In 1939, Kenneth Burke, reviewing the first translated, unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf for The Southern Review, complained in the introduction that earlier reviews were long on condemnation and...

When the late Aaron Traywick—self-styled biohacker and founder of Ascendance Biomedical—dropped his pants in front of a live audience and injected an untested, experimental, do it yourself treatmen...

Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle open Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things by positing that “In disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, the first decade of the twenty-first century has been...

In a journal entry of March 1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, “why has never the poorest country college offered me a professorship of rhetoric? I think I could have taught an orator, though I am...

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

In their production and uptake, memoirs grapple with the status of the self and subjectivity as evidentiary fodder for social, cultural, and political concerns. The concept of ethos illuminates memoir’s rhetorical potency and its dubious ethics. Personal experience that subtends memoir serves as a form of persuasion, but it can also be used to overly personalize issues in need of systemic critique. We argue that attending to a memoir’s uptake is one way to contend with the ethical challenges this genre poses. This approach places a memoirist’s ethos—her vision, language, modes of rationality, and ideology—as well as memoir’s varied functions, within larger social, cultural, and political debates. It thereby traces memoirs’ rhetorical power while also enabling critique of their ethical grounding in the “self.” Two case studies illustrate our findings: J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

In Intimacies, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips argue that the ego is constitutionally threatened by difference, and they turn to Plato’s Phaedrus to locate a theory of Eros to combat this inherent aggressivity. They see in Plato’s dialogue an articulation of an Eros based in sameness and see this new account of love as a possible alternative way to form non-aggressive human relationships. While their account captures Plato’s revolutionary take on Eros, it does not discuss his equally revolutionary theory of rhetoric, a theory that recuperates difference as an essential feature of discourse. Plato’s relocation of rhetoric in private conversations transforms threat into risk and argues for the role of desire in constituting a subjectivity that is both private and political.

I come to Jenna Vinson’s book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, as anything but a teen mother. I am thirty-seven, in a tenure-track job, and pregnant with my first ch...

Imprisonment in America has become a form of civil death that blocks the capacity of ordinary people to develop intellectually, creatively, and ethically in ways more harmonious with the polity. Prison paideia in the grain of the sophists reconnects the imprisoned with the polis by challenging all assembled to inquire freely about the nomos that has shaped their perceptions of things; to make the weaker cases about those things, including themselves, stronger; and through dissoi logoi, to discover a culturally diverse aretê animating the demos they could become.

This article examines commonplaces in the debate over using trigger warnings in college classes with special attention given to the repudiation of “sensitivity.” Arguments against sensitivity have privileged appeals to academic freedom over course and classroom accessibility, but these values may engender conflicting and even contradictory obligations. A rhetorical theory of sensitivity can equip teachers and scholars of rhetoric to make more ethical decisions in the debate over trigger warnings and can lead the field toward a more “sensitive” rhetoric.

Bryan J. McCann asks us to think about the history of Gangsta Rap as instructive for engaging rhetorics of identity and embodied performances embedded in the politics of “the mark of criminality,” ...

This essay explores “viral circulation” and “slow circulation” as two alternate ethics for rhetorical decision making in civic settings. I analyze interviews with media producers from civic organizations in central Appalachia in order to illustrate the ways community and regional-based rhetorics strive for slow circulation through strategies of “rhetorical persistence” in public discourses. I argue that framing “viral” or “slow” circulation as ethical models helps us understand speed of circulation as both an ethical and rhetorical choice. The essay concludes with a discussion of ways that slow circulation offers an ethic better suited to the circulation of civic rhetorics in some community advocacy contexts.

With the publication of books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and the release of Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, as well as mass mobi...

This essay conducts a rhetorical analysis of the efforts to commemorate Charles “Buddy” Bolden with a mock jazz funeral in 1996. Widely recognized as a jazz pioneer today, Bolden acquired most of his acclaim posthumously. Bolden spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum where he died in obscurity in 1931. Bolden’s mock funeral provides a useful case for extending public memory scholarship by exploring the rhetorical dimensions of defleshed memories. Drawing from interviews, archives, and textual analysis, this essay theorizes defleshed memories as memories whose physical trace—or evidence of a physical trace—is attenuated to a state close to non-existence by coercive acts of institutional repression and neglect that sanitize and depoliticize memories. Further, this essay finds that defleshed memories are often rebodied to serve commercial interests but can also be reincorporated into more robust living traditions through rhetorical acts of commemoration.

In the late 1430s, a collection of letters began to circulate among humanists in Venice that displayed a mastery of Ciceronian Latin and expressed the highest virtues; but what most caused a sensat...

Recent scholarship at the intersection of new materialism and environmental rhetoric advances our understanding of human/nonhuman rhetorics, but some of this work retreats from conservation efforts and environmental politics, driving a wedge between scholars of rhetoric and those laboring on conservation’s front lines. This essay critiques and builds on Thomas Rickert’s and Nathaniel A. Rivers’s uses of the notion of “withdrawal” and on Rivers’s concept of “deep ambivalence” to argue that rhetoricians should embrace forms of anthropocentrism and human control of the nonhuman. To illustrate how this viewpoint might interact with conservation efforts, this essay examines the work of mid-twentieth-century forester and wildlife researcher Aldo Leopold and further explores the current mission of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, a conservationist organization developing a pluralistic, productive land community. At stake in this essay is an environmental rhetoric that can be both theoretically invigorating and practically compatible with on-the-ground conservation.

Stacey Waite’s Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing offers a crucial provocation for rhetorical studies. As “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education” reminds, pedag...

This article considers how rhetoricians might access rhetoricity, that which precedes and pervades meaning. The three pieces of minimalist music I examine—Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach—experiment with speech, peeling back the meaning-filled dimension of language in order to expose how affect and material move people. This peeling back of meaning, my analysis suggests, is achieved through refrain and rhythm, two forceful sonic rhetorical phenomena that rhetoricians might both study and deploy.

This essay asks how social enterprises like TOMS generate so much consumer affective investment in an age whose cause-related messaging fatigues shoppers. I find one answer in the energizing buy-one-give-one mode in which TOMS participates and to which it gives collective access. The mode expresses an increasingly widespread sensibility that company growth cannot proceed indefinitely without constraint by company largesse: gathering and growth must be countered by expenditure and even a kind of waste. Modal analysis of metonymic tropes within TOMS’s discourse (by chief executive officer Blake Mycoskie) shows how the company gives a feel for connecting the apparently opposed concerns of self-interested acquisition and “wasteful” expenditure—doing good and doing well—without collapsing one into the other. Unfortunately, other social enterprise rhetorics have failed not only to acquire but also to “waste” consumer enthusiasm in similarly generative fashion, thereby deactivating at times the significance of social enterprise’s projects. This essay concludes by discussing why modal reading of affective investments matters for rhetorical scholarship in this historical moment.

Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has been a tremendously influential thinker in the history and theory of art. Parts of his project have implications for the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric. For the most part, however, rhetoricians have not engaged with his work. This article seeks to persuade rhetoricians to engage with Warburg’s thought and legacy. In particular, it seeks to articulate his Mnemosyne image atlas as a theory and practice of visual topics. Discovered as part of a historical investigation and expressed in a theoretical register, Warburg’s account of visual topics is then exemplified in reference to the gestural politics of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in the twin contexts of contemporary media ecology and contemporary racial politics in the United States.

This essay reads The Civil War in France, Karl Marx’s account of the 1871 Paris Commune, as an example of revolutionary epideictic rhetoric that takes debt as a central unifying trope. Marx deploys the rhetoric of debt as a synecdoche to unify diverse French and international political constituencies around the political project of the Paris Commune. Simultaneously, in the wake of the Commune’s destruction, the trope of debt allows Marx to signal the political potential of the Commune outside its immediate context, inviting thinkers and activists after Marx’s time to invest in the Commune’s project in new and creative ways. I argue that this reading of The Civil War in France contributes to conversations about revolutionary community within Marxian rhetorical studies, as well as furthering discussions of the links between epideictic rhetoric and social change.

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, travelers from the United States regularly shared pictures of their South American adventures with US audiences increasingly eager to imagine US influence spreading across the American hemisphere. Examining two well-received and broadly disseminated examples—a painting by Frederic E. Church and a photo essay by Hiram Bingham—this essay demonstrates how US viewers learned to see their own national greatness in scenes of the distant, yet still profoundly American, Andes. The essay draws attention as well to the role that such hemispheric claims to magnitude play in crafting arguments about US national import.

Furthering the field’s attention to the rhetoric of archives, this article offers an extended consideration of archival description as an information infrastructure that provides powerful, although often invisible, orientations to the past. This article examines three stages of the archival process—selection, organization, and labeling—by focusing on a handful of historical objects, held in two separate collections, that depict transgressive gender presentations. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that archival description functions not only for bureaucratic and access purposes, but for epistemological ones as well.

Rhetoricians first saw “the digital” flickering on screens but now feel its effects transducing our most fundamental of social practices. This essay traces digital emergence on screens and through networks and further into everyday life through infrastructures and algorithms. We argue that while “the digital” may have once been but one more example of the available means of persuasion, “digital rhetoric” has become an ambient condition.

Raymond Williams’s Keywords was first born in the form of an appendage to his book manuscript Culture and Society, but—although it showed no signs of rupturing or of sepsis—the publisher snipped th...

The body has always been an implicit concern for rhetorical studies. This essay suggests that that implicit concern has mostly relied on an abstract, and specific, concept of the body. It is only through bodily difference in contrast to the unspoken, yet specified, white, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual male standard that particular bodies come to matter. The essay ends with a discussion of the body of the black civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, in order to enact a “textual stare” at the field of rhetoric. This stare calls the field to be more attentive to what kinds of rhetorical performance are accepted on their own terms and what kinds deserve scrutiny.

During the 1960s, when departments of English had little knowledge of or regard for “rhetoric,” a small community of “autodidacts,” including Richard Young, Ross Winterowd, Edward P. J. Corbett, James Kinneavy, and Richard Ohmann, gathered to foster rhetorical knowledge. The group was joined by other scholars in academic fields, such as speech communications, philosophy, and linguistics (including Donald C. Bryan and George Yoos), similarly interested in rhetorical studies. Having grown organically and informally—with an interdisciplinary interest—the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) currently has approximately 1,500 members. The organization held its first, formal meeting at the 1968 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Minneapolis, the year it began publishing its Rhetoric Society Newsletter. In 1975, the Newsletter became the academic journal, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and in 1984, the Society held its first RSA conference. This essay, drawing on anecdotal accounts, details the history of the organization’s origins and growth.

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.