Abstract This article examines two texts important in American rhetorical history, Caleb Bingham's 1794 American Preceptor and Eliphalet Pearson's 1802 abridgment of Blair's Lectures. These schoolbooks challenge accepted historiographies of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century rhetoric in two ways: they demonstrate that neoclassicism encompassed a much greater variety of ancient figures and texts than is usually presumed, and they suggest that neoclassical rhetorics operated within a more complicated sociopolitical milieu than is commonly understood. Bingham and Pearson emerge as key figures in early American rhetorical history and their books prompt reconsideration of American neoclassicism.

Writing in A Milieu of Utility: The Move to Technical Communication in American Engineering Programs, 1850–1950 by Teresa C. Kynell, 2nd ed. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 2000. 134 + xix pp. Rhetorical Figures in Science by Jeanne Fahnestock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv + 248 pp.

Abstract Although viewed as problematic and strange by many scholars, the elocutionary theories of Thomas Sheridan deserve more scholarly attention because of their unique understanding of the relationships between writing, oral reading, performance, and literary consumption. In contrast to Hugh Blair's emphasis on silent reading and tasteful (and passive) appreciation of literature, Sheridan concentrates on tasteful (and active) interpretation of literature through oral performance. Sheridan's theories complicate our understanding of eighteenth‐century rhetoric, its relationship to “literature,”; and its lasting effects on educational practices.

Abstract A 1927 pageant at the Saratoga Battlefield illustrates the workings of spectacle, here defined as a public gathering of people who have come to witness some event and are self‐consciously present to each other as well as to that event. Like Debord and others, I emphasize a tension between lived experience and text. Unlike them, I argue that spectacle is itself a lived experience that may be of greater consequence than the rhetorical text. I suggest that rhetoricians should strive to get at the lived experience that may be reflected quite imperfectly in the rhetorical text.

Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.

Riding the third wave of rhetorical historiography Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists by Martha Watson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 149 pp. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 by Susan Kates. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 157 pp. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Boston by Dorothy C. Broaddus. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 136 pp. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present by Charles Paine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 261 pp. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders by Katherine H. Adams. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 169 pp. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. xxvi + 308. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 2000. xi + 237 pp.

Abstract All but ignored by historians of rhetoric, Quintilian ‘s meditations on improvisation not only allow us to situate the Institutio Oratoria more firmly in its historical context but also require us to confront issues of performance, issues which (again) have been largely overlooked in historical studies of rhetoric. Quintilian's many references to extemporaneous speech participate in a broader argument the author advances against what he sees as the unscrupulous activities of the delatores (informers working in the service of the Emperors) and the theory of oratory implicit in their oratorical practices. In particular, Quintilian uses the topic of improvisation as an argumentative vehicle to reject the dependence of the delatores on natural ability, to parody their artless attempts at extemporization, and to promote his own educational program based on study, training, and art. Quintilian's discussion of improvisation also invites consideration of oratorical performance: the occasions upon which an orator should switch from a scripted to an improvised mode of performance, the psychological and affective experience of the orator who speaks extemporaneously, and the response of listeners who (according to Quintilian) regard the extemporized oration as more credible, more engaging, and more authentic than the one prepared in advance. For Quintilian, improvisation is the mode of performance to which all oratory should aspire.

Abstract Balancing the critiques of scientism in communications, this response notes how belletrism has marginalized rhetorical studies on the other side of the modern opposition of the arts and sciences. Such institutional divisions need to be assessed against broader changes in literacy if our disciplinary histories are to be a resource for assessing how rhetoricians in composition and communications can work together. The marginal positions of composition and speech courses may undermine the prestige of rhetoric as an academic discipline, but the margins can be a place of power if approached pragmatically. Looking beyond the pragmatic professionalism of disciplinary insiders such as Stanley Fish, we need to develop alliances with practitioners of the arts of rhetoric outside as well as within the academy if pragmatism is to contribute to the institutional work of making universities into institutions of public learning.

Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux notes that “many compositionists in the seventies and eighties did not find it necessary to claim to be a scientific discipline “(16). I respond to this claim by focusing on the new discourse about writing that emerged in the 1970s in work by Emig, Shaughnessy, Flower & Hayes, and others. Distinguishing between the “formative “ (intellectual) contexts from which this work drew, and the “receptive”; contexts in which it came to valued, used, and resonate, I show that whereas the roots of this work were almost exclusively empirical, their effects in the receptive context, including beyond the academy, were deeply rhetorical.

Abstract Relevance is a universal function of communication by which humans innately attempt to balance processing effort with the cognitive effect of an utterance. Relevance theory informs the cognitive and rhetorical dimensions of reading a narrative by (a) defining the conditions under which a text will initially be taken as a narrative (emphasizing context selection, display, and tellability) and (b) delimiting the unmarked cases of the ur‐conventions for reading narrative (naturalization and progression). These ur‐conventions and the Cognitive and Communicative Principles of Relevance also ground claims about the role played by narrative in humans’ search for rationality and moral identity.

Abstract This essay studies how photographs made by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression negotiate the complicated rhetorical space between “art”; and “documentary”; in Edward Steichen and Tom Maloney's photography journal U. S. Camera. I conclude that Steichen's insistence upon separating the documentary purposes of the FSA project from issues of aesthetics relies upon the construction of a false dichotomy that is nevertheless rhetorically productive, for it recognizes the realities of the time—that a government photography project created to publicize efforts to manage poverty could not align it self with the discourses of art and expect to survive.

Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument by Christopher W. Tindale. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 245 pp. WEIGHTY WORDS: THE MATERIALITY OF RHETORIC Rhetorical Bodies, edited by Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. 395 pp. Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction, edited by Mary M. Lay, Laura J. Gurak, Clare Gravon, and Cynthia Myntti. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 308 pp. Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignoredby Arabella Lyon. University Park: Penn State Press, 1998. 215 pages

Abstract It has generally been assumed that Aristotle's Rhetoric was unknown or insignificant in nineteenth century England. This article shows that it was an important text in the period and argues that the pattern of publication of translations, editions, and student aids concerning Aristotle's Rhetoric reflects a pedagogical movement beginning with a broadly humanistic tradition of the Noetic school at Oriel College, Oxford at the beginning of the nineteenth century and ending with a more philologically oriented approach at Cambridge towards the end of the century. Among the authors discussed are John Gillies, Thomas Taylor, Edward Copleston, Richard Whately, Prime Minister Gladstone, Daniel Crimmin, Theodore Buckley, James Hessey, James Rogers, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Edward Cope, and J. E. C. Welledon.

Abstract Much about the trope of irony is confusing. However, a consideration of the similarities between irony and African American Signification can help us recognize that this confusion can empower rhetors. One rhetor who can illustrate this power is Fanny Fern, a white nineteenth‐century American newspaper columnist whose rhetoric could be described as Signification. Simultaneously praising and condemning subjects such as suffrage, Fern was able to write on subjects forbidden to many. In addition, Fern's use of Signifyin(g) ironic rhetoric illustrates that language is not as determined as many would believe.

Abstract This essay emends Foss, Foss, and Griffin's invitational rhetoric to strenghten its philosophical undergirdings and release it from unfounded criticism. Standpoint hermeneutical rhetoric is the framework offered to position the theory more solidly in the canon. Three strategic moves include discovering and revising its epistemological stance to reflect Lorraine Code's concepts of knowing others and second personhood; connecting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to rhetoric; and using Gadamer's emphasis on position and historicity to develop the connection to feminist standpoint theory. Conclusions point toward the implications of invitational rhetoric as dialogue linked to practical application in public communication and pedagogy.

Abstract In this essay I call critical attention to the role of physical location in rhetorical situations, naming this aspect of communication “rhetorical space.”; Rhetorical space is the geography of a communicative event, and, like all landscapes, may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of a location. Drawing on the observations of novelists, philosophers, anthropologists, cultural geographers, and architectural historians, I explore the dimensions of this concept through an investigation of the pulpit, a rhetorical space that communicates a message to the audience quite apart from the sermon.

Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. viii+322. Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation, edited by J. Michael Hogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xxxviii + 315 pp. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law by Rosemary J. Coombe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xi + 462 pp. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators by Rebecca Moore Howard. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. xi + 195 pp. Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words by Brad Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xii + 202 pp. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America by James Perrin Warren. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. x + 202 pp.

Abstract Michael Psellos' heretofore untranslated synopsis of Hermogenean rhetoric, Peri Rhêtorikês, composed probably between 1060 and 1067, gives us a window into the state of rhetorical education in late Byzantium. The details of its inclusions, elisions, and amplifications suggest the ways in which Hermogenean rhetoric was understood and taught, at least by one uncommonly talented and influential rhetorician. The text suggests that Psellos may have found the pseudo‐Hennogenic On Invention —rather than On Stases or OnTypes of Style—most useful, most amenable to his efforts to revive an "Aristotelian"; rhetorical philosophy, and most relevant to actual rhetorical practices (including his own).

Abstract This essay defines a “rhetoric of disaster,”; traces its origins in Maurice Blanchot and its connection to trauma theory, explains how it works in figural terms to present what otherwise defies representation, and suggests a relation between the events of history and testimonial evidence that accounts for the uncanny effect of some representations of the Shoah. In doing so it examines three touchstone texts whose sources are profoundly traumatic events: a diary of the Warsaw ghetto written by Abraham Lewin, eyewitness testimony from the Fortunoff Archives at Yale University, and a “memoir “ by Binjamin Wilkomirski whose origin and authenticity has been recently and hotly disputed. The essay argues that because an event like the Shoah presents the writer (and her audience) with a limit to writing which destabilizes what we traditionally think of as knowledge, the consequences of a rhetoric of disaster are troubling. The second half of this essay lays out some of those consequences in both pedagogical and ethical terms. If writing the Holocaust confronts us with something “other”; than knowledge, in Blanchot's terms, it is doubtful that we can simply obey the ethical imperative never to forget that which we cannot remember, let alone know.

Abstract Antebellum African‐American literary societies in Philadelphia promoted rhetorical education and gave members the opportunity to craft powerful arguments. This study investigates the presence of the Anglo‐American rhetorical tradition—particularly eighteenth‐century Scots principles of Blair, Smith, and Campbell—in six representative speeches delivered at literary society meetings. Our analysis focuses on two major issues: 1) the influence of traditional principles of nineteenth‐century university rhetorical education on theory and practice in these societies; and 2) the ways in which traditional principles were infused with new purposes; deployed for radical ends; and appropriated, reshaped, and reinvented in ways that transform and redefine nineteenth‐century rhetorical practice.

The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218 + xv pp. Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 209 + xiii. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 130 pp. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 256 pages. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres by Gerard A. Hausen Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 335p. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois State University), 1998. 118 pp.

Abstract Mailloux and Leff urge us to seek a transdisciplinary ground for the study of rhetoric; this essay agrees but argues that neither Leff nor Mailloux has taken sufficient notice of the institutional and historical differences between Speech Communication and English, thus rendering the putative ground unstable. By offering an tentative account of the distinctive general orientation of Speech Communication rhetoricians, I hope to engage a substantive dialogue on the practical conditions of an interdisciplinary study of rhetoric.

Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux laments the separation between rhetoricians in English and Communication and issues a call for them to join a multi‐disciplinary coalition. Mailloux tries to connect the two by studying their disciplinary histories, and I respond to his account of developments in Communication. While his history of the discipline seems flawed in detail, I argue that his main point holds true and is a matter of considerable importance: Communication‐rhetoricians generally have adhered to a scientific rather than a “rhetorical, hermenemic”; conception of disciplinarity, and this commitment has hampered their ability to enter into interdisciplinary endeavors. But there is also another significant difference between rhetoricians in the two disciplines. Communication rhetoricians, for a variety of reasons, have a weaker sense of internal disciplinarity, and I argue that an unstable disciplinary self‐conception results in a confusion between disciplinary rhetoric located at a particular academic site and the global rhetoric of disciplinarity. Dealingwith this problem presents a major problem for Communication‐rhetoricians and for those who seek to establish effective interdisciplinary ties between English and Communication.

Abstract Feminist research in the history of rhetoric has used traditional humanistic research techniques to recover many women rhetoricians. Nevertheless, such work has been faulted for making tendentious arguments on behalf of some women figures. These criticisms arise in part from failing to understanding that feminist researchers, although employing many traditional methods, do not seek the traditional goal of objective truth. Rather, they work for truths that are relative to the interests of specific communities. Scholars who refuse to accept their findings may be motivated in part by rejection of the emotional allegiances the relevant communities invoke. An exemplary theory to negotiate these research difficulties can be found in the work of Jacqueline Jones Royster.

Abstract Though early American revolutionary and scientist Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) never wrote a formal treatise on rhetoric, his medical lectures and reform essays constitute an important site for the reception of rhetorics in revolutionary America. Focusing on Rush as a cultural register rather than a biographical subject enables historians to observe more immediately the cultural uses of rhetoric, the ways that individuals encountered, synthesized, and utilized assumptions about language to fashion identities at specific historical moments. Rush's early encounter with Great Awakening oratory, his scientific training in Edinburgh, and his participation in republican politics all record new attitudes toward language in eighteenth‐century America.

Plato on Rhetoric and Language by Jean Nienkamp. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates for Hermagoras Press, 1999. 220 + ix pp. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. 381 + xii pp. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature and Culture by Caroline Field Levander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 186 pp. The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture by Carey McIntosh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 276 + xi pp.

(2000). Remembering Robert J. Connors. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 5-5.

Abstract This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates’ performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.

Abstract The authors offer a reading of the Civil Rights Memorial (Maya Lin, Montgomery, Alabama, 1989) as a set of rhetorical performances that reproduce the tactical dimensions of Civil Rights Movement protests of the 1950s and 1960s. Their reading attempts to counter the reading ofAbramson who claims for the Memorial a conservative political stance. Specifically, they argue that, while the Memorial reproduces the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, it argues for a break with the past in its visual proffer of a politics of difference and a critique of whiteness.

Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics by Steven Mailloux. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 206 + xv pp. Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century, edited by Bernard L. Brock. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 292 pp. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth‐Century Black Women by Shirley Wilson Logan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 255 + xvi pp. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, by Bruno Latour. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 324 + x. The Rhetoric of Science in the Evolution of American Ornithological Discourse by John T. Battalio. Bayshore, TX: Ablex, 1998. 264 + xix pp. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy, edited by John T. Battalio. Stanford, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pp.

Abstract This article explores the ways in which Romantic literary theory offers contemporary rhetoricians a balanced answer to the question of audience, . an answer that allows for prose which reflects a private vision at the same time that it strives for social transformation. In connecting Coleridge's and Keats's hostile reactions to their nineteenth‐century readers with current expressivist theories, especially the work of Peter Elbow, the need to avoid audience at certain stages in the writing process becomes apparent. Yet ultimately the most powerful writing is audience‐centered, as Shelley's A Defence of Poetry illustrates through its call for imaginative empathy.

Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.

Abstract In the last few years, scholars have turned their attention to configuring narratives of rhetoric and composition studies’ disciplinary history. This essay advocates reading the field as a social formation whose move toward professionalization can be understood as a series of rhetorical negotiations. Using the local histories of two institutions that established doctoral programs in English Departments, I consider how local and material factors provide a more nuanced understanding of that field's evolution. This methodology highlights how the current state of a discipline is inextricably bound to the daily work of its members and offers a way to explore the social shapes of rhetoric yet to come.

The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 by James A. Herrick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997; 245 pp. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1998. 306 pp. Four recent studies of rhetoric in Socrates and Plato The Religion of Socrates. Mark McPheran. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 353 pp., (paperback, 1999). Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Charles H. Kahn. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 431 pp., (paperback, 1998). Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Andrea Wilson Nightingale. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 222 pp. The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates’ Philosophic Trial. Jacob Howland. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 (hardcover & paperback). 342 pp.

Abstract Rhetoric of science has come a long way in understanding the role of analogy in scientific language and thought. Further progress is hindered, however, by the analytic and methodological limitations native to classical rhetoric. Accordingly, I turn to cognitive psychology for an adequate theory of analogy through which to remedy this stalled research program. Using Dedre Gentner's Structure Mapping theory of analogy, I investigate the role of the Saturnian analogy in Hantaro Nagaoka ‘s theory of atomic structure and show how the analogy constrained him, serving sometimes as an asset to his argument and other times as a serious liability.

The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece by Edward Schiappa. Yale UP, 1999; 225 pp. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Plato's Dream of Sophistry by Richard Marback. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press (1999): 147 pp. Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education by Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 202 pp. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.

r he three essays that follow offer readings of one of the most popular and l widely known rhetorical performances of recent times, the Earl of Spencer's 1997 funeral eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales (text reproduced in Appendix). Each section of the paper offers a reading of the address through a critical lens derived from the rhetorical theory of a different canonical theorist, respectively (and chronologically) George Campbell, Richard Whately, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Three questions animate this project. The first concerns the relationship of theory to criticism. Neither Campbell, Whately, nor the Belgians discusses the role of rhetorical criticism or offers an apparatus that facilitates it, although each of their theories includes tenets applicable to criticism. How well do their theoretical tenets work at the level of criticism; do any of these theorists introduce concepts that analysis of rhetorical practice might challenge? The second question concerns influence. The three theorists we chose are particularly interesting from this perspective because all of them, to varying degrees, are selfconscious about their debts to the rhetorical tradition. Campbell cites and affirms the contributions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Whately incorporates Campbell, and the Belgians incorporate Whately incorporating Campbell. What is the nature of this influence? Are the differences among these theorists differences of perspective or of emphasis? We are aware of the complexities surrounding the question of influence since it was broached by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, subsequently complicated by Harold Bloom, and more recently challenged by Michel Foucault. Our purpose is not to arbitrate these quite different views (which raise their own questions about the nature of influence) but to prompt a discussion of the nature of influence within the rhetorical tradition. The third question concerns the idea of progress in rhetorical theory. In what sense can each of the theorists be said to have made an advance over his predecessors? Does rhetorical theory progress as science typically progresses, by making obsolete that which it builds on? Or does rhetoric resemble philosophy, a discipline in which responses to a relatively constant problem set seem to benefit from their predecessors' work without replacing it?

(1999). Recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 7-20.

(1999). Disarticulating fantasies: Figures of speech, vices, and the blazon in renaissance English rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, The Editors of Rhetorical Copulas, Archaic to Early Modern, pp. 43-54.

(1999). Friendly dress: A disciplined use. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 25-45.

(1999). Speech in context: Plato's Menexenus and the ritual of Athenian public burial. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 65-74.

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism by Robert Wess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 262 pp. Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, anda Theory of Social Change by Barbara A. Biesecker. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. x + 123 pp. Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric by Victor J. Vitanza. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 428 pages. Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 247 pp. Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

(1999). Common sense deliberative practice: John Witherspoon, James Madison, and the U.S. constitution. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 25-47.

Comparative Rhetoric by George A. Kennedy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (1998): ix + 238 pp. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Janet M. Atwill. Cornell UP, 1998. xvi; 235 pp. Landmark Essays on Aristotelian Rhetoric edited by Richard Leo Enos and Lois Peters Agnew. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press of Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.265 pp. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design by David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.322 pp. The Rhetoric Canon edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997.251 pp.

(1999). Aristotle on epideictic: The formation of public morality. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 5-23.

T his paper is an effort-which none of the characters in the dialogue maketo listen carefully to Socrates' most famous attack on rhetoric. This locus classicus is found in the Gorgias within the opening pages (461-466) of Socrates' conversation with Polus. In it he charges that rhetoric, Gorgias' skill, is a defective art and no more than base sucking up or flattery. He completes his condemnation by likening rhetoric, as Shakespeare's Faulconbridge does, a millennium and a half later, to sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth, (King John, I, I), a debased confection in place of healthy food. It is not only characters in the dialogue who fail to make a searching inquiry into Socrates' condemnation. Many rhetors since that time, smarting from the sting of what Plato has Socrates say about rhetoric, have taken the passage as unproblematically expressing a blanket condemnation of rhetoric. But I believe it is not necessary to read Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric in that fashion, and I attempt a reading in which the condemnation is less absolute. In the interest of disclosure I should say that I undertake this analysis in an Aristotelian spirit. My interest in the passage began with Aristotle's allusion to it in the opening sentence of his Art of Rhetoric (1354a) and continues to be guided by what I believe Aristotle has to teach about rhetoric. It is also guided by a realization that Plato, a dramatic poet, achieves his effect, in dramas that have little overt action, almost entirely by rhetoric, that is, by the creation of a coherent voice through which we approach each character. Whatever Plato's ultimate understanding of the relation of wisdom and art (Roochnik), any argument that Plato has contempt for rhetoric must, sooner or later, deal with his constant and loving use of it in his work. The passage in question forms the first part-about a fifth of the bulk-of Socrates' dialogic encounter with Polus. This paper is thus limited to reflection on a fragmentary part of that encounter, for Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric emerges in four Stephanus pages. Nevertheless, it is a fragment that, like all of the pieces of a Platonic dialogue, spirals into place in the larger encounter and beyond that in the dialogue as a whole. I argue that our assessment of Socrates' argument is decisively affected by our grasp of the dramatic context in which it appears in several decisive ways. One obvious event that demands dramatic explanation is Polus' intervention in what had been a discussion between Gorgias himself and Socrates and his subsequent ineptness. Indeed, Polus is so inept that the pages barely qualify as part of a conversation, or at least a conversation with Polus. What we have is

A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.