Rhetoric Society Quarterly
1770 articlesJanuary 2003
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Theology, canonicity, and abbreviated enthymemes: Traditional and critical influences on the British reception of Aristotle'sRhetoric ↗
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Abstract This essay argues that the construction of the 18th and 19th century British rhetorical theories and canon was strongly influenced by the debates between Catholic (or Anglo‐Catholic) traditionalists and Protestant critics over religious hermeneutics, by examining three specific cases, the Phalaris controversy, definitions of the enthymeme, and the reception history of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. The major figures discussed are Richard Bentley, William Temple, John Gillies, Edward Copleston, Sydney Smith, Richard Whately, James Hessey, and William Hamilton. Notes Research for this study has been supported by many sources, including a fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center of the University of Utah, a Rocky Mountain MLA Huntington fellowship, and a First Year Assistant Professor grant from Florida State University. An NEH Summer 2002 Seminar, "The Reform of Reason,"; which I co‐directed with Jan Swearingen, provided an opportunity to revise this essay, and I owe thanks to both the NEH and the fifteen seminar participants. I also owe thanks to several libraries, including the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, Rylands Library, St. Deiniol's Library, and the ILL staffs of Montana State University and Florida State University libraries. I also would like to thank Marilyn Faulkenburg, Thomas Miller, Christopher Stray, Jan Swearingen, and Karen Whedbee for many useful comments.
September 2002
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Abstract In this essay, I explore the materiality of rhetoric through a close analysis of one Starbucks coffee shop. Starbucks' rhetoric works to suture individual bodies and subjectivities into a seemingly natural world through the practices of production and consumption of coffee and through the use of "natural"; colors, shapes and materials. This turn to nature is augmented by a claim to authenticity made by the coffee itself and is further reinforced by the rituals surrounding the buying and drinking of coffee. These rituals provide sanctifying performances that strive to cover the sins of postmodern consumer culture.
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Abstract This essay explores rhetoric tropologically through various strophes: antistrophe, catastrophe, and apostrophe. Our purpose is to delineate problems and possibilities that these tropes pose for rhetoric in an effort to create new rhetorics. We seek to display the antistrophic and catastrophic figurations of rhetoric and then use visual lenses of photography and cinema to disrupt the figurations. Following the disruption, we seek to heighten sensibilities to other figurations, in particular an apostrophic figuration. We cast apostrophe as a figure for change because it marks a deeply felt turn toward difference and otherness. Turned as such, rhetoric becomes erotic.
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Abstract Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was published far more frequently and in more substantively different formats than has yet been recognized. Its publishing history suggests that as the book circulated across diverse locations for over a century, it supported a large array of uses, values, and meanings. By providing detailed bibliographic information on a single influential rhetoric, and by comparing its publication record to several other influential rhetorics, this essay seeks to use research in the history of the book to articulate a more nuanced history of rhetoric.
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Abstract This article contributes to ongoing feminist efforts to regender the rhetorical canons, in particular, by exploring how the fifth canon of delivery changes once the assumed male at the center of the rhetorical tradition is replaced by a woman who is both a mother and a speaker. Delivery—which conventionally focuses upon the speaker's use of voice, expression, and gesture—is usually considered the most material of the canons. However, once viewed from the perspective of nineteenth‐century maternal rhetors, distinctive corporeal, ideological, and performance issues become apparent, all indicative of significant gender differences in men's and women's delivery. More broadly, this study illustrates how recasting the canons by recognizing and incorporating the experiences of previously marginalized groups promises to produce a more comprehensive, complex, and compelling understanding of the history and practice of rhetoric.
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Lucifer Rising (Yet Again) American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty by Michael W. Cuneo. New York: Doubleday, 2001. 301 + xvpp. Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth J. Medway. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 465 + ix pp. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media by Bill Ellis. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 332 + xix pp. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition by Jacqueline. Bacon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 291 + xiv pp. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric by Thomas O. Sloane, Editor in Chief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. xii 837 pp. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres by Rosa A. Eberly. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 + xvii pp.
June 2002
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Abstract Aristotle's discussion of political deliberation fixes the practice in that it implicitly addresses critiques found in the writings of earlier authors such as Aristophanes, the Old Oligarch, Thucydides, Plato and Isocrates. His perspective likewise fixes political deliberation by securing its status as the central means by which the polls is able to confront the contingent and pursue the expedient. The acceptance of argument from probability, and the disciplining of that argument into proper and improper forms, made his position in favor of political deliberation tenable. Finally, his perspective fixes political deliberation in that it stands as the latest and most thorough treatment of the subject in the classical period.
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Abstract The Creek colony of Thurii, founded in southern Italy around 444, BCE, was apparently planned to be a model polis. Any reconstruction of that plan must be speculative, but the stories about Thurii suggest that its design incorporated three entities not usually linked — a democratic constitution, an orthogonal street layout, and a rhetorically‐oriented educational system. In trying to understand what these things might have had to do with one another, I examine the thought of three individuals who, sources tell us, participated in the colony: the rhêtor Pericles, who apparently instigated the project; the designer Hippodamus, who supposedly laid out its streets; and the sophist Protagoras, who reportedly wrote its laws. If indeed these three collaborated on Thurii, what they may have sought there was a “bounded”; democracy, a community of free and equal citizens, governed by open, transparent, and agonistic means but guided by an unmistakable sense of rightness, something manifest not only in the town's constitution but in its educational system and built space as well.
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Abstract The first noticeable thing about almost any situation of conflict is how soon conversation breaks down and the proverbial ‘other means ‘take the fore. This study explores how Jane Addams, a prominent Chicago mediator, crafted new rhetorical openings for conflict resolution. The bloody Pullman Strike of 1894 was a landmark event in Addams’ rhetorical career, since it was during this strike that she learned to negotiate the rhetorical space between labor and management, as well as learning how to enlist the public in the work of reconstructing severed human relationships. Using the lenses of invitational rhetoric and fantasy theme analysis, I show how Addams attempted to create a more conciliatory mode of speech for seemingly intractable situations.
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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.
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Abstract This paper analyzes a recent Internet‐based protest action in terms of its historical and rhetorical antecedents. Throughout the mid‐1990s, the GeoCities company offered visitors a “deed”; to a small portion of electronic storage space, so long as these virtual “homesteaders”; maintained and improved these parcels of cyberspace‐based “property.”; This exchange, based expressly on the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act, proved popular, and GeoCities thrived to the point that it was taken over by the Internet giant Yahoo. When Yahoo circulated a change in the GeoCities Terms of Service which claimed ownership to the intellectual property found on the homesteaders’ home pages, the residents of GeoCities responded with a visually sophisticated protest which quickly generated national publicity and created a public relations nightmare for Yahoo. This protest ultimately demonstrated the homesteaders ‘ability to organize online, and then to discover the available means of persuasion within the relatively novel communicative spaces of the World Wide Web.
March 2002
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Abstract John Quincy Adams's speech on behalf of the kidnapped Africans aboard the slave ship Amistad points to a troubling dilemma in rhetoric: that the power of rhetoric is limited by the audience's perception of what is plausible, and that can, as in the case of the Amistad argument, mean that outrageously unjust but intransigent and powerful interests set the limits of discourse. If rhetorical theory promotes decorum, what is the place of principled dissent and sincere outrage?
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Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucault's theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.
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Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity by Jeffrey Walker. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 396 pp. Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness by Laura J. Gurak. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 194 + viii. Rhetoric and religion: recent revivals and revisions Wandering God, A Study in Nomadic Spirituality. Morris Berman. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.349 + xiv pp. Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives. Walter Jost, and Wendy Olmsted, eds. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 425 + vi pp. The Rhetoric of Pope John Paul II, the Pastoral Visit As a New Vocabulary of the Sacred. Margaret B. Melady. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 256 + ix pp. ”Foul Demons, Come Out!”, The Rhetoric of Twentieth Century American Faith Healing. Stephen J. Pullum. Westport: Praeger, 1999. Hardback, 167 + xix pp.
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Abstract This essay traces the reception of a new grammatical‐rhetorical theory of personification in the canon of textbooks widely used to teach vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century. Invented, in 1751, by James Harris’ Hermes, a work in universal grammar, this new doctrine contributed to the increased masculinity of standard literate performance. Hermes increased the representivity of gendered pronouns and required a contradictory use of gendered personification as if it were both literal and figurative. As a result, two distinctive relations to language were made possible. For men, grammar and rhetoric appear in strict opposition and are always representative of their experience of language. Women literates, who were not taken into account by the masculinist sensibility of Hermes, were assigned, de facto, an anomalous position and a potentially more critical relation to language. The texts of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Sarah Willis ("Fanny Fern “) provide examples which demonstrate that women recognized and profited from their anomalous difference, which suggests the creation of a historically specific l'ecriture feminine.
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Abstract As the discourse of traditionally marginalized voices becomes increasingly salient in rhetorical studies, standpoint theory—which emphasizes the epistemological importance of the perspectives of oppressed groups—could play a significant role in textual analysis. This essay first outlines the central tenets of standpoint theory and the debate they have generated. We then suggest how standpoint theory, with some significant modifications and expansions, may function as a productive methodology for rhetorical analysis. We demonstrate this potential contribution to our field through analyses of two nineteenth‐century texts: Jane Austen's Persuasion and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
January 2002
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Abstract Archaic lyric provided opportunities for reflection on civic power and community values before the invention of prose and the emergence of democracy in Athens with its attendant rhetorical practices. The fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus, poets of 6th‐century Lesbos, can be read along side each other for an exploration of gender difference. Sappho's evocations of memory bespeak the situation of women excluded from public spaces of political deliberation and subject to displacement and loss. Gendered practices of memory are traced from Sappho and Alcaeus through the memory systems of classical Greek and Roman rhetoricians.
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Historical studies of rhetorical women here and there: Methodological challenges to dominant interpretive frameworks ↗
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Abstract This article examines theoretical premises of the historical study of rhetorical women, epistemological confusions caused by postmodernism, and challenges from the studies of black and Third World rhetorical women. On that basis it points out that the present difficulties in accepting discursive feminist methodologies in the study of rhetorical history are direct results of a continued adherence to certain established interpretive frameworks that dominate inquiry and knowledge construction in the field of rhetoric/composition.
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Abstract As a feminist scholar, I prefer to pursue primary research partly because it allows me to cooperate with other scholars instead of opposing them. I employ the feminist method of engagement with, not detachment from, the object of research, a holistic approach using rhetorical ethos and pathos as well as logos. However, I avoid taking positions excessively driven by ideology, or swayed by ultra‐relativism. Instead, I try to present the author's ideas in her own context. Feminist research is valuable as pure research, but it can also be useful in teaching. Future projects should include further study of the rhetorical theories of historical women, and some attempt to contribute to theorizing of sermo.
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Abstract After the thousands of years in which a masculine canon of rhetoric has been constructed, feminist scholars have recently worked to create a more inclusive tradition. While problems and concerns have arisen with regard to this change, my work with nineteenth‐century primary texts has convinced me that more time to explore extant texts can alleviate many of the apprehensions associated with this new research. Further time to recover, evaluate, and make meaning from additional information will allow for a more complete picture of women's rhetorical history. In addition, a greater breadth of knowledge will allow us not only to add figures to a more inclusive tradition, but to redefine what counts as evidence in evaluating rhetoric and rhetoricians. In this way we may create a more complete, honest, and interesting picture of the rhetorical tradition.
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Abstract As a form of discursive practice, consciousness‐raising links recovery, recuperation, and the development of theory. The recovery of texts by women and recovery from the dynamics of suppression by which women's voices were silenced encompasses an enormous conversation among women through time. As a recuperative process criticism promotes an appreciation of women's artistry and eloquence and challenges the capacity of traditional theory to analyze or evaluate women's discourse. Finally, extracting theoretical principles from the practices of women through time suggests alternative ways of viewing rhetoric.
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The archaeology of women in rhetoric: Rhetorical sequencing as a research method for historical scholarship ↗
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Abstract For well over a decade, a number of scholars have argued that a more thorough and representative account of the history of rhetoric can only take place after women are accurately included in the rhetorical tradition. If we are to provide a sensitive accounting of women in the rhetorical tradition, current methods of, and perspectives on, historical research need to be reconsidered and adjusted in three respects. First, our mentality toward rhetoric must expand beyond civic, agonistic discourse to include alternative modes of expression used by women. Second, our efforts to discover primary evidence must intensify so that a more representative body of sources becomes available. This expanded body of evidence must include non‐traditional sources that provide insight to the oral and literate practices of women. Third, historians of rhetoric must create methods of research and analysis that will provide a more sensitive accounting of primary material than current historical methods were designed to yield. This essay argues that these needs can be met by an archaeological approach to historical rhetoric. A method called “rhetorical sequencing”; is offered as an heuristic to facilitate historical research on women in the rhetorical tradition.
September 2001
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Abstract This article examines two texts important in American rhetorical history, Caleb Bingham's 1794 American Preceptor and Eliphalet Pearson's 1802 abridgment of Blair's Lectures. These schoolbooks challenge accepted historiographies of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century rhetoric in two ways: they demonstrate that neoclassicism encompassed a much greater variety of ancient figures and texts than is usually presumed, and they suggest that neoclassical rhetorics operated within a more complicated sociopolitical milieu than is commonly understood. Bingham and Pearson emerge as key figures in early American rhetorical history and their books prompt reconsideration of American neoclassicism.
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Writing in A Milieu of Utility: The Move to Technical Communication in American Engineering Programs, 1850–1950 by Teresa C. Kynell, 2nd ed. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 2000. 134 + xix pp. Rhetorical Figures in Science by Jeanne Fahnestock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv + 248 pp.
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Abstract Although viewed as problematic and strange by many scholars, the elocutionary theories of Thomas Sheridan deserve more scholarly attention because of their unique understanding of the relationships between writing, oral reading, performance, and literary consumption. In contrast to Hugh Blair's emphasis on silent reading and tasteful (and passive) appreciation of literature, Sheridan concentrates on tasteful (and active) interpretation of literature through oral performance. Sheridan's theories complicate our understanding of eighteenth‐century rhetoric, its relationship to “literature,”; and its lasting effects on educational practices.
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Abstract A 1927 pageant at the Saratoga Battlefield illustrates the workings of spectacle, here defined as a public gathering of people who have come to witness some event and are self‐consciously present to each other as well as to that event. Like Debord and others, I emphasize a tension between lived experience and text. Unlike them, I argue that spectacle is itself a lived experience that may be of greater consequence than the rhetorical text. I suggest that rhetoricians should strive to get at the lived experience that may be reflected quite imperfectly in the rhetorical text.
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Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.
June 2001
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Riding the third wave of rhetorical historiography Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists by Martha Watson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 149 pp. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 by Susan Kates. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 157 pp. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Boston by Dorothy C. Broaddus. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 136 pp. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present by Charles Paine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 261 pp. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders by Katherine H. Adams. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 169 pp. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. xxvi + 308. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 2000. xi + 237 pp.
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Dissent and emotional management in a liberal‐democratic society: The Kent state iconic photograph ↗
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Abstract Public discourse in contemporary Western democracies is constructed, studied, and policed according to a general suppression or suspicion of emotional display, which then can become a mode of dissent. These tendencies are evident in the use of visual images in the public media. An icon of emotional public protest—the young woman screaming over the murdered Kent State student on the ground before her—reveals how visual practices and emotional display are important for democratic life. The iconic photograph constitutes citizenship as an emotional construct while it shapes emotions according to norms of public order. This representation of dissent provides resources for advocacy and change, but it also is vulnerable to narratives of fragmentation and control.
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Abstract This article examines the shift in views of virtue in eighteenth‐century Britain as the emerging middle‐class attempted to legitimize commerce and forge a broader concept of citizenship. I illustrate how middle‐class values were sanctioned, in part, by relocating the source of civic virtue from the public to the domestic or private sphere. During this transition, women came to be seen as the “civilizing”; agents of society, and I demonstrate how this new ethical role prescribed for them was reflected and instantiated in eighteenth‐century culture through specific pedagogical practices. By analyzing eighteenth‐century conceptions of civic virtue in terms of how they were implicated in specific historical configurations of gender and class, I illustrate the need for further studies that approach ethics as a contingent, unstable category.
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Abstract All but ignored by historians of rhetoric, Quintilian ‘s meditations on improvisation not only allow us to situate the Institutio Oratoria more firmly in its historical context but also require us to confront issues of performance, issues which (again) have been largely overlooked in historical studies of rhetoric. Quintilian's many references to extemporaneous speech participate in a broader argument the author advances against what he sees as the unscrupulous activities of the delatores (informers working in the service of the Emperors) and the theory of oratory implicit in their oratorical practices. In particular, Quintilian uses the topic of improvisation as an argumentative vehicle to reject the dependence of the delatores on natural ability, to parody their artless attempts at extemporization, and to promote his own educational program based on study, training, and art. Quintilian's discussion of improvisation also invites consideration of oratorical performance: the occasions upon which an orator should switch from a scripted to an improvised mode of performance, the psychological and affective experience of the orator who speaks extemporaneously, and the response of listeners who (according to Quintilian) regard the extemporized oration as more credible, more engaging, and more authentic than the one prepared in advance. For Quintilian, improvisation is the mode of performance to which all oratory should aspire.
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Abstract Balancing the critiques of scientism in communications, this response notes how belletrism has marginalized rhetorical studies on the other side of the modern opposition of the arts and sciences. Such institutional divisions need to be assessed against broader changes in literacy if our disciplinary histories are to be a resource for assessing how rhetoricians in composition and communications can work together. The marginal positions of composition and speech courses may undermine the prestige of rhetoric as an academic discipline, but the margins can be a place of power if approached pragmatically. Looking beyond the pragmatic professionalism of disciplinary insiders such as Stanley Fish, we need to develop alliances with practitioners of the arts of rhetoric outside as well as within the academy if pragmatism is to contribute to the institutional work of making universities into institutions of public learning.
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Distinguishing formative and receptive contexts in the disciplinary formation of composition studies: A response to Mailloux ↗
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Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux notes that “many compositionists in the seventies and eighties did not find it necessary to claim to be a scientific discipline “(16). I respond to this claim by focusing on the new discourse about writing that emerged in the 1970s in work by Emig, Shaughnessy, Flower & Hayes, and others. Distinguishing between the “formative “ (intellectual) contexts from which this work drew, and the “receptive”; contexts in which it came to valued, used, and resonate, I show that whereas the roots of this work were almost exclusively empirical, their effects in the receptive context, including beyond the academy, were deeply rhetorical.
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Abstract Relevance is a universal function of communication by which humans innately attempt to balance processing effort with the cognitive effect of an utterance. Relevance theory informs the cognitive and rhetorical dimensions of reading a narrative by (a) defining the conditions under which a text will initially be taken as a narrative (emphasizing context selection, display, and tellability) and (b) delimiting the unmarked cases of the ur‐conventions for reading narrative (naturalization and progression). These ur‐conventions and the Cognitive and Communicative Principles of Relevance also ground claims about the role played by narrative in humans’ search for rationality and moral identity.
March 2001
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Abstract This essay studies how photographs made by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression negotiate the complicated rhetorical space between “art”; and “documentary”; in Edward Steichen and Tom Maloney's photography journal U. S. Camera. I conclude that Steichen's insistence upon separating the documentary purposes of the FSA project from issues of aesthetics relies upon the construction of a false dichotomy that is nevertheless rhetorically productive, for it recognizes the realities of the time—that a government photography project created to publicize efforts to manage poverty could not align it self with the discourses of art and expect to survive.
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Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument by Christopher W. Tindale. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 245 pp. WEIGHTY WORDS: THE MATERIALITY OF RHETORIC Rhetorical Bodies, edited by Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. 395 pp. Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction, edited by Mary M. Lay, Laura J. Gurak, Clare Gravon, and Cynthia Myntti. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 308 pp. Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignoredby Arabella Lyon. University Park: Penn State Press, 1998. 215 pages
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Abstract It has generally been assumed that Aristotle's Rhetoric was unknown or insignificant in nineteenth century England. This article shows that it was an important text in the period and argues that the pattern of publication of translations, editions, and student aids concerning Aristotle's Rhetoric reflects a pedagogical movement beginning with a broadly humanistic tradition of the Noetic school at Oriel College, Oxford at the beginning of the nineteenth century and ending with a more philologically oriented approach at Cambridge towards the end of the century. Among the authors discussed are John Gillies, Thomas Taylor, Edward Copleston, Richard Whately, Prime Minister Gladstone, Daniel Crimmin, Theodore Buckley, James Hessey, James Rogers, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Edward Cope, and J. E. C. Welledon.
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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.
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Abstract This essay emends Foss, Foss, and Griffin's invitational rhetoric to strenghten its philosophical undergirdings and release it from unfounded criticism. Standpoint hermeneutical rhetoric is the framework offered to position the theory more solidly in the canon. Three strategic moves include discovering and revising its epistemological stance to reflect Lorraine Code's concepts of knowing others and second personhood; connecting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to rhetoric; and using Gadamer's emphasis on position and historicity to develop the connection to feminist standpoint theory. Conclusions point toward the implications of invitational rhetoric as dialogue linked to practical application in public communication and pedagogy.
January 2001
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Abstract In this essay I call critical attention to the role of physical location in rhetorical situations, naming this aspect of communication “rhetorical space.”; Rhetorical space is the geography of a communicative event, and, like all landscapes, may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of a location. Drawing on the observations of novelists, philosophers, anthropologists, cultural geographers, and architectural historians, I explore the dimensions of this concept through an investigation of the pulpit, a rhetorical space that communicates a message to the audience quite apart from the sermon.
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Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. viii+322. Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation, edited by J. Michael Hogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xxxviii + 315 pp. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law by Rosemary J. Coombe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xi + 462 pp. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators by Rebecca Moore Howard. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. xi + 195 pp. Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words by Brad Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xii + 202 pp. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America by James Perrin Warren. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. x + 202 pp.
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Abstract Michael Psellos' heretofore untranslated synopsis of Hermogenean rhetoric, Peri Rhêtorikês, composed probably between 1060 and 1067, gives us a window into the state of rhetorical education in late Byzantium. The details of its inclusions, elisions, and amplifications suggest the ways in which Hermogenean rhetoric was understood and taught, at least by one uncommonly talented and influential rhetorician. The text suggests that Psellos may have found the pseudo‐Hennogenic On Invention —rather than On Stases or OnTypes of Style—most useful, most amenable to his efforts to revive an "Aristotelian"; rhetorical philosophy, and most relevant to actual rhetorical practices (including his own).