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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Abstract Postmodernism typically questions metaphysical foundations and then assumes that because no common ground beyond linguistic and cultural codes can be discovered, discursive agreement is necessarily contingent. Questioning the efficacy of such codes, causal theories erase the distinction between words and the worlds, and so invent strategies to direct interlocutors’ attention toward causal conditions they can share rather than find codes they already share. A comparison of two proponents of causal meaning, St. Augustine and Donald Davidson, reveals a common set of logical and attitudinal constraints to interpretive understanding that rejects linguistic and cultural incommensurability and therefore inventive contingency.

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

T his paper deals with the embodiment in Cicero's De Oratore of a particular rhetorical method. The method is referred to by the Romans as controversia and by the Sophists before them as antilogic and involves the conduct of argument by placing two or more opposing claims in juxtaposition. I will argue that instead of discussing controversia in a formal manner, by abstracting its general nature and detailing its logical parts (diaeresis), Cicero chooses to dramatize controversia in order to transcend abstract principles and allow his students direct access to argument in action. In a word, Cicero chooses to perform the subject, and in so doing to give substance or body to theory and pedagogy. In the process, he also pursues his own most cherished philosophical objective, which is to bring res and verba, the thing and the word into synthesis. I will further suggest that the rhetoric of embodiment which Cicero develops in De Oratore is replete with interesting pedagogical implications. Like much of Cicero's published work, De Oratore was intended to serve as a model for imitation by others (see Axer 59). In this case, the text models both a particular set of rhetorical principles and a distinctive pedagogical stance for teaching them. I am particularly interested in what the pedagogy of De Oratore has to say to us today about an appropriate approach to the teaching of argumentation.' But before I begin with Cicero, De Oratore, antilogic, controversia, and the rhetoric of embodiment, I would go back even further in history, from Rome to the eastern Mediterranean, from the eloquence of Cicero to the arguments of Odysseus, that other man famous for dealing with contention (Odyssey 1.2). You will recall that when Odysseus leaves Calypso after seven years as a captive on her paradisal island, he sails away on a log raft which breaks up in a large storm sent by Poseidon. When it looks as though he is doomed to drown, he laments that all he has accomplished on his way home will perish with him. Would that I had died on the fields of Troy, he cries, where all my deeds would have been noted, praised, and preserved (5.306-12). What Odysseus is concerned with here is his kleos: his fame, honor, stature, renown, that standard heroic obsession that one's reputation will ring out under heaven (8.74f; cf. Thalmann 60-69). Instead of a life of adventure marked by kleos, however, Odysseus in Book V is faced with death at sea, a death unmarked and lonely (5.312). What is notable for us in this episode is that kleos appears only to exist in the reports on one's life; i.e. it requires discourse to give it substance, enough substance to transcend the event itself. Consequently, when Odysseus arrives on land and is taken by Nausikaa to the Phaiakian court, he acts the part of a poet as well as a hero (11.68-69) by recounting his adventures and in the process giving form to his kleos. Discursive enactment, therefore, becomes the only way in which the unforgettable experi-

The Internet and access to it have grown exponentially in the past three years. Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center reports that, since January 1994 when its first survey of Internet users was conducted, the Internet has grown from 1250 servers to over one million servers. There are over thirty million users of the Internet in the United States alone (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center). The versatility of the medium has increased along with its size, as the addition of Java technology and other features has increased the dynamism and interactivity of Web sites and as conveyance via television has increased access. Mass communications scholars and our colleagues in interpersonal, organizational, and small group communication have been studying computer-mediated communication [CMC] for some time. Mass communications researchers have been concerned with a number of questions-how First Amendment protections and intellectual and property rights transfer from print to CMC; what factors play a role in attracting audiences to Internet sites; what strategies can be used to determine accuracy of information on the Internet; and so forth (McChesney; Morris and Ogan; Reeves and Nass). Interpersonal communication researchers have studied the development and maintenance of relationships online (Walther; Parks and Floyd), while small group researchers have examined the dynamics of group process in computer-mediated environments (Savicki, Lingenfelter, and Kelley; Rafaeli and Sudweeks). In addition to these, there have been many other forms of communication research studying Internet discourse and interaction. But rhetorical critics and theorists are latecomers to the scene. There are many possible reasons for this. Many humanists have been slow to take up interest in discourse in electronic environments, perhaps because they suspect that critical work and critical theory will need to be changed to suit the new communication environments, and this is true because in a hypertext environment, author, audience, and text are dispersed. While such dispersion can and does occur in other modalities, computer-mediated discourse is particularly prone to it. The function of the author as originator of a message can be suppressed in groupauthored, disguised, or anonymous Internet postings. As I will show later, identifying the nature and reactions of audiences is made more difficult in computer-mediated environments. And when text becomes hypertext, the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability. As Ted Friedman (73) noted,

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

Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip by Laura Gurak. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pp. Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work by Jane Maher. Urbana: NCTE, 1997. 331 pp. Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth, edited by Frederick J. Antczak. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1995. 335 pp. Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction by Jonathan Potter. London: SAGE Publications, 1996. The Emperor's New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style by Kathryn T. Flannery. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. 240 pp.

delegitimate any work that has been done on scientific style and arrangement and any attention that has been paid to ethical and pathetical proofs in (252) by scholars in sociology and rhetoric of science. Pera responds to the point about scientific style by stating believe that style and arrangement, although interesting topics of philosophical analysis, are inessential to science (the law of falling bodies, say, did not acquire or change its status of scientific knowledge when Galileo translated it from Latin into Italian and put it in the context of a dialogue) (255). In effect, he agrees with Gross's assessment by implying that style has no role in science. In addition, Pera's example suggests that he limits the scope of style to mere surface features of discourse-words may change but the concept (or scientific law) does not. If we examine examples from the realm of contemporary science in action, it becomes difficult to continue to conceive of style as ornamental or reduced to surface features and separate from the thoughts being articulated. While some scholars and many scientists may share Pera's reductive definition of style as surface, recent research in rhetoric and composition, as well as postmodern theories of language, suggest that style is connected in central ways with thought and argument (Faigley, Gage, Rankin). To build on this recent scholarship on style, the study of scientific practices can provide important examples of style that encompass an integral part of the scientific concepts or laws being formulated. The role of the rhetorical trope of metaphor or the figure of analogy in the process of scientific inquiry constitutes a prime example. In fact, the role of analogies and metaphors (and a third, related category, models) in scientific investigation has been, for several decades, a topic of much discussion by scholars interested in the workings of science; however, there has been much less inclination for scholars to draw out the implications of these discussions. In this paper, I want to begin to explore some of these implications by reviewing first, how philosophers and rhetoricians of science have conceptualized analogy and its contribution to the work of science; and second, by reporting some observations drawn from an empirical study of a group of physicists as they

T he goal of this essay is to present an argument for the unity of Isocrates' l speech Antidosis which takes into account its complexity. Isocrates recognized the unusual nature of the discourse he was creating and talked explicitly about its complexity and the need for the reader's careful attention. To argue for the unity, or cohesion, of the speech, I will examine Isocratean notions of unity specifically, especially in the use of stylistic terminology related to mixtures. Then I shall examine how these ideas fall in with ideas of unity more generally in Greek composition. After examining these approaches, we can then look at the progress within the Antidosis and its particular sense of cohesion on both structural and thematic levels. The two levels of structure and theme are intimately related, and thus will need to be treated together. In attending to the issues proposed, I hope to set out some ideas on how Isocrates perceives unity to function, how notions of unity are affected by the rhetorical situation, how multiple ideas can be unified in one discourse, and finally how this discourse can demonstrate Isocratean methods of rhetorical composition. The speech presents an important example of the possibilities of expanding discourse to serve multiple functions. As such, the speech and its mixed unities can be relevant to ideas about the discourse of modem times as well as ancient. About 354/3 BC Isocrates created the fiction of defending himself before a jury in his speech known as the Antidosis. The speech responds to an actual antidosis procedure in which Isocrates had been asked to finance from his private estate a public expense known as a liturgy. Through this rather elaborate antidosis procedure, an Athenian citizen who was asked to finance a liturgy could request that another citizen take over that burden if the latter were more financially capable. The latter then had the option to finance the liturgy or exchange estates. If the challenged person refused the two options, the issue would go to a court (MacDowell 162-4). This antidosis procedure, as a question of one's private estate, would be handled as a private case (MacDowell 58). That is, this was a private dispute between two individuals. But when Isocrates found himself in such a situation, being asked to take on someone else's liturgy, this private litigation also raised the question of his history of public service. Isocrates defended his willingness to take on liturgies (15.5, 15.158),1 but he saw the charge as a broader attack on his public life and as evidence of confusion or envy on the part of most Athenians. He states in the opening of the Antidosis:

A. Introduction In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates suggests that rhetoric is not only implicated in the continual pursuit of truth, but it is also the study of how truth is made known in (276a). Socrates warns Phaedrus not to suppose that because words are that they have therefore become reliable and permanent (275d). For Socrates, when living speech is down it becomes transformed or objectified into a representation of the real. In Socrates' view, living speech is a state of interiority, an articulation of self-understanding; when speech is alienated from its dialogic context it becomes discourse. Although Socrates argues that one must be exceedingly to believe that written words can do anything more than remind oneself what one already knows, this simple-minded approach to writing provides a means of exploring how discourse produces what Martin Heidegger calls a commemorative meaning. For Heidegger, discourse preserves the remembrance of an event; dead discourse reminds us of the event of living speech because it bears the design and inscribes historical occurrences. character of living speech does not change in its articulation; its character does not begin as an object, does not end as an object, and does not consist of any essential qualities of an object. In Part I of this paper I explore the impact of Heidegger's idea of discourse upon the traditional concept of style to argue, in accordance with Heidegger, that style is a reminder of living speech; style is a disclosure of incarnate thought, the presencing of a human's being that is structured by a two-fold process: first, a standing forth or unconcealing of its presence; and second, a holding back or concealing of its presence. Traditionally, discussions of style have been limited to representational theories of discourse that see style either solely in terms of outward appearance, beautiful form or in terms of some combination that sets form into a bipolar opposition with content. However, Heidegger's argument is that the traditional view of art as an aesthetic object is not adequate. In order to retrieve style from the confines of bipolarity, Heidegger develops a model of art that is based upon his disclosive theory of truth; his theory of art effectively removes beauty as a criterion for understanding art. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger develops a non-aesthetic approach to a work of art by arguing that truth, rather than beauty, is the origin of a work of art; his essay also suggests the outlines of a non-representational

In one way or another, an interest in has been present in from writings of Gorgias and Plato, through treatises on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres,' and on to work of Kenneth Burke, particularly his notions of identification and consubstantiality.2 As in many disciplines, has played its part implicitly in rhetorical theory and pedagogy. For example, reader response criticism addresses in terms of affective and subjective aspects of epistemic and composition theory; rhetorical interest in memory addresses theories of knowledge, sources of inspiration, and subjectivity in prewriting (see Rider, Reynolds), all of which are body-centered; bodily delivery remains a concern in speech communication. The rhetoric of and, more specifically, of medical science, explores ways in which medicalized is both socially and discursively constructed (see Duden). More recently, feminist rhetoricians such as Janice Norton have begun a historiography of which focuses on need to reread a rhetorical theory that theorizes without reference to sexual difference. Only recently, however, has the body as such become explicit locus of debates about interrelation of power and discourse. This annotated bibliography surveys germinal texts which read in terms of epistemology, gender construction, and social inscription of meaning. Its intent is to assist rhetoricians who wish to investigate as a crucial site of intersection of persuasion, discourse, and power. More explicit discussions of began when Anglo-American feminists asserted that the personal is political and French feminists exhorted us to write body. Since then, a number of disciplines have begun to work out what this focus on personal and could possibly mean: gendered body? symbolic body? social-political body? discursive body? While feminists are credited with initiating discussions of female as text or site in which issues of power are hotly contested, has become locus of cultural, historical, sociological, philosophical, and literary, as well as gender studies. As Anthony Synnott reminds us, is

James L. Kinneavy, who was until this year the Blumberg Centennial Profes sor of English at the University of Texas, has been one of the major influences on the development of composition for more than 25 years. His bestknown book, A Theory of Discourse, published in 1971, is credited by many in our field with promoting the revival of rhetoric in university English That book was followed in 1976 by Aims and Audiences in Writing and Writing-Basic Modes of Organization (Both written with John Cope and J.W. Campbell). Kinneavy's theory of discourse relies on his definition of discourse as any utterance having a beginning, middle and end, and a purpose. He explained his theory graphically by means of his well-known communications triangle. this interview, conducted in May 1996 in Austin, Texas, he offers some ways that the triangle can be used in teaching writing. He also uses the trianglewith its acknowledged debt to Jakobson-to generate his theory of the major aims of discourse. Using this taxonomy, Kinneavy attempts to explain the basic organizational pattern of each aim of discourse. But Kinneavy does not wish to be known solely or even principally as a taxonomer, for, as he says, taxonomy is only a part of theory, and he has extended much of his influence as a theorist and historian of rhetoric. His 1987 book, Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith, explains how the new testament idea of faith grew out of the use of the term pisteis by Isocrates and Aristotle. Kairos is another term frequently associated with Kinneavy because of his lucid explanation of the term in his work. Kinneavy is credited with demonstrating the moral aspect of kairos, establishing a link between it and justice by arguing that to be moral and just means to observe the proper measure in action and words. At the end of the interview, with typical Kinneavian modesty in response to a question about how he looks back on his career as a scholar and teacher, he concedes that In the discipline of rhetoric, tried to recognize the importance of history and the importance of theory and the importance of the empirical. Finally, with a touch of pride, he closes with this admission: I think one of the most important contributions gave to rhetoric as a discipline was as one of the people-Corbett comes to mind; a lot of other people come to mind-who gave rhetoric a respectable name as a scholarly discipline in English departments. Few, if any, of the many members of our profession whose minds have been touched by Kinneavy would disagree.

The early works of I. A. Richards, while not committed to hard-line verificationism, nonetheless seem persuaded of the central tenet of logical positivism, that the only truth strictly so-called is the truth disclosed by the methods of empirical science. This minimal positivism, coupled with a non-physicalist form of behaviorism, is evident in books like Science and Poetry (1926) and Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). However, if Richards was a positivist, he was a positivist who wanted to save poetry from positivism. Primitive positivists like A. J. Ayer impenitently regarded poetic discourse as meaningless. Since they are neither analytic nor available for empirical testing, the statements found in poems are really pseudo-statements, expressions of feeling and no more. Richards, who loved poetry, feared that people would cease to read it or write it if they were convinced that it was nothing but emotional gush. And so, in his early books, he developed an affectivism in which poetry, by helping us order our conflicting impulses, acquires a value distinct from the value of science. On this view, poetry is not a means of expressing and communicating propositional truth-only science does that-but a device for constructive behavior-modification by means of language. Meanwhile, from the very beginning of his career, Richards had been a diligent student of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was convinced that the works of Coleridge contained many important insights into the nature and effects of poetry which, in order to be made generally accessible and secure wider appreciation, needed only to be disentangled from the metaphysics of romantic idealism in which they were embedded. Quotations from Coleridge appeared with great frequency in his own writing and teaching. Kathleen Coburn predicted that sooner or later Richards would have to write a book on Coleridge, and eventually her prophecy was fulfilled. Setting out to rewrite Coleridge in the language of empiricism, Richards produced Coleridge on Imagination (1934), which suggested to some of his readers that Richards had not converted Coleridge to empiricism but that Coleridge had made Richards an idealist, if not a metaphysical then at least a linguistic idealist. It is the Richards thus baptized in the Alphean flood who speaks in the lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) delivered two years after the publication of the Coleridge book.' From first to last, in all his writings and through all his changes of mind, Richards insisted that he was a pragmatist. And indeed, in every project he undertakes, from Basic English to literary theory, he is unfailingly preoccupied with the practice of reading and the possibilities of communication. If behaviorism and romanticism are just the low-mimetic (preterite) and high-mimetic (elite) forms of pragmatism, respectively, then Richards' progress from the former to

I n last few decades historians have devoted significant attention to language used by political actors during American revolution and founding. The ground-breaking work of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood established importance of language as a motivating force, conceptual filter, and constitutive process.' The concept of ideology as a paradigm or organizing conceptual framework figured prominently in these early studies. Initially, (re)discovery of situated language led to recovery of a republican ideology at core of early American political imagination.2 The claims of republican historiography were, of course, contested by other historians who located alternative ideological frameworks such as liberalism or protestant Calvinism in language of early American politics.3 More recent historical scholarship challenges the assumption that there is but one language-one exclusive or even hegemonic paradigm-that characterizes political discourse of a particular place or moment in time.4 Historians of political discourse (including rhetorical critics and public address scholars) now face challenge of studying interaction of, and interrelationship between, multiple ideologies, idioms, or languages in early American public culture. This recent interest exhibited by historians in language of revolutionary and founding period is part of a broader in historiography and humanities scholarship generally.5 Part of this turn has involved problematizing status of language and historical documents or texts. Whereas pre-turn scholarship commonly approached language as a transparent medium for transmitting ideas and treated text as an unproblematic vessel that transported idea, first, to an historically proximate audience, and then, to succeeding generations, post-turn scholarship (in rhetoric, history, literary studies, etc.) explores cognitive and constitutive capacity (and limits or incapacity) of linguistic representation as well as internal and external dynamics of discursive text. This shift in attitude regarding language and text generates a particular dilemma that I term problem of contested text.6 Put simply, certain texts (most notably in philosophy and sciences, but in political realm as well) seem to resist linguistic turn. These texts invite and/or demand, their defenders inform us, a pious, respectful reading. Texts of this sort, opponents (mainly on right) of linguistic turn commonly argue, have escaped perishable or ephemeral fate that awaits vast majority of discursive products because they contain and transmit timeless truths or universally valid principles and must, therefore, be read in a manner that acknowledges and respects this achievement. Contested texts challenge critics and historians to

Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. Theresa Enos. Garland: New York and London, 1996; xxiv; 803. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archeological Composition of the Discourse Community by James E. Porter. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, 1992; 6 +185 pages. Writing the Speech by William E. Wiethoff. Greenwood, Indiana: The Educational Video Group, 1994; xi; 217.

pletely unavailable to conscious introspection, as Mark Turner explains (247). According to Turner, the paradigm emphasizes the ties between meaning (hence semantics) and conventional cultural and structures, in contrast to the generative paradigm, which places these structures outside its area of interest (21). Turner insists that we are designed as a species to notice in consciousness not the obvious and unoriginal but rather the novel and nuanced, but that of language and literature are for the most part ... acts of the unconscious mind (43). These acts are based on conceptual connections [which] are disclosed in our patterns of reading and writing (149). A cognitive rhetoric should provide as complete a description as possible of what drives an audience's reaction in the presence of different kinds of texts as well as what basic needs and expectations in readers cause some kinds of texts to be produced and others, logically possible, not to exist in the literary universe. The cognitive rhetoric I'm suggesting treats the novel genre as a linguistic

course of his mythic depiction of the struggles of the lover's soul, when the lover's soul is converted from mania to reverence. The soul's conversion to reverence is a key moment in the myth, for it enables the lover to engage his beloved in edifying communication-in the kind of rhetorical discourse literally described by Socrates after reciting his second speech.' This essay interprets the conversion of the lover's soul as an instance (or allegory) of persuasion that sets an attitude of reverence in the lover/student of Plato's ideal rhetoric. The persuasion-to-reverence, the consequence of the lover's appropriate interpretive act, shows how the transformation of a lover's/ student's character is a starting-point in his progress toward becoming a Platonic rhetor-not only in affecting the appropriate ethical stance toward winning his beloved through edifying communication, but also in understanding, and being influenced by, the dual nature of embodied logos-its material and spiritual significance. The lover's reading of the beloved's face-this nondiscursive sensual presence embodying and radiating a Platonic Idea-is explained, in the context of the allegory, as a trope for the appropriate reception of a rhetorical artifact. The difference between the persuasive face and the persuasive word is the difference between the two sites where logos is manifest. Their difference shows how rhetorical words artfully mimic the persuasive face of the natural order. Nevertheless, they both may influence the soul to harmonize with Platonic Ideas in more or less the same way. From this perspective, in Platonic thought the redeeming character of the natural order is the effect it has on souls prepared to receive/observe it appropriately. The same value is attributed to Plato's ideal rhetoric. So part of the idea of learning rhetoric is linked to preparing the soul to appropriately receive/observe embodied logos-to be able to interpret sensually evocative signifiers in morally edifying ways (as the lover does). Thus, in the context of the allegory, Plato's understanding of rhetoric, and what the rhetor must know, encompass not only its appropriate production, but its appropriate reception as well. The lover's conversion is an allegorical case in point. It exemplifies an edifying aim of rhetorical education as a process of being persuaded

[The] temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life. This led to the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times. -Mikhail Bakhtin (trans. H. Iswolsky 10)

A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy, edited by Stephen P. Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger D. Cherry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; 376 pp. Rethinking the History of Rhetoric: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Rhetorical Tradition ed. Takis Poulakos. Boulder: Westview Press. 1993. xi + 292 pp. Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism edited by Thomas W. Benson. Davis, CA, Hermagoras Press, 1993; xi‐xxii; 247pp. Landmark Essays on American Public Address edited by Martin J. Medhurst. Davis, CA, Hermagoras Press, 1993; xi‐xliii; 227pp. Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Phaedo, by Paul Stern. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993; 240 pp. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges: Years of Acceptance, Growth, and Doubt by Katherine H. Adams. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993; xi + 192 pp.

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism edited by Thomas W. Benson. Davis, CA, Hermagoras Press, 1993; xi‐xxii; 247pp. Landmark Essays on American Public Address edited by Martin J. Medhurst, Davis, CA, Hermagoras Press, 1993; xi‐xliii; 227pp. A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy, edited by Stephen P. Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger D. Cherry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; 376 pp. Rethinking the History of Rhetoric: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Rhetorical Tradition ed. Takis Poulakos. Boulder: Westview Press. 1993. 292 pp.

Classical practitioners of the art of rhetoric such as Demosthenes have long been a familiar part of the rhetorical tradition, but subsequent periods have generally been confined to the history of rhetorical theory, with little attention paid to political rhetoric or public discourse. We need to develop a more rhetorical perspective on the history of rhetoric to encompass rhetoric's dual nature as an intellectual discipline and a practical political art. Such a perspective would focus on the domain between the learned culture and the public experience, the domain where rhetorical theories are applied to discursive practices to formalize who can speak, how controversial issues are to be argued, and what political purposes such arguments serve. The eighteenth century is a dynamic period in the history of rhetoric precisely because the domain between the educated world and the public sphere was transformed by the expansion of the reading public.' Rhetoricians such as Hugh Blair were the first professors to lecture on modern culture because they taught students who came from the provinces of the English reading public.2 General histories of college English studies tend to ignore eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the assumption that the study of English is more or less synonymous with the study of literature (see Baldick, Graff, McMurty, and Palmer).3 We need more rhetorically oriented histories of modem cultural studies, not just because literature specialists have tacitly accepted the erasure of rhetoric from such studies, but also because the formation of disciplinary knowledge is a rhetorical process, and the domain of rhetoric is where disciplines set themselves off from related discourses and public audiences. Rhetoricians first introduced English into the university curriculum in the middle of the eighteenth century in Scotland, America, and elsewhere in the cultural provinces. All of the figures whom Howell has categorized as New rhetoricians came from outside the centers of English education, while Oxford and Cambridge

Coleridge criticism has a stormy quality about it, as if what we know about Coleridge is something we see only by flashes of lightning over some dark landscape. In Experience Into Thought, Kathleen Coburn says that Coleridge is irritating to certain tempers, perhaps especially to the curriculum-making academic mind(67). Her statement is ironic. Coleridge was always working on curriculum. His rage for a system that included the irrational and lucky graces forced him into whole courses about thinking and language, whole encyclopedias of knowledge. Still, the plan in most academic circles seems to have been to place Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the canon as a fragment of history and forget him. After long years of reading criticism about Samuel Taylor Coleridge rather than reading his works, it is time to see if there is a Coleridge worth claiming for rhetoric and composition. One problem in validating a Coleridge for our time is reading him. It seems that we have lost the habit of reading his kind of discourse. Perhaps because of his translations and readings of the German Transcendentalists, Coleridge's prose wanders and speculates, opposes its central premises, comments on itself incessantly. Composition scholars see him as an antithesis of the kind of style recommended in our classrooms and in our journals. Also, as composition studies attempt to establish territory in departmental turf wars, Coleridge becomes an easy target for those who would use him to demonstrate how literary concerns should not be included in composition pedagogy. As much as some might want Coleridge to go away, he will not. Linda Flower argues that Coleridge's inspirational model for composition is a threat to the teaching of composition (Problem-Solving). Ross Winterowd asserts that Coleridge is a primary reason for the devaluation of the literature of fact because his theory of composition or rhetoric lacks purpose (64). In both cases, eminent scholars and researchers in the field of composition are reacting to a stereotypical view of Coleridge and his works, as if the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan represent Coleridge's philosophy and theory of composition. But there is more to Coleridge's philosophy of composition than his poems, his theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, or his criticism suggest. Kenneth

By now there seems widespread consensus among scholars on rhetoric that Protagoras and Gorgias, the leading sophists of the fifth century B.C.E., made significant progress in building a theory of discourse that excluded any absolute standard for the judgment of truth. These ancient sophists thus anticipated today's prevailing school of rhetoricians, who hold that absolute standard for the judgment of truth can never be found ... because the individual mind can never transcend personal emotions, social circumstances, and historical conditions.1 This position prevented the two sophists from adopting, as it now impels us to set aside, the terms knowledge and truth in their classic objective sense since neither consciousness nor discourse can be supposed accurately to represent an absolute and non-contingent external reality. Robert Scott's famous 1967 article On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic, from which we often date the current renaissance of anti-foundationalism in rhetoric, repeatedly acknowledged Protagoras and Gorgias as pioneers. And the resonance has been repeatedly acknowledged since (Jarratt &9, Crowley 332, Meiland 51, Newman 47). Patricia Bizzell has pointed out, however, that something is missing from today's anti-foundationalist rhetoric:

Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness by Patricia Bizzell. Pittsburgh, U of Pittsburg P, 1992; pp. 295.

Rhetorical criticism, as it has developed over the past five decades or so, has taken on many agendas-for example, neo-Aristotelian criticism, movement studies, dramatistic criticism, genre criticism-all of which have been attempts to apply, reconstruct, or improve on a long tradition. What is striking about this body of critical literature is that none of it takes very seriously one of the paramount concerns of that tradition-namely, style. Indeed, a survey of the periodical literature shows that there persists a fundamental neglect of in both the theory and the practice of rhetorical criticism.1 Various theoretical and critical practices represented in this body of literature suggest that is a frustratingly elusive and amorphous creature, stubbornly resisting description. Most of the material does not venture much beyond theory and is, for the critic, consequently inadequate, for it falls short of a level of analysis that would reveal how rhetoric works. As a result, rhetorical criticism does not provide a useful critical approach to reading a discursive text. In one respect, this shows that some incisive remarks about the importance of in criticism and the neglect thereof which Donald Bryant made over thirty years ago have been either disregarded or forgotten. Moreover, I argue that both the interpretation of discourse (criticism) and the production of discourse (composition) can profit from careful attention to rhetorical style. For if, as Bryant2 has suggested, style is the final elaboration of meaning, then surely is the initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning. Does it not seem reasonable that ought play a major role in the critical act of the analysis of discourse? However, granting that has been neglected, I now must explain what I mean by style. To begin, Bryant has urged us to regard it not as the mere department of elocutio but that in dispositio and even inventio participate. Bryant argues: It is difficult at best to consider the functioning language of discourse without becoming involved at once with the ordering of the discourse. Furthermore, if we go beyond the static idea of disposition as arrangement, to the potentially dynamic idea of disposition as disposing, as Wagner thought necessary, we may conclude that for the critic the two names signify the two lenses for a stereopticon view of a

Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions by Haig Bosmajian. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, 205 pp. The Context of Human Discourse: A Configurational Criticism of Rhetoric by Eugene E. White. Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 1992, vii‐ix, 307pp. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts by Rita Copeland.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; 295pp. Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Theory by Robert L. Montgomery. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1992; 216. The Discipline of Taste and Feeling by Charles Wegener. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Robert M. La Follette Sr., The Voice of Conscience by Carl R. Burgchardt. New York, Greenwood Press, 1992, viii + 243 pp.

First, I'd like to offer analysis of Halasek's and Bernard-Donals' utterances, but it may also be taken as rhetorical or tendentious characterization of them. If we begin with the two points of reference provided by our session's title, and Rhetorical Criticism, I think we can say that Halasek identifies herself as rhetorical critic or theorist who belongs to community of like-minded rhetorical critics and theorists, one that together poststructuralist thought, social constructivism, and writing and pedagogy. For them Bakhtin's vilification of is problem and his alternative rhetorical tradition is an opportunity. Halasek can summarize the Bakhtin attacks and distance herself from it as a definition of that is not ours and she can appropriate as much more congenial to herself and her fellow rhetoricians the rhetorical tradition of oppositional genres and discourse moves with which Bakhtin identifies the novel. She imagines Bakhtin's hostility to as consequence of his hostility to the official languages of Russia during his lifetime and imagines herself and her colleagues as also opposed to a of oppression but apparently not confronted with similar authoritarian political situation. Instead of identifying herself exclusively with parodic rhetoric opposed to an official monologic she posits dialogic rhetoric which can contemplate the tensions between polemic and rhetorics in the professional and pedagogical tasks of textual and cultural analysis. Bakhtin offers her better way of doing what rhetorical critics were already doing. Halasek welcomes Bakhtin's tension-filled genres and joyful relativity in prose that is relatively free from tension and clear about where it stands. She can separate Bakhtin's vilification of from his celebration of it, choose one side over the other, and even explain away Bakhtin's adherence to the side she rejects as function of his particular historical situation. She is at home with the listeners she posits and brings them Bakhtin they can use without having to change their minds about or politics. Bemard-Donals, on the other hand, writes tension-filled and ambivalent prose in the name of escaping from relativism and uncertainty. He is not at one with what he takes to be the community of contemporary rhetorical but sees it as plagued by the collapse of distinction between science and that he somehow wants to reassert He persists in commitment to theory or science or dialectic or history that he believes rhetorical critics like Fish and Rorty have subsumed under rhetoric, and he turns to Bakhtin not to assimilate him to the consensus in current rhetorical but to find way out of the impasse of current rhetorical theory. The Bakhtin he needs for his purposes is not the celebrant of parody and joyful relativity but the theorist of the socially constituted subject who can provide rhetorical criticism with scientific model for understanding how subjects are formed in language. In effect, he wants to substitute Bakhtin's sociolinguistics of the subject for the psychology of the subject Plato calls for in the Phaedrus as the scientific foundation for that could then know, as he put it in his

(Inter)views: Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy edited by Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale, with an introduction by David Bleich.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 269 pp. Rhetorical Questions: Studies of Public Discourse by Edwin Black. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; 209 pp. $24.95 cloth. An Introduction to Composition Studies,> edited by Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 189. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research ed. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1992; ix+354. John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse by James S. Baumlin.Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991; 333 pages. Richard McKeon: A Study by George Kimball Plochmann.Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990; vi + 260pp. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon ed. By Thomas Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 318.

In the summer of 1763, James Boswell witnessed Quaker woman speaking to her Sunday gathering. Shortly thereafter, Boswell remarked on the event to Samuel Johnson. Sir, Dr. Johnson replied, a woman's preaching is like dog's walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Johnson's comment expresses two significant features of early modem rhetorical practice: women's public address was rare, and it was widely considered an affront to conventions of cultural discourse. Neither comes as surprise for those familiar with eighteenth-century public life; but they do serve as prompts to the question: How and to what effect was women's speech portrayed in this period? In searching for answers, we are led back toward the modem origins of rhetoric's historical association with misogyny. I examine in this essay popular representations of women as speakers in the eighteenth-century. Surveying prominent journals, reviews, newspapers, and magazines, we can better understand how rhetorical conventions help to condition audiences and habituate responses. One such rhetorical convention-misogynist satire-is here examined as force in shaping attitudes toward women as speakers. My interest is not so much in the formal properties of satire-though we must reckon with rhetorical form-but more in convention and content as modes of insinuation. satiric portrayal of women by men in eighteenth-century England may be grouped for synoptic purposes according to two general characterizations: (1) Womens's speech is perverse, and (2) it is meaningless. Subsidiary associations interlard this body of satiric literature, including images of violence, victimage, and absurdity. Together, these satiric representations help to establish patterns of reception, habits of perceiving women's speech as naturally aberrant. Insofar as such images of women's speech were promoted in popular and pejorative terms, we may accord to the eighteenth-century male satirists significant role in shaping modern attitudes about women and speech. My analysis thus enters into the arc of rhetorical action where production and praxis meet-that is, at the point where misogynist convention and audience inclination touch. I hope to thereby establish the destructive force of such satire, and to show that it functioned to withhold from women incentives to public address. This study, then, takes as its point of departure Felicity Nussbaum's observation on eighteenth-century discursive practices. The context of antifeminist satires, she writes, creates myth of assumptions that resonate in the satirists's minds. Women, as the violator of the authority of her contractural bonds to the patriarchical order, dares to disdain that authority in the Restoration

Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr. and its Sources by Keith D. Miller. New York: The Free Press, 1992. 247 pp. +. Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman by Walter Jost. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse by Kathleen E. Welch. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990; pp. viii + 186. Constructing Rhetorical Education, edited by Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; pp. 432 + Preface, Index. Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality by Ruth Morse. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp.ii + 295.

(1992). Legitimating leadership: The rhetoric of succession as a genre of presidential discourse. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 25-38.

Perhaps fullest expression of contrast between as a set of rules or as a bureaucratic system and as literature or rhetoric or language' is work of James Boyd White. In a series of books and articles, White has explored a cultural critique of by considering life of to be a kind of discourse that engenders a special kind of ethical and political community.2 While my main intent is critique, I want to begin by celebrating position that underlies what White calls literary or rhetorical character of law: fundamental recognitions that shapes perception and directs action, and that texts create communities. In White's words, law constitutes a world of meaning and action: creates a set of actors and speakers and offers them possibilities for meaningful speech and action that would not otherwise exist; in so doing establishes and maintains a community, defined by its processes of language (White 1990, xiv). While Professor White has been object of a variety of criticisms, I will focus on two criticisms that accept position that is fundamentally discursive, while expressing concerns about White's conception of role of power in communication. First is position represented eloquently by late Robert Cover-that, while is integrally interpretive, differs fundamentally from other interpretive activities because law, unlike literature or poetry or drama, is necessarily coercive.3 Since interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death, wrote Cover, its texts must attend to the conditions of effective domination (Cover 1986, 1601). Even violence of weak judges is utterly real-a naive but immediate reality, in need of no interpretation, no critic to reveal it (1609). A second, related, critique is that White's vision of community is insufficiently attentive to operation of law's ideological power. The problem is not that White ignores power or that, as Richard Posner would seem to have it, literature is but a sidelight to real operations of and legal institutions (Posner 1988). As White notes, whoever controls our languages has greatest power of all (1988, 747). His reaction has been to offer new ways to read and to write of power. My concern is that he does not account for resistance to change that is built into social form and social practice of legal discourse. Linguistic practices run deep;

This essay examines James Boyd White's analysis of legal discourse from the perspective of legal and cultural critic. We commend his observation that jurists have done poor job of communicating their decisions to both legal practitioners and the public community. We ask, however, how his art of translation as constitutes ethical and political communities enabling writers and readers of what White characterizes as law's most central text, the judicial opinion, to participate more constructively the creation of a world of meaning. We have focused our analysis on White's Justice as Translation.' Our focus is appropriate because this essay is the developmental sequel to When Words Lose Their Meaning2 which White announced his method of rhetorical and cultural criticism. His is method for analyzing legal texts systematically to illuminate the meaning of justice and injustice in the relations we establish with our languages and with each other.3 We argue that the forms of discourse addressed to or issued from courts the United States define distinct (in White's terms) of argument. White contributes an approach to this culture which is particularly useful to those extra-legal critics who participate the construction of the meaning of judicial opinion through thoughtful reading, but which provides little guidance to those involved the creation of those texts.4 While we accept that legal discourse is distinct culture of argument with characteristics common with other cultures of argument, including literary

Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches. Edited by Richard Leo Enos. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990. Pp.vi + 264. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Newly Translated, with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by George Kennedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, xvi + 335 pp. Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge by Greg Meyers. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1990. Ethics in Human Communication by Richard L. Johannesen. 3rd Edition. Waveland Press, 1990. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action by James V. Wertsch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 147 pp. + references and name and subject index. Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science by J. Vernon Jensen. Newark: University of Delaware, 1991. Pp. 253. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Edited by Herbert W. Simons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 388.