OpenAI's ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students' experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were "consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication." Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of "writing degree zero" (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

Studies of Augustine's rhetoric have been focused on the De doctrina christiana and the Confessions. As a result, these studies have been restricted to questions of Augustine's reception of Greco-Roman ideas. This article analyzes an underappreciated source, the De catechizandis rudibus, to show that Augustine engaged with a topic that his pagan forebears did not account for, namely rhetorical depression, a condition that tempts speakers to slide into a grim silence. Because rhetorical depression does not admit of a technical solution, Augustine responds to it by locating discourse within a redemptive drama animated by love. The hope of love's ultimate victory over communicative futility and frustration inspires the depressed speaker to stammer onward rejoicing. Augustine's placement of rhetoric within a dramatic history can prompt future reflection on the stories and myths found in past handbooks of rhetoric. It may also help us tell stories about rhetoric today that help depressed speakers get up in the morning.

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.

This essay initiates a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. We argue that four patterns of discourse exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously: conflicting rhetorics regarding egg quantity and quality in relation to the typical age one starts a tenure-track job; sexist and transphobic rhetorics of fear-mongering in medical and academic settings; rhetorics of silence surrounding the impact of miscarriage, which often accompanies infertility; and cisheterosexist institutional discrimination in the face of exorbitant treatment costs. We use feminist “strategic contemplation” to reflect critically on these patterns of discourse in relation to our lived experiences of (in)fertility. In doing so, we validate those struggling, educate those who are not, and seek a more just reproductive landscape for academic women and trans* people whose clocks are ticking.

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines discourse surrounding contemporary calls for consilience, a form of interdisciplinary collaboration articulated by E. O. Wilson aimed at uniting the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from a Darwinian perspective. This essay builds on earlier examinations of Wilsonian consilience by analyzing a sample of texts that reflect a “second wave” of consilience and shifting rhetorical tactics over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that current calls for consilience reflect heightened rhetorical awareness among authors and that additional rhetorical work is required to gain adherence among diverse cross-disciplinary audiences. Implications are discussed for future research into enactments of consilience-style interdisciplinary research.KEYWORDS: CollaborationconsilienceE. O. Wilsoninterdisciplinarity Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Wilson’s rationale for unifying the disciplines is, on the surface, noncontroversial. In Consilience, he argues that knowledge is too segregated, academic specialties too specialized, and engagements too infrequent among scholars and researchers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities (9). Additionally, Wilson believes that addressing real-world social and political problems demands “fluency across boundaries” (13–14), that any single branch of knowledge would not yield the synoptic vision required for effective intervention. For Wilson in 1998, consilience remains a “metaphysical” hope, ultimately pointing the way toward a more systematic and integrated account of human knowledge about the world and ourselves (9).2 For example, conferences and workshops include Integrating Science and the Humanities (Vancouver, BC, 2008), Consilience Conference (St. Louis, MO, 2012), and TEDxWellesleyCollege on Consilience (Wellesley, MA, 2014). Scholarly texts include, among others, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Dutton); Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Slingerland & Collard); Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences (Carroll); The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Gottschall).3 While a broader conversation about consilience style research might take into consideration works in subfields such as evolutionary esthetics, evolutionary literary study, paleoesthetics, evolutionary film and media study, evolutionary musicology, evolutionary studies in popular culture and include journals such as Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, these works—along with the remaining chapters excluded from Darwin’s Bridge and Creating Consilience—would fall into the category of enactments of consilience and do not meet Ceccarelli’s criteria for “interdisciplinary inspirational” texts. Although such works might prove to be fruitful examples of enactments of consilience, they do not explicitly label their work as a continuation of Wilson’s Consilience, as is the case in both Creating Consilience and Darwin’s Bridge.

This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.

This essay explores the figure of “liberal tears” as a manifestation of contemporary sadistic conservative discourse in the United States. Sadistic rhetoric betrays an underlying structure of affect where hate and desire coincide. Its primary work is to enforce separation between sadistic subjects and fantasy objects that appeal to them in ways that must be disavowed for their identities to remain coherent. The liberal other is a figure both promising and threatening overwhelming enjoyment. Because of the ways in which it relies on separation and identification to generate enjoyment for its subjects, strategies like satire and empathy are insufficient to respond to sadistic conservative discourses, but rhetoric’s capacity to destabilize identities and undermine certainty remain promising contributions to engaged scholarship.

In this essay I turn to the world-renowned book and film The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan in order to conceptualize and critique what I label the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy. Doing so, I advance two interrelated claims: first, that neoliberalism’s rhetorical force is derived primarily from its extension and alteration of liberal notions of possessive individualism into a dispositif of corporate personhood. Second, I claim that Bakan’s argument that corporations are psychopaths—and his larger rhetoric of corporate psychopathy—ultimately reinscribes rather than challenges the disciplinary functions of liberal discourse in interesting ways. Thus, while the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy is an easily digestible line of argument that offers a ready-made case against corporate personhood and rights it is an argument against corporate personhood that those who oppose corporate power ought to reconsider.

As a longstanding area of practice and inquiry in rhetorical scholarship, the role of the example in rhetorical discourse has undergone its share of debates, discussions, and important advancements. One important topic of discussion on these matters involves the role of the example in providing either strategic ambiguity or experiential clarity. Through an analysis of William James’s deployment of a pragmatic rhetoric of exemplary figures in The Varieties of Religious Experience, this essay advances a view of the example as a resource for transforming the ambiguous consequences of inner ideals into pragmatic and empowered social action. In a chapter titled “The Value of Saintliness,” James invokes a cadre of saintly figures as exemplars in the attempt to cultivate democratic individuality and inspire social change efforts through the conduct of spiritual meliorism. This essay offers expanded conceptions of exemplarity and pragmatist rhetoric in contexts concerning democracy and social justice.

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.

Western notions of race have never been for us. Yet culture has historically functioned as an “insider” discourse, representing our ways of living, knowing, and communing with one another. How, then, might Black folks remain mindful in our treatments of race and culture, ever cognizant of how we wield these constructs to our collective global advantage? In this essay, I reflect on how three Africana historical figures have engaged this question: (1) David Walker, whose sense of literacy in Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World centered free and enslaved Black audiences as cultural “insiders,” (2) C.L.R. James, whose evolving sense of collective Black identity prompted him to write texts such as The Black Jacobins, a Black-centered interpretation of the Haitian Revolution, and (3) Reverend John Chilembwe, whose Africana global alliances and literacy-based leadership ignited the Nyasaland Uprising against colonial oppression in Malawi. I argue that these three figures resisted race by affirming global Black collectivity as a cultural homeplace, thus informing how we may theorize and practice Black rhetorical studies today.

In this essay, Patterson continues the tradition of turning to analysis of family as a way to challenge asymmetrical power relations within academic discourse. Through an analysis of publications and performances from three members of the author’s family—Phillip Patterson’s The Serenity of Knowing, Michael Patterson’s Humanist Solutions to American Problems: An Apolitical Approach to Governing, and Morgan Deane’s “A Light in the Night: Reopening & Operating Nightlife Venues in the Time of Covid-19”—Patterson animates Tracie Morris’s theory of grace as an African proverb performance rooted in Black family rhetoric to make visible rhetorical traditions and strategies used to create literacies for working across difference and surviving and thriving despite racist hegemonic structures of oppression. Additionally, Patterson extends their family rhetorical practices as useful techniques for decolonizing curriculum in form and content.

This essay draws on theories of rhetorical ability to analyze public discourse on sexual consent. By emphasizing the rhetoricity of disability, these theories underscore the environmental conditions of communication. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding a controversial legal case, the author develops a rhetorical theory of consent that calls attention to the way that arrangements of power enable and constrain the communicative conditions that facilitate the possibility of consent.

This essay presents a theory of rhetorical decay, a rhetorical state that results from argumentative gestures that “derail” and suppress productive discourse (i.e., exchanges that produce new understandings, consensus, or “legitimate dissensus” between members of a public). Reviewing works from critical race studies, rhetorical criticism, and feminist rhetorical studies, the author identifies several individual preexisting concepts that can be classified as individual rhetorical decay–fostering practices. However, a gap remains in theorizing the larger category and understanding the outcomes of such rhetorics; this essay intervenes in this space by creating the metatheory of rhetorical decay, characterizing the family of gestures, examining affiliate concepts, providing an example of rhetorical decay in a contemporary public argument (over lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender marriage), and identifying precedents for mitigating such practices.

This essay applies Craig Rood’s concept of rhetorical closure to the specific case study of the creation of feminist discourse communities to discuss sexuality. It looks at the editorial policies of two feminist discourse communities in order to more broadly analyze the ways that rhetorical closure operates constitutively along with invitational rhetoric. It connects these issues to past and current debates about censorship, echo chambers, safe spaces, and trigger warnings in order to show when and how rhetorical closure is intended to prevent harm. Like Rood, I do not resolve questions on distinguishing the effectiveness or ethics of rhetorical closure. Examining a radical feminist periodical of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere shows how invitational rhetoric works with and as rhetorical closure.

Bisexual discourse is underexamined as such within rhetoric. So too are the historical practices of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) communities. Responding to these forms of erasure, my essay advances the study of Black women’s bisexual rhetorics through a focus on the collected papers of a freeborn African American woman, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932). Specifically, the essay offers a comparative analysis of two archival collections containing letters to her: the widely studied Primus Family Papers and the more recently acquired Rebecca Primus Papers. Taken together, these collections offer an enlarged view of Rebecca’s epistolary relationships with people of more than one gender. In doing so, I argue, the new collection reveals a need for a bisexual archival framework, which redresses the limitations of any single collection of romantic letters as a necessarily partial and speculative source of information. This framework affirms Black women’s bisexual rhetorics while recovering a more diverse LGBTQ+ past.

In public discourse, lay cognitive precepts are invoked at every turn. People regularly speak of believing, thinking, knowing, and so forth, ascribing those states to themselves and others alike. This essay identifies the cognitive vernacular as a discernible dimension of public discourse, one that includes such regularly deployed lay precepts as well as popularized psychological and neuroscientific ideas. The cognitive vernacular may find expression in focal texts (e.g., a self-help book on positive thinking), but also pervasively, and somewhat elusively, takes shape in discussions that are otherwise overtly concerned. This essay takes the public discussion regarding the discovery of a teenage heroin ring in Centreville, Virginia, in 2008, a single episode within the large-scale and enduring American opioid crisis, as a focal site to investigate the cognitive vernacular. In doing so, it discerns how lay precepts concerning choice and knowledge are wielded as rhetorical resources to both cast and mitigate blame.

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.

Marching in public, as members of a public meant to be seen in public, has been one of the most frequently deployed forms of collective social protest in the United States. For people with disabilities, however, this type of rhetorical action is fraught with normative assumptions that go beyond presumed needs for accommodation, access, and alternative modes of participation. This essay identifies the far less visible constraints created by previous historic and rhetorical practices, including some of the discourse of other progressive social activists. Both the prospect and the practice of marching as a rhetorical form of performative public argument are thus complex for people with disabilities who are too often not seen as equal citizens. The trouble with marching is thus ableism and its sustained invisibility.

This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video "This Is America," artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of "appropriate" kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst's own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California's Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners' subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists' accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

This article considers how demagoguery gives meaning to violence by providing a symbolic, expressive outlet for resentment resulting from real or felt precarity. This rhetorical process redirects frustrations away from the entities and sociopolitical structures responsible for creating precarity and toward a scapegoat. Rather than examining demagoguery as rhetoric produced by an individual rhetor or consumed by an audience of the masses, the author explores the “meso-level” of demagogic discourse: the organizations called into existence and motivated by individuals’ shared identification with a symbolic struggle against an imagined Other. This phenomenon is illustrated through a close reading of the Proud Boys, a multinational fraternal organization that uses an aesthetic of libertarianism to advance a fascist politic.

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

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

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

Reactionary conservative groups such as the sovereign citizen movement are increasingly prominent—and violent—in the United States. These groups cohere around their own unique discourses of law, language, and history, which are often dismissed as meaningless, or even “crazy.” Following Jacques Lacan’s injunction that the analyst must “let the subject speak,” this essay will examine sovereign citizen rhetoric as a coherent, internally consistent field of meaning exhibiting the traits of psychotic discourse in which the metaphorical operation of the law-as-signifier is disavowed. Doing so illustrates not only the powerful intersection of communication and psychoanalysis but also the potential for a rhetorical reading to challenge the most violent collective psychoses.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has attracted worldwide attention for his break with the public style of his immediate predecessors. This seeming rupture has often incited controversy, particularly between liberals and conservatives in American Catholicism. This division was exacerbated by the 2015 publication of Laudato Si’, Francis’s encyclical letter on the environment. Yet the apparent divergence of opinion masked a more fundamental agreement that popes should normally steer clear of scientific matters. The belief that science is one thing and religion another rests on what Bruno Latour has called “the Modern Constitution,” which draws sharp divisions between science and politics and relegates religion to the private sphere. Laudato Si’ rejects this framework in favor of a more holistic analysis articulated through epideictic rhetoric. I name this approach “nonmodern epideictic” and argue that it both confirms and supplements Latour’s understanding of religious rhetoric.

This essay explores the rhetorical qualities of neoliberalism through an analysis of economic and rhetorical theories of conventional wisdom and common sense. I analyze Barack Obama’s health care advocacy to demonstrate how neoliberal language animated his arguments for reform and frustrated his appeals to community. I argue that neoliberalism maintains its influence on political culture in large part because of its deep embeddedness in political language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how rhetors might operate within a culture marked by this prominent and often problematic discourse.

This brief essay examines the undervalued technê of vultures as they take up putrid material for their own sustenance. These broad-winged masters of the updraft glide along a dialectic between graceful and gross. Even grounded in the pragmatics of materiality and its decay, they nonetheless soar in our collective unconscious as psychopomps, guides on the bridge between the living and the dead, creatures of the uncanny and deeply symbolic. The essay uses Morton’s “dark ecology” and the intersection of rhetoric and magic to make sense of the rhetorical contributions of vultures.

Rhetorical studies has long worried about its identity as a critical discipline and a practical art. Since the Great Recession of 2008, a myriad of social and political forces has provoked a discourse about the vitality of the liberal arts, which brings this identity crisis to the fore. Defenders of the liberal arts have deployed a negative critical stance, positing the liberal arts as external to liberalism as a public culture. This stance limits criticism’s political potential because it ignores the productive role of liberal cultural constraints in forming social bonds and creating self-understandings. As the liberal arts grapple with an evolving liberty to learn, so too might the rhetorical arts commit to the productive possibilities of simulation and judgment. This path would respond to the needs of students, who find themselves between structural constraints and contingent possibilities for change.

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in an American West town that embraced prostitution as integral to its sense of identity from 1884–1991, when its economy began to shift from silver mining to tourism. The circulation of social values negotiated through gossip enabled a century-long period during which brothels flourished in an illegal yet decriminalized way. Even though the madams and sex workers were subject to spatial restrictions and the whims of local political and regulatory power, they managed to harness the available means of opportunistic discourse often overlooked in rhetorical analysis. I highlight the influence of the semi-private exchange of rumor and normative small talk. Arising out of spatial and qualitative public memory, gossip can be a persuasive force that harmonizes community needs across past, present, and future.

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.

This essay extends efforts to facilitate emotional–material frameworks of rhetoric informed by strides in rhetorical and biological studies respectively. Specifically, I examine Edwin Black’s theory of exhortation in light of neurological theories of affect, emotion contagion, and embodiment. I argue Black’s theory offers a prescient precursor to emotional–material rhetoric but also demands revision in light of recent advances in neuroscience. I present two claims. First, I argue emotionally grounded rhetoric can exhort emotional–discursive connections and preference judgments absent the need to convert emotional experiences into formal beliefs. Second, I argue physiological indicators are at least as important as verbal discourse in facilitating emotional exhortation. Finally, I conclude with some theoretical implications for the emotional–material study of rhetoric.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke a difference-driven inquiry. Drawing on a study of a deliberative process triggered by issues of diversity within a university, this essay sketches a working theory of community engagement supported by the rhetorical scaffold of a Community Think Tank. The essay explores the theoretical potential of conflict in local publics while asking how rhetorical activists and educators might support a difference-driven deliberation in practice.

In both popular and scholarly discourse, wearable technologies are characterized primarily as technologies that quantify, providing wearers with new knowledge about themselves and their environments. Such limited characterizations do not fully engage technologies that are, indeed, wearable but do not simply quantify. This essay argues that wearability encompasses rhetorical work beyond that of popular, mainstream technologies like fitness trackers and sleep monitors. Using Judy Segal’s “kairology,” this essay traces five ostomy pouch narratives—focusing on narratives of empowerment and constraint and analyzing competing experiences of wearing and the divergent identifications those experiences support. The essay concludes with preliminary insights into how kairology is well-suited to help researchers tease out the dynamic processes between wearer and technology, as well as the identities that those processes make possible.

I argue for conceiving agency via dispossession rather than possession, specifically in the context of prison writing. While the study of prisoner discourse tends to link agency and resistance to the subject through what I term the recuperative narrative, I map out an alternative paradigm through an analysis of Nawal El Saadawi’s prison memoir and Václav Havel’s prison letters. I demonstrate how the prisoners write to retain their fundamental address-ability and response-ability that is the condition for any sense of self, and not (only) to reclaim a subject position and voice. I conclude by considering how this response-ability provides the potential for resistance, a kind of agency and resistance that does not rely on notions of the individual will. I argue that our primary dispossession can serve to redress the unequal distribution of forcible dispossession and that rhetoricians have a significant role to play in this project.

In the last twenty-five years, researchers from diverse fields of inquiry, including rhetoric and communication studies, have sought to “mine contemporary discourse and dominant logics that often b...

This essay draws attention to the vital role that the "other" America has played in the creation of (U.S.) American rhetorics. It examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world. In 1823, when James Monroe articulated what became the "Monroe Doctrine," the idea that the United States had a two-continent sphere of influence was novel at best. Over time, however, U.S. public discourse developed a ubiquitous common sense in which U.S. strength, security, and even national being have a hemispheric basis. From Monroe's assertion that actions against any American state would manifest "an unfriendly disposition toward the United States" to Theodore Roosevelt's lionized national virility and into the present moment, the figure of Latin America—present and absent—has become powerfully definitive for U.S. national image.

This article examines Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate Manzano’s reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it. This reception is briefly situated in the context of contemporary receptions of belletristic rhetoric within the Cuban literary circle that solicited Manzano’s life story. Additionally, the article brings rhetorical terminology to what critics have observed as Manzano’s developing agency through the process of writing his narrative and selecting its content. Providing a view of rhetoric from the margins, Manzano’s narrative offers a critique of the complex relationship between oral and written discourse and the slave’s ability to be seen as truthful.

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.