During the past 30 years, genre conceptualized as social action has been a generative framework for scholars, teachers, and rhetors alike. As a mid-level, mediating concept, genre balances stability and innovation, connecting theory and practice, agency and structure, form and substance. Genre is multimodal, providing an analytical and explanatory framework across semiotic modes and media and thus across communication technologies; multidisciplinary, of interest across traditions of rhetoric, as well as many other disciplines; multidimensional, incorporating many perspectives on situated, mediated, motivated communicative interaction; and multimethodological, yielding to multiple empirical and interpretive approaches. Because genre both shapes and is shaped by its communities, it provides insight into both ideological conformity and resistance, lends itself to multiple pedagogical agendas, and provokes questions about media, materiality, ethics, circulation, affect, and comparison.

This essay makes sense of rhetorical scholarship on publics by interpreting publics as networks of relationships. I begin by considering how the concept of relationship has circulated as a prominent theme in the foundational scholarship on which contemporary scholars often draw. I then discuss how scholarship on multiple public spheres and counterpublics explores advocates’ efforts to reconstruct relationships in pursuit of inclusion, justice, and equality. I conclude by explicating neoliberal publics as a prominent contemporary challenge to robust relationships and critical public engagement. Against contemporary scholarship and practice that emphasizes fluidity, diversity, and transformation, a neoliberal public asserts its own universality, claiming that market relations represent an intrinsic, common orientation to public engagement and that markets treat everyone the same.

From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning the vitality of speech, and the related enargeia referring to vivid description. Recent interest in affect, the Anthropocene, new materialism, and the more-than-human has only made “energy” more salient, yet more promiscuously evoked than ever. Notwithstanding the concept’s centrality to some major works of contemporary scholarship, the importance of energy to rhetoric has remained widely underexplored. This essay traces some of the quiet history that energy has played in the rhetorical tradition and charts some points of its ongoing importance.

Sound has typically been approached as an object of study that gets rhetorical theory applied to it in order to interpret its meaning. Both sound and theory remain unchanged. Understood as vibration that materially affects bodies, however, a sonic orientation toward rhetoric has the potential to further develop theoretical models of situatedness and newer rhetorical concepts such as resonance.

In Ancient times and in the contemporary moment, kairos has operated as a keyword for theorizing rhetoric and its potential. Aligning ourselves with these endeavors we take stock of varying iterations of the kairotic not to artificially force a singular conception of the term, but to hold such resolutions at bay. We assess efforts to realign kairos with challenges to the ontological priority of rhetorical actors and trace recent theoretical articulations that further decenter human agency by relocating the kairotic in ecological/contextual forces. We assert the need to maintain invention and eventfulness as crucial elements of the kairotic so as to insist that rhetoric be understood as a practice that exceeds socio-anthropological “adaptation” to those conditions. Through a series of propositions we hold hope for an inventive and evental kairotic stance that likewise avoids naïve conceptions of sovereign subjectivity.

Often paying attention to dominant voices and events, the field of rhetoric appears to have had a fraught relationship with resistance. Contemporary rhetorical theory has moved to embrace resistance as a key term, however, particularly to underscore the embodied politics of the rituals of everyday life, as well as how collective acts assemble to negotiate power and public goods. This essay provides a brief etymology of the term and surveys three dominant articulations of it within this journal: writing, embodiment, and ecologies. Reflecting on cultural histories and contemporary cultural conjunctures, we argue resistance is better appreciated as a practical, vulnerable, and collective articulation of opposition and struggle.

This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.

Reactionary conservative groups such as the sovereign citizen movement are increasingly prominent—and violent—in the United States. These groups cohere around their own unique discourses of law, language, and history, which are often dismissed as meaningless, or even “crazy.” Following Jacques Lacan’s injunction that the analyst must “let the subject speak,” this essay will examine sovereign citizen rhetoric as a coherent, internally consistent field of meaning exhibiting the traits of psychotic discourse in which the metaphorical operation of the law-as-signifier is disavowed. Doing so illustrates not only the powerful intersection of communication and psychoanalysis but also the potential for a rhetorical reading to challenge the most violent collective psychoses.

Robert T. Oliver, a professor of speech at Pennsylvania State University, served as a ghostwriter for Syngman Rhee, the first president of the Republic of South Korea between 1943 and 1960. Within the larger context of an ongoing global Cold War and the division of the Korean peninsula in August 1945, Oliver and Rhee developed a foundational myth, Puk-jin Tongil (), to build the new nation of South Korea. The Puk-jin Tongil myth called for a reunification of the Korean people and land through a US-led invasion of North Korea and was paired with a myth of enemyship that named the Communists of North Korea as essentially evil, estranged them as beyond the pale of rationality, and escalated the conflict between the two Koreas. In this essay, we consider the first full presentation of the Puk-jin Tongil myth in Rhee’s August 15, 1948, inaugural address, which had significantly different versions: an English version written by Oliver and a Korean version delivered at the inaugural ceremony by Rhee. Rhee’s confrontational version of the myth was delivered in Korean to his South Korean audience while Oliver presented a much tamer version in his English draft of the inaugural, targeting an American audience. Rhee’s speech, we suggest, foreshadowed his dictatorial approach to the presidency and revealed tensions between the president and the US government and in the Rhee-Oliver collaboration. Our essay fills a gap in our understanding of nation building through mythic rhetoric in the global Cold War, contributes to our disciplinary history with its focus on Oliver’s role in Rhee’s symbolic efforts, and offers a judgment of the mythic rhetoric crafted by the Rhee-Oliver collaboration.

Recent attempts to brand US President Donald J. Trump as a psychotic or fascist have failed because such labels do not capture the double character of his appeal. In this essay, I argue Jacques Lacan’s understanding of perversion better captures Trump’s peculiar brand of political rhetoric.

This essay features a study of the #NotOkay Twitter thread, which arose as a response to the Access Hollywood Trump tape and comprises thousands of tweets by women who describe their first experience of sexual assault. I analyze this hashtag as an act of what Elspeth Probyn calls “writing shame.” I first trace the cultural habitus of emotion around sexual assault and harassment, which teaches survivors to internalize shame and normalizes assault. I then examine how #NotOkay contributors—both before and after the election—participate in writing shame, a practice that does the following rhetorical work: serves as an invitational space for women to rewrite assault-related shame; revises the locus of shame from the individual to the culture that shames; and generates calls to transform this emotional and rhetorical sphere.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

The historical relationship between Judaism and Islam has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for decades. Until recently, however, this fourteen-century-old relationship has gone unremarked on by theorists and historians of rhetoric. In this article, I explore the interconnectivities between legal rhetoric in Judaism and Islam. Looking at the Nicomachaean Ethics and Chaim Perelman’s analysis of rhetoric, justice, and law, I first investigate how, like Aristotle, Jewish and Muslim jurists link virtuousness to obedience to the law. Then, I show how sharia and halakha, Islamic and Jewish law, use rhetoric and systematic argumentation to articulate the place of law in the lives of Muslims and Jews. Finally, using the medieval Mamluk Sultanate and the Geniza community as the basis of a comparatist rhetorical analysis, I demonstrate the lived interconnectedness of Judeo-Muslim legal rhetorics pertaining to marriage, divorce, and the juristic agency of medieval Mediterranean women.

Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).

Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.

The consensus memory of the 1960 Greensboro student sit-ins suggests that four men were solely responsible for the demonstration. Contrary to that memory is the story of women at Bennett College who began planning the sit-ins in the fall of 1959. This essay uses rhetorics of silence to explore questions about feminist historiography and public memory studies raised by this controversy. In 1960, rather than speaking publicly about their role, Bennett women protected the credibility of the demonstration by taking a position of silence. As time passed, public memories of the event were defined by the four men, and the women’s stories were further suppressed through the processes of commemoration. Studying silence in this context reveals how rhetorical values associated with silence can change over time. Although the Bennett women’s silence began as a temporary tactical choice, their voices were nearly permanently silenced through the processes of commemoration.

“A dog walks into the middle of Aristotle’s Rhetoric” (1).In reading the opening line to Hawhee’s most recent book, published with The University of Chicago Press, a reader might anticipate the eme...

Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosophy for the rhetorical analysis of what she terms “visual things.” For scholars and students who are l...

It used to be that only rhetoricians of science and technology read Bruno Latour. However, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers’s 2015 collection Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition d...

Recently I was chatting with our environmental science faculty about a monarch butterfly project and the lead scientist exclaimed, “Citizen Science?! That’s a bad phrase around here.” Our conversat...

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has attracted worldwide attention for his break with the public style of his immediate predecessors. This seeming rupture has often incited controversy, particularly between liberals and conservatives in American Catholicism. This division was exacerbated by the 2015 publication of Laudato Si’, Francis’s encyclical letter on the environment. Yet the apparent divergence of opinion masked a more fundamental agreement that popes should normally steer clear of scientific matters. The belief that science is one thing and religion another rests on what Bruno Latour has called “the Modern Constitution,” which draws sharp divisions between science and politics and relegates religion to the private sphere. Laudato Si’ rejects this framework in favor of a more holistic analysis articulated through epideictic rhetoric. I name this approach “nonmodern epideictic” and argue that it both confirms and supplements Latour’s understanding of religious rhetoric.

This essay examines citizen correspondence to the White House following Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s “Fala speech.” During the 1944 presidential election, citizens often engaged in prosopopoeia by writing from the perspective of their pets and Roosevelt’s dog, Fala. I argue that citizens used this classical rhetorical figure to identify with the president and express their views of FDR’s character. Thus, animals offered a strategic, seemingly nonpolitical locus for expressing judgments about the election.

Katy Rothfeldera* & Davi Johnson Thorntona*a Communication Studies, Southwestern University, 1001 University, Georgetown, TX 78626, USA

This essay explores the rhetorical qualities of neoliberalism through an analysis of economic and rhetorical theories of conventional wisdom and common sense. I analyze Barack Obama’s health care advocacy to demonstrate how neoliberal language animated his arguments for reform and frustrated his appeals to community. I argue that neoliberalism maintains its influence on political culture in large part because of its deep embeddedness in political language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how rhetors might operate within a culture marked by this prominent and often problematic discourse.

The rhetoric surrounding 9/11 and the consequent War on Terror was rooted in fear of violent subjects capable of performing violent actions. In her book, Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography...

If I were to attempt to summarize S. Scott Graham’s formidable volume The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry with the briefest of pithy quotes from within its pages, I migh...

I call communication that attempts to stop further communication "rhetorical closure." This essay focuses on a form of rhetorical closure that implies character judgments of the interlocutor or audience in order to force assent and delegitimize dissent. Using Ayn Rand's rhetoric as an exemplar, the essay demonstrates what rhetorical closure by character judgment looks like in practice, examines its dynamics, and assesses its enduring appeal.

Snakes suffer from a bad reputation, and few human allies stand to prevent their extirpation. Yet more rhetorically powerful than any ethical injunction halting human violence upon nature, a sensuous moment of intertwining with the serpent can enact onto-epistemological shifts and dispositional transformations. Through a serpentine mêtis and mythopoetics of cunning wisdom and knowledge production, we can imaginatively, transversally, re-member the feeling of raising serpentine energy along the spine, sloughing off old skin, and slithering down among the roots and rhizomes into the depths of uncertainty. Opening up a space for the otherwise, responding to the hum of rhetorical energy coursing through our more-than-human relations, we may still live to tell new stories with the snakes and the rest of our strange kin.

Salmon learn the scent of the stream into which they are born, journey for sometimes thousands of miles, and, if they survive the sojourn, return home to spawn and die, leaving traces that enrich ecological relationships. In the homing practices of the Pacific salmon, we find not only a critical portent of ecological health, but also an exemplar of olfactic memory and a model of practical wisdom that moves us toward multi-species flourishing. The homing practices of salmon are instructive for rhetoric, offering a biotrope that challenges us to engage in deep ecological change in order to honor and restore relationships with place.

Rhetoric has always been bestial. The horse, Polos, bucks against decorous Aristotelian rhetoric (Sutton, “The Taming”). Octopi model an Odyssean metis (Hawhee, Bodily Arts 57), Korax—that infamous...

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life—but there was no one to tell me.—George Washington ...

This entry distinguishes captive orcas from their wilder and freer kin. We speculate that captive orcas embody three principle metaphors: Prisoner; Activist; Martyr. These metaphors help us to imagine the kinds of rhetorical thinking necessary for a deeper understanding of the costs of human behavior as well as the potential for creating new visions and modes of witnessing. By witnessing orcas-as-prisoners, humans begin to see marine parks anew, as prisons, understanding their own complicity in the imprisonment of animal activists. Captive orca metaphors help to convey the actions of other-than-humans as rhetorically salient and politically motivated.

The humanist tradition of rhetoric has historically emphasized differences rather than similarities between humans and nonhuman animals. Attending to similarities between humans and other species is considered anthropomorphic; however, avoiding similarities is anthropocentric. Using case studies of feral children, this essay attends to the way similarities may be constituted across differences, particularly in cases where wolves domesticate human children. Domestication is the constitution of common sense. Aristotle theorizes common sense as an interspecies capacity, while Cicero contends it is innately human. The humanist tradition has favored Cicero’s rendering. This essay works through the consequences of this adoption and concludes by speculating on Aristotle’s notion of common sense as zoomorphism, a form of animal troping.

This brief essay examines the undervalued technê of vultures as they take up putrid material for their own sustenance. These broad-winged masters of the updraft glide along a dialectic between graceful and gross. Even grounded in the pragmatics of materiality and its decay, they nonetheless soar in our collective unconscious as psychopomps, guides on the bridge between the living and the dead, creatures of the uncanny and deeply symbolic. The essay uses Morton’s “dark ecology” and the intersection of rhetoric and magic to make sense of the rhetorical contributions of vultures.

A reflection on the rhetorical work of bestiaries that concludes a special issue on animal rhetoric in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Friedrich Schiller may not be a household name among contemporary rhetoricians, yet since the 1960s Schiller’s critics have begun to take an interest in the rhetorical dimension of his aesthetic writings, particularly with respect to his Aesthetic Letters. These efforts, however, tend to focus on Schiller’s method of presentation rather than the possible rhetorical implications of the Letters’ key ideas and concepts. This essay proposes treating the Letters as an instance of implicit rhetorical theory, one that suggests an innovative model of rhetorical effectivity, according to which rhetoric enables people to experience the normative ideal of beauty as freedom.

Rhetorical studies has long worried about its identity as a critical discipline and a practical art. Since the Great Recession of 2008, a myriad of social and political forces has provoked a discourse about the vitality of the liberal arts, which brings this identity crisis to the fore. Defenders of the liberal arts have deployed a negative critical stance, positing the liberal arts as external to liberalism as a public culture. This stance limits criticism’s political potential because it ignores the productive role of liberal cultural constraints in forming social bonds and creating self-understandings. As the liberal arts grapple with an evolving liberty to learn, so too might the rhetorical arts commit to the productive possibilities of simulation and judgment. This path would respond to the needs of students, who find themselves between structural constraints and contingent possibilities for change.

This essay assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s response to Booker T. Washington based on the economic principles structuring public-intellectual intervention in social crisis. Arguing that public-intellectual work relies on ethos-driven rhetorical engagement that conflates the public intellectual and his conceptual intervention as a single product to be marketed, I recontextualize the debate between the two thinkers in order to account for the intersection of their discursive activities in terms of competing public-intellectual models. While Washington relied on a closed-market model that situated him as the spokesperson for an otherwise silent black community, Du Bois worked to create opportunity for deliberation among a number of black publics, and Du Bois’s more democratically minded rhetorical modeling offers a version of public-intellectual work that resonates with the needs of the current moment.

Scholars in rhetoric have been slow to recognize children as capable of exercising rhetorical agency. This oversight inadvertently recapitulates the divestment of agency experienced by children who speak publicly about civic concerns. This essay examines the argumentative and organizational strategies of a group of children from New Mexico who worked in the early 1990s to publicize, design, and fund the Children’s Peace Statue and who repeatedly petitioned the Los Alamos County Council to accept the statue as a gift to the city of Los Alamos. Analyzing the children’s rhetorical strategies alongside responses of adult opponents, I show how opponents rejected the statue in part by resisting engaging with children as rhetorical agents. This research underscores the stakes of recognizing children’s agency as complexly meaningful.

This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

In light of the genuine disagreement between the seemingly non-rhetorical political philosophy of John Rawls and the philosophical rhetoric of the new rhetoric project I propose a re-reading of Rawls that will help move that project in a needed direction. This re-reading will make the case that (1) Rawls’s conception of justice implies a commitment to the reasonable that is very like the new rhetoric projects, that (2) their differences regarding distance—in particular the distancing strategies of impartiality and objectivity—can be reconciled, that (3) the major difference between them—that is, the role of the rational—comes down to Rawls’s willingness to try universalizing the good, and that (4) such universalizing is a resource of rhetorical particularity that adds value to the construction of the universal audience.

This issue of RSQ offers an intriguing showcase of the wide range of topics, places, and subjects that rhetoricians now study on a regular basis. We encounter a finely detailed portrait of the hist...

This essay examines the production of economic space as a rhetorical project in the motion picture work of Ford Motor Company between 1918 and 1945. On film, Ford’s overlapping visual narratives worked to position abstractions like markets, commodities, and class as spatially experienced entities grounded in the materiality of roads, village industries, and national parks. When presented to an American public working through ideas of national identity, isolationism, and economic depression during the interwar period, these films played an integral role in shaping the trajectory of the American landscape to this day. Moreover, in taking up this set of artifacts, I position Ford Motor Company as a unique category of spatial rhetor—an institutional figure large enough and powerful enough to generate and distribute narratives that can crack open the codified elements of social life and insert, in the newly formed intermediary spaces, images of individuals performing industrial or corporate identities.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in an American West town that embraced prostitution as integral to its sense of identity from 1884–1991, when its economy began to shift from silver mining to tourism. The circulation of social values negotiated through gossip enabled a century-long period during which brothels flourished in an illegal yet decriminalized way. Even though the madams and sex workers were subject to spatial restrictions and the whims of local political and regulatory power, they managed to harness the available means of opportunistic discourse often overlooked in rhetorical analysis. I highlight the influence of the semi-private exchange of rumor and normative small talk. Arising out of spatial and qualitative public memory, gossip can be a persuasive force that harmonizes community needs across past, present, and future.

While recently browsing online news, my eyes wandered to a particularly enticing headline: “Abortion Rates Drop to Historic Low in Wealthy Countries.” Eagerly, I clicked the link and was brought to...

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.