This essay attends to the archive as an “inventional site for rhetorical pasts” (Morris, “Introduction”) by examining the construction of a queer archive and its effects on lesbian subjects. Drawing on queer archival theories of ephemera, I argue that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman (1972) constitutes an archive of lesbian experience that functioned rhetorically as a communal and identificatory resource. Martin and Lyon rendered the experiences of women associated with the lesbian homophile organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in the form of “anecdotes” and strategically curated them into middle-class categories designed in direct contrast to the gender and class transgressions of the lesbian bar scene. I identify the rhetorical effect on readers, “archival consciousness raising,” by analyzing autobiographical letters Martin and Lyon received in response and tracing the limits of this effect for more diverse lesbian readers.

In his last seminars, Michel Foucault analyzed parrēsia (frank speech) in classical Greece and Rome, a subject also addressed by classical rhetoricians. Foucault regards parrēsia as an idealized modality of truth telling—unartful, sincere, courageous speech that tells an unwelcome truth to power. Aligning rhetoric with flattery, Foucault excludes rhetorical parrēsia from his history of thought. This essay offers an alternative analysis of parrēsia from the perspective of classical rhetoric. Drawing especially on the comprehensive description in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, this essay identifies within the classical tradition a feigned parrēsia as well as a sincere one and a rhetorically artful parrēsia as well as the unartful, bold one that Foucault favors. Furthermore, the essay traces a genealogy that highlights changes in the practice of parrēsia as the term is conceptualized in the context of friendship, at which point parrēsia takes on an unmistakably rhetorical character.

The essay argues that no substantial connection exists between Stanley Fish's work and the tradition of sophistic rhetoric. The purpose of this argument is to show that Fish's work undermines and weakens the development of a rhetorical pedagogy that focuses on the role of language in the formation of beliefs. I contend that Fish's book, Doing What Comes Naturally, is actually hostile to most forms of a classical rhetorical education and can only issue from theoretical grounds that misunderstand the rhetorical tradition. Thus this essay seeks to critically examine one of the foremost defenders of rhetoric over the last twenty years by contextualizing his work in classical rhetorical theory. Fish produces a thin account of rhetoric that disassociates the language arts from citizenship in contemporary democracies. Such a move shapes his highly disciplinary and epistemological understanding of the function of higher education.

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.

Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

In the 1870s and ‘80s, more women discussed sex to promote free love and sex education in speeches, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Some of these women inspired the 1873 “Comstock law,” which banned materials deemed obscene. This essay uses the fictional figure of Audacia Dangyereyes to illustrate the constraints on women discussing sex in public forums. It identifies the rhetorical moves necessary to accommodate constraining audiences through close readings of the works of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, and Angela Heywood, all women deemed immodest by public standards and obscene by Anthony Comstock. To allay such charges, these women worked to redefine appropriate speech for women.

I was recently given a Kindle. But because it is bound inside a hardback black leather carrying case with an elastic strap around it, when I received the gift I thought I held in my hands a Moleski...

With turns pictorial and spatial, somatic and sonic, scholarly movements in rhetoric resemble the epicycles of the Ptolemaic universe: they keep rhetoric fixed in the center while allowing for moti...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment During the completion of this review, the author was supported by a predoctoral fellowship in clinical and translational research funded by the National Institutes of Health through grant numbers UL1RR024153 and UL1TR000005.

Scholars across the disciplines find much dysfunction in public apologies because they assume that these statements pursue the reconciliatory end of forgiveness. In contrast, this essay argues that public apologies do not enable forgiveness, but rather operate as ritualistic public punishment and humiliation in order to enforce certain ethical standards for public speech. These punishments are achieved by coercing offenders to offer apologies that embody metanoia, a rhetorical and religious concept that denotes a sudden change of heart or personal conversion. Through a rhetorical analysis of the performance of metanoia in public apologies from Don Imus, Michael Richards, and Mel Gibson, this essay demonstrates the punitive function of apologetic discourse and examines its ethical implications.

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.

Scholarship across the fields of rhetoric, history, and religion credits Frances Willard for her activist work, most notably her contribution to the nineteenth-century temperance movement. Although this scholarship references Willard's religious motivations, it is silent about one of the causes that Willard was committed to, women's preaching, and rarely cites her book, Woman in the Pulpit. By offering a close reading of the rhetorical and theological features of Woman in the Pulpit, this essay (1) suggests that Willard introduces a feminist theological resolution to the separate spheres ideological debate of the nineteenth century—the prevailing discourse that men should lead in political/public space, and women should occupy domestic/private space; and (2) recasts Woman in the Pulpit as a central text in Willard's repertoire—a magnum opus of sorts that represents her feminist brand of Christian Socialist thought.

Abstract This essay argues that the theory of form Kenneth Burke introduced in Counter-Statement can be read as articulating a usable concept of a rhetorical aesthetic. Here rhetoric involves identity in assertions and responses that develop through immediate encounters that prompt, even if just vicariously, a sensory experience. In their conventional conceptions, rhetoric engages concepts while aesthetic engages sensation and emotion—an overgeneralization that may still be more or less accurate. But if we conclude with Burke that it is not always useful to treat the rhetorical and the aesthetic as separate we might come to better understand the human tendency to abandon abstraction and dive into immediacy in matters pertaining to the alienation of self from community. Ideas and arguments bind people together or push them apart, but aesthetic experience does that as well and perhaps to greater effect. The essay explores that claim in the context of a contemporary revival of traditional Hawaiian music that draws directly on sensory experiences of life in Hawaii to assert aesthetically a place for Hawaiian identity in an American national community.

This essay uses the Kansas reception of Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood to reflect on processes of regionalism and resistance. Noting that Capote and In Cold Blood were articulated quite differently in different portions of the state of Kansas, I explain how Kansans used a text that was imposed on them to craft for themselves regional identities of their own making. I call these “counter regions,” a term I coin to emphasize that region making is an important, if often overlooked, ingredient in practices of cultural resistance.

This essay performs a rhetorical cartography of “regional accents” to draw a map of how they articulate regions into, and out of, maps of power. First, the essay isolates the accent of neoliberalism in the constitution of regions through the use of regional trade agreements. Second, the essay tracks a socialist accent for regional power in Samir Amin's call for the Global South to execute a political strategy of “delinking.” Third, the essay argues that the rhetorical movement between places in protest, expressed by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, invents a horizontal regional accent. For places of protest, a horizontal regional accent invents and folds regions of protest into one another to fuel the production of new places of protest. As a political subjectivity, the protester emerges in the crease of a regional fold of protest places as these places make and unmake maps of power.

Although regionalism has long been an important concept in architecture and political science, rhetorical studies has not specifically theorized regionalism as an analytical or productive concept. This introduction outlines four premises of a regional rhetoric that help to articulate a specifically rhetorical theory of regionalism.

Drawing on Douglas Powell's assertion that “region making [is] a practice of cultural politics” (8), this essay traces the nationalist force of mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorian appeals to America as a strategic ethno-historic region. It suggests that such arguments bound national, regional, and transnational concerns together, using indigenous roots and cultural landscape as their anchors. Ecuadorian intellectuals who made nationalist arguments by building a larger, American moral geography drew on a racialized sense of history and landscape to re-imagine their relationship with their Spanish ex-colonizer and to distinguish an autochthonous American Ecuador from its diluted American neighbors. These arguments from America gave their small country greater cultural weight through regional identification. Tracing those tactical claims to America as they played out within Ecuador and across its regional commitments contributes to a broader understanding of the rhetorical force of place. The Ecuadorian example of regional appeals that amplify national stature demonstrates how place-based claims to identity can simultaneously ground and circulate arguments; it shows as well how the cultural politics of a particular landscape invoke and move within larger complexes of meaning and force.

Sometimes we desire to forget. Although we often assert a hunger for the grounding and securing structures of memory, some memories are extraordinarily painful and deeply destructive. These memorie...

This essay examines how three of the most popular public speaking textbooks address rhetorical invention. The essay argues that textbooks minimize the discursive space shared by speakers and audiences in public speaking classrooms. As a consequence, topic and argument invention is framed largely as an internal affair that occurs prior to the speaker's interaction with the audience. The essay concludes with recommendations for teaching invention by reframing the public speaking classroom as a protopublic space.

Peter Mack, Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor at the University of Warwick and University of London, is a foremost expert in Renaissance rhetoric. In his previous book, Elizabethan Rh...

Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.

Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler's edited collection, Agency in the Margins, is a welcome contribution to scholarship on rhetorical agency, adding to debates regarding “ownership” of rhetoric and what ...

Abstract This essay analyzes one moment that has forced a reconsideration of the historical public sphere: the debate between John Stubbs and Queen Elizabeth I of England over her proposed marriage to the French Duke of Alençon. Stubbs adopted an argumentative strategy in which scripture served as a source of universal truth on which to base arguments about politics. Unable to allow such a strategy to undermine her own authority, Elizabeth's response asserted the communicative, rather than transcendent, nature of argument. Reading the debate in this way, in turn, calls into question a historical, developmental model of rationality and the public sphere. Ultimately, I argue, the public sphere does not develop as a radical emergence to be documented, but instead operates as a rearticulation of argumentative positions that are consistently and always available. Notes 1There are a number of discussions of the political possibility of the public sphere specific to the field of rhetoric; a review essay by Tanni Hass, and a special issue of Communication Theory edited by Michael Huspek, give a good indication of the directions of these discussions. Gerard Hauser is explicit in describing the possibility of reforming politics through rethinking the public sphere, while David G. Levassuer and Diana B. Carlin exemplify the assumption of the “public sphere” as a thing with a real historical existence that can be measured and examined. 2Other scholars have discussed the controversy between Elizabeth and Stubbs in terms of more thematic strategies without directly discussing questions of contemporary rhetorical theory. Jacqueline Vanhoutte considers this debate as demonstrating the emergence of a rhetoric of nationalism by both Stubbs and Elizabeth, while Debra Barrett-Graves sees Elizabeth and other politicians as employing a rhetoric focused specifically on the concept of honor. Illona Bell's argument is that the queen “was less outraged by Stubbs’ militant Protestantism … than by his overt paternalism and barely concealed antifeminism” (101). Peter Mack, Janet M. Green, and Allison Heisch have treated Elizabeth's rhetoric in terms of contemporary formal practice, such as her handling of schemes and tropes, while Cheryl Glenn and Janel Mueller have discussed how Elizabeth adapted her rhetoric in light of her position as a woman monarch. 3Although he had already become Duke of Anjou by the time of his courtship with Elizabeth, I follow the scholarly convention of referring to him by his first title, Duke of Alençon, though Elizabeth refers to him at times as Anjou. 4All of these scholars were connected with what has been variously called the Leicester faction or the Sidney circle—that group of political and literary figures associated with Leicester and the Sidney family, and with the reformist Protestantism (among other reforms) generated out of Cambridge University throughout the sjxteenth century. 5As defined by Dudley Fenner in 1584: “Methode is the judgement of more axioms, whereby many and divers axioms being framed according to the properties of an axiome perfectly or exactly judged, are so ordered as the easiest and most generall be set downe first, the harder are less generall next, until the whole matter be covered, as all the partes may best agree with themselves & be best kept in memorie. For as we consider in an axiome truth or falsehood, in a sillogisme, necessary following or not following, so in Methode the best and perfectest, the worst and troublesomest way to handle a matter” (Fenner 167). 6He commissioned Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawier's Logike, for example. 7Although it should be pointed out that this is in practice only—in theory scriptural understanding was available to all. But divines such as Knox, because of their training and study, were often better equipped, so the thinking went, to help people come to an understanding of the truth of scripture. 8Wallace MacCaffrey sums up both the views of faction and of Stubbs's pamphlet as produced at the bidding of others: “Its central arguments were shrewdly considered, comprehensive, and very knowledgeable. Indeed, they were so well informed—and so close in content to the actual council debates—that the Queen had some ground for her suspicion that someone in the Council was behind Stubbs” (Making 256). 9It is impossible to say in fact that Elizabeth authored this proclamation; however, a number of factors suggest authorship, while the nature of proclamations themselves is such that to discuss them as belonging to the monarch is not erroneous. Frederic A. Youngs has noted this proclamation is one of the lengthiest issued under Elizabeth; it is also one of her only proclamations to do more than simply issue an agenda or reiterate a legal ruling, but actually engage an opponent. The exact legal nature of proclamations under the Tudors has been the source of much debate, in their day and in our own, but it seems most likely that under Elizabeth they were issued primarily to call attention to an existing law, and as such served mainly, due to their widespread distribution, as an educational or, in a different sense, propagandistic tool. These would be sent to local authorities throughout the country and in cities, and their contents would be disseminated and enforced by those officials—so that their effectiveness in implementation depended on the crown's relationship to the particular localities. In other words, while their legal status was uncertain, they are effective gauges of the intentions of the monarchy. More than this, these proclamations can be seen as attempts to intervene into public discourse by setting the terms of that discourse—they are efforts to shape the ways in which the world under the monarch is thought of—both in the sense that they serve as reminders of the presence and authority of the monarch, as well as in the sense that they connect a particular understanding of the world to that authority. In considering this as an expression of Elizabeth's political will that is fully implicated in her rhetoric, it is useful to point to Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, who collected the proclamations into the definitive anthology. They define a Tudor royal proclamation as “a public ordinance issued by the sovereign in virtue of the royal prerogative, with the advice of the Privy Council, under the Great Seal, by royal writ” (xvii). Whether or not they were in fact authored by a monarch's hand, proclamations were definitely authored as though by intention of the monarch, and always reflective of the monarch's interests; so Hughes calls the proclamation (vol 1, p. xxvii): “a literary form psychologically gauged to elicit from the subject an obedient response, favorable to the will and interests of the crown.” Given the personal nature of this particular proclamation, and given its unique features, to call the proclamation Elizabeth's seems to me warranted.

Cynicism is generally considered anathema to democratic politics. This essay argues that it is a potential wellspring of constructive distrust. Diogenes of Sinope, the fountainhead of Cynic philosophy, is recollected as a means for recuperating cynicism as an attitude, and thus a mode of civic being, rather than simply a social condition. Particular attention is paid to the liberatory promise of the Cynic exercises of parrhesia (truth-telling), askesis (training), and ponos (hard work), as well as the use of chreiai (anecdotes) as critical rhetorical devices, in order to approach a more charitable and humane politics. Street and graffiti artist, Banksy, is situated as an important figure of contemporary cynic citizenship.

This essay examines homogeneous, suburban commercial streets commonly found in the United States. These streets employ minutely regulated systems of order organized under the logic of automobile traffic. In a society where consumerism reigns, these streets and the spatial order they entail contribute significantly to the ideologies of everyday life. Because these streets rely almost entirely on driving, the walker opens a space of difference and rhetorical invention within these homogeneous spaces. Using Roxanne Mountford's notion of rhetorical space, I examine the fixity of these streets. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theorization of abstract space, or overdetermined spaces that attempt to crush any agency, I consider how tactics such as walking can open permanent room for rhetorical agency in abstract spaces. By attending to a common but particular rhetorical space that figures materially in the everyday lives of American consumers, I explore the possibilities of agency in a fixed rhetorical space.

Following George Whitefield's 1739 New England tour, debate erupted among colonial clergy over the perceived threats and benefits of his itinerant preaching, continuing well into his 1744 return. This exchange is indicative of broader concerns among protestant clergy over waning influence in colonial America as well as a shift in colonists’ expectations about the form and function of public oratory. Questions of what constitutes good preaching, who is fit to preach, and suitable audiences demonstrate that itinerancy served as a powerful point of contention among ministers struggling to maintain power in the new nation. Focusing on Reverend Whitefield's efforts, this essay explores the competing conceptions and examines trends in form, function, and audiences for religious rhetoric that inform both our understanding of popular expectations of civic leaders’ discourse and emerging positions on the proper enactment of the rhetorical leadership within the new nation.

Many continue to note Kant's hostility to rhetoric. This view is far from unfounded, as Kant often voiced a particularly limited and negative view of the art of rhetoric. Yet it seems to limit explorations into any sort of Kantian form of rhetoric. If one approaches the connection of Kant's thought and rhetoric from the perspective provided by his under-studied work on education, one can extract a defendable notion of educative rhetoric in Kant. This present study will attempt to do just this, as well as show how such a use of communicative means plays a vital role in Kant's scheme of moral cultivation. The connecting point between education, practical reasoning, and moral cultivation is shown to be the important communicative device of example. An analysis of Kant's educative rhetoric can provide a useful extension of the rhetoric of example.

Drawing on Kenneth Burke's music reviews in The Nation, this article argues that the shifting music scene of the 1930s heavily influenced Burke's development of the key term “secular conversion” in Permanence and Change. While reviewing works by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Burke also witnessed audience reactions to (and often acceptance of) jarring atonal works by Schönberg, Debussy, and others, leading to music reviews that focused on musical as well as rhetorical matters. Burke's interest in music provides a “perspective by incongruity” that illuminates the often-overlooked key term “graded series” as a type of secular conversion that informs Burke's dialectic in A Grammar of Motives. A greater understanding of “perspective by incongruity,” “piety,” and “graded series” through music provides a window into the possibilities of linguistic transformation that bridges Burke's continuously merging, dividing, and transcending dialectic in A Grammar of Motives.

The sacred exceeds our understanding and compels us to respond. I intend to broaden a definition of the sacred so that we can begin to see how it functions in less mystical and more mundane circumstances. The sacred call troubles, rather than easily calls forth, a rhetorical response, a reasonable discourse, or even an autonomous interlocutor or a stable ground from which to speak, and is distinguished from what Michael Hyde and others have described as the “call of conscience.” I then examine the call of the sacred in a Biblical text well known in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions (the Akedah), and in a contemporary text (Caryl Churchill's very recent and very brief Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza) whose topic—the violence in Israel and Palestine—is decidedly political rather than religious but whose call, I will argue, is excessive, sacred, and unavoidable.

George W. Bush's September 20, 2001 address to Congress and the first-century CE early Christian text of 1 John both exhibit a form of rhetorical ambiguity, called here “polemical ambiguity,” that does not fit within Eisenberg's concept of strategic ambiguity, but rather serves as its argumentative doppelgänger. Polemical ambiguity allows a rhetor to leave real and potential allies in a composite audience in doubt as to the exact parameters of the rhetor's message, while an alienated section of the composite audience perceives a stark and wholly unambiguous message. The following analysis explores how Bush's speech and 1 John, faced with composite audiences, pursue similar goals through the use of polemical ambiguity, as well as how this particular maneuver is closely linked to religious rhetoric.

This article argues for a rethinking of the rhetorical canon of memory as a productive tool for understanding and effectively responding to recent changes in culture, economics, and politics. After reviewing historical conceptions of rhetorical memory both before and after its “canonization,” we identify two processes at the heart of the contemporary relationships between persuasion and memory: an “externalization” of memory and commonplace rhetorical structures through information networks and technologies, and an “internalization” of memory and dispositions that takes place in human affective systems. We conclude by arguing for the value of such an expanded notion of rhetorical memory for addressing two of the more pervasive and significant registers of contemporary persuasion: advertising and populist politics.

Kenneth Burke's dramatistic theory of rhetoric presents a significant tension between an “Iron Law of History” and a “comic” attitude. Comic framing in ironic awareness of one's own shortcomings in a conflict, as well as those of one's opponent, moderates aggression but also appears to dissolve the ground for the identification and censure of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Burke from engaging in the censure of wrongdoing. Although Burke does not explicitly and adequately counter the apparent inconsistency, he implicitly provides a meta-perspective advancing a possible resolution. Forceful scapegoating of scapegoating itself, through comic irony and double-visioned analysis, can guide, in serial progression, warfare and redemptive reunion. Wartime speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt illustrate the larger comic framing inherent in a rhetorical movement from “factional tragedy” to “comic” regard and reconciliation.

The pedagogical strategy of imitatio cultivates particular attitudes and habits that are useful resources for democratic citizens. Specifically, a mimetic pedagogy cultivates duality, as manifest in a faculty of perspective taking and enabled through the close analysis of rhetorical texts. Reviving imitatio as the central component of a rhetorical education entails a productive critique of norms of sincerity that prevail in contemporary culture, and as such constitutes one of the more significant contributions that rhetorical education can make toward enhancing and sustaining democratic culture.

The Rhetoric of Pope John Paul II begins to fill a considerable gap in communications scholarship about this rhetor, one of the most powerful and influential in the twentieth century. Examining Pop...

David Timmerman and Edward Schiappa's Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse sustains the substantive claim that ancient authors codified rhetoric in conceptual terms i...

Phonographic or verbatim reports, in claiming to replicate extemporaneous speeches, offer a version of interactions that occurred in public settings. The "technology" of record represented the dialogic nature of abolitionist oratory, creating a discursive space for identification for attending and reading publics. Authorized by an appeal to accuracy, full-text reproductions of speeches were both a reflection and a performance of publicness. Full-text records represented abolitionists as truthful (offering an alternative to proslavery designations of "fanatic"), while also facilitating the circulation of the sounds of abolitionist events, using the means of mass production. The rhetorical force of these records depended on their assertions of accuracy, as well as the aural and embodied public presence that they implied. The narrative created by the phonographer, operating in the transitional space between fixed and unfixed text, emphasizes the rational, inclusive nature of abolitionist public discourse, simultaneously creating and representing an abolitionist public sphere.

The preacher Henry Ward Beecher was once the most famous man in America. Although he is now often unnoticed, history has attested to Beecher's influence on important elements of contemporary rhetorical style and homiletic theology. In his largest pronouncement on the theory of preaching, his Yale lectures, Beecher set out a theory of preaching that declared the goal of preaching to be a core transformation of the listeners through an aesthetic connection to the Divine presence. As a part of this process, Beecher argued in favor of an ecumenically Christian form of “taste” that would sensitize the audience to the existence of a new kind of knowledge: a divinely inspired linkage of logos and pathos that Beecher referred to as the Doctrine of Love.

Rhetoric scholars have developed approaches to both civil and human rights as political, ethical, and academic discourses. Such approaches include examining the development and reproduction of hierarchies, the politics of representation, and the relationships among symbols, audiences consisting of disparate communities, rights, and rights events. After an overview of rhetorical contributions, as well as risks and limitations of a rhetoric approach to human rights, this introduction turns to the focus of the special issue: testifying and witnessing as a way to scrutinize the roles of bystanders to rights atrocities and the responses of listeners who may be rights committed or not.

Through her reading of the editors' introduction and ensuing four essays, Hesford approaches human rights as a discourse of public persuasion that envisions certain scenes of sociopolitical recognition, normative notions of subject formation, and paradoxical particularities. She joins contributors in their interrogation of the normative scenes of sociopolitical recognition on which the human rights paradox of exclusive universalism rests. Yet, she also maintains that in our efforts to construe a more inclusive human rights history that we are mindful of distinctions between the rhetorical tactics of individuals and social movements and differences of geopolitical scale and scope.

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was among the U.S. industrial labor movement's savviest practitioners of visual politics to champion human rights for workers. This article focuses on two key features of Jones's exploitation of the power of “the eye” for persuasive ends: first, was her keen appreciation of the rhetorical potency of the camera as an emerging technology with differing force for varied audiences, and second, was her trademark spectacles ritualizing rebellion, showcasing workers' resolve, and generating publicity. To mine these visual features, this essay situates them within two significant historical episodes: the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–14, especially the Ludlow Massacre, and the Children's Marches of 1903 she led to lobby for child labor reforms.

What can be said in the aftermath? Faced with legacies of conflict and the gross violation of human rights, the contemporary discourse of transitional justice has defended the work of confession as a way for deeply divided societies to “come to terms” with the past and move forward. Underwritten by a complex promise of recognition, this call for confessional truth-telling has proven controversial, not least at it risks undermining the testimony of victims and granting undue status to perpetrators. Giving voice to events that may prove unspeakable and performing a subjectivity that may defy accountability, the figure of confession imagined by transitional justice is perhaps best envisioned as a rhetorical question, a difficult inquiry into the response-ability of language in the wake of violence.

Joining the recent bevy of books about liberalism, Michael Kaplan's first book, Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary, adds critical/cultural media studies, deco...

This article uses Foucault's enunciative analysis and stasis theory to explore the rhetorical work of the Midwest Pain Group (MPG) as its members struggle to collaborate across disciplinary difference to transform the discourse and practice of pain science. Foucault's enunciative analysis explains how discourse formations regulate statements, but not how formations can be transformed. We argue that stases can be thought of as nodes in the networks of statements Foucault describes and that stasis theory explains the rhetorical means through which members of the MPG work to transform the discourse of pain science. As the members of the MPG confront the epistemological incommensurability that exists between their individual disciplines, they establish a meta-discourse in which the definitional and jurisdictional stases help them invent a new definitional topos. We describe the way this rhetorical work occurs “off- label” in violation of the discursive restrictions of scientific disciplines, regulatory agencies, and insurance institutions.

This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning women's gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.

Abstract Rhetorical analysis of John Locke's monetary arguments reveals that Locke relied on a core enthymeme that deployed several rhetorical devices (including a narrative diegesis, a dissociation and hierarchization of terms, and several metaphors) to synthesize two contradictory and common beliefs about money's value—money's value is determined by supply and demand; money's value is determined by substance. Moreover, this analysis revitalizes the conversation between economists and rhetoricians by presenting rhetorical analysis as a way to discover causal mechanisms. Finally, locating causal mechanisms allows an historical understanding of how debates have been shaped by the available means of persuasion. Acknowledgments Special thanks to James Aune, Martin Medhurst, and the editor and anonymous RSQ reviewers for their feedback at various stages in this article's production. Notes 1The stalled nature of the conversation is nowhere better captured than in Fabienne Peter's “Rhetoric Vs. Realism in Economic Methodology.” 2For another social-scientific discussion of causal mechanisms, see Sayer 105–117. 3My description of a “deep-seated” mechanism depends on the assumption that a social formation can be productively imagined as a stratification of numerous causal powers, some deeper and more pervasively effective. What we immediately witness at the top of a formation is thus “overdetermined” by the causal mechanisms layered beneath. For a fuller exploration of this concept, see Andrew Collier's “Stratified Explanation and Marx's Conception of History.” 4For a fuller explanation of how England's various parties formed into a “military-financial state,” see Dickson (chs. 1–3) and Carruthers (chs. 2–3). 5Aristotle asserts that “an ability to aim at commonly held opinions [endoxa] is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability to regard the truth” (33). Pierre Bourdieu differentiates between orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Outline 164–171). According to Bourdieu, crises can disrupt all the rhetorical resources available to a population, both the heterodox and the orthodox, creating a space for an allodoxia, a new, potentially revolutionary, set of assumptions (Language 132–133). 6For more on the term “crisis of representation” and its relation to seventeenth-century England, see Poovey 6. 7Although they disagreed about recoinage, Locke and Nicholas Barbon believed that commodities' values are set by the intersection of supply and demand (Barbon Trade 15–19; Locke Some Considerations 66). 8James Thompson contends that Locke made an “ontological” appeal to the “ineluctable being of silver,” thus strictly emphasizing its substance value (63). Thompson, on the other hand, also notices that Locke accredited the socially constructed forces of supply and demand with value creation (61). He therefore concludes that Locke contradicted himself. 9Vaughn dubs Locke's model a “proportionality theory of money,” but given the overwhelming use of the term “quantity” in post-Lockean monetary theory, I choose this term to emphasize the model's persistence in subsequent arguments. 10James Thompson rightly notices the central importance of security in Locke's monetary theory. Locke wanted a stable monetary system that guaranteed transmission of value: “The return is always the same, for the ideal is an exchange system, or a system of debit and credit, in which one receives what he gave” (58). Karen Vaughn notes that Locke was an unusual metalist because he did not believe in money's ontological value, while he did believe that the substance (silver) was necessary to guarantee stability (35). 11For further treatment of Locke's economic writings and his theory of natural law, see Appleby; Finkelstein 165–170; and Vaughn 131. For a dissenting perspective, an argument that money had no place in Locke's imagined state of nature or in his theory of natural law, see Tully 149. 12In this paragraph, I rely on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's explanation of dissociation, hierarchy, and the topic of order (80–83, 93–94, 411–415). 13For a fuller review of the Bill, its enactment, and its effects, see Horsefield (61–70) and Feavearyear (135–149). 14Marx contended that Locke emphasized one side of money's contradictory composition, its substance (Contribution 159). Eli Heckscher similarly contended that Locke accepted the mercantilist equation of metal and value, saying that Locke confused Juno for the cloud, money for what money represented (209). Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, PAR 3, Mailcode B5500, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.