Rhetoric Society Quarterly
183 articlesMarch 2005
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Abstract
Abstract Chaim Perelman's concept of presence is extended and enriched by applying it to a historical museum exhibit that commemorated a watershed of Austrian history, the Anschluss of 1938. To understand the argumentative effect of presence in this exhibit, new rhetorical categories are deployed: foreground and background, space, and time. These are managed in the interest of an ideological position: to free the Austrian conscience and consciousness from the burden of memory created by the disproportionate participation of Austrians in the Holocaust. Finally, a basic problem with presence is addressed: its apparent incompatibility with any form of rational argumentation.
January 2005
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Abstract
Many scholars have argued that rhetorical theory and pedagogy should return to the neo‐classical and agonistic theory and pedagogy of the antebellum era. The ability of proslavery ideology to dominate political and rhetorical practice, however, troubles any easy equation between that pedagogy and practice. This article argues that agonism was hindered by the rhetoric of the improbable cause, a tragic metanarrative of novels like Nick of the Woods, which served as a defense of slavery and slaveocracy, without even mentioning the word, through reinforcing a foundation for that system. This view served to rationalize a system that had a dreamy, noble, and tragic ethos that was actually protected and supported by a brutal practicality; left out is something in the middle, the practical but principled argument about long‐term politics.
September 2004
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Abstract
Abstract Between August of 1939 and February of 1942 Kenneth Burke maintained a vigorous correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, the editor of the Kenyon Review. The conversation between the two men delved repeatedly into the intersections of rhetoric and epistemology, and took as its point of departure an influential essay written by Burke and published by Ransom: “Four Master Tropes.” In this article, I contextualize “Four Master Tropes” against the author‐editor conversation in order to clarify the Burkean relationship between rhetoric and knowledge. I argue that Burke understands rhetoric as a core epistemological practice operative in every discovery of “truth.”
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Rhetorical theory in Yale's graduate schools in the late nineteenth century: The example of William C. Robinson'sForensic Oratory ↗
Abstract
Abstract Although conventional views about nineteenth‐century rhetoric highlight a shift from oratory to composition and from classical rhetoric with origins in Cicero and Quintilian to a "new" rhetoric with origins in Campbell, Blair, and Whately (with an attendant loss of scholarship and quality), William C. Robinson's Forensic Oratory (1893) can be grouped with a growing number of works that complicate such views. Robinson continues to emphasize oratory and to derive his theory from Cicero and Quintilian, using a complex of ideas called "uniformitarianism" to justify his direct appropriation of classical ideas. The resulting rhetoric lacks neither responsible scholarship nor high quality.
June 2004
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Abstract
Abstract One of the primary discussions at last fall's meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies addressed the question, “How ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical agency?” Several developments are worthy of note. First, although concern with agency began as a rear guard action against the post‐modern critique, the discussion appears to have shifted to more productive investigations into the consciousness and conditions of agency. Second, a growing number of scholars acknowledge that rhetoric as an interpretive theory describes a variety of rhetorical positions, some with more and some with less rhetorical agency. Rhetoric still faces the issue, however, of incorporating this knowledge into rhetoric's mission as a productive art.
March 2004
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Abstract
The rhetorical and poetic imaginations of Kenneth Burke The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke by James H. East. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 288 + xxxvii pp. The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke by Ross Wolin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 256 + xiii pp. George Campbell: Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment by Arthur E. Walzer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 175 + vii pp. Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, and Monboddo by Catherine L. Hobbs. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. 211 + vii pp. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 279
January 2004
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Abstract
Abstract This essay contributes to the growing body of historical research on Kenneth Burke by considering his work as a drug researcher for the Bureau of Social Hygiene in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The research he conducted under the watch of his conservative boss, Colonel Arthur Woods, reveals a resistant worker who effectively became hooked on the question of bodies and habits even as he at times explicitly rejected the aims and methods of his boss. Burke's rearticulations of efficiency and piety help show how the Bureau offered new vantages on the body, effectively broadening his critical compass.
June 2003
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Abstract
Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 by Nan Johnson Carbondale: SIU Press, 2002. 220 pp. Rhetoric In The Middle Ages And Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts By James J. Murphy. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. 1974. “Foreword to the Reprint”; Jody Enders. Bibliography, not credited. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 4. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xii + 399 pp. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts by James J. Murphy. 1971. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 5. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xxiii + 236 pp.
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Abstract
Abstract A Rhetoric of Motives is Kenneth Burke's only published work to consistently focus upon the subject of race. Although encouraged by the book's topic, this treatment was significantly shaped by Burke's friendship with African American novelist and critic, Ralph Ellison. Consequently, this essay offers one history of Burke's Rhetoric, drawing on both published work and unpublished correspondence between and concerning these two men. Based upon these materials, I isolate three texts as the central moments of the Burke/Ellison dialogue on race: Ellison's essay, “Richard Wright's Blues,”; Ellison's letter to Burke of November 23, 1945, and, finally. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives.
March 2003
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Appealing to the “intelligent worker”: Rhetorical reconstitution and the influence of firsthand experience in the rhetoric of Leonora O'Reilly ↗
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the rhetoric of labor activist Leonora O'Reilly for the ways she reconstituted her audience through a second persona of “intelligent workers.”; By balancing concrete contextualization with abstract visions of a future democracy, O'Reilly established identification with her audience of young, uneducated, poor women while simultaneously encouraging them to become a group of outspoken agents capable of transforming their oppressive circumstances. This article also explores the ways firsthand experiences influenced the process of reconstitution. To recognize the influences of extra‐verbal phenomena does not downplay rhetoric's role in the creation of an audience but rather calls attention to the dialectical relationship between language and an extra‐discursive reality and encourages scholars to examine a number of factors which can precipitate, impede, or otherwise shape the process of reconstitution.
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What happened at the first American writers’ congress? Kenneth Burke's “revolutionary symbolism in America” ↗
Abstract
Abstract Burke's famous performance at the First American Writers’ Congress in 1935 should be understood in relation to its occasion. The Congress was held to enlist the services of writers in creating a broad Popular Front, or People's Front, to encourage social change, so Burke's recommendation that “the people”; ought to be substituted for “the worker”; in Communist Party symbolism—that “propaganda by inclusion”; ought to succeed “propaganda by exclusion “—was actually in moderate keeping with the Congress’ broad aim. Though his recommendation was resisted by some, Burke was actually not so much marginalized by the Congress as identified with its controversies.
January 2003
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Practices, theories, and traditions: Further thoughts on the disciplinary identities of English and communication Studies ↗
Abstract
I often run along a path near my home. Recently I noticed something about my behavior: On especially crowded days I seldom greet either walkers or bikers, who are often talking in couples or riding by at high speeds. But when I meet other runners, I almost always say or signal hello. I interpret my greeting practice as a mode of identification: identifying with others sharing a running practice. For certain purposes, runners might identify with walkers and bikers, for example, in a civic action to save the path from the encroachment of housing developers. But within the group of pathway users, I identify primarily with other runners and, in a certain sense, we form a loose community of running practitioners. This is a very, very rough analogy for what happens at local university functions, at national scholarly conferences, and at non-academic events of all kinds, rhetorical contexts where disciplinary identities are established and reinforced for professional and lay audiences. To analyze performances of disciplinary identities in more depth, I'd like to begin heuristically with a three-dimensional model for locating academic fields in relation to each other. Axis A (Disciplinary Matrices) consists of practices, theories, and traditions; Axis B (Field Boundaries) includes disciplines, interdisciplines, transdisciplines, and non-disciplines; and Axis C (Cultural Sites) comprises ideational domains, material institutions, and public spheres.' Academic disciplines and their subfields can be identified and compared across the different axes of this model. For example, the disciplinary matrix of English Studies includes interpretive practices for critically reading, researching, and teaching texts; aesthetic and other theories for defining textual objects of study; and evolving traditions of texts to be described, compared, and evaluated (canons of literary, critical, and theoretical works). In the twentieth century, English as this matrix of practices, theories, and traditions (Axis A) was identified as a separate discipline (Axis B) with its own ideational domain in relation to other disciplines and its own subfields, institutionalized as an academic department within the
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Abstract
Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi‐disciplinary Perspective by Khosrow Jahandarie. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Company, 1999. 446 pp. Mattingly's “Telling Evidence”;: Re‐Seeing Nineteenth‐Century Women's Rhetorics Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader edited by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 292 + xii. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth‐Century America by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uniersity Press, 2002. 175 + xv. Seeking the Words of Women: Two Recent Anthologies Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology edited by Jane Donawerth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 337 + xlii pp. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 521 + xxxi pp.
September 2002
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Abstract
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.
June 2002
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Abstract
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.
March 2002
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Abstract
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
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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Abstract
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.
September 2001
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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.
January 2001
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Abstract
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.
June 2000
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Playing to the press in Mckinley's front porch campaign: The early weeks of a nineteenth‐century pseudo‐event ↗
Abstract
Abstract In the summer of 1896 William McKinley, Republican candidate for President, remained at home while his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, conducted a vigorous railroad campaign. Nonetheless, McKinley was not idle as he campaigned effectively from his home in Canton, Ohio. This analysis of McKinley ‘s summer campaign speeches establishes, first, that McKinley ‘s Front Porch campaign, even in its earliest weeks, consisted of a series of artificial events staged for the media, and, second, that this feature of the campaign shaped what McKinley said and how he said it, as McKinley created the impression of identification between the voters and himself.
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Mimesisbetween poetics and rhetoric: Performance culture and civic education in Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle ↗
Abstract
Abstract This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates’ performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.
March 2000
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
Abstract This article explores the ways in which Romantic literary theory offers contemporary rhetoricians a balanced answer to the question of audience, . an answer that allows for prose which reflects a private vision at the same time that it strives for social transformation. In connecting Coleridge's and Keats's hostile reactions to their nineteenth‐century readers with current expressivist theories, especially the work of Peter Elbow, the need to avoid audience at certain stages in the writing process becomes apparent. Yet ultimately the most powerful writing is audience‐centered, as Shelley's A Defence of Poetry illustrates through its call for imaginative empathy.
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Abstract
Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.
September 1999
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Abstract
The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece by Edward Schiappa. Yale UP, 1999; 225 pp. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Plato's Dream of Sophistry by Richard Marback. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press (1999): 147 pp. Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education by Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 202 pp. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
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The uses and limits of rhetorical theory: Campbell, Whately, and Perelman and Olbrechts‐Tyteca on the earl of Spencer's “address to Diana”; ↗
Abstract
r he three essays that follow offer readings of one of the most popular and l widely known rhetorical performances of recent times, the Earl of Spencer's 1997 funeral eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales (text reproduced in Appendix). Each section of the paper offers a reading of the address through a critical lens derived from the rhetorical theory of a different canonical theorist, respectively (and chronologically) George Campbell, Richard Whately, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Three questions animate this project. The first concerns the relationship of theory to criticism. Neither Campbell, Whately, nor the Belgians discusses the role of rhetorical criticism or offers an apparatus that facilitates it, although each of their theories includes tenets applicable to criticism. How well do their theoretical tenets work at the level of criticism; do any of these theorists introduce concepts that analysis of rhetorical practice might challenge? The second question concerns influence. The three theorists we chose are particularly interesting from this perspective because all of them, to varying degrees, are selfconscious about their debts to the rhetorical tradition. Campbell cites and affirms the contributions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Whately incorporates Campbell, and the Belgians incorporate Whately incorporating Campbell. What is the nature of this influence? Are the differences among these theorists differences of perspective or of emphasis? We are aware of the complexities surrounding the question of influence since it was broached by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, subsequently complicated by Harold Bloom, and more recently challenged by Michel Foucault. Our purpose is not to arbitrate these quite different views (which raise their own questions about the nature of influence) but to prompt a discussion of the nature of influence within the rhetorical tradition. The third question concerns the idea of progress in rhetorical theory. In what sense can each of the theorists be said to have made an advance over his predecessors? Does rhetorical theory progress as science typically progresses, by making obsolete that which it builds on? Or does rhetoric resemble philosophy, a discipline in which responses to a relatively constant problem set seem to benefit from their predecessors' work without replacing it?
March 1999
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Abstract
Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism by Robert Wess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 262 pp. Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, anda Theory of Social Change by Barbara A. Biesecker. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. x + 123 pp. Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric by Victor J. Vitanza. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 428 pages. Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 247 pp. Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
January 1999
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Identification and dissociation in rhetorical exposé: An analysis of St. Irenaeus’Against Heresies ↗
Abstract
A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.
June 1998
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Abstract
T he critical commonplace that rhetoric simply declined in direct proportion to rise of Romanticism has thankfully come under increasing scrutiny. In 1989, for example, Susan Jarratt questioned Donald C. Stewart's observation that the most notable feature of history of rhetoric in nineteenth century was its absence (73) and established constitutive role of rhetoric in literary and critical writings of Victorian Walter Pater. More recently, Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham have argued that the hesitancy of of rhetoric to consider political, cultural, or material factors when discussing rhetoric and Romanticism has been due to their willingness to accept at face value what Romantic authors have said about writing. For example, they have accepted uncritically pronouncements about Romantic genius that place author outside lines of dependency and relationship-and beyond concerns of rhetoric. Consequently, they write, historians of rhetoric have been curiously ahistorical in their accounts of rhetoric and Romanticism . (8). And just last year, almost as if in response to Bialostosky and Needham's assessment, Rex Veeder demonstrated how political and rhetorical principles informed Romantic pulpit practice in nineteenth century. He finds that What Romantics suggest is that purpose of art, including art of writing, is rhetorical in that it encourages act of identification and by so doing allows auditors to transcend their world view through imaginative participation with another (316). Rather than dismissing Romantic discourses as arhetorical or contentedly relegating Romantic texts to conservative pedagogies of taste, these rightly inquire into complex political and social conditions that impelled production and reception of Romanticism. Further, they implicitly or explicitly view their work as having important institutional consequences for literary studies, rhetoric, and composition. That is, if Romanticism has often been elided from histories of rhetoric for its aesthetic affiliations, this brand of revisionist historicism takes as its primary political motive opportunity to revisit-and to qualify-such founding Romantic oppositions as imaginary and factual, reading and writing, literary and rhetorical. In words of Bialostosky and Needham, A new investigation of relationship between Romanticism and rhetoric may lead to a rapprochement between literary and rhetorical branches of English studies (as well as between English and Rhetoric departments) whose separation was founded upon and is sustained by commonplace story of end of rhetoric and rise of literature in Romantic period (5).
March 1998
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Abstract
(1998). The civic function of taste: A re‐assessment of Hugh Blair's rhetorical theory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 25-36.
September 1997
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Abstract
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:
June 1997
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Abstract
Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915–1931 by Jack Selzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996; 284 pp. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology by James Phelan. Columbus, OH: Ohio State U P, 1996; pp. xiv + 237. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't by George Lakoff. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1996. 413 pp. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1925–1993: A Bio‐Critical Sourcebook edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994; pp. xxiii; pp. 491. Eloquent Dissent: The Writings of James Sledd, edited by Richard D. Freed. Portsmouth, NH, Boynton/Cook 1996;188 pp.
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Abstract
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
March 1997
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Abstract
The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan by David Metzger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. xvi; 135. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence by Richard Leo Enos. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995; xii + 135pp. Nineteenth‐Century Women Learn to Write edited by Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 1995. 343 pp. Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought edited by Bernard L. Brock. Tuscaloosa, U of Alabama P, 1995; xii; 279 pp. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition by W. Ross Winterowd & Jack Blum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. A Teacher's Introduction to Postmodernism by Ray Linn Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
January 1997
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Abstract
[A]ll. . . transcending of the thing by its name is toward death. And in this sense, even the most vital of language is intrinsically deathy. It is a realm of essence such that, without the warm blood of live bodies to feed it, it cannot truly exist. The spirit of all symbol systems could be said to transcend the body in this sense, taking on a dimension that can also be named by our good word for death: immortality. (Language as Symbolic Action 342)
March 1996
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Abstract
It is no overstatement to claim that Kenneth Burke was weaned on modernism, that indeed he was a pivotal figure among the remarkable moderns who gathered in Greenwich Village in the years just before and after World War I. Yet the observation bears repeating nonetheless. Born in 1897 in Pittsburgh and educated there through high school, Burke moved with his parents in 1915 to an apartment in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from 42nd Street in New York City. Though he studied at Ohio State during the spring semester of 1916 (with his thoroughly modernist friend James Light) and though he commuted from Weehawken to Columbia University throughout 1917, Burke gradually determined to take his instruction from Greenwich Village rather than from the university; having insinuated himself into the literary and intellectual scene, he moved to Greenwich Village early in 1918. There he met, associated with, befriended, and/or worked with a host of Village writers, artists, and critics, including (to mention only the ones that seem most prominent today) William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, and Katherine Anne Porter. Burke was on hand for the most experimental and successful period of the Provincetown Players, and he followed political and artistic developments in The Masses. While spending much of his time after 1922 writing, reading, editing, and translating at his Andover, New Jersey farm, Burke remained very much a physical and verbal presence in the Greenwich Village modernist scene, contributing poetry, fiction, criticism, and translations to modernist magazines. As an editorial assistant at The Dial, the most prominent such magazine of the era, he provided editorial services on behalf of Williams, Crane, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Schnitzler, and Wallace Stevens. And he maintained his social and artis
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Abstract
As Sharon Crowley claims, first question asked of any research is 'What use is it in the classroom?' (Politics 7). Knowledge of the history of rhetoric should enable us to lecture persuasively, to convince our students of the significance of the rhetorical texts which we and our colleagues research. This essay will address the challenges in teaching the Latin rhetoric of the Middle Ages compellingly. Despite the astounding productivity of scholars in medieval rhetoric-despite the discoveries of new manuscripts, editions of pedagogical glosses and theorization of medieval precepts for communication-unfortunately, in many American survey courses, medieval Latin rhetoric is still presented with Elizabethan disgust.' It is typically introduced as wrongheaded excursion away from classical principles toward the slavish study of rhetorical formulae. While evaluating trends in scholarship on rhetoric's history, Kathleen Welch implies one reason for the dismissal of medieval rhetors: a nostalgia for the perceived golden past in the classical world. . (85). Here, I am proposing that, in order to cultivate greater understanding and respect, we must find other lectern generalizations than those current about medieval Latin rhetoric in history of rhetoric surveys. I suggest one alternative: that many of the accomplishments of medieval rhetoric correspond to the Burkean theory of identification. The Generals of History
January 1996
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Contextualizing the Pliny/Trajan letters: A case for critiquing the (American) myth of deliberative discourse in (Roman) society ↗
Abstract
[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)
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Abstract
Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol and Ritual in the Greco‐Roman Era by Donovan J. Ochs. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993; xiv + 130pp. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students by Sharon Crowley. New York: Macmillan, 1994. 364 pages; glossary; time‐line of important moments in Greek and Roman rhetoric; bibliography; index. Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke. Edited by Barry Brummett. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1993; xix; 290 pp. Ramon Hull's New Rhetoric: Text and Translation of Llull's Rethorica Nova. Ed. and Trans. Mark D. Johnson. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994; 1; 109. Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing by James Thomas Zebroski. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook P, 1994. 334 pages. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth‐Century England, by Steven Shapin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. 483.
January 1995
August 1994
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Abstract
When James Boswell first meets Samuel Johnson in London in 1763, Johnson has already written the Rambler (1750-52), the Dictionary (1755), and Rasselas (1759), and dominates the publishing marketplace. They become close friends, and, until Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell often records in his journals Johnson's conversations, documenting his Wisdom and Wit and describing Johnson's encounters with his contemporaries. After Johnson's death, Boswell augments his own collection of Johnsonian memorabilia by soliciting anecdotes and letters from many of Johnson's friends, accumulating a mass of material which he pieces together and publishes in 1791 as The Life of Johnson, perhaps the most powerful and controversial biography ever written. In this influential biography of Johnson's life, Boswell presents Johnson as the great sage and philosopher, the composing genie who could dash off brilliant, eloquent essays and verse, seemingly without planning, revising or even rereading them. With this picture Boswell tries to create Johnson as the ideal writer of the age, whose writing method and style perfectly exemplify the paradigm of composition that prevailed in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, particularly that of Adam Smith. Influenced by Smith's lectures, which he had attended while a student at Glasgow University, Boswell constructs Johnson as writer within this paradigm and thus fosters both a narrow view of invention and a mythological image of Johnson as inspired speedwriting genius. In the process, he misrepresents Johnson's theory of writing, tying Johnson too closely to what W.S. Howell calls Smith's new rhetoric (541), which focuses on style and views invention as an autonomous activity based on introspection and imagination rather than as interactive, systematic inquiry, Aristotle's conception of invention. A careful reading of the Life of Johnson reveals major contradictions in the picture Boswell sketches of Johnson as writer and indicates that Boswell's mythical image of Johnson's spontaneous writing ability tends to rest upon thin and questionable anecdotal evidence, upon the clever way Boswell arranges and phrases his material, upon the narrow conception of invention he inherited from Adam Smith, and upon his need to canonize Johnson into literary sainthood and even to make him the secular Godhead of the age, the Father of modern writing. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid concluding that most contemporary critics remain mesmerized by Boswell's myth and impelled by his same motives.
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(1994). Neo‐sophistic rhetorical theory: Sophistic precedents for contemporary epistemic rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 16-24.
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Abstract
Dissertation Abstracts 48 (June 1988): 3125-A: Emphasizes medieval Arabic philosophers al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. Attention to general logical and epistemological topics: the relationship between language and argumentation; the end of logic as the production of conception (tasawwur) or assent (tasdiq); the orientation of logic towards demonstration; the relationship between logic and syllogistic. Also includes detailed analyses of the formal This content downloaded from 157.55.39.171 on Sat, 23 Jul 2016 05:36:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
July 1994
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Abstract
The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents by Barbara Warnick. Columbia: University of South Carolina P, 1993. 176 pp.
June 1994
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Abstract
Defining the New Rhetorics, edited by Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park: Sage, 1993; pp. 243 + Introduction, Index Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection by Winifred Bryan Horner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 211 Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama by Jody Enders. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992;xiv; 281. Rhetoric and Society Series, ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Peter Ramus's Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus's Brutinae Quaestiones. Ed. James J. Murphy.Trans. Carole Newlands. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1992. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art by Ruben Quintero. Newark: U of Delaware Press, 1992; 187. Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development by Bryan C. Short. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.