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

Because visuals play a significant communicative role in the majority of texts in the sciences, a theory of the role of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of meaning would seem a useful addition to the exegetical armamentarium. This paper offers such a theory, Dual Coding Theory (DCT), borrowed from cognitive psychology but adapted to exegesis. An analysis of Lavoisier's final geological memoir, an analysis grounded in this theory, is designed to illustrate DCT's utility. In my conclusion, I take note of the fact that in a wide variety of contemporary media meaning is also largely the product of verbal-visual interaction.

Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart's performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession.

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

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

In 1925 Everett Lee Hunt contributed “Plato and Aristotle on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians” to Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James A. Winans. He approvingly noted the work of Ferd...

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

Articles signed with female pseudonyms and contributed to the newspaper The Massachusetts Spy (1770–1775) demonstrate that female editorialists warranted their public-sphere participation with a wide variety of rhetorical methods. Choice of topic, degree of assent or dissent from male writers, and manipulation of tone, especially humor, assisted in women's public-sphere participation during the Revolutionary period when conventions regarding writerly authority were in flux. In turn, male rhetors used religious and medical warrants to control female public sphere participation. Although women's disagreement about overtly political issues was not tolerated, subtle declarations of patriotic behavior more obviously connected with feminine topics and behavior allowed women authors to write publicly when they aligned their contributions with republican notions of sympathy and concern for the common good. In the end, republicanism rendered women's bodies contested ground, both warranting their public-sphere participation and increasing surveillance over them.

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

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

Almost two decades after the transitions of 1989/90, the political transformations in Central/Eastern Europe continue to attract scholarly interest. Although the sense of novelty and drama has larg...

This article analyzes five of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's catechisms for the Children of the Confederacy dating from 1904 to 1934. Of particular interest are the ways the women constructed collective memories for their young readers. It is my contention that the UDC crafted four collective memories of the South's past by drawing on the mythical rhetorical context of the post-war era and by employing eight interdependent rhetorical strategies. Identifying the material and strategies of collective memory illuminates the rhetorical choices that must take place in order for memories to become successfully employed in public discourse.

Abstract Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic's perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), the author of what is commonly regarded as the European Renaissance's most influential magical text, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533). In investigating the rhetorical strategies contained in Agrippa's famously ambiguous retraction of his occult works we may uncover an equally polysemic stance toward the ability of language to deal with both the everyday world and the realm of the sacred, a stance that uses textual instantiations of paradoxes of self-reference to forcefully undermine the apparently paradigmatic magical identification of signifier and signified. Acknowledgment I thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on this article. Notes 1See Lehrich (Language of Demons and Angels) for a comprehensive analysis of the three books. 2See Zika for an overview of Reuchlin's influence on Agrippa. 3"…, lapides loquitor, caveant ne cerebrum illis excutiat." J.F.'s use of the alliterated "b"s in his English translation is perhaps more effective in its Anglo-Saxon brutality. 4Note that the quotation marks are not in the original Latin but added by J.F. for the English translation of 1651. 5Again, the quotation marks are an addition of J.F.'s English translation and are not in the Latin original. 6See Kneale and Kneale (228–231) for a discussion of the Liar's context in medieval logic. 7See Sainsbury (114–132), Simmons (2–7), and Hofstadter for accessible re-formulations from the nineteenth century onward. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Miles Chris Miles is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magusa, Mersin 10, Turkey. E-mail: chris.miles@emu.edu.tr

Historians of rhetoric have largely neglected eighteenth-century Language Origins Theory (LOT). Yet, as a theory that interconnects language, human nature, and human difference, LOT is an important and central inquiry to modern formations of rhetoric, particularly in how they engage with ethics of difference. Examining how the Scottish rhetorician and Enlightenment intellectual, Lord Monboddo, bases his rhetoric on an ethically problematic version of LOT, this article urges historians and students of rhetoric to be wary of the traces of LOT in canonical rhetorical histories as well as in contemporary theories and pedagogical practices.

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

As Scott Newstok notes in his introduction, Kenneth Burke presents a problem for the field of Shakespeare studies. On the one hand, Burke exerts a durable influence there; one can even chart the eb...

In recent years, scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have given increased attention to the various ways that rhetoric and religion intersect. To explore this relationship further, this article employs Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad and the methods of pentadic analysis proposed by Floyd Anderson and Lawrence Prelli in order to analyze two texts, Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourseand Obama's “Pentecost 2006 Keynote Address.” In our analysis, we aim to reveal the motives locked within Crowley's and Obama's texts to demonstrate how their attempts to open the universe of discourse—that is, to provide ways of bridging the divide between political liberals and religious conservatives—shut down the possibility for dialogue. We then offer counterstatements—what Anderson and Prelli refer to as “expressions of alternative orientations toward social reality” (90)—that may serve to open the universe of discourse.

Since its publication, William Clark's massive tome Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University has attracted attention from quite a few critics and commentators in several academi...

This article elucidates Gertrude Stein's theory of rhetorical grammar by locating it in her studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College in the mid-1890s and by demonstrating how for Stein the study of grammar correlates with rhetoric's first canon, invention. In her experimental primer, How to Write (1931), a book about the craft of composition, Stein devotes chapters to vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and forensics, but refuses to reduce writing to mechanical correctness. For Stein, a grammar that supposes invention as both discovering and creating does something much more than offer pre-existing rules for writers to follow. Placing Gertrude Stein's writing practices in the rhetorical traditions of the nineteenth century reveals a Gertrude Stein who is not necessarily or not only a literary figure, but rather a twentieth-century rhetorician who refigures past traditions to teach a new century how to write.

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

Ann George and Jack Selzer's Kenneth Burke in the 1930s joins two major collections of essays by Burke himself—Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives and Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare—to mark 2007 as a...

This article argues that the history of the speech field is best understood by examining the primary sources for its institutional and pedagogical origins, and that public speaking instruction originates in a complex understanding of the civic implications of speech pedagogy.

Why is it that discussion of the sophists and sophistic activity routinely mentions the fees they charged, but never explores why the sophists might have charged fees and why this rather mundane detail would warrant such regular reiteration? I argue that the sophists charged fees to demystify the ways in which gift-exchange made it possible to naturalize culturally established values and misrecognize power relations as relations of generosity and friendship. By charging fees, the sophists showed that trade in skillful political discourse was always tied to the pursuit of advantage and power. This critical practice was rejected by Socrates, so that when his students needed a way to highlight the distinctions between their master and other teachers and schools (since in the popular mind all alike were sophists), they fixated upon the fees the sophists charged as a distinguishing trait. As a result, it took on the form of a stigma, and has been remained a defining charge against the sophists ever since.

Whether they use the term or not, rhetoricians have been known to approach the concept of incommensurability with some reluctance. This reluctance has manifested itself in a variety of ways from Gr...

Kenneth Burke bases his theory of identification on Freud's; however, whereas Burke insists that identification is a symbolic act that therefore remains available for conscious critique and reasoned adjustment, Freud reflects on an affective identification that precedes the distinction between “self” and “other.” This nonrepresentational identification—Freud sometimes calls it “primary identification”—remains stubbornly on the motion side of the action/motion loci, impervious to symbolic intervention. This article argues that Freud's scattered insights on primary identification undercut any theory of relationality grounded in representation, and therefore any hope of securing a crucial distance between self and other through conscious critique. It further argues that Freud's theory on identification presents rhetorical studies with a distinctly unBurkean challenge: to begin exploring the sorts of rhetorical analyses that become possible only when identification is no longer presumed to be compensatory to division.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's idiosyncratic reading of what he calls “the distant ancient meaning of rhetoric” pulls out an unfamiliar thread in the history of the Greek logos from the weave of the ancient texts, and his separation of the sophistic challenge from rhetoric proper stems from his commitment to rhetoric. What has typically been read as rhetoric's counter-tradition, a kairotic-performative rhetoric championed by Isocrates and Cicero against Platonic essentialist philosophy, is for Gadamer the counter-tradition to Western essentialism as a whole, anchored squarely in Plato's dialogic example. In this reading, Plato becomes strange to all ersatz platonists, and the great body of the dialogues become the gravitational center of a humanist rhetoric. Gadamer's recommendation that we treat Plato's dialegesthai as the highest fruit of ancient rhetoric provides a fresh opportunity to reimagine our interdisciplinary debates.

This article outlines a rhetoric of digital mapping through the specific example of Detroit, Michigan. In particular, the essay challenges representational mapping by offering a database driven rhetoric. This rhetoric, the essay argues, offers possibilities for new media invention and arrangement practices.

Scholars have shown that Kenneth Burke's research on drug addiction at the Bureau of Social Hygiene shaped his rhetorical theory in Permanence and Change, but less attention has been paid to another facet of this research, criminology, and its influence on Attitudes Toward History. In Attitudes, Burke uses a criminological framework, called the “constabulary function,” to characterize the rhetorical strategies political and economic elites use to bolster a deteriorating social order while deflecting attention away from broader, systemic problems. The constabulary function and its attendant terms—alienation, cultural lag, transcendence, symbols of authority, and secular prayer—provide a vocabulary for sociorhetorical critique. I examine how Burke's theory of the constabulary function grew out of his criminological research, consider how that theory informs key terms in Attitudes.

The subject of Phaedra Pezzullo's book, Toxic Tourism, concerns the use of the toxic tour as a performative re-definition of tours and tourism. The book examines the ways in which environmental jus...

The vandalizing of Monument to Joe Louis initiated efforts in the media to explain both the meaning of the vandalism and of the monument itself. This article engages those efforts to find an explanation linking act to object. Proceeding through the joining of acts, objects, and words, this article works toward a non-reductive account of the embodiment of rhetoric.

Abstract Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, this article argues that the fixation of some scholars on the status, size, and identity of rhetorical studies is symptomatic of an apocalyptic perversion. An attention to the apocalyptic tone of recent discussions about "Big Rhetoric" in conference papers and journal articles bespeaks a characteristically phallogocentric ideology of discrimination between insiders and outsiders. An examination of the ubiquity and character of this tone, I suggest, forever precludes a united rhetorical studies for two reasons: (1) we enjoy our apocalyptic too much; and (2) apocalyptic is central to the identity of rhetorical studies because it is central to disciplinarity as such. Insofar as the urgency of the apocalyptic tone is sometimes a pragmatic and political necessity, an argument is made in favor of a more playful, polytonal apocalypticism that can help us better reckon with—and sometimes avoid—rhetoric that excludes. Acknowledgments The author thanks Carole Blair, Diane Davis, Debbie Hawhee, and the blind reviewers for their helpful suggestions and wise counsel. Notes 1Arguably, the first love object is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice; the implications of this article of faith will be detailed in my later remarks on the apocalyptic (see Silverman; and Schwarz). 2I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny (also see Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double" 341–366). 3That is, he is both celebrated and cursed for establishing order in the idiom of the negative. I should indicate that by "Big Rhetoric" I refer not only to the globalization of rhetoric (or what is sometimes termed the rhetoric of inquiry), but all the related issues that are collected under that name via anxiety about disciplinary identity, including: (1) how ought we define "rhetoric"? (2) how should we define rhetorical studies as a field? by object or recourse to method, or by pedagogical mission? (3) who "owns" rhetoric or where is rhetoric better situated, in departments of English or Communication Studies? (4) is there such a thing as a "rhetorical tradition?" if so, what constitutes that tradition? (5) who does or does not have the authority to define rhetoric and rhetorical studies? (6) is rhetoric inclusive or mutually exclusive of cultural studies? and so on. These many questions all speak to the fundamental anxiety about what rhetoric is and who we are as rhetoricians, and I am focused on the whole of this anxiety vis-à-vis discipline, not any one question in particular. 4The primal horde refers to a mythic scenario developed by Darwin and elaborated by Freud to explain the emergence of the social contract and incest taboo: the idealized and primal father seizes all the women for himself, driving the sons away when they reach maturity. The sons, resentful of the father's despotism but desiring his love, agree to band together, kill the father, and eat him. They do so, however, only at the price of indigestion, for they find that their ideal leader is dead and are haunted by him; consequently, they agree to live as equals and to dispossess "the women" and practice exogamy (See Freud, Totem 201–204). 5This article is the most accessible and, in my view, most accurate description of the debate surrounding rhetoric and discipliniarity. I will nevertheless take issue later with what I think is a misreading of Dilip Gaonkar's positions. 6Of course, "criticism in crisis" is a tired hat, about which more shortly, but for the moment, we can trace it to Paul de Man's "Criticism and Crisis" (in Blindness 3–19). 7For the different ways in which a more interdisciplinary yet coherent, text- or practice-centered and historically mindful rhetorical studies has been called for, see Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies" 69–76; Fuller, "Globalization"; Keith, "Identity, Rhetoric, and Myth" 106; Leff, "Rhetorical Disciplines" 83–93; Mailloux, "Disciplinary Identities" 5–29 (also see his Disciplinary Histories for a revised version); Mailloux, "Practices, Theories, and Traditions" 129–138; and Mailloux, "Places in Time" 53–68. For arguments in favor of "Big Rhetoric" or globalization, see Simons, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics" 86–109; and Simons, "Globalization" 260–274. For a diversity of views on the issue of disciplinarity, see Herbert W. Simons' edited collection, The Rhetorical Turn, as well as the edited collection by Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Finally, one consequence of this decade-long discussion was the formation of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies—initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and many others associated with the Rhetoric Society of America—which brought together a diverse group of rhetoricians for three days in Evanston, Illinois in the fall of 2003. Descriptions of the discussions at the conference are printed in the third issue of volume 24 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). 8For a rumination on the "death" of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellberry, The Ends of Rhetoric, especially the introductory essay by the editors, which argues that in modernity "rhetoric" has given way to the delightfully more-syllabic "rhetoricality." 9My argument, however, is deliberately elliptical, as it attempts to underscore the performative dynamics of the debate over "Big Rhetoric" performatively. By "performative" I mean to suggest that the frequent masturbatory, petulant tone and prose of the present essay is both "fun and games" as well as argumentative, a point that will become clearer as the essay progresses toward the analysis of "tone" as a rhetorical device. From time to time I use the word "playful" to denote this approach. As an aside, an important if sadly over-critiqued element of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis is their playful tone and wildly associative writing techniques, which are deliberately employed to accompany the more traditional, syllogistic argument (and sometimes in Derrida's case, against the syllogistic argument). Slavoj Žižek's work is perhaps the most accessible example of performative writing in this sense, but for a full-throttle example of this "style" of performance, see Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume One: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). "All you consumer fascist types, you know who you are," opens Rickels on the topic of his style of writing, "cannot be stopped from policing the middlebrow beat to which intellectual discourse was condemned a long time ago" (xv). Although Rickels insists that his "obscurity" is less a "style of writing or argument" than the juxtapositional demand of the objects of his analysis, his rhetoric is unquestionably strategic. 10Most breaks with Freud among psychoanalysts were a consequence of disagreements about drive theory. Some thinkers believed that the drives were not sexual but something else; for example, Jung believed the drives were spiritual in nature, whereas Adler eventually argued humans are driven by self-esteem. Others advocated a complete abandonment of the drive model in favor of more "relational" model, which generally goes under the name of "object relations theory." For the classical textbook on the latter, see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations. 11The better explanation here, however, is that he does not seem to give a shit, when he understands his obstinacy and petulance to be precisely what the Other wants! He very much gives a shit (by hoarding his stuff, as it were) and wants to be disciplined! See Karl Abraham, "Contributions" 370–392. 12Initially Freud believed that the drives always aimed toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain in accord with "the pleasure principle." Eventually, however, Freud changed his mind to suggest there is a "death drive," or a pursuit of something beyond pleasure and life (see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's thinking in this respect would lead Jacques Lacan to suggest that, in the end, all drives are death drives. I will discuss this later in terms of "jouissance" or "enjoyment." 13The late James P. McDaniel's recent article, "Speaking Like a State," identifies "political enjoyment" as the problematic jouissance of our time. He argues that only by owning up to satisfactions of sadism, cruelty, and pain that all of us harbor through the processes of self-knowledge and "ironic self-suspension" can we start to counter and avoid the terrible political events (and the destructive, local responses to those events) in these "times of terror" (346). In a certain sense, the critique I advance here shows how the same "psychosocial economy of enjoyment" is in play in our discussions of disciplinarity as well. 14I acknowledge that such a shift from the psychoanalytic theory of the individual psyche to the "group behavior" of rhetoricians is controversial to some readers. In his understudied monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud links the two levels via the function of the "object" (understood as another person) in the individual psyche: "In the individual's life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology…is at the same time social psychology as well" (3). My approach is similarly informed (that is, that groups behave in an analogous manner to individuals; e.g., class behavior often reflects Oedipal arrangements). For a more thoroughgoing discussion of this important theoretical tangle, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic" 338–395. 15I would be remiss not to point out that this some who enjoy tend to be gendered male, a point well made by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter at the same disciplinary moment that Big Rhetoric became a concern. I will return to their essay later (see Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 383–409). 16For more on this evangelical riff, see Lundberg and Gunn, "'Ouija.'" 17The most recent are Steven Mailloux ("Places in Time") and James Arnt Aune's ("The Politics of Rhetorical Studies") essays in the February 2006 Quarterly Journal of Speech, which are revised versions of papers each delivered at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetorical Societies meeting in Evanston, Illinois in 2003. As the present essay attests, the theme of the 2006 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America guarantees there are yet more and more to come. 18The keynote address by Steven Mailloux, "One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Contingent Universality of Rhetoric," revisits the Big Rhetoric debate, as did a number of papers on the 2006 RSA Convention Program. 19For the bottom feeders such as me, the suggestion here is that tone marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a rhetorical quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 20 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Dolar, "The Object Voice" 19–20. 21"Voice" is a mediating, sister concept to tone, and has received closer scrutiny in rhetorical studies (see Vivian, Being Made Strange; and Watts, "'Voice'" 179–796). 22If "mourning" is "a feeling-tone perhaps unique in the modern university," as James Arnt Aune has suggested ("Politics" 71), then apocalypticism is what the discourse of the modern university shares with the current administration of George W. Bush. The difference between the academic and federal apocalyptic, suggests Ellen Messer-Davidow, is that conservatism truly mourns and moves on, whereas the academic Left seems stuck in its nostalgic weeping. Space limits expanding the argument I offer later beyond the local, however, I would suggest inability of rhetorical studies to "get over itself" or "its death" is the same problem of the academic humanities as well; we simply cannot reckon with our dehabilitating and discriminatory perversity (see Messer-Davidow 1–35). 23For context, the complete comment from the blind reviewer was as follows: "Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." 24For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Graff, Walzer, and Atwill's The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. 25James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see Darsey 199–210). 26Once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion, then we are led to a renewed responsibility to re-read our written work and be ever wary of tone. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her perversion to stop hurting the self and others. Owning up to one's role in the continuance of oppressive ideological norms is difficult, but as many of those who critique ideology have argued, the systemic character of ideology requires a degree of reflexivity. 27That the latter is the founding motto of any academic department was an argument often told by Robert Lee Scott to his students during many of his rhetoric seminars. My thanks to Dr. Scott for this humorous truism. 28In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone—one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other—may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean, and so on). 29Stylistically, Nietzsche famously yoked the feminine to tonal hollows (wombs), water, and the oceanic (see Derrida, Spurs; and Irigaray, Marine Lover). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Responding to critiques of instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing, this article explains why such approaches do not necessarily suppress the materiality of language or inhibit the writer's ability to experience that materiality. Relying on Samuel Weber's re-translation of Heidegger's term, Ge-stell, as “emplacement” and Maurice Blanchot's understanding of the contradictory function of negation in language, the article demonstrates how rhetoric both secures language in place with a particular meaning for the sake of an external goal and unsecures language from that meaning. Without endorsing all instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing (or the concept of instrumentality in general), the article then argues that there is no reliable way to distinguish inherently valuable writing from instrumentally valuable writing.

The official apology is a discursive phenomenon with complex rhetorical significance and must be distinguished from the apologia. The main difference is that the official apology entails an element of regret and acknowledgement of wrongdoing that makes it an even more delicate rhetorical matter than the apologia—not least because it involves a collectivity such as a nation state. The symbolic nature of the assumption of guilt is therefore particularly clear. This article argues that official apologies, however circumscribed by public skepticism, nevertheless may serve important functions as loci for articulating the norms of a society at a given time. The article discusses how the official apology raises a host of issues concerning rhetorical agency and argues that this particular type of rhetoric is promising point of departure in the ongoing pedagogical and theoretical exploration of the concept of rhetorical agency. By integrating theories of epideictic rhetoric and of rhetorical agency, the complexity of the official apology is analyzed, and through a reading of an official apology by the Danish Prime minister, the essay examines how rhetorical agency is both established and undercut by the speaker.

Though scholars debate whether Foucault offers a viable theory of resistance, his analysis of parrhesia(fearless speech) poses and problematizes an oppositional rhetoric of truth-telling. Fearless speech challenges regimes of power/truth; spiritual narratives of Early Modern women challenge cultural norms to justify their right to speak. The rhetorical strategies that women use to authorize their writing—performing a struggle between God and Satan, recording revelation, and reinterpreting scripture—make them vulnerable to stereotypical criticisms of madness and witchcraft. Nonetheless, female spiritual narratives courageously critique religious and social culture, playing Foucault's “parrhesiastic game”: these texts break silence to tell truth. A notion of a contemporary rhetor-as-parrhesiastes reflects the historical evolution of parrhesia towards critique and self-questioning. A contemporary parrhesiastes interrogates guises of generalized Truth to give voice to experiential, localized, multiple truths.

Adam Smith's contribution to antislavery rhetoric has been well-documented by scholars. However, few have thought to examine his impact on the writing of slavery advocates. In the late eighteenth-century debate to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain, abolitionists appropriated Smith's rhetoric to create a “moral economy” that could not tolerate the practice of slaving. Proslavery writers, perceiving the sincere threat to their livelihood, also manipulated Smith's rhetoric and the concept of “moral economy” to formulate arguments in defense of the slave trade. This article complements and expands analyses of Smith's rhetorical and economic theories as well as the rhetoric of the first abolitionist campaign in order to open avenues of inquiry that examine both sides of the debate.

This long overdue translation of Dan Sperber's 1975 paper, “Rudiments de rhetorique cognitive,” beyond its sheer quality of thought, is important for three specific reasons. One is simple priority....

This article asserts the viability of key topoi in feminist historiography: first, to establish presence for everyday women rhetors, and second, to explore ramifications of their positioning within variant historical narratives. Catalina Hernández was one of six European women recruited to Christianize indigenous girls immediately following the military conquest of Mexico. Her letter to the civic judicial council seeking autonomy for her community of women teachers was perceived as sufficiently dangerous to warrant its deletion from the historical record and the subsequent “disappearance” of the writer herself; only excerpted accounts of Catalina's writing remain. I seek the historical Catalina Hernández in the sophistic mode, assaying four motives and four contexts for the production and reception of her letter.

I am honored and flattered that this old text of mine should have been deemed worth translating and publishing in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly. It was initially intended as a chapter of my book Le symbolisme en général (Hermann, 1974; translated as Rethinking Symbolism by Alice L. Morton, for Cambridge University Press, 1975). But, under the encouragement of Tzetan Todorov, it developed beyond what I had planned and was taken out of the draft of the book. In 1975, Deirdre Wilson, who had introduced me to analytic philosophy in general and to the work of Paul Grice in particular, published her book, Presuppositions and Non-truth-conditional Semantics (Academic Press). She and I decided to write a joint programmatic paper covering the ground between semantics and the rhetoric of figures and we ended up collaborating for thirty years, and developing, with the help of many students and colleagues around the world, the cognitive approach to verbal communication known as Relevance Theory. In retrospect, my 1975 “rudiments” were indeed quite rudimentary. Still, re-reading the article, I confess that I find it insightful. Most insights have been integrated and improved upon in later work. Little has been done however with one of the main insights of the article: that the use of figures of speech evokes ideas not just about the topic of the utterance but also about the shared background knowledge of the interlocutors.—Dan Sperber, December 2006