In sizing up the notion of public memory, rhetoricians would be remiss not to consider the increasing influence of new media on today's remembrance culture. This article addresses memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern “archival memory” as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia. To explore the strengths and limitations of the internet as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past, the article examines The September 11 Digital Archive, a comprehensive online effort to document public involvement in recording and commemorating the tragedy of 11 September, 2001.

At a time when Athenians were still trying to explain the loss of their empire, Plato's Gorgias—through its dramatic structure and themes, through its allusions to critical moments in the Peloponnesian War, and through its literary engagements with Thucydides, Isocrates, and Polycrates—challenged both the actuality and legitimacy of that power as well as the rhetoric with which democratic Athenians rationalized their former tyranny. By portraying imperial Athens as an unjust student of sophistic rhetoric, as an immoderate practitioner of opportunistic reasoning, Plato offers an instructive explanation for its defeat. Interpreted in its historical contexts, his Gorgias has new relevance.

In this article, I examine configurations of space and time in memory texts written by men and women who lived at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. These accounts each use somewhat different parameters to frame their recollections, drawing attention to the gendered hierarchy of space-times involved in the work of the Manhattan Project. Despite their heterogeneous authors and motivations, however, these frameworks circumscribe memories within a narrow time and space—the physical boundaries of the Los Alamos site and the frantic tempo of wartime work. In this way, they construct a collective memory of Los Alamos that overlooks the broader spaces and times within which the development of the atomic bomb was situated. Far from being neutral, like dates on a calendar or coordinates on a map, space and time function ideologically to shape memories in ways that support the ideological interests of scientists.

Nineteenth-century orator Elizabeth Cady Stanton frequently spoke to groups of male legislators. In examining the ways in which she met this challenge, scholars have tended to focus on how she “argued like a man” via logical appeals. In this article, I discuss Stanton's equally strong reliance on an emotional appeal: namely, that of sympathy. The practices and theories of Stanton's peer, the well-known preacher Henry Ward Beecher, as well as the moral and rhetorical thought of eighteenth-century Scotsman Adam Smith illuminate Stanton's own practices of sympathy. This study yields both a fresh interpretation of Stanton's oratory and an expanded understanding of sympathy's role in the rhetoric of the marginalized.

This article reconsiders the debate over the origins of rhetoric by the historical reconstructionists and neosophists beginning in the 1990s. It contends that both are misled by relying only upon texts overtly identified as “rhetorical theory” and suggests that other ancient sources offer significant insights into the “origins” and contemporary theorizing of rhetoric. It examines the legend of Corax and Tisias, arguing that the narrative of rhetoric's originator is folkloric expression intimately related to other narratives of the korax—“raven”—in natural histories and myths of Apollo. It concludes by theorizing rhetoric as a “koractic” art of pollution.

In her essay “For a Politics of Love and Rescue,” anthropologist Virginia Dominguez reflects on a conference for which she was the keynote speaker, writing, “there was…generosity in their deliberat...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Heath's previous work in the field includes a translation of Hermogenes's On Issues with detailed introduction and commentary (1995) and numerous essays in journals and edited collections (listed among the works cited at the end of this review). See Kennedy (2003 ——— . “Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric.” American Journal of Philology 124.2 ( 2003 ): 295 – 301 . [Google Scholar]) for an overview of some of the recent work in the study of Greek rhetoric under the Roman Empire. Much important work on Hellenistic rhetoric and rhetorical criticism of the Bible is being done in the “Pepperdine” series of books and conferences, including, most recently, Olbricht et al. (2002 et al. . Eds. Rhetorical Argumentation in Biblical Texts: Papers from the Lund 2000 Conference . Harrisonburg , PA : Trinity Press International , 2002 . [Google Scholar]; 2005 ———, et al. Eds. Rhetoric, Ethic, and Moral Persuasion in Biblical Discourse . Harrisonburg , PA : T&T Clark International , 2005 . [Google Scholar]). See Dilts (1983 Dilts , Mervin . Scholia Demosthenica . Leipzig : Teubner , 1983–1986 . [Google Scholar]) and Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]) for recent work on Demosthenes scholia. For consensus, see, inter alia, Kennedy (1983 ——— . Greek Rhetoric Under the Christian Emperors . Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press , 1983 . [Google Scholar]), Pernot (1993a Pernot , Laurent . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain. Tome 1: Histoire et technique . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993a . [Google Scholar] and 1993b ——— . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le Monde gréco-romain. Tome 2: Les Valeurs . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993b . [Google Scholar]), Russell (1983 Russell , D. A. Greek Declamation . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1983 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Walker (2000 Walker , Jeffrey . Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2000 . [Google Scholar]). Parks (1945 Parks , E. P. The Roman Rhetorical Schools as Preparation for the Courts under the Early Empire . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1945 . [Google Scholar]) takes a position similar to that of MRC. Other scholars who emphasize the collaborative and evolving nature of ancient pedagogical works include Dilts and Kennedy (1997 Dilts , Mervin S. and George Kennedy . Eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire . Leiden : Brill , 1997 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]), and Poster (1998 Poster , Carol . “(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica.” Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle . Ed. Cynthia Freeland . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press , 1998 . 327 – 350 . [Google Scholar]; 2007 ——— . “A Conversation Halved: Epistolary Theory in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.” Letter-Writing Manuals from Antiquity to the Present . Eds. Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell . Columbia : University of South Carolina Press , 2007 . [Google Scholar]).

Abstract In this article, we contribute to scholarship on visibility and rhetoric by examining the way in which photographs published in march 1965 issues of life magazine functioned rhetorically to (1) evoke common humanity by capturing moments of embodiment and enactment that challenged the established images of blacks in the minds of whites and held up for scrutiny assumptions and power relationships that had long been taken for granted; (2) evoke common humanity by creating recognition of others through particularity; and (3) challenge taken–for-granted ideas of democracy, reminding viewers that a large gap existed between abstract political concepts like democracy and what was actually occurring in american streets. We conclude by considering the transformative capacity of photojournalism as it mediates between the universal and the particular, and enables viewers to experience epiphanic moments when issues, ideas, habits, and yearnings are crystallized into a single recognizable image. Notes This type of discourse is exemplified by the following excerpt from Congressional Debates the year preceding the Selma marches: See "An American Tragedy, Newsweek (22 March 1965), p. 21. The article gives a complete summary of the draft of the bill completed the weekend immediately following the Selma march. Life magazine ran stories about the Selma marches in back-to-back March issues that tied President Johnson's pivotal speech in support of the bill to the photographs and other media coverage of the Selma march. And Senators referred to television coverage of the marches as impacting their view in the Senatorial debate over the bills, see Congressional Record – Senate, "Disorder in Selma, AL," 9 March 1965, p. 4504. The description of the pictures that follows was re-written after a long and frustrating effort to receive permission to reprint the photographs themselves with the article. Black Star, a photo agency with a long and respected history, represents the photographers and their work. Unfortunately, the agency charges a minimum of $300 for reprints of each civil rights–related photograph, making the cost of reprinting quite prohibitive. In our description of the artifacts, therefore, we strive to provide a brief written sketch of each picture we analyze—relying on the analysis itself to provided added dimension—and also describe its relation to others on the page and in the subsequent issue of the magazine. More importantly, we strive to provide information that will assist readers in locating the images via library resources to which they may have access. As Hariman and Lucaites argue, "Photojournalistic icons operate as powerful resources within a public culture, not because of their fixed meaning, but rather because they artistically coordinate available structures of identification within a performative space open to continued and varied articulation" (387). For a summary of this exhibit, see "In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."<http://www.sites.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibit_main_print.asp?id=60>.

In One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon takes the reader on a six-chapter journey that reconsiders traditional notions of site and identity. As an associat...

No contemporary discussion of America's sites of tragedy and violence would be complete without reference to Ground Zero. The current prototype of a contested tragic space, the former location of t...

Computerized systems for automated assessment of writing and speaking create a situation in which Burkean symbolic action confronts nonsymbolic motion. What is at stake in such confrontations is rhetorical agency. In this article, an informal survey that asked teachers of writing and speaking about automated assessment informs an analysis of agency that contrasts writing and speaking along the dimensions of performance, audience, and interaction. The analysis suggests that agency can be understood as the kinetic energy of performance that is generated through a process of mutual attribution between rhetor and audience. Agency is thus a property of the rhetorical event, not of agents, and can best be located between the two traditional ways of defining agency: as rhetorical capacity and as rhetorical effectivity. Unwillingness to attribute agency to automated assessment systems makes them rhetorically ineffective and morally problematic.

Reading Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric from a rhetorical perspective—as an attempt to address issues relevant to religious rhetoric—I argue that Campbell's aims of preparing future ministers to preach and defending the authority of revealed religion shaped, first, his conception of inventing and presenting emotional appeals and, second, his key assumptions about reason and passion. The article adds a chapter to accounts of the relationship between reason and passion in sacred rhetorics and in rhetorical traditions more generally, and addresses the question of what Campbell's theory of rhetoric may aim to inculcate or cultivate emotionally and why.

As a contribution to the discussion of Rhetorical Pathways between English and Communication Studies, I argue that rhetoric education for civic engagement can be furthered best by providing more undergraduate curriculum in rhetorical performance and analysis. I use the word “paideweyan” to invoke both the classical tradition of rhetorical instruction for civic praxis and John Dewey's argument for critical and poetic public engagement. In addition to forming interdisciplinary coalitions, rhetoricians should continue to develop courses, majors, and departments in rhetorical studies. To support the argument I provide curricular data from 257 English and Communication departments (or their equivalents) in four-year institutions.

This article argues for the recovery of an interior ignorance from Socrates's life of philosophy as a contribution to recent constructions of dialogic rhetoric. Synthesizing Bakhtin's reading of Socratic contestation with his concept of microdialogue, a view of dialogic rhetoric emerges that combines the testing of ideas and persons with interior conditions of doubt, anxiety, and ambivalence. A reading of Socrates's enactment of an interior/exterior piety in the Apology of Socrates is offered to demonstrate how interior ignorance uncovers the double-voicedness of rhetorical texts. The article counterposes this fuller interior/exterior view of ignorance against exteriorized suspicions directed at the character of Socrates, and the idea of ignorance, in rhetorical and cultural criticism.

The assumption that black women lack a positive and respectable ethos is a historical and contemporary problem. To address the problem with ethos, I turn to Aristotle's Rhetoric to foreground an analysis of ethos. Then I examine Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative and the autobiography of Billie Holiday and Sister Souljah, respectively, to illustrate the difficulty they faced as they attempted to redefine an ethos of immorality to an ethos of respectability in their narratives. As each text demonstrates, acquiring a positive ethos becomes problematic given that a classical model such as Aristotle's excludes their lived realities and experiences as black women living in a slave and post-slavery society.

This article argues that figures of speech are cultural forms that serve performative ends. After introducing this claim through an analysis of a Daily Show segment, the article reexamines treatments of the figures in Aristotle, Quintilian, and Peacham, claiming that these verbal devices are rituals of language that organize social experience while shaping relationships among communicative participants. The article then examines George W. Bush's address to Congress shortly after 9/11, and an article by John Edgar Wideman. Although Bush uses the figures in conventional ways, Wideman challenges the use of such rituals of language to shape public opinion in the wake of 9/11.

Because of its familiarity, Plato's Gorgias frequently is treated as if it is stable in its material composition and meaning. However, closer attention to historical reception reveals that the text is not as stable as it might first appear. For example, today, we take for granted that Plato's text is available to English-only readers in clear and engaging prose, but until the nineteenth century, most intellectuals would have considered a "popular Plato" to be a contradiction of terms. This article examines the complex ideology that prompted John Stuart Mill to publish a "popular" translation of Plato's Gorgias (1834). By exploring the motivation behind Mill's English text, we illuminate key assumptions that have shaped the modern reception of ancient Greek rhetoric.

(2006). A Review of: “Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus, translated with introductions and notes by George A. Kennedy.”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 105-108.

At the beginning of the long and contentious discussion with Callicles that makes up the second half of Plato's Gorgias, Socrates tells his fellow Athenian how delighted he is to find a worthy inte...

This article further develops a method of rhetorical homologies developed in some earlier work. A grand binary of the unique as opposed to copies is shown to underlie Walter Benjamin's classic essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—people's experiences of capital as it relates to humanity—and popular experience of capital—and some recent texts in popular culture, principally the film The Ring. The homology occurring across those texts and experiences is manifested with different polarities of value so as to adapt to differing rhetorical needs.

Bakhtin’s work from the late 1920s and 1930s on the novel has been the principal source for critical discussion of his views of rhetoric and poetics—a discussion in which both arts are deprecated—but his early phenomenological work on architectonics and Voloshinov’s early sociological work provide alternative sources that offer fresh terms for rethinking these discursive practices. The phenomenological works permit us to reconceptualize rhetoric as the primary discourse of active evaluative being-in-the-world and poetry as an imitation of that discourse that makes it available for aesthetic contemplation. The sociological work preserves the relation of speaker/agent to the other that the phenomenological work emphasizes and adds to it a relation of speaker to listener. The translation of the phenomenological terms to a sociological register brings the theory closer to life and history. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Asian rhetoric has drawn much attention in American academia over the last three decades. Still, studies of Asian rhetorical traditions were often initiated from a “deficiency” model, in which the ...

Most rhetorical readings of Confucius's Analects have focused on his views on eloquence, reflecting an insuppressible impulse among comparative rhetoricians to match Confucian rhetoric to Greco–Roman rhetorical framework. My reading of the text argues that Confucius was more concerned about the suasory power of the multimodality of ritual symbols than narrowly verbal persuasion. To achieve the Way for restoring social unity and peace, Confucius emphasizes the ritualization of both the self and the others through studying history and performing rituals reflectively. I suggest, as the first Chinese rhetoric par excellence, the Analects shares some similar features with epideictic rhetoric.

This article attempts to demonstrate that the so-called Special Topics in Aristotle's Rhetoric are neither idia/eidē, endoxa, the traditional logos, nor pisteis as these terms are typically understood within the Aristotelian texts. After an analysis of these important technical terms, I conclude that the material in Rhetoric 1.4–15 is neither of these. Then, analyzing 1.4 as an example section, I argue that the bulk of the material in 1.4–15 is to be understood as previously independent texts, much of which was written for a non-rhetorical context, that were then inserted into a text that has become our Rhetoric by an editor who also added his own (awkward) transitions in order to try to seam these previously independent texts into a more coherent whole. This conclusion suggests that there may not have been a systematic or coherent conception of rhetoric within the Peripatetic school even as late as the first-century BCE when Andronicus edited Aristotle's texts—including the Rhetoric—into their form that has since been transmitted to us.

This article attempts to analyze the ineffable quality of ethos in a case study anout Frances Willard, contending that she succeeded with conservative middle-class audiences by invoking the ethos of the Methodist woman preacher, which she may have learned from her mentor Phoebe Palmer. Methodism encouraged women's moral activism, and Palmer, foreshadowing Willard's agenda, worked for many causes, all the while maintaining a genteel True-Womanly persona. Willard testified to Palmer's spiritual influence on her, and her speaking style also reflected Palmer's blend of intense commitment, spiritual restraint, refined appearance, sound logic, and seemingly artless eloquence. Both women's rhetoric came to seem dated in their final years, yet both left lasting legacies of social change in their communities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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