“Tao Trek” traces recent debates regarding comparative and contrastive rhetorical studies and proposes that revisiting some of the earliest encounters of Eastern and Western philosophies of rhetoric can help resolve recent binaries in rhetorical history and theory.

Over 2,500 years, philosophers in India refined a truth-centered and rhetorically egalitarian method of analogical debate: Nyāya vāda, and its five-part expression, the “Nyāya method.” According to Indian tradition, its practices emerged in the context of inter-scholar debates. However, most historical examples of Indian debate occur in mythical/religious dialogues between teacher and student, and currently Nyāya's scholars focus on theory, neglecting social practice. While Indologists describe the “what” of Nyāya, their bias toward theory leaves its conversational uses unexplored. Comparative rhetoricians describe Indian rhetoric with Greek terminologies as points of reference, and miss Nyāya's theoretical and practical debate tradition. This essay addresses this lack of social context and paucity of representation of Nyāya. It shows how informal debates in ancient literary/historical dialogues presage Nyāya's formulation and traces Nyāya's use in contemporary public examples, illustrating its rhetorical journey from discussions of scholars and kings, to academic formulization, to popular dialogic expression. Nyāya offers a clear alternative to Western confrontational rhetoric, and the presence of Indian “rhetorical” practice and theory undermines assumptions about “rhetoric” being uniquely Greek in origin, underscoring the need for comparative rhetorics.

This essay examines methodological practices in comparative rhetoric over the past three decades and suggests that the field conceive new perspectives to engage with transnational spaces, hybrid identities, and subjectivities grounded in differences related to gender, race, class, and culture. Drawing on insights from postcolonial and transnational feminist studies, the author explores the implications of contemporary theories for comparative work and develops an approach that links the cultural specificities of particular non-Western rhetorics with larger geopolitical forces and networks. Through an analysis of early-twentieth-century Chinese women's discourse on nüquanzhuyi, she argues that a geopolitical approach focusing on how rather than what we read would help practitioners rethink history, identity, and the nature of theoretical investigation in the field and set the stage for more nuanced and sophisticated studies of non-Western rhetorics in the twenty-first century.

Journalists contribute in many routine ways to public controversies, ways that are often overlooked in traditional criticism. They have tended to be overlooked in part because of the agonistic argument dialogue that functions as a tacit, a priori location for controversy, and in part because of the tendency of traditional critics to treat news texts as reflections of controversy rather than contributions to it. This essay examines in detail journalists' entextualization and recontextualization of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's discourse from a press conference on September 22, 1999 in order to explain one way that they contributed to the Brooklyn Museum controversy. The analysis adopts a constitutive attitude toward controversy, asking how our habits of talking and writing contribute to our impressions of a controversy as an autonomous cultural phenomenon.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how Aristotle's conception of tragic catharsis provides a basis for fleshing out the political office he tacitly assigns to rhetoric: defending a city-state's constitution against its characteristic forces of corruption so as to promote stability over the long-run. By inquiring into the Politics' emphasis on preservation and its endorsement of ostracism, this essay argues that Aristotle's theory of constitutions enables a rethinking of rhetoric's political efficacy in terms of a non-representational cathartic process that by means of facilitating civic purgation renews a community's political identity and so strengthens its commitment to the task of preserving the constitution. It demonstrates how, in articulating the grounds for exile, appeals to ostracism work toward the clarification both of the community's organizing principle and the emotional bonds of political philia. The essay concludes by reflecting on the persistence of rhetorical catharsis in today's Western democracies.

This essay analyzes and contrasts the rhetorical appeals of Breast Cancer Action and Breast Cancer Fund, the two national breast cancer organizations devoted to prevention and environmental activism. Following in the tradition of rhetoric scholars who understand rhetoric as constitutive of its audiences, I elucidate not only how these organizations recruit new audiences to their cause, but who they construct as recruitable. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of these organizations' rhetorics is successful as constitutive rhetoric (the other's less so), but worry over the political and social actions potentially precluded by its successes. This organization's rhetoric, as I show, retains and thus recirculates many individualistic assumptions and regressive notions of femininity associated with the more mainstream breast cancer movement and, well beyond, with most hegemonic US discourses.

The purpose of this essay is to advance the importance of the Lacanian registers for rhetorical scholarship by focusing (paradoxically) on the register of the Real. We argue that the Real functions as a condition of (im)possibility of critical invention for rhetorical critique. We advance five varieties of the Real that disrupt the coherence of rhetorical method/perspective and rhetorical formations: (1) the Real as Void, (2) The Real as Return, (3) The Real as Enjoyment, (4) The Real as Recalcitrance, and (5) The Real as Materiality.

Multidisciplinary from the start, Rebecca Dingo's Networking Arguments provides a new methodology that can be adopted by individuals working in the field of rhetoric as well as those in political s...

This essay examines the rhetorical significance of commonplace books kept by twenty-two Quaker women. Artifacts of remembrance, these books provide us with a detailed portrait of Quaker rhetorical culture during that era. The women who keep these books do more than just catalog and copy rhetorically significant texts. They participate in and help shape their rhetorical culture by reenacting invention practices central to the creation of powerful Quaker discourse. More specifically, they reveal the potential of three practices—prophecy, friendship, and conversation—to function as sites of rhetorical invention. As they weave into their books texts where prophecy, friendship, and conversation frequently give rise to powerful discourse, they affirm the value of these practices to their community, but they also provide insight into the particular purposes and processes at work when a creator engages in such practices. In this essay I analyze these frequent occurrences of prophecy, friendship, and conversation, arguing that early Quakers, especially Quaker women, understood successful invention not as a private and autonomous endeavor, but as a social process. Furthermore, their beliefs about invention have implications for later generations, influencing the rhetorical practices of women both within and outside the Quaker community.

This essay attends to the archive as an “inventional site for rhetorical pasts” (Morris, “Introduction”) by examining the construction of a queer archive and its effects on lesbian subjects. Drawing on queer archival theories of ephemera, I argue that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman (1972) constitutes an archive of lesbian experience that functioned rhetorically as a communal and identificatory resource. Martin and Lyon rendered the experiences of women associated with the lesbian homophile organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in the form of “anecdotes” and strategically curated them into middle-class categories designed in direct contrast to the gender and class transgressions of the lesbian bar scene. I identify the rhetorical effect on readers, “archival consciousness raising,” by analyzing autobiographical letters Martin and Lyon received in response and tracing the limits of this effect for more diverse lesbian readers.

In his last seminars, Michel Foucault analyzed parrēsia (frank speech) in classical Greece and Rome, a subject also addressed by classical rhetoricians. Foucault regards parrēsia as an idealized modality of truth telling—unartful, sincere, courageous speech that tells an unwelcome truth to power. Aligning rhetoric with flattery, Foucault excludes rhetorical parrēsia from his history of thought. This essay offers an alternative analysis of parrēsia from the perspective of classical rhetoric. Drawing especially on the comprehensive description in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, this essay identifies within the classical tradition a feigned parrēsia as well as a sincere one and a rhetorically artful parrēsia as well as the unartful, bold one that Foucault favors. Furthermore, the essay traces a genealogy that highlights changes in the practice of parrēsia as the term is conceptualized in the context of friendship, at which point parrēsia takes on an unmistakably rhetorical character.

A prominent strain of argument and assessment in ancient texts places stones and words side-by-side for evaluation. I call this strain “the mock rock topos,” exploiting the ambiguity of mock (mimic/taunt) to capture a common ancient attitude toward verbal representations, written especially: that they share certain qualities with stone and stonework but outperform them, too. The mock rock topos consists of four main sub-topoi—masterpiece, mimêsis, movement, and memory—whereby graphic rhetors assert the superiority of their products. Detractors of writers and writing often use lithic language in their criticisms as well. The practice of pairing busts of representative authors with their book-rolls in ancient libraries complicated the representation competition between stone and scroll and enhanced the cultured and cultural experience of readers in those spaces.

The essay argues that no substantial connection exists between Stanley Fish's work and the tradition of sophistic rhetoric. The purpose of this argument is to show that Fish's work undermines and weakens the development of a rhetorical pedagogy that focuses on the role of language in the formation of beliefs. I contend that Fish's book, Doing What Comes Naturally, is actually hostile to most forms of a classical rhetorical education and can only issue from theoretical grounds that misunderstand the rhetorical tradition. Thus this essay seeks to critically examine one of the foremost defenders of rhetoric over the last twenty years by contextualizing his work in classical rhetorical theory. Fish produces a thin account of rhetoric that disassociates the language arts from citizenship in contemporary democracies. Such a move shapes his highly disciplinary and epistemological understanding of the function of higher education.

If the title of the text under review is not sufficient warning, Vilem Flusser (1920–1991) was a provocateur. With roots in 1920s and ‘30 s Prague and the intersecting Czech, German, and Jewish cul...

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.

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

In the 1870s and ‘80s, more women discussed sex to promote free love and sex education in speeches, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Some of these women inspired the 1873 “Comstock law,” which banned materials deemed obscene. This essay uses the fictional figure of Audacia Dangyereyes to illustrate the constraints on women discussing sex in public forums. It identifies the rhetorical moves necessary to accommodate constraining audiences through close readings of the works of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, and Angela Heywood, all women deemed immodest by public standards and obscene by Anthony Comstock. To allay such charges, these women worked to redefine appropriate speech for women.

I was recently given a Kindle. But because it is bound inside a hardback black leather carrying case with an elastic strap around it, when I received the gift I thought I held in my hands a Moleski...

With turns pictorial and spatial, somatic and sonic, scholarly movements in rhetoric resemble the epicycles of the Ptolemaic universe: they keep rhetoric fixed in the center while allowing for moti...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment During the completion of this review, the author was supported by a predoctoral fellowship in clinical and translational research funded by the National Institutes of Health through grant numbers UL1RR024153 and UL1TR000005.

Scholars across the disciplines find much dysfunction in public apologies because they assume that these statements pursue the reconciliatory end of forgiveness. In contrast, this essay argues that public apologies do not enable forgiveness, but rather operate as ritualistic public punishment and humiliation in order to enforce certain ethical standards for public speech. These punishments are achieved by coercing offenders to offer apologies that embody metanoia, a rhetorical and religious concept that denotes a sudden change of heart or personal conversion. Through a rhetorical analysis of the performance of metanoia in public apologies from Don Imus, Michael Richards, and Mel Gibson, this essay demonstrates the punitive function of apologetic discourse and examines its ethical implications.

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.

Scholarship across the fields of rhetoric, history, and religion credits Frances Willard for her activist work, most notably her contribution to the nineteenth-century temperance movement. Although this scholarship references Willard's religious motivations, it is silent about one of the causes that Willard was committed to, women's preaching, and rarely cites her book, Woman in the Pulpit. By offering a close reading of the rhetorical and theological features of Woman in the Pulpit, this essay (1) suggests that Willard introduces a feminist theological resolution to the separate spheres ideological debate of the nineteenth century—the prevailing discourse that men should lead in political/public space, and women should occupy domestic/private space; and (2) recasts Woman in the Pulpit as a central text in Willard's repertoire—a magnum opus of sorts that represents her feminist brand of Christian Socialist thought.

This essay argues that Dorothy Day's 1930s Catholic Worker columns prudently translated Catholic social teachings in order to articulate a vision for radical Catholic social reform. Day's columns interpreted dogmatic Church texts in response to public outcries for social change during a period of economic and social collapse, specifically the doctrinal principles of human dignity, hospitality to laborers, and Catholic action. As a translator, Day balanced arguments for the relevance of traditional religious values with circumstances requiring innovative solutions. She used prudence in order to carve out a “middle way” between the two extremes of dogmatic fidelity to the views of established Church leaders and pandering to revolutionary sentiments that urged the working class to eschew traditional religion. Day's case illustrates an important relationship between translation and prudence—how prudent translation enables rhetors to craft innovations from within traditional belief systems in order to rework cultural norms and advance social change.

This essay investigates the role of ephemeral co-location within practices of regionalization as a potential response to the increasingly commodified, mediated, and militarized experience of public space. An “epilogue” to the articles gathered for this special issue, this essay outlines five characteristics of regionalization: active resistance, selective deployment, shared aesthetics, common identity, and augmented reality.

Multimodality is a provocative challenge to those of us who understand the primary concerns of our field to be speech and writing. At its most simplistic, Kress's work is an expansive account of ho...

Abstract This essay argues that the theory of form Kenneth Burke introduced in Counter-Statement can be read as articulating a usable concept of a rhetorical aesthetic. Here rhetoric involves identity in assertions and responses that develop through immediate encounters that prompt, even if just vicariously, a sensory experience. In their conventional conceptions, rhetoric engages concepts while aesthetic engages sensation and emotion—an overgeneralization that may still be more or less accurate. But if we conclude with Burke that it is not always useful to treat the rhetorical and the aesthetic as separate we might come to better understand the human tendency to abandon abstraction and dive into immediacy in matters pertaining to the alienation of self from community. Ideas and arguments bind people together or push them apart, but aesthetic experience does that as well and perhaps to greater effect. The essay explores that claim in the context of a contemporary revival of traditional Hawaiian music that draws directly on sensory experiences of life in Hawaii to assert aesthetically a place for Hawaiian identity in an American national community.

This essay uses the Kansas reception of Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood to reflect on processes of regionalism and resistance. Noting that Capote and In Cold Blood were articulated quite differently in different portions of the state of Kansas, I explain how Kansans used a text that was imposed on them to craft for themselves regional identities of their own making. I call these “counter regions,” a term I coin to emphasize that region making is an important, if often overlooked, ingredient in practices of cultural resistance.

This essay performs a rhetorical cartography of “regional accents” to draw a map of how they articulate regions into, and out of, maps of power. First, the essay isolates the accent of neoliberalism in the constitution of regions through the use of regional trade agreements. Second, the essay tracks a socialist accent for regional power in Samir Amin's call for the Global South to execute a political strategy of “delinking.” Third, the essay argues that the rhetorical movement between places in protest, expressed by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, invents a horizontal regional accent. For places of protest, a horizontal regional accent invents and folds regions of protest into one another to fuel the production of new places of protest. As a political subjectivity, the protester emerges in the crease of a regional fold of protest places as these places make and unmake maps of power.

Although regionalism has long been an important concept in architecture and political science, rhetorical studies has not specifically theorized regionalism as an analytical or productive concept. This introduction outlines four premises of a regional rhetoric that help to articulate a specifically rhetorical theory of regionalism.

Drawing on Douglas Powell's assertion that “region making [is] a practice of cultural politics” (8), this essay traces the nationalist force of mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorian appeals to America as a strategic ethno-historic region. It suggests that such arguments bound national, regional, and transnational concerns together, using indigenous roots and cultural landscape as their anchors. Ecuadorian intellectuals who made nationalist arguments by building a larger, American moral geography drew on a racialized sense of history and landscape to re-imagine their relationship with their Spanish ex-colonizer and to distinguish an autochthonous American Ecuador from its diluted American neighbors. These arguments from America gave their small country greater cultural weight through regional identification. Tracing those tactical claims to America as they played out within Ecuador and across its regional commitments contributes to a broader understanding of the rhetorical force of place. The Ecuadorian example of regional appeals that amplify national stature demonstrates how place-based claims to identity can simultaneously ground and circulate arguments; it shows as well how the cultural politics of a particular landscape invoke and move within larger complexes of meaning and force.

Abstract Sor Juana's 1680 arch, designed and written in her role as professional writer for Church and state, consisted of commissioned words, art, and performance to celebrate the arrival of the new viceroy. It is significant as the remaining trace of a seventeenth-century female exerting high-level political influence on the closed, patriarchal society of New Spain. Reading and writing about the arch presents multiple challenges, including lack of the full "text" for what was an ephemeral event as well as a problem in recent feminist criticism, which insists on seeing Sor Juana as only a rebellious iconoclast. I argue that the work, and Sor Juana herself, must be read as having both a conservative, hegemonic agenda and radical critique of dominant ideology. This "both/and" move, which I position as necessary for a robust feminist approach, helps us better understand the complexity of Creole identity and belonging in colonial Mexico. Notes 1This is the only English translation of Neptuno alegórico, cited henceforth as "AN." I have consulted both the Spanish text and English version. Sor Juana's baroque Spanish is difficult, and this translation is often too literal and doesn't always make sense. It also renders the verse of the Explication in prose form. When necessary I provide my translation of the Spanish text from the fourth volume of Sor Juana's Obras completas (OC). 2 Obras completas vol. IV and Vincent Martin and Electa Arenal's recent edition of Neptuno alegórico contain select contemporary art work portraying the mythical themes Sor Juana uses, suggesting what the paintings may have looked like or drawn from. 3I'm indebted to Martínez-San Miguel's excellent discussion of criollismo and Sor Juana. 4In fact, the vicereine who was about to arrive was instrumental in fostering much of Sor Juana's subsequent work and was responsible for its publication in Europe. 5All translations of scholarship in Spanish are my own. 6Cf. Bacon, e.g.,: "Some praises come of good wishes and respects, which is a form due, in civility, to kings and great persons, laudando praecipere, when by telling men what they are, they represent to them, what they should be." 7Sor Juana may have copied many passages from a Spanish treatise on mythology without attribution, probably to foreground her Latin (over Spanish) knowledge and boost her affiliation with classical European learning (McNichols 6, 68–77). 8 Non is a negative meaning "not"; plus means "more"; and ultra can mean "beyond," "to an extent or degree exceeding," "on the farther side," and "on the other side." 9See Proverbs 31:10, which praises the virtuous (not strong or valiant) wife. I thank Thomas Hall for his assistance in translating this passage and identifying the source.

Sometimes we desire to forget. Although we often assert a hunger for the grounding and securing structures of memory, some memories are extraordinarily painful and deeply destructive. These memorie...

This essay analyzes Myriad Genetics’ marketing of the BRACAnalysis genetic test to argue that the campaign creates a unique and problematic understanding of choice and decision making in the domain of applied genetic biotechnologies. The essay identifies how the campaign creates a subject position that invites audiences into a double bind of action and moral obligation, where specific decisions to make powerful medical choices become circumscribed as a necessity. A reduction and oversimplification of technical, scientific complexity replaces deliberative processes and phronetic understandings of complex situations and exigencies with intuition and feeling as warrants for action; in turn, a resultant appearance of empowerment becomes dialectically invested in an invocation of moral urgency and necessity.

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

Featuring ten innovative essays by leading scholars of memory and sexuality, Charles E. Morris III's Remembering the AIDS Quilt grapples with one of the world's most challenging and ubiquitous publ...

Peter Mack, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor at the University of Warwick and University of London, is a foremost expert in Renaissance rhetoric. In his previous book, Elizabethan Rh...

Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.