McWhorter. Gotham Books: 2003. 276 pp. + xxiii.

Abstract George Grote's History of Greece (1846–56) was instrumental in overturning the traditional view of Athens as an oppressive and corrupt society. In particular, Grote's rewriting of the story of the Athenian demagogue Cleon illustrates the difficulties he faced in attempting to argue for the legitimacy of popular government and popular rhetoric. His defense of Cleon—and more broadly, his defense of rhetorical democracy—helped to challenge the ascendancy of rhetoric as belles lettres and to stimulate the modern revival of Athenian popular rhetoric.

Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present by Alan Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, Michael Reidy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 267 + x pp. Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West 1100–1540: Essays in Honour of John O. Ward, edited by Constant J. Mews, Cary J. Nederman, and Rodney M. Thomson. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003. 270 + viii pp. Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, edited by James A. Inman, Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 419 + xxiv pp.