This essay examines the way in which the song “Strange Fruit,” as performed by Billie Holiday, employs ekphrasis in order to make appeals condemning the practice of lynching. In developing the visual aspects of a lynching scene through ekphrasis, Holiday engages audiences in a way that encourages them to experience the lynching scene with all five senses. The sensory experience of the scene and Holiday's performance creates a strong condemnation of lynching and practices of racial violence.

Abstract Royster and Cochran use the words of African American women writers to enrich our view of intersections between American civil rights discourses and the discourses of human rights as a global concept. They focus on both individual and collective activities of the women and contextualize this activism within the larger framework of the rise of individual human rights language in twentieth century international relations. Notes 1Sam Occom (1723–1792), a progenitor of Native-American literature, was a Mohegan minister and political leader who worked to protect the cultures, traditions, and practices of indigenous peoples. He was an advocate for their political autonomy, spiritual well-being, and their education, as evidenced by his associations with Dartmouth College. 2A simplistic measure of this positioning is a keyword search of a top-ranked research university's library (The Ohio State University). "African Americans Civil Rights" yielded 1,346 entries. "African Americans Human Rights" yielded 194 entries. 3For a complementary argument about connections between civil rights and human rights, see Kirt Wilson's Keynote Address at the 2010 Public Address Conference on Human Rights, "More than Civil Rights: The Fight for Black Freedom as a Human Rights Struggle." Also, as noted below we are distinguishing between human rights as a set of values, policies, and practices exercised by individuals and groups and human rights values, policies, and practices that function universally in international relations and thereby beyond the boundaries of nation-states. 4In presenting this analytical framework, we note the persistent ways in which the master narrative of self-determination, peace, and justice for all gave rise to special allowances among the Western powers, creating various illogicalities for those not in power, a situation that, as we explain with more detail below, has pushed persistently the double-edged sword of hope and rage/despair. 5The analytical framework for this essay is drawn from Royster's larger manuscript project, currently entitled A Nation Within: Utopian Desire, Radical Action, and the Voices of African American Women. 6In addition to its linkages with Christian discourses, Wheatley's quotation also suggests the impact of Enlightenment values on human rights discourses and a more inclusive approach to human dignity and human rights. Further, a case can be made that Wheatley positions herself as a witness to this "absurdity," the discontinuity between the words and actions that prevailed so dramatically during her era. 7For a book-length treatment of affective mapping, see Flately. 8This use of "museum piece" mirrors the use of this term by Spitzack and Carter (407). 9Insightful and compelling as a discursive framework, the quest for "civil rights" as a response to the disempowering conditions and effects of slavery, rather than the quest for "human rights" as a global concept, has been the norm in scholarly analyses of racial oppression in the United States. Examples of civil rights scholarship include leading scholars, such as: Stampp; Woodward; Gutman; Franklin; Sundquist; and others. More attention to the connection of struggles in the United States for civil rights to struggles globally for human rights include: Eric Foner; Anderson; Henry J. Richardson, III; Shuler; Soohoo, Albisa, and Davis; and others. 10Space limitations do not permit a full explanation of how transnational feminist scholarship (e.g., Alexander and Mohanty) has enriched contemporary human rights discourses or how women of African descent, including African-American women writers, continue to be pacesetters in making insightful connections, analyses, and interpretations. 11This explanation is based on Eleanor Hinton Hoytt. 12Note that elite African-American women broadened their horizons in the twentieth century through foreign travel, with increasing numbers participating in both individual and organized trips. By the mid-twentieth century, foreign travel had become a booming business among this group, as evidenced by the highly successful Henderson Travel Agency, founded in 1955 by African-American woman entrepreneur Freddye Henderson in Atlanta, Georgia. Furthermore, the push to be philanthropic was very much in motion, as verified by Gill's discussion of the community activism of beauticians in Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (2009). 13For example, prominent writer H. G. Wells drafted an international bill of rights in his New World Order. 14The drafting subcommittee was composed of eight individuals from the United States, Lebanon, Great Britain, France, China, Australia, Chile, and the U.S.S.R., which appointed a "working group" of the first four state representatives listed. Rene Cassin, the lead author in drafting the UDHR, states all 58 nations contributed to the final shape of the UDHR. The UDHR was adopted unanimously, albeit with eight abstentions from the Eastern bloc, on 10 December 1948. 15Dorothy Jones discusses why the positioning of the term dignity in the Preamble and Article 1 is significant as a statement of intent for the whole document. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline Jones Royster Jacqueline Jones Royster is Ivan Allen Jr. Chair and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0525, USA. Molly Cochran Molly Cochran is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610, USA.

This article examines the work of anthropologist Franz Boas who, in the early twentieth century, argued against the existence of the stability of the cephalic index, a measure of head shape, and its relation to the mental and moral capacities of human races. The article claims that Boas successfully shifted the burden of proof to his opponents and set the stage for the scientific rejection of belief in innate racial differences in intelligence. The article urges rhetorical scholars to attend to the notions of burden of proof and presumption in scientific controversies over neurological differences.

Abstract While traditional rhetoric missed opportunities for potent change in the New World, alternative rhetorical theory nonetheless existed. This essay argues that a play by renowned nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a source of protofeminist, New World rhetoric, prompted by multicultural seventeenth-century New Spain. Immensely respected by the dominant powers of Church and state, Sor Juana was also attuned to issues of nondominance because she was criolla and female. Her religiously orthodox Divine Narcissus is simultaneously a rhetoric of listening that rewrites classical rhetoric's focus on speaking within a community to attend to people at odds with one another. It highlights the need for Spaniards, criollas, and Mesoamericans to go beyond talking at one another, and instead listen with care. The Divine Narcissus is an important text in rhetorical theory, concerned with dominant and nondominant rhetors and audiences in early Mexican society. Notes 1See Merrim and Kirkpatrick on the echo; Stroud's Lacanian reading; Gonzalez, Granger-Carrasco, and Kirk on theology; and Merrim on narcissism. Like me, Ackerman emphasizes the theme of utterance and hearing voices, but stresses this as a means of encouraging an "interpretive devotion to Christ" (73). 2Work on rhetoric and listening is now being explored by rhetoricians such as Royster, Krista Ratcliffe (see "Cassandra," Rhetorical Listening), Michelle Ballif, and Gemma Fiumara. Wayne Booth is one of the few scholars to posit listening as an overlooked but traditional part of rhetoric. See also Cynthia Selfe's recent argument for composition studies to reclaim "aurality," "the reception and production of aural communications" (646, note 1). 3Naming indigenous groups is a fraught endeavor. Current scholarly practice favors using an ethnic group's name for itself when feasible; the specific group Sor Juana refers to here are the Mexica. I use Nahua (of which Mexica are a prominent subgroup) to refer to a wider group of Nahuatl speakers and their religious practices, and I use Mesoamerican as a general term for indigenous peoples of central Mexico and environs. While sensitive to the history of associating native with pejoratives like primitive, I use native as a neutral term for connoting indigenous inhabitants. 4For example, Flower suggests that in composition studies we teach students how to "speak up" and "speak against" but not "how to speak with others" (2). Her rhetoric of public engagement aims for intercultural dialogue in urban settings, often through "hybrid discourse" or nontraditional delivery (32). Ratcliffe investigates rhetorical listening as "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges" (Rhetorical Listening 1). Glenn examines how nondominant groups use silence, "as a rhetoric, a constellation of symbolic strategies" (xi). 5As an auto sacramental, The Divine Narcissus is a one-act play with a prefatory loa. While both are divided into scenes, the numbering of lines is consecutive throughout each respective unit, so my citations specify loa or auto and the line number only. This and subsequent citations from The Divine Narcissus (hereafter abbreviated DN in parenthetical citations) are from the first and only full English translation of the play, by Patricia Peters and Renée Domeier, now out of print. 6For poems in which Mesoamericans speak Nahuatl and Blacks speak their own dialect of Spanish and an African language, see Obras completas 2.14 (translated into English in Trueblood 125), 26, 39, 71, 94, and 138. Sor Juana's use of Nahuatl in these poems reflects a concern for native speakers that is also a rhetorical device, making parishioners feel the Church was also theirs. 7See Pratt's discussion of Guaman Poma's letter ("Arts"). 8Méndez Plancarte, one of the two twentieth-century editors of Sor Juana's collected works, argues against the possibility that this auto was used to explain doctrine or that it had a missionary goal of educating indigenous groups (Juana, OC 3.511). 9 Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical, and which typically during this period honored the Eucharist (Granger-Carrasco Ch. 1). 10Between 1691 and 1725, The Divine Narcissus was published in Spain several times in collections of Sor Juana's works. It was not reprinted again until 1924, in Mexico. 11Echo plays the part of "Angelic nature, fallen from grace." 12New Spain's literary scene was determined by Spain, where Narcissus was a "ubiquitous" literary presence from the fifteenth century on (Méndez Plancarte in Juana, OC 3.514). Both Méndez Plancarte and Paz aver that Sor Juana's play is not only different from but also far superior to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play (Juana, OC 3.lxxiv; Paz 351). 14 Yo iré también, que me inclina la piedad a llegar (antes que tu furor lo embista) a convidarlos, de paz, a que mi culto reciban. I offer my own translation because Peters's and Domeier's is quite off the mark: "And I, in peace, will also go/(before your fury lays them low)/for justice must with mercy kiss;/I shall invite them to arise/from superstitious depths to faith." Sor Juana's Spanish is more generous. There is no mention of "superstitious depths"; both Nahua and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf. Loa 95, 178). 13My reading contrasts with Gerard Flynn's: "All in all, her attitude towards the Conquest seems neutral. She shows no recrimination for Zeal, and yet the pagan Occident and America are not ugly…. Sor Juana assents to both that which is Spanish and that which is Indian. The Conquest happened, and she accepts it" (74). 15Octavio Paz views Sor Juana's works as crucial to the early formation of criollo identity. It is only recently, though, that Sor Juana's works have been classified as literature of Mexico, not Spain (Granger-Carrasco 15). 16A similar multiplicity of identity is what Gloria Anzaldúa capitalizes on in her twentieth-century rhetorical theory for Mexican Americans. 17The Requerimiento demands allegiance to the Church as supreme ruler, but also tells Mesoamericans that Spaniards "shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith" (Washburn 308). 18It is this aspect of language that Moraña attributes to Sor Juana, claiming that her "rhetoric of silence" (the capacity for words to persuade beyond their overt reference) is affiliated with the sublime (176). 19Sor Juana seems to be conflating rituals that apply to two different Nahua gods, Huitzilopochtli (god of the seeds) and Quetzalcoatl (to whom human sacrifices were made) (Sabat de Rivers 290–291). 20The incident is quite possibly apocryphal, and at the very least, sculpted to resonate with the stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the young Jesus in Luke 2:46–47. 21"An attitude of complete receptivity, of openness to 'any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously wants to advance,' still puts a woman, I believe, in a dangerous stance," Susan Jarratt cautions, quoting Peter Elbow (117). 22"Why is the Devil a woman?," Merrim asks of the play, and reconciles the dilemma by finding parallels between Satan and Sor Juana, who must also dissimilate because divine authorities restrict her voice (114). 23In Spanish, the last line cited here (line 1300) reads, "Suene tu voz a mi oído": "Make your voice sound within my hearing." Sor Juana is playing upon verse 2.14 of the Song of Songs: "Let thy voice sound in my ears" (Douay-Rheims version). The English translation given by Peters and Domeier does not change the meaning, and the use of pour manages to allude to the fountain into which Narcissus gazes. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJulie A. Bokser Julie A. Bokser is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University, 802 W. Belden, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, language authorities in the United States were distressed by what they saw as a pervasive misuse of words. A particular type of language authority, the verbal critic, attempted to mitigate misuse by establishing and insisting upon "correct" meanings of words, and the writing of these verbal critics were remarkably popular at the time. Verbal critics' goals are not always clear-cut: they often lament the ignorance of those who "abuse" words, and at other times, they express their purpose as offering instruction in how to speak properly. Indeed, verbal criticism is full of contradictions, which this article explains in terms of a widespread crisis in representation, a crisis that seemed to threaten speakers' ability to communicate, affected late-nineteenth-century social structure, and mirrored political and economic debates over monetary policy, as well. Acknowledgment I thank the editor and anonymous readers for RSQ for their helpful comments and suggestions, which enriched this article, as well as my thinking about verbal criticism. A number of references cited or discussed in footnotes were brought to my attention by the readers. Notes 1Edward Finegan discusses Mathews's professorship (71), and Kenneth Cmiel tabulates the publication history of this and other such works (263–266). The number of copies in print comes from the title page to the 1896 edition. 2See Finegan, passim and Baron, 188–225 for more on this distinction between doctrines of correctness and usage. Plato's Cratylus offers the classical articulation of this distinction, with Cratylus arguing for correctness or "naturalism," described by Hermogenes as words with "a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians" (383b), and Hermogenes arguing for usage or "conventionalism." 3As Assistant Keeper of the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1838–50, Garnett composed a number of essays on philology that were later collected by his son (also Richard Garnett) as The Philological Essays of the Late Rev. Richard Garnett (Citation1859). The younger Garnett prefaced the collection with a "Memoir" explaining that Garnett aspired to join the clergy, in preparation for which he was required to "obtain a thorough acquaintance with Latin, of which he knew little, and with Greek, of which he knew nothing" (ii). Although, his son notes, Garnett's learning about Latin and Greek was "especially Scriptural," he nevertheless, in 1829, "entered upon an entirely new sphere of social intercourse and literary activity": writing about philology. As his son observes, Garnett "entered upon his new career at the most auspicious period imaginable, when Rask and Grimm and W. Humboldt" had begun writing about linguistics (x). However, Garnett's contributions to the discipline have gone largely unnoted by contemporary linguists, revealing perhaps that Garnett's "acuteness" derives more from his service to Mathews than it does from his service to more general studies of language. 4See p. 313. Cmiel studies eight newspapers: "the four refined papers were the Boston Daily Advertiser, The New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune. The four popular papers were the Boston Herald, the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and the Chicago Times." 5This way of approaching the debate between critics and scholars (the scholars were as elitist as the critics) turns out to be a way of missing another important similarity that I will consider later: the critics too had a democratic impulse. After all, given verbal criticism's immense popularity, what should we infer? Did readers consume books that merely made them feel inferior? Or did they find in these texts instruction for speaking in more refined or cultured ways? Cmiel has shown that Ayres and White, after publishing for refined newspapers in the 1860s and '70s, had their columns picked up by populist newspapers in the 1880s, and verbal criticism became "a part of popular adult education" (146). Adams Sherman Hill's Our English, for example, originated as a series of Chautauqua lectures. 6Plato's distinction between belief in beautiful things and beauty itself (Republic 476c) usefully distinguishes nominalists from realists (as well as particulars from universals). 7This is not to say that no one compared words to money prior to the nineteenth century. At least as early as John Locke, philosophers were noting the imprecision of words' representation of ideas and money's representation of value. (For Locke on language, see Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly chapters II, "On the Signification of Words" and IX, "Of the Imperfection of Words"; on money, see Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.) However, discussing language as money (as opposed to language and money or language and/as a precious metal) does seem to have been rare until the nineteenth century. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen's New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (Citation1999) collects a number of works attempting "to rediscover the contact points among literature, culture, and economics" (9). Although the essays in the collection are primarily concerned with how critics informed by economics can approach the study of literature, the editors' introduction, particularly pp. 10–17, provides a helpful review of what they call economic criticism, recent attempts by theorists to link literature and language to money and economics. 8Although this evolution of the trope suggests it "had shifted from its earlier appreciation of beautiful coins," presumably to appreciation of a medium of exchange, the important point for Carr is that the trope's repetition demonstrates that "the history of nineteenth-century readers is marked by borrowing and adaptation, and by the persistence of traditional associations and definitions that nevertheless adapt to changing times and values" (145). But finding the same kind of value in language that one finds in money, I am arguing, has a particular significance in the late nineteenth century. 9Mathews cites Farrar on this point, coincidentally on his own page 261. 10The point for Painter is that inflationary policy hurt workers and farmers, giving rise to Populist resentment. Milton Friedman ultimately agrees, albeit from a much different orientation, that deflation was devastating. More concerned with economic growth than with the effect on the working classes, Friedman concludes that "Whether or not a verdict of guilty would have been appropriate in a court of law for 'the crime of 1873,' that verdict is appropriate in the court of history" because a "bimetallic standard … would have produced a considerably steadier price level than did the gold standard that was adopted" (78, 76). 11The other significant plank of the Populists' platform was an endorsement of direct election of U.S. senators. For more on Populism as a response to monetary policy, see Trachtenberg 175. 12Ritter's conservative and antimonopolist positions map neatly onto the deflationist and inflationist positions I have been discussing. An excellent history of the "financial question" during the period 1865–96, Goldbugs and Greenbacks argues that existing scholarship has managed to recognize "the significance of the farmer-labor tradition" without accounting for the "prominence the antimonopolists gave to the financial question." Even "common citizens" were invested in debates about money, Ritter argues, because these debates concerned "the belief that the preservation of economic opportunity was essential for meaningful democracy" (ix–x). 13This question over the role of persuasion in Marxism, of course, has everything to do with rhetoric. James Aune's Rhetoric and Marxism is concerned with just this issue, in only a slightly different register. For instance, Aune asks how rhetoricians might bridge the theoretical gap between structure and struggle—that is, the difference between rhetoric being a tool for interesting, but finally defeatist, analysis and being a tool for producing discourse that might effect real change (13). 14Even earlier political economists (Smith and Ricardo) recognized the existence of surplus-value—the unpaid portion of production—but what "they had regarded as a solution" Marx "considered but a problem" (149–151). 15Production must itself be understood as more complex than the mere set of steps individual workers take to generate a product if we are to understand how it effects class positions that come to be occupied by workers. Production comprises the labor process and relations of production, the former of which is a material condition of production (which, Althusser argues, means "a denial of every 'humanist' conception of human labour as pure creativity"). The relations of production entail foremost "relations between men and things, such that the relations between men and men are defined by the precise relations existing between men and the material elements of the production process" (171–175). Moreover, insofar as these relations include "agents of production," we must distinguish between "direct agents," whose labor power directly and materially infuses the product with use-value, and non-direct agents—the owners of the means of production—whose "labour power is not used in the production process." The arrangement of these agents and their instruments of production designates "a certain political configuration." And it is this political configuration that has a structural effect on other elements (e.g., the economic and the cultural) in the social totality: "the nature of the relations of production … establishes the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality." In other words, what we have here is not a pre-existing arrangement of levels in the social totality. Rather, the mode of production is the name we give to the "site" and "extension" of each structural element (176–177). 16In this sense, Kenneth Cmiel misses the point when he writes, "The very success of verbal criticism was undermining the original goals" (139), since the goals of verbal criticism included giving readers the verbal tools for upward mobility. 17The tragedy has, nevertheless, been feared and even predicted on numerous occasions. Locke's theory of language allowed not only for the "Imperfection of Words" (Book III, Chapter IX of Essay Concerning Human Understanding), but also—as a result—for the "Abuse of Words" (Chapter X), proposing "Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfection and Abuses" (Chapter XI). As recently as 2004, Samuel Huntington warned that the "persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." Such linguistic anxieties, and there have been plenty in the intervening years, tend to correspond to other cultural changes. Huntington was responding to increased immigration, Locke the coinage crisis of the 1690s. Locke's case is similar to the late nineteenth century's insofar as he too was concerned with theories of representation for both language and money. In a fascinating reading that brings together these theories, Carol Pech shows that Locke identifies the value of money through metonymy and also (elsewhere) describes the problems of language as beginning with metaphor and synecdoche. "That Locke goes on to examine the problems posed by synecdoche through the example of a precious metal (i.e., gold) is significant to understanding his writings on money" (283). These writings reveal, Pech ultimately argues, that Locke fetishizes precious metals in order to "disavow the ways in which symbolic modes of signification have begun to sever the connections between currency and natural substances" (286). Additional informationNotes on contributorsWilliam Rodney Herring William Rodney Herring is a Lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver, 2150 E. Evans Ave., Penrose Library Room 202, Denver, CO 80208-5203.

Abstract The 1930s in America abounded with debates about language and communication. Interest in the effects of propaganda and the problems of miscommunication prompted the development of organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937) and Count Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics (1938). Albeit in different ways, each of these groups aimed to increase the public's awareness of the effects of language and to improve its ability to communicate. But the assumptions about language and communication held by these organizations would ultimately render them short-lived in terms of public and scholarly attention. This article examines the work of these organizations in relation to that of Kenneth Burke, and demonstrates how Burke developed his rhetorically oriented theories of communication against and in response to this rich background. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Selzer for his encouragement and advice on earlier drafts of this article (as well as for inspiration, as in its original version this was written for his Kenneth Burke graduate seminar at Penn State). Thanks also to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1For more thorough elaborations and further discussions, see, for example, Crowley; Sproule; George and Selzer. 2See, for instance, “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The Journal of Philosophy 31 (February 1, 1934): 80–81; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” International Journal of Ethics 44 (April 1934): 377–384; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The New Republic 79 (August 1, 1934): 327; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” Supplement to Nature (October 20, 1934): 617. 3Korzybski has a curious predilection for not capitalizing names of systems (the aristotelian, newtonian, and euclidian being the most commonly used). Because most adherents to General Semantics use the same convention, I will follow it as well in this article. 4Of course, “orientation” is also a key word for Burke, especially in Permanence and Change. Burke's idea of “orientation” appears to have come directly from Korzybski: “Orientation can go wrong. Consider, for instance, what conquest over the environment we have attained through our powers of abstraction, of generalization; and then consider the stupid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these abstractions were mistaken for realities” (6). Burke's term, via Veblen, for problematic orientations is “trained incapacities,” or, as he defines it more completely, “a faulty selection of means due to a faulty theory of causal relationships” (9), as, for example, chickens who have been trained to eat when a bell rings will still come running when the bell signals punishment instead of food. 5In an unpublished manuscript (recently discovered, edited, and published by James Zappen), Burke notes that Korzybski's structural differential “is valuable for calling attention to an important abstractive process of language, but cannot of itself replace a mature linguistic analysis.” 6Also, while the IPA definitely experienced failure as an organization (although certainly, as I pointed out earlier, communication departments and composition programs still find value in the seven propaganda devices), it should be noted here that contrary to Condit's assertion that “I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir” (“Post-Burke” 350), in fact the Institute of General Semantics is still quite active, and has been varyingly influential in the fields of cognitive psychology, popular psychology, linguistics, and education. Inarguably, though, it has lost most of its credibility (and even name recognition) with scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition and communication. 7In the same letter, Burke explains to Josephson that he was going to attend one of Korzybski's General Semantics seminars in Chicago upon the offer of the “Semanticists” to pay his expenses, but decided against it because it would have consumed nearly two weeks. He writes, “Hated to pass it up—for these are the days when one yearns for his band of the like-minded—and Hayakawa writes me: ‘Both the students of General Semantics of my acquaintance and the students of linguistics are enthusiastic about your work.' Hayakawa teaches at a school in Chicago that recently offered me a job, though alas! at no such handsome salary as I could easily imagine” (Burke to Josephson 17 Dec. Citation1941). In a letter of several years earlier, Burke had complained to Richard McKeon about Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words (which he was then writing the review for); he quips, “how he does tyrannize with words!” Burke goes on to write, “Rule of thumb: Anyone who takes Korzybski's ‘Science and Sanity’ for anything more than half a book on the subject of semantics is a public calamity. Taken as half a book, it is excellent. Taken as a whole book, it is far worse than no book at all, far inferior to naïve words uttered at random” (Burke to McKeon 13 Dec. 1937). Perhaps reviewing Chase's book (which presented a fairly skewed view of Korzybski's ideas) helped to highlight for Burke the problems with General Semantics. Both of these statements taken together, though, indicate fairly clearly that Burke saw himself not so much rejecting General Semantics, perhaps, as negotiating with it. 8Although he focuses explicitly on the “semanticists” here, Burke is also implicitly responding to the New Critics, a fact suggested by the initial appearance of the essay in The Southern Review, a journal colonized at the time by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. Burke's double purpose can be ascertained in small jabs elsewhere in The Philosophy of Literary Form; for instance, he remarks, “It is ‘poetic’ to develop method; it is ‘scientific’ to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a ‘scientific’ ideal.)” (130). As Ann George and Jack Selzer point out, “That distinction between scientific and poetic language, based on the Agrarian distrust of science and on the positivist assumption that science and poetry lead to two different and complementary approaches to knowledge and derived at least in part from I.A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), was fast becoming a central tenet of the nascent New Criticism, as the movement would officially be dubbed by Ransom in his 1941 book of that name” (Kenneth Burke 193). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441102, Moscow, ID 83844-1102, USA.

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

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

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

Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies by Elizabeth McHenry. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xiv + 423 pp. Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing by J. Blake Scott Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xii + 281 pp. Authority and Reform: Religious and Educational Discourses in Nineteenth‐Century New England Literature by Mark G. Vasquez. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. xxii + 393 pp.

Abstract A Rhetoric of Motives is Kenneth Burke's only published work to consistently focus upon the subject of race. Although encouraged by the book's topic, this treatment was significantly shaped by Burke's friendship with African American novelist and critic, Ralph Ellison. Consequently, this essay offers one history of Burke's Rhetoric, drawing on both published work and unpublished correspondence between and concerning these two men. Based upon these materials, I isolate three texts as the central moments of the Burke/Ellison dialogue on race: Ellison's essay, “Richard Wright's Blues,”; Ellison's letter to Burke of November 23, 1945, and, finally. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives.

Fearless Speech by Michel Foucault. Edited by Joseph Pearson. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001. 183 pp. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working‐Class Children in Their Own Self‐Interest by Patrick J. Finn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 243 + xii pp. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth‐Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine by Susan Wells. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. 312 + xii pp. Black on Black: Twentieth‐Century African American Writing about Africa by John Cullen Gruesser. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 205 + xiii pp. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again by Bent Flyvbjerg. Trans. Steven Sampson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 214 pp.

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.

In his 1829 Appeal to Coloured Citizens of World, a militant condemnation of evils of slavery and a prophetic call for a potentially violent end to institution, African-American abolitionist David Walker demands, See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you understand your own language? (75). Walker's question highlights a fundamental and enduring paradox: in spite of centrality of Declaration of Independence to our nation's founding and to America's self-definition, continual reinterpretation of text and controversies over its meaning and significance are endemic to national discourse. Antebellum Americans faced a particular theoretical and exegetical problem with respect to Declaration of Independence. Nineteenth-century rhetoric often elevates document to a religious significance in mythologizing founding of America, idealizing creation of a completely new nation dedicated to liberty and (Wills, Inventing xvi-xxii; Wills, Lincoln 86-89, 100-03, 10910). Yet many antebellum Americans supported slavery and opposed full civil rights for free African Americans. Supporters of slavery engaged in complicated gymnastics in order to support ideals of American Revolution as well as nation's peculiar institution. Many proslavery rhetors argued that, based on Founding Fathers' intentions, Declaration's promises of freedom and did not include African Americans. Another argument suggested that term equality did not connote that all Americans should have same rights. Some supporters of slavery even downplayed significance of articulation of certain rights in Declaration of Independence.' Within this context, African-American abolitionists who wished to feature Declaration of Independence and related themes of American Revolution in their antislavery rhetoric could not rely on conventional interpretations. They needed to appropriate these topoi, redefining them in service of abolition. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites demonstrate that antebellum AfricanAmerican men crafted a concept of that countered proslavery formulations, using rhetorical revision of Declaration of Independence to extend scope of terms such as equality, liberty, and human rights (69-98). Condit and Lucaites emphasize rhetoric that is, in Gary Woodward's terms, primarily adaptory-appealing to common ground with an audience and aiming to reduce dissonant messages that clash with their beliefs (28-30). In adaptory rhetoric, the expectations of others form basis of a persuasive situation, and rhetor attempts to adapt message to avoid a clash with audience's

Arthur Inman was a very strange man. Part of this strangeness has to do with his massive, engrossed, graphic legacy-a sprawling diary of well over sixteen million words, filling one hundred fifty-five manuscript volumes, omnivorously chronicling the wreck of the Hindenberg and the only known 'Petrified Ham,' the rise of Hider and the crash of the stock market, the depression and Mr. Farnsworth's Flea Circus, the sexual life of his domestics, the Lindberg baby-snatching, the Coconut Grove fire, Joe Louis' heavyweight tide defeat of Max Baer, the tribulations of stockpiling rations during the war, the perils of a small-time dancer in Hollywood, the deaths of Joe McCarthy and Franklin Roosevelt, the menu of the Jackson Day benefit dinner for the Democrats, the escapades of an oily little picaro, and, always, his own distorted, phobic, neurotic life, his rantings, ragings, and assaults, his aches, pains, compulsions, his enemas, stomach pumpings, and bromide ingestions, his delusions, desires, and hatreds, his pettiness, his machinations, his racism, his vicious nightmares, his consuming failures at poetry, at business, and at suicide, and what he considered his two crowning successes, his diary and, finally, his death. Why? Why would Arthur Inman devote his life to this monstrous fungoid growth (Gross, 1985)? The long answer is an involved psychological study, one that might be too short of external evidence to reach a satisfactory conclusion. For all his incessant self-probing, strapping his childhood and his nightmares to the examining table and poking them until they twitch, Inman provides neither and adequate account of his condition nor a solid grounding on which to base one. He places tremendous emphasis on a speech his father delivered on the dangers of masturbation (a human life, in those few minutes ... was-and I do not exaggerate-as much as ruined [90]).1 He was tortured for most of his life by dreams of the taunts and tensions he endured at an all-male private school. He resented his mother's moral injunctions. But surely others suffered these Victorian vestiges in turn of the century childhoods and lived normal, less obsessed, less self-absorbed lives. There is no trauma, no single event that explains Inman's peculiarities-at least none that he records-and the complex of all that he reports does not seem

Persuasive discourse, either as a separate mode of discourse (Kinneavy 1971) or as a distinctive part of argumentative discourse,2 frequendy remains part of the overall writing assignment for our composition students. Although we may disagree as to how to define exactly or teach persuasive discourse in writing classrooms, we have more or less followed the tradition of Western classical rhetoric with respect to our basic understanding of it--although few of us would now restrict ourselves only to discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion (Aristotle 1960: 7). For example, we teach our students different sub-types of persuasive discourse and ask them to apply ethical, emotional (pathetic) and logical proofs to their own persuasive essays; we select political speeches, polemic essays or modern advertising materials as prime examples of how different persuasive strategies and techniques can be most effectively invoked to achieve their respective objectives of winning. To varying degrees, many composition text books have adopted, and thus perpetuated this normal way of doing things with persuasive discourse.3 In so doing, however, we have--perhaps unknowingly--imparted to our students two problematic notions, which underlie much of what has been believed to be persuasive discourse. The first assumes that persuasive discourse is grounded in or predicated on conflict or confrontation, which it aims to overcome or eradicate. The second perceives audience as both external4 and oppositional, whom persuasive discourse is intended to transform or convert. It is these two notions and their probable consequences that I will discuss first in this essay. Following this discussion, I will draw upon, respectively, Grice's cooperative model of conversation (1975; 1989) and Burke's concept of (1962) to propose a new heuristic model5 of persuasive discourse, one that takes cooperation through identification as a core constituent and provides a dynamic setting that is conducive to rhetorical diversities. Finally, I will consider some potentials of this new model in our writing classrooms.

Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Martin J. Medhurst. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 236 pp. Reviewed by Warren Rubel. The Sophists. Harold Barrett, Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp Publishers, 1981. 85+ix pp. Reviewed by William Benoit Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. Michael Heim. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987.305 pp. Reviewed by Ronald A. Sudol. Thoreau's Comments on the Art of Writing, Richard Dillman, editor. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Reviewed by J. L. Campbell. Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, Winifred Bryan Horner. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Reviewed by James Leonard. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Allen Harris. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 332 pages. Reviewed by David S. Kaufer.