Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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January 2026

  1. The Paradigmatic Aftermath of Digital Rhetoric
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2025.2590769

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

May 2023

  1. “I Wish I Could Give You This Feeling”: Black Digital Commons and the Rhetoric of “The Corner”
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThe unique experience of Black Americans in the United States produces a physical and cultural space with a long history of misuse, commodification, and theft of the Black imagination and Black culture. These spaces, which also historically complicate notions of privatization and ownership, are replicated online today. In this essay, we propose the corner as a lens through which to interrogate whether Black networks online potentially produce a rhetorical digital commons and, further, whether the theory and practice of “the commons” adequately make space for the particular historical reality of Black America. To do so, we focus on three social media platforms wherein Black digital praxis meets the possibility of the corner: TikTok, Twitter, and Black Planet. These digital corners provide lessons that center the Black experience on- and offline, and point toward possibilities and limitations in our digital future. Ultimately we argue that the corner contradicts hegemonic modes of white supremacy in public spaces while also spotlighting the brutal realities of gentrification, commodification, and theft that fortify the exploitation of Black communities.KEYWORDS: Black/African American rhetoricdigital commonsdigital rhetoricsocial media Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We use Black liberation here to reference freeing Black persons from multiple forms of political, social, and economic subjugation. Black liberation movements, theories, and theologies have been espoused by numerous organizations. Here. though, we reference any orientation toward this perspective whether explicitly named by individuals or simply inferred through their online activities. See Stokley Carmicheal’s “Toward Black Liberation” and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From# BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.2 See André Brock, Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, especially chapter four, for an insightful analysis on breaking the dichotomy of ratchetry and antiracism.3 See Nakamura 181–93.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2200704

March 2023

  1. (Re)Turning to Hypertext: Mattering Digital Learning Spaces
    Abstract

    This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re)conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2095424
  2. Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing: by John R. Gallagher, Utah State UP, 2019, 202 pp., $26.95 (paperback); $19.95 (ebook), EISBN: 978-1-60732-974-9
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2185010

August 2021

  1. Graphed into the Conversation: Conspiracy, Controversy, and Climategate’s Visual Style
    Abstract

    This essay reads the 2009 Climategate blogosphere through the rubric of visual style. We argue that Climategate bloggers used the stolen e-mails between prominent climate scientists to leverage claims about the proper perspective for seeing data, imitate institutional forms of climatological inquiry, and posit transparency as a moral imperative in many online forums. Rather than attacking science tout court, these appeals to visibility operated on the grounds of visuality and proof established by institutional forms of scientific inquiry, thus alleging climate change-denying bloggers were the “actual” scientists. By forwarding alternative visualizations of global temperature data and characterizing institutional climatology as secretive, Climategate bloggers significantly shaped public understandings of global warming. Ultimately, our purpose is to show how a visual style is an ambivalent form of rhetoric that scientific experts may also deploy in public science communication.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1947515

May 2018

  1. The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2018.1454187

October 2014

  1. Stranger Relations: The Case for Rebuilding Commonplaces between Rhetoric and Mathematics
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.965046

November 2010

  1. What are Neurorhetorics?
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJordynn JackJordynn Jack is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina, 512 Greenlaw Hall CB#3520, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA. E-mail: jjack@email.unc.edu

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2010.519758

January 2009

  1. TheAra Pacis Augustae: Visual Rhetoric in Augustus' Principate
    Abstract

    Abstract Scholars of rhetoric have veered away from non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in the classical period. In this article I examine the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace, as one such overlooked rhetorical artifact. I argue the altar, although constructed as a war monument, shapes public memory to persuade the people of Rome to accept the dynastic succession of Augustus's heir. In addition, I show a variety of rhetorical theories operate on the altar in visual form including amplification, imitation, and enthymeme. Ultimately I contend that by focusing on non-traditional rhetorical artifacts, we can deepen our understanding of the rhetorical tradition in a period in which rhetoric is generally believed to have faded away. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen LampKathleen Lamp is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., 244 Lincoln Hall, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: lamp@uiuc.edu

    doi:10.1080/02773940802356624

October 2008

  1. Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language
    Abstract

    Abstract Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic's perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), the author of what is commonly regarded as the European Renaissance's most influential magical text, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533). In investigating the rhetorical strategies contained in Agrippa's famously ambiguous retraction of his occult works we may uncover an equally polysemic stance toward the ability of language to deal with both the everyday world and the realm of the sacred, a stance that uses textual instantiations of paradoxes of self-reference to forcefully undermine the apparently paradigmatic magical identification of signifier and signified. Acknowledgment I thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on this article. Notes 1See Lehrich (Language of Demons and Angels) for a comprehensive analysis of the three books. 2See Zika for an overview of Reuchlin's influence on Agrippa. 3"…, lapides loquitor, caveant ne cerebrum illis excutiat." J.F.'s use of the alliterated "b"s in his English translation is perhaps more effective in its Anglo-Saxon brutality. 4Note that the quotation marks are not in the original Latin but added by J.F. for the English translation of 1651. 5Again, the quotation marks are an addition of J.F.'s English translation and are not in the Latin original. 6See Kneale and Kneale (228–231) for a discussion of the Liar's context in medieval logic. 7See Sainsbury (114–132), Simmons (2–7), and Hofstadter for accessible re-formulations from the nineteenth century onward. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Miles Chris Miles is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magusa, Mersin 10, Turkey. E-mail: chris.miles@emu.edu.tr

    doi:10.1080/02773940802375467

September 1998

  1. Rhetorical criticism of public discourse on the internet: Theoretical implications
    Abstract

    The Internet and access to it have grown exponentially in the past three years. Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center reports that, since January 1994 when its first survey of Internet users was conducted, the Internet has grown from 1250 servers to over one million servers. There are over thirty million users of the Internet in the United States alone (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center). The versatility of the medium has increased along with its size, as the addition of Java technology and other features has increased the dynamism and interactivity of Web sites and as conveyance via television has increased access. Mass communications scholars and our colleagues in interpersonal, organizational, and small group communication have been studying computer-mediated communication [CMC] for some time. Mass communications researchers have been concerned with a number of questions-how First Amendment protections and intellectual and property rights transfer from print to CMC; what factors play a role in attracting audiences to Internet sites; what strategies can be used to determine accuracy of information on the Internet; and so forth (McChesney; Morris and Ogan; Reeves and Nass). Interpersonal communication researchers have studied the development and maintenance of relationships online (Walther; Parks and Floyd), while small group researchers have examined the dynamics of group process in computer-mediated environments (Savicki, Lingenfelter, and Kelley; Rafaeli and Sudweeks). In addition to these, there have been many other forms of communication research studying Internet discourse and interaction. But rhetorical critics and theorists are latecomers to the scene. There are many possible reasons for this. Many humanists have been slow to take up interest in discourse in electronic environments, perhaps because they suspect that critical work and critical theory will need to be changed to suit the new communication environments, and this is true because in a hypertext environment, author, audience, and text are dispersed. While such dispersion can and does occur in other modalities, computer-mediated discourse is particularly prone to it. The function of the author as originator of a message can be suppressed in groupauthored, disguised, or anonymous Internet postings. As I will show later, identifying the nature and reactions of audiences is made more difficult in computer-mediated environments. And when text becomes hypertext, the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability. As Ted Friedman (73) noted,

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391131

September 1990

  1. Rhetoric as a wedge: A reformulation
    Abstract

    George Yoos was once kind enough to contribute paper to panel concerned partly with my use of the metaphor is wedge.1 Prior to that time, I had been using the metaphor only incidentally and in passing; most of the indexers of the books in which I had used it had missed it altogether. But the metaphor does encapsulate an aspect of rhetoric that I think is worth discussing in its own right. The speakers in the panel-not only Yoos, but also Carroll C. Arnold2-have already provided useful elaboration of this aspect. Here I shall discuss it further. Rhetoric, as I see it, is means-perhaps the only means-of evoking and maintaining consciousness. It accomplishes these ends by driving wedge between subject and object. For it is the instrument that objectifies stimuli or presuppositions not hitherto perceived as objects. An example of rhetoric at its most elementary level would be the question Isn't that your telephone ringing? addressed to person not hitherto conscious that his telephone was ringing. At more sophisticated level, if I have been unconsciously assuming that the death penalty is permissible punishment for some crimes, and you call that assumption into question, objectifying it as topic for discussion, you are engaging in rhetoric. In either case, you are evoking consciousness by introducing gap between subject and what can now objectively concern him. By a I simply mean whatever introduces such gap. Rhetoric has no place in transactions within systems in which there is no gap between the input of data and their acceptance. A good example is the continuity between the input of data to computer and its response to those data. The computer does not decide whether to accept the data. Of course software can be designed-and undoubtedly has been designed-providing message to the effect that certain data fed into the machine are inappropriate. But the mechanism that produces this result is merely an extension of the same mechanism through which the machine accepts other data. Consider the input ABXY. If this is acceptable, it is processed in certain way. If it is unacceptable, it is still received by the computer as input, and is processed in another way not different in principle from the first, although perhaps little more complex. The result of the second sort of processing is to produce the message ABXY is not acceptable. In neither situation, I would say, has there been use of rhetoric. For in neither case has the machine been made to stand over against its data-to take account of these data as objects. Even the machine's rejection of data fails to be an objectification of them. There was no wedge, and there is no gap. Rhetoric, as I conceive it, is the art of calling attention to situation for which objectivity is claimed. But I do not believe that any particular psychological

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390895

January 1989

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

    Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Martin J. Medhurst. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 236 pp. Reviewed by Warren Rubel. The Sophists. Harold Barrett, Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp Publishers, 1981. 85+ix pp. Reviewed by William Benoit Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. Michael Heim. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987.305 pp. Reviewed by Ronald A. Sudol. Thoreau's Comments on the Art of Writing, Richard Dillman, editor. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Reviewed by J. L. Campbell. Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, Winifred Bryan Horner. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Reviewed by James Leonard. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Allen Harris. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 332 pages. Reviewed by David S. Kaufer.

    doi:10.1080/02773948909390834

September 1986

  1. The old paradigm in computer aids to invention: A critical review
    Abstract

    Abstract The major types of computer aids to invention are reviewed to reveal the paper‐based design paradigm that characterizes them. Implications of this “old paradigm”; are discussed and directions are suggested for developing new, uniquely electronic paradigms for future aids.

    doi:10.1080/02773948609390754

June 1984

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

    Verbal Style and the Presidency: A Computer‐Based Analysis. By Roderick P. Hart. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, Inc., 1984. The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Winifred Bryan Horner, Editor. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizxng of the Word. By Walter J. Ong, S. J. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

    doi:10.1080/02773948409390712