Rhetoric Society Quarterly

36 articles
Year: Topic: Clear
Export:
archival research ×

January 2025

  1. Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives: edited by Gesa Kirsch, Romeo Garcia, Caitlin Burns Allen, and Walker P. Smith, Southern Illinois UP, 2023, 321 pp., $40 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8093-38955
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2025.2453426

October 2024

  1. Hospitable Historiography and/of the First All-Woman Special Supreme Court in the State of Texas
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2024.2405183

October 2023

  1. “Our Hidden Revenge”: Anti/Colonial Rhetorics at a Korean Women’s College Graduation, 1918
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2233501

August 2023

  1. Movidas after Nationalism: Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez and Chicana Aesthetics
    Abstract

    This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2175025

May 2022

  1. Self-Identified as Nonpolitical: Locating Characteristics of African Rhetoric in Nigerian Women’s Words
    Abstract

    According to African women’s theorizing, nationalism can be nonpolitical. This is a novel approach to defining nationalism, which is usually seen as a purely political event. Women of the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Organizations (FNWO) developed a rhetoric of nonpolitical nationalism in the 1950s that has been ignored by the current politically elite male-led narrative of African nationalism. This marginalization of African women is mirrored in the Black rhetorical cannon as well because they are Africans in an African American-centered narrative. In order to address this double marginality and to understand their novel characterization of nationalism, this essay joins scholarly conversations in the field of women’s historical rhetorics by upholding two objectives. First, it highlights the unique rhetoric of Nigerian women in the FNWO. Second, it analyzes their words to uncover characteristics of nonpolitical thought and situate it within a broader African rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2077625

August 2021

  1. A Counterhistory of Rhetorical Ecologies
    Abstract

    In this essay, I argue that the ecological turn in rhetorical studies has produced spatiotemporal problems and that these problems are directly tied to the material disciplinary history of ecosystems ecology and its connections to the Anthropocene violence of nuclear colonialism. These spatiotemporal concerns result from rhetoric’s “ecological moment”—a kairotic framework that emphasizes flux but elides material histories. Building from rhetorical scholarship in decolonial historiography and place-based methods, I offer a counterhistory of ecology to demonstrate how our field can better engage with the dynamic narrative pasts that shape contemporary rhetorical ecological inquiry. Through this counterhistory, I provide a method for combating rhetoric’s spatiotemporal concerns, a framework I refer to as field histories, which aims to situate disciplinary practices in place and time by combining historiography and fieldwork.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1947517

January 2021

  1. Of Beetles and Men: Public Memory, Southern Liberal Kitsch, and the Boll Weevil Monument at 100
    Abstract

    This essay addresses the public memory of the Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama, as an exemplar of Southern liberal kitsch, a memory practice articulating regional identity through a playful discourse of progress that secures whiteness and deflects confrontation with historical racial injustice. Through a combination of archival research and fieldwork during the centennial celebration of the Boll Weevil Monument in 2019, I identify three rhetorical quirks underwriting Boll Weevil public memory that inform broader efforts to reimagine the past in greater service to contemporary political exigencies.Editor Content Warning: This essay contains descriptions of racial violence.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1841275

October 2020

  1. Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education: by Pamela VanHaitsma, U of South Carolina P, 2019, 162 pp., $24.99 (hardcover); $24.99 (ebook). ISBN: 1611179904
    Abstract

    Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers the first queer rhetorical history of nineteenth-century romantic epistolary practices in the United States. Pamela Van...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1817689

August 2020

  1. Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border, by Nina Maria Lozano: The Ohio State UP, 2019, 158 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8142-5518-6
    Abstract

    Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border provides a rhetorical historiography of feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez, archives the voices of family members of victims, and expands the boundaries of theori...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1785819

January 2018

  1. Mythic Historiography: Refiguring Kenneth Burke’s Deceitful Woman Trope
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1278780
  2. Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1273379

January 2015

  1. Recuperating John Bascom’s Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric and Contemporary Rhetorical Education
    Abstract

    Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by demonstrating how a wider range of materials can produce more complex, compelling accounts of an individual’s contributions to theory or pedagogy.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.980520

May 2014

  1. Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip”
    Abstract

    Around 1980, Michel Foucault took a new direction in his historical work. This essay poses a question about the historiographical stance Foucault adopts in his late lectures by contrasting them with an early essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The central question concerns the status of “critical history,” a term Foucault derives from Friedrich Nietzsche. The turn toward ethics in the later work combines with Foucault’s urge toward a rapprochement with philosophy as a discipline and his engagement with canonical works of antiquity in a constellation of effects that seem to blunt the critical edge of his earlier historiography. It is finally through a turn toward the Cynics very near the end of his career that Foucault revives a form of historiographical untimeliness.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911559
  2. Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibility for Historiography
    Abstract

    This essay argues that traditional historical methods elide the radical singularity of the event by subjecting the event to meaning by way of categorical norms that cannot—by definition—include the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such historiographical methods render every event significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a proper beginning, middle, and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a linear, logic of time. Relying on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the event, specifically in “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” this essay will address the impossible possibility of writing the event by way of a hospitable historiography—beyond the representational demand, appropriative impulse, and temporal mandate of traditional historical methods.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911561
  3. Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Dolmage
    Abstract

    In Disability Rhetoric, Jay Dolmage draws together disability studies and rhetorical history and theory to make a compelling case for both the “central role of the body in rhetoric” (3) and disabil...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911573
  4. Haunted by a Peacock: Discovering, Testing, and Generating Rhetoric in Untimely Ways
    Abstract

    In this essay, a peacock represents an “untimely” agent of transformation in an Aristotelian-based rhetoric. The peacock refers to a fragment attributed to Antiphon. This essay identifies and develops two untimely historiographical ways for pursuing an answer to the question, how can sophistical fragments in general and Antiphon’s fragment in particular be employed to generate attractive spaces for the future of rhetoric as an art of civic discourse? The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a methodological introduction to untimely ways of doing historiography followed by a discussion of the fragment about the peacocks. The third part situates the fragment in a “laboratory” where “equipment” is set up to explore the fragment with untimely ways. The last part of the essay describes how if the peacock’s wing were left alone, rhetoric would be better prepared to look outside of itself into new forms for new functions.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911562

May 2013

  1. Tao Trek: One and Other in Comparative Rhetoric, A Response
    Abstract

    “Tao Trek” traces recent debates regarding comparative and contrastive rhetorical studies and proposes that revisiting some of the earliest encounters of Eastern and Western philosophies of rhetoric can help resolve recent binaries in rhetorical history and theory.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2013.792701

January 2010

  1. “Grand Convergence” in the Mexican Colonial Mundane: The Matter of Introductories
    Abstract

    “Grand Convergence” introduces Mexican colonial rhetoric by way of a short text that is partial to clerical ideology and that eclipses a rich tradition of Amerindian medical rhetoric. Noting distinctions between Burke's theory of the representative anecdote and New Historicist uses of the “detail,” it explores the suitability of the text as an introduction to Latin American rhetoric historiography. Part two of the article examines contemporary scholarship on colonial Mexican rhetoric for its reductions and deflections.

    doi:10.1080/02773940903413407

January 2009

  1. Letter Writing in an Italian Immigrant Community: A Transatlantic Tradition
    Abstract

    Alfonso Arbib-Costa's 1909 Arbib-Costa , Alfonoso . Manuale di Corrispondenza Commercial, Familiare, e Amorose Italiana-Inglese . New York : Italian Book Company , 1909 . [Google Scholar] Manuale di Corrispondenza Commerciale, Familiare, e Amorose Italiana-Inglese offered letter-writing instruction to Italian immigrants hoping to succeed in American business and social circles. The book contained some theory, but was primarily a collection of model letters, or formulary. This article identifies the text as one of a distinct type of bilingual, bicultural letter-writing handbooks for immigrants that arose in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, situates it in the American parlor rhetoric tradition, and analyzes its theoretical content and models. Although formularies are often overlooked by scholars, they are rich texts that reveal important connections between rhetoric and culture. Formularies for immigrants are particularly interesting because they clearly demonstrate how attempts at social engineering may be embedded in rhetorical pedagogy. The study concludes with a call for additional research into this area of rhetorical history, which remains largely unknown.

    doi:10.1080/02773940802561884

October 2007

  1. The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Femininst Historiography
    Abstract

    This article asserts the viability of key topoi in feminist historiography: first, to establish presence for everyday women rhetors, and second, to explore ramifications of their positioning within variant historical narratives. Catalina Hernández was one of six European women recruited to Christianize indigenous girls immediately following the military conquest of Mexico. Her letter to the civic judicial council seeking autonomy for her community of women teachers was perceived as sufficiently dangerous to warrant its deletion from the historical record and the subsequent “disappearance” of the writer herself; only excerpted accounts of Catalina's writing remain. I seek the historical Catalina Hernández in the sophistic mode, assaying four motives and four contexts for the production and reception of her letter.

    doi:10.1080/02773940601116021

June 2007

  1. Menander: A Rhetor in Contextby Malcolm Heath: A Review of: “Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvii+374 pp.”
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Heath's previous work in the field includes a translation of Hermogenes's On Issues with detailed introduction and commentary (1995) and numerous essays in journals and edited collections (listed among the works cited at the end of this review). See Kennedy (2003 ——— . “Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric.” American Journal of Philology 124.2 ( 2003 ): 295 – 301 . [Google Scholar]) for an overview of some of the recent work in the study of Greek rhetoric under the Roman Empire. Much important work on Hellenistic rhetoric and rhetorical criticism of the Bible is being done in the “Pepperdine” series of books and conferences, including, most recently, Olbricht et al. (2002 et al. . Eds. Rhetorical Argumentation in Biblical Texts: Papers from the Lund 2000 Conference . Harrisonburg , PA : Trinity Press International , 2002 . [Google Scholar]; 2005 ———, et al. Eds. Rhetoric, Ethic, and Moral Persuasion in Biblical Discourse . Harrisonburg , PA : T&T Clark International , 2005 . [Google Scholar]). See Dilts (1983 Dilts , Mervin . Scholia Demosthenica . Leipzig : Teubner , 1983–1986 . [Google Scholar]) and Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]) for recent work on Demosthenes scholia. For consensus, see, inter alia, Kennedy (1983 ——— . Greek Rhetoric Under the Christian Emperors . Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press , 1983 . [Google Scholar]), Pernot (1993a Pernot , Laurent . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain. Tome 1: Histoire et technique . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993a . [Google Scholar] and 1993b ——— . La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le Monde gréco-romain. Tome 2: Les Valeurs . Paris : Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes , 1993b . [Google Scholar]), Russell (1983 Russell , D. A. Greek Declamation . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1983 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Walker (2000 Walker , Jeffrey . Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2000 . [Google Scholar]). Parks (1945 Parks , E. P. The Roman Rhetorical Schools as Preparation for the Courts under the Early Empire . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1945 . [Google Scholar]) takes a position similar to that of MRC. Other scholars who emphasize the collaborative and evolving nature of ancient pedagogical works include Dilts and Kennedy (1997 Dilts , Mervin S. and George Kennedy . Eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire . Leiden : Brill , 1997 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Gibson (2002 Gibson , Craig A. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and his Ancient Commentators . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar]), and Poster (1998 Poster , Carol . “(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica.” Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle . Ed. Cynthia Freeland . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press , 1998 . 327 – 350 . [Google Scholar]; 2007 ——— . “A Conversation Halved: Epistolary Theory in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.” Letter-Writing Manuals from Antiquity to the Present . Eds. Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell . Columbia : University of South Carolina Press , 2007 . [Google Scholar]).

    doi:10.1080/02773940701402529

December 2006

  1. Wise Ignorance and Socratic Interiority: Recovering a Dialogic Rhetoric
    Abstract

    This article argues for the recovery of an interior ignorance from Socrates's life of philosophy as a contribution to recent constructions of dialogic rhetoric. Synthesizing Bakhtin's reading of Socratic contestation with his concept of microdialogue, a view of dialogic rhetoric emerges that combines the testing of ideas and persons with interior conditions of doubt, anxiety, and ambivalence. A reading of Socrates's enactment of an interior/exterior piety in the Apology of Socrates is offered to demonstrate how interior ignorance uncovers the double-voicedness of rhetorical texts. The article counterposes this fuller interior/exterior view of ignorance against exteriorized suspicions directed at the character of Socrates, and the idea of ignorance, in rhetorical and cultural criticism.

    doi:10.1080/02773940600860025

January 2003

  1. A sphere of noble action: Gender, rhetoric, and influence at a nineteenth‐century Massachusetts State Normal School
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay explores the rhetorical education of nineteenth‐century women attending the Westfield State Normal School, the second public and first co‐educational normal school in the United States. Archival research reveals that Westfield developed a program of rhetorical study that aimed to prepare both men and women to use oral and written persuasive discourse in their work as teachers. Westfield justified its progressive curriculum by arguing that advanced study in rhetoric would help future teachers to foster learning, win respect, and achieve meaningful moral influence among their pupils. While traditional gender ideologies at times complicated the efforts of female students to master oral and written persuasive discourse, Westfield's faculty and students remained committed throughout the century to the idea that study in rhetoric would aid the future teacher in cultivating a powerful public voice.

    doi:10.1080/02773940309391245

January 2002

  1. Historical studies of rhetorical women here and there: Methodological challenges to dominant interpretive frameworks
    Abstract

    Abstract This article examines theoretical premises of the historical study of rhetorical women, epistemological confusions caused by postmodernism, and challenges from the studies of black and Third World rhetorical women. On that basis it points out that the present difficulties in accepting discursive feminist methodologies in the study of rhetorical history are direct results of a continued adherence to certain established interpretive frameworks that dominate inquiry and knowledge construction in the field of rhetoric/composition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391222
  2. Feminist historiography: Research methods in rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract As a feminist scholar, I prefer to pursue primary research partly because it allows me to cooperate with other scholars instead of opposing them. I employ the feminist method of engagement with, not detachment from, the object of research, a holistic approach using rhetorical ethos and pathos as well as logos. However, I avoid taking positions excessively driven by ideology, or swayed by ultra‐relativism. Instead, I try to present the author's ideas in her own context. Feminist research is valuable as pure research, but it can also be useful in teaching. Future projects should include further study of the rhetorical theories of historical women, and some attempt to contribute to theorizing of sermo.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391224
  3. Telling evidence: Rethinking what counts in rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract After the thousands of years in which a masculine canon of rhetoric has been constructed, feminist scholars have recently worked to create a more inclusive tradition. While problems and concerns have arisen with regard to this change, my work with nineteenth‐century primary texts has convinced me that more time to explore extant texts can alleviate many of the apprehensions associated with this new research. Further time to recover, evaluate, and make meaning from additional information will allow for a more complete picture of women's rhetorical history. In addition, a greater breadth of knowledge will allow us not only to add figures to a more inclusive tradition, but to redefine what counts as evidence in evaluating rhetoric and rhetoricians. In this way we may create a more complete, honest, and interesting picture of the rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391223
  4. Consciousness‐raising: Linking theory, criticism, and practice
    Abstract

    Abstract As a form of discursive practice, consciousness‐raising links recovery, recuperation, and the development of theory. The recovery of texts by women and recovery from the dynamics of suppression by which women's voices were silenced encompasses an enormous conversation among women through time. As a recuperative process criticism promotes an appreciation of women's artistry and eloquence and challenges the capacity of traditional theory to analyze or evaluate women's discourse. Finally, extracting theoretical principles from the practices of women through time suggests alternative ways of viewing rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391220
  5. The archaeology of women in rhetoric: Rhetorical sequencing as a research method for historical scholarship
    Abstract

    Abstract For well over a decade, a number of scholars have argued that a more thorough and representative account of the history of rhetoric can only take place after women are accurately included in the rhetorical tradition. If we are to provide a sensitive accounting of women in the rhetorical tradition, current methods of, and perspectives on, historical research need to be reconsidered and adjusted in three respects. First, our mentality toward rhetoric must expand beyond civic, agonistic discourse to include alternative modes of expression used by women. Second, our efforts to discover primary evidence must intensify so that a more representative body of sources becomes available. This expanded body of evidence must include non‐traditional sources that provide insight to the oral and literate practices of women. Third, historians of rhetoric must create methods of research and analysis that will provide a more sensitive accounting of primary material than current historical methods were designed to yield. This essay argues that these needs can be met by an archaeological approach to historical rhetoric. A method called “rhetorical sequencing”; is offered as an heuristic to facilitate historical research on women in the rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391221

September 2001

  1. Complicating the classics: Neoclassical rhetorics in two early American schoolbooks
    Abstract

    Abstract This article examines two texts important in American rhetorical history, Caleb Bingham's 1794 American Preceptor and Eliphalet Pearson's 1802 abridgment of Blair's Lectures. These schoolbooks challenge accepted historiographies of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century rhetoric in two ways: they demonstrate that neoclassicism encompassed a much greater variety of ancient figures and texts than is usually presumed, and they suggest that neoclassical rhetorics operated within a more complicated sociopolitical milieu than is commonly understood. Bingham and Pearson emerge as key figures in early American rhetorical history and their books prompt reconsideration of American neoclassicism.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391214

June 2001

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Riding the third wave of rhetorical historiography Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists by Martha Watson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 149 pp. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 by Susan Kates. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 157 pp. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Boston by Dorothy C. Broaddus. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 136 pp. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present by Charles Paine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 261 pp. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders by Katherine H. Adams. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 169 pp. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. xxvi + 308. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 2000. xi + 237 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391210

March 2000

  1. Disciplinary identities: On the rhetorical paths between English and communication studies
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.

    doi:10.1080/02773940009391173

September 1998

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance by Cheryl Glenn. Southern Illinois UP, 1997. 235 pp. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. by Jean Grondin. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Xviii & 233 pages. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. Edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Xxiv & 407 pages. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy by Barbara Herrnstein‐Smith. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England. 1997. 221 pp. The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument by James Crosswhite. Madison: U. Wisconsin Press, 1996. 329 pages. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James S. Taylor. Albany: SUNY, 1998. 211 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391133

June 1997

  1. Researching the body: An annotated bibliography for rhetoric
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391098

January 1997

  1. Heteroglossia, polyphony, andthe federalist papers
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391086

June 1990

  1. Positional historiography and Margaret Fuller's public discourse of mutual interpretation1
    Abstract

    (1990). Positional historiography and Margaret Fuller's public discourse of mutual interpretation. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 233-239.

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390886

March 1981

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

    Historical Rhetoric. An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources in English. Edited by Winifred Bryan Horner. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1980. Pp. xii + 294. The Winged Word. Berkley Peabody. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975. Pp. 562. $40.00. Averroës’ Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle's “Topics,” "Rhetoric.” and “Poetics.” Edited and translated by Charles B. Butterworth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. Pp. 3d. & 206. Francis Bacon and the Style of Science. James Stephens. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xi ‐ 188. $10.95 (Cloth).

    doi:10.1080/02773948109390602