ABSTRACTInspired by challenges we faced in an undergraduate community-literacy cohort, we theorize “epideictic listening” as an important concept for articulating the range of listening strategies necessary both for our work in local public schools and for sustaining the cohort’s internal cohesion. Through critical reflection, we (faculty and student coauthors) offer a definition of “epideictic listening” that draws from, but also distinguishes itself from, other theoretical frameworks, such as rhetorical listening and community listening. We situate epideictic listening within the larger rhetorical tradition of epideixis. We end with a concrete application for epideictic listening—the debrief—and gesture toward the larger significance for epideictic listening in community settings.KEYWORDS: Debriefepideictic listeningepideixisethosrhetorical listening Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay examines how the Swedish disability movement creates policies involving naming practices as a means for self-presentation.The study takes its departure from two kinds of empirical data: websites of specific disability organizations and an interview with representatives of a national disability organization.Different angles of problems associated with terms for selfdescription are discussed mainly from a rhetorical-agency perspective.Through the analysis of data, I show how different political goals are connected to naming practices, resulting in ambivalence toward ongoing linguistic innovation processes, especially those with roots in norm criticism.

Scholars have often noted that the Greek rhetorical term, kairos, relates etymologically to weaving. However, many accounts of this connection overlook the weaving technology used in ancient Greece, the warp-weighted loom. Examining this technology alongside archeological experiments, ancient depictions on vases, and references in ancient lexicons, we propose adopting a definition of kairos (in its weaving sense) as a “chained spacing cord” used to ensure balance and evenness. By focusing on kairos’ relationship to weaving, we shift its etymological resonances away from the idea of an opening to be penetrated, reemphasizing a concept of kairos grounded in embodiment, materiality, balance, and due measure. More broadly, attending to the materiality of praxis highlights rhetoric’s connection to other technai and offers an additional way to understand gendered histories of rhetoric.

ABSTRACTWhat exactly is the Church? Is it primarily an institution? Or is it the people in its pews? And depending on the answer, what obligations do the people who constitute it in the present have toward the past? This essay utilizes the Pennsylvania State Legislative debate over clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a way to explore how communal commonplaces are activated in public argument and used to shift the dominant meanings of a community. Communal commonplaces act as a shorthand to bring audiences to a place of shared understanding while managing opposing lines of argument, images, and tropes. Understanding the Church as a communal commonplace illuminates how divergent meanings can be activated for wildly different and materially consequential purposes. Analyzing the Church helps us to understand how other communal commonplaces— the nation, for instance—manage opposing images of a community.KEYWORDS: Catholic Churchcommunitymetaphortropes Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 There is considerable debate over the terms used to refer to individuals who have experienced sexual violence. The term victim is often used in legal contexts, whereas survivor is common in antisexual violence advocacy circles (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network [RAINN]). Some individuals who have experienced sexual violence prefer one term over another (or neither), and that preference may change over time and in different contexts (Williamson and Serna). Throughout the essay, in an attempt to honor the terms individuals have chosen for themselves, I use whatever term appears in the text I am most recently quoting or analyzing. Otherwise, I follow RAINN’s practice of referring to individuals as victims when referring to their relationship to the criminal or civil legal system.2 While a partial Statute of Limitations reform bill was signed into Pennsylvania law in 2019, Rozzi’s look-back window was taken out of the bill and put forth as a constitutional amendment. Due to several significant setbacks, the question of the look-back window remains unresolved.3 Both within legal and academic circles, the idea of institutions expressing corporate agency is a contested one. This idea is a part of an ongoing debate over whether groups can exhibit the capacities and actions associated with theories of individual agency, such as the capacity for thought, intention, and moral blameworthiness (Smiley). In both its legal and public use, it is oftentimes used to capture both the tendency for institutions to be the subject of moral reproach, and the idea that individuals both share and enable each other’s actions within specific group structures (Williams). My use of corporate agency within this essay is meant to capture the sentiment of the Rozzi coalition, and their insistence that the structures of the Church enabled the concerted actions of multiple individuals, and thus that the institution could be held legally and morally responsible.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

This essay uses Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” as a heuristic for analyzing the rhetorical processes of erasure that have created one of the largest open pit copper mines on the planet: The Bingham Canyon Mine (BCM). Contributing to studies of corporate rhetoric, persona criticism, and nonhuman agencies, I argue that the BCM, and its corporate owner Rio Tinto, is characteristic of Being-in-the-Anthropocene and informs rhetoricians about our extra-human ethos, or manner of dwelling, as an entwinement with corporate actors. Taking Rio Tinto as a synecdoche for corporate personhood and persona (prosōpon), I make the case for an ecological approach to corporate disclosedness that accounts for the earthly resources of corporate rhetorical invention (e.g., copper). Through the later work of Martin Heidegger, I show how the BCM has become a standing reserve within a corporate world picture that is rhetorically apparent in the rhetorical architecture of Salt Lake City, Utah.

This essay examines the queer rhetorical capacities of what the pornographer, poet, professor, and tattoo artist Samuel Steward called latriniana—sexual graffiti located in public lavatories. While this genre’s rhetorical objective is often associated with sexual solicitation, this essay argues that latriniana proffers a destabilized logos—always in motion, roving along a continuum of cohesion and disintegration, while never truly landing on any definitive form. As a result, the genre exemplifies what Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes have cited as queer composition’s impossibility. Using samples of latriniana collected from gay bars in San Francisco and New York City, the essay traces the rhetorical gestures inherent to the genre, exploring the way latriniana enables a multiplicity of readings, and thus embodies the chimerical, uncontainable queer logos.

Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at stake. Yet nearly every dispute over water involves not just contested meanings but contested ontologies. This essay examines water ontologies in a controversy over water wells in Ontario, Canada, which residents claim were affected by pile driving for wind turbine installation. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontologies and the Bakhtinian term, chronotope, I show how different water ontologies emerge from spatiotemporal orientations and shift how expertise is enacted. Common water ontologies, water-as-resource and water-as-chemical-entity, enshrine white settlers as experts, despite their different stances on the issue in question. Municipal leaders, corporate representatives, and community members enacted water as an entity knowable to technoscience and exploitable by humans. An alternative ontology introduced by First Nations leaders, water-as-lifeblood, emphasizes water as a sacred, life-giving force. Speakers authorize themselves as experts by enacting water differently.

This essay focuses on writing assessment. Specifically, the author explores the embedded raced construction of writing assessment, rubrics, inter alia, commonly used in first year composition courses. The author posits that rubrics used to assess what Asao Inoue termed Habits of White Language cannot effectively assess and may be detrimental to assessing speakers from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically African Americans. The importance of Black Language (BL), rhetoric, and argumentation styles to rhetorical studies and American discourse must not only be recognized but also explored and taught as a style of argumentation. I implement an Afrocentric rubric using the principles of African American Rhetoric as a means for both expanding the rhetorical triangle and providing ethical assessment of BL in writing.

E. Johanna Hartelius’s monograph, The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons, teems with insights and provocations about the ways that the discourses of the digital commons are anchored in...

This essay shows how Plato uses methods of fourth-century rhetorical theory to build a theory of language-as-signification, which he constructed to overcome the problem of lies and “false speech” in sophistic culture. By deconstructing Plato’s theorization of signification, I question the historical process by which the “sovereignty of the signifier” (in Michel Foucault’s terms) came to be established, and I reposition Plato as a theorist in the rhetorical tradition who, by redefining the key terms of onoma, rhêma, and logos, created a theory of language that made lies all the more potent by reducing them to “mere signification.” It is this understanding of language as merely signifying and referencing the world that, I argue, lies at the root of the post-truth problem in 21st-century politics. While Plato’s truth problem is characterized by “silence without disproof,” our own post-truth problem is characterized as “disproof without silence.”

Rhetoric is again dominating the humanities. Even so, sometimes deeply rhetorical books are not identified as such. Katie Oliviero’s Vulnerability Politics: The Uses and Abuses of Precarity in Poli...

When representatives from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage program approved Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley for inclusion on its list of World Heritage sites in 2004, they did not anticipate that the area—selected as a model of sustainable development—would be delisted five years later. Plans for construction of Waldschlösschen Bridge (Waldschlößchenbrücke) on the site sparked a debate between the World Heritage Committee and Dresden’s city council over the best possible future for the site. This controversy is indicative of the challenges involved in maintaining international conservation efforts. I analyze how urban planners, Dresden’s city council, World Heritage representatives, and citizens navigated competing visions of Dresden’s past and future during the bridge controversy. Each party’s reliance on memories of Dresden’s past at the expense of other possibilities for invention reveals the limits of the topos of historical legitimacy as a determining factor for the future of a space.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery—how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to reverse it, or if it’s even possible to do so. The essays in this issue advance that effort in a time when demagoguery is once again on the rise.

Evangelical women who write from lived experience—in blogs, social media, and memoirs—develop a personal narrative rhetoric to negotiate contentious currents of religious thought. This essay studies the work of Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker, who use this rhetorical strategy to destabilize mainstream evangelical discourses of gender and biblical authority. This study expands understandings of rhetorical practices in North American evangelicalism, particularly the contemporary, female-led Xvangelical movement. Analyzing their writing illuminates the interplay among feminist and conservative agendas in debates over gender roles and biblical authority. Because they take conservative doctrine seriously, Hatmaker and Bessey invoke an audience of evangelical readers disappointed with the political and patriarchal commitments of their churches. Finally, this essay advances conversations about the rhetoric of personal narrative. Bessey and Hatmaker explore the ways life writing creates knowledge and offers alternatives to argumentation based in certainty that often characterizes evangelical rhetoric.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

This essay extends efforts to complicate traditional understandings of ethos by considering it as expressed through and by means of the body. This analysis also examines ethos in relation to Vicki Tolar Burton’s concept of rhetorical accretion or the practice of overlaying new texts on the primary core text. To reveal the significance of analyzing ethos in this manner, this study explores the work of Genevieve Stebbins, a late nineteenth-century proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. The essay examines her use of textual accretion as a form of critique but also as a means of acceptance and overlay. More significantly, it reveals the ways that Stebbins’s deployment of rhetorical accretion represents a striking reversal of Burton’s concept. Instead of men overlaying a woman’s text we see the opposite practice in Stebbins’s case.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

Increasingly, rhetoricians have taken up the task of understanding how rhetoric is applicable to material conditions, yet have found difficulty in approaching the rhetoric that exists between nonhumans. While the debate over the size of rhetoric, big or small, has often dominated discussions, the concern over size is less important than the relationship between rhetoric and materiality. Both “rhetorical materialism” and “rhetoric’s materiality” approaches see nonhuman objects as subsumed in symbolic representations and human-centric worldviews. This essay suggests a micro-rhetorical stance, which avoids discussions over size and builds upon existing formulations of exploratory, nonhuman rhetorics. A micro-rhetoric allows for concepts not previously thought of as rhetorical, such as hyle, which can be used to identify persuasive elements within nonhuman relations. To show how hyle can be used in a micro-rhetorical investigation, this essay offers a brief analysis of the material persuasions involved in the design of a microbrewery malting system.

In this essay, I examine how Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner used her 2007 inaugural address to legitimize her political leadership. Placing the address within Argentina’s political climate and working in light of the fact that Fernández de Kirchner’s spouse was the out-going president, I use theories of political ethos to examine the challenges Fernández de Kirchner faced in inaugurating her presidency. I suggest that she constructed a hybrid ethos, combining multiple presidential images to reconcile competing concerns. I treat in depth three elements of that hybrid ethos: the ethos of a presidential couple that positioned Fernández de Kirchner alongside her popular husband; the ethos of a woman president building on a tradition of other influential Argentine women; and the ethos of a teacher-expert whose knowledge authorized national leadership. Enacting these varied ethoi, I argue, Fernández de Kirchner turned political challenges to her advantage and crafted the presidency she would assume.

This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.

From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Chaim Perelman's work showed the Platonic roots of Modernist thought; see especially The Realm of Rhetoric. Latour's work is strong in terms of Modernism's impact on understandings of science.2 See Robert Hariman; Reyes, "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."3 I draw mostly on Rotman's more recent Mathematics as Sign because there one finds the clearest articulation of his approach.4 The issue of the relationship between informal and formal mathematical discourse, the discursive/argumentative strategies within each, and the rhetorical purposes of each remains an unexplored and potentially rich area for rhetorical analysis. See the "Potentialities" section that follows.5 For others who make this argument see William P. Thurston; Lakoff and Núñez; Imre Lakatos.6 This is, of course, a major issue in the mathematics education literature, where studies of student perspectives on math reveal two consistent themes: students perceive math as (1) abstract and (2) rule-driven. The point that we are building toward is that mathematics is not abstract or rule-driven by nature, but it can and often is taught as an abstract form of logical (rule-driven) reasoning. This pedagogical approach, it has been shown, does not allow the majority of students to identify with mathematics (see Boaler). Regarding computers and mathematics, an interesting phenomenon has emerged in the twenty-first century: powerful computers are analyzing enormous data sets and are producing complex mathematical formulas out of those data sets that even the best mathematicians cannot understand—they know they work to predict certain phenomena in the data set but they cannot give meaning to those predictions. The fact that computers can generate novel mathematical formulae significantly undermines the Platonic view of mathematics. See Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, 126–128.7 Lakatos's work reveals the importance of historical context and the dynamics of argumentation in mathematical innovation. See Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations.8 For insightful accounts of the emergence of Greek geometry and its debt to empirical, material features of the world see Michel Serres; Reviel Netz.9 To the skeptical reader who thinks math is only metaphorical at the basic level: Nearly half of Where Mathematics Comes From addresses more complex mathematics, offering analyses of the concept of infinity and of Euler's classic equation eπi = −1. A full treatment of these analyses is beyond the scope of this essay.10 Rhetoric of science scholars have extended Latour's argument in various ways. The number of scholars is too long to list here but one might profitably begin with John A. Lynch and Chantal Benoit-Barné.11 Analysis of rhetoric as constitutive has increased in many areas of rhetorical studies but remains a minority approach to the study of mathematical discourse. I develop this point in "The Rhetoric in Mathematics."12 These works build of course on previous scholarship on mathematics as deployed in other domains, including especially the domains of economics and statistics.13 Bernhard Riemann's concept of manifold, for example, comes to mind as a potentially beneficial way to advance our thinking about polysemy and subjectivity, for it emphasizes not only the discrete differentiations of meaning and identity but also their layered and continuous features. See Arkady Plotnitsky.

The historical actors at the center of Kimberly Harrison’s The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion are not easy figures to identify with, but they are worth studyi...

My bookcase holds many contemporary books on “style”—or to use the Aristotelian term, lexis—in written communication. They are largely concentrated on such matters as clarity, conciseness, and cons...

This essay recovers the rhetorical career of San Francisco Examiner journalist Winifred Black to demonstrate how professional journalists used late-nineteenth-century newspapers for rhetorical education and social change. I analyze two campaigns—the “Orphan's Santa Claus” and the “Little Jim” crusade—to demonstrate how Winifred Black constructs a persuasive ethos capable of inspiring the writing and social action efforts of male and female children from various socioeconomic classes. Specifically, Black revises the rhetorical tradition of the “stunt girl reporter” in order to craft a teacherly ethos anchored in a “symbolic motherhood”—an effective rhetorical strategy due to close cultural links between teaching and mothering. Combined with aspects of what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell terms a “feminine style,” this ethos allows Black to promote not merely social change, but a particular kind of rhetorical education that: (1) privileges moral principles over grammatical and mechanical correctness and (2) blurs gender and class lines.

Over 2,500 years, philosophers in India refined a truth-centered and rhetorically egalitarian method of analogical debate: Nyāya vāda, and its five-part expression, the “Nyāya method.” According to Indian tradition, its practices emerged in the context of inter-scholar debates. However, most historical examples of Indian debate occur in mythical/religious dialogues between teacher and student, and currently Nyāya's scholars focus on theory, neglecting social practice. While Indologists describe the “what” of Nyāya, their bias toward theory leaves its conversational uses unexplored. Comparative rhetoricians describe Indian rhetoric with Greek terminologies as points of reference, and miss Nyāya's theoretical and practical debate tradition. This essay addresses this lack of social context and paucity of representation of Nyāya. It shows how informal debates in ancient literary/historical dialogues presage Nyāya's formulation and traces Nyāya's use in contemporary public examples, illustrating its rhetorical journey from discussions of scholars and kings, to academic formulization, to popular dialogic expression. Nyāya offers a clear alternative to Western confrontational rhetoric, and the presence of Indian “rhetorical” practice and theory undermines assumptions about “rhetoric” being uniquely Greek in origin, underscoring the need for comparative rhetorics.

This essay analyzes and contrasts the rhetorical appeals of Breast Cancer Action and Breast Cancer Fund, the two national breast cancer organizations devoted to prevention and environmental activism. Following in the tradition of rhetoric scholars who understand rhetoric as constitutive of its audiences, I elucidate not only how these organizations recruit new audiences to their cause, but who they construct as recruitable. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of these organizations' rhetorics is successful as constitutive rhetoric (the other's less so), but worry over the political and social actions potentially precluded by its successes. This organization's rhetoric, as I show, retains and thus recirculates many individualistic assumptions and regressive notions of femininity associated with the more mainstream breast cancer movement and, well beyond, with most hegemonic US discourses.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.