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.

Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent's limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant "rhetoric of innovation" that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative "rhetorics of innovation" that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

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.

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.

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.

During the past 30 years, genre conceptualized as social action has been a generative framework for scholars, teachers, and rhetors alike. As a mid-level, mediating concept, genre balances stability and innovation, connecting theory and practice, agency and structure, form and substance. Genre is multimodal, providing an analytical and explanatory framework across semiotic modes and media and thus across communication technologies; multidisciplinary, of interest across traditions of rhetoric, as well as many other disciplines; multidimensional, incorporating many perspectives on situated, mediated, motivated communicative interaction; and multimethodological, yielding to multiple empirical and interpretive approaches. Because genre both shapes and is shaped by its communities, it provides insight into both ideological conformity and resistance, lends itself to multiple pedagogical agendas, and provokes questions about media, materiality, ethics, circulation, affect, and comparison.

The death of philosopher and public intellectual Jacques Derrida drew international attention and generated public acts of mourning in the media. Several of the published obituaries for Derrida are notable for their overtly hostile and dismissive tone. This essay explores the genre of epideictic rhetoric and is grounded in Derrida’s work on mourning, analyzing several instances of “uncivil” epideictic rhetoric including three hostile obituaries and several responses to them written by friends and colleagues of Derrida for the insight that they yield regarding ethical public remembrance. We argue that a sincere engagement with the ideas of the dead, while always incomplete, is at the heart of an ethical, civil mourning.

While romantic letters are usually understood as unstudied and natural expressions of heartfelt love, I argue they are learned through genre instruction and crafted through rhetorical practice. In the nineteenth-century United States, manuals taught generic conventions for epistolary address, pacing of exchange, and rhetorical purpose, embedding within this instruction a heteronormative conception of romantic relations. Yet these same conventions were susceptible to queer adaptation, particularly in the epistolary practices of writers composing same-sex relations. Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus were African American women who learned but reinvented the conventions by negotiating category-crossing forms of address, timing exchange with urgency rather than restraint, and repurposing the romantic letter to erotic and even political ends. Analyzing Brown and Primus's letters alongside manuals thus underscores the dynamic ways both instruction and practice shape romantic letters and life.

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.

Scholars in rhetoric are increasingly attentive to the power of places and spaces to shape rhetorical performance. This article takes up the connection between ethos and location identified by several recent scholars, arguing that affiliation with and representation of material environments plays a crucial role in ethos. Ethos strategies are further shaped by genres, which are theorized as locations and environments in order to capture a fundamental dynamic between strategy and social norm. To demonstrate the strengths of understanding ethos in relation to both geographical and genre location, I analyze the ethos-maneuvers of Mary Austin, prominent early twentieth-century feminist, activist, and nature writer whose thirty-year public career merits attention from rhetorical scholars. In articulating how genre shapes Austin's efforts to develop her location in the deserts of the American West into a persuasive public ethos, I argue that ethos emerges in genre-specific formations.

Recent rhetorical accounts of mental illness tend to suggest that psychiatric disability limits rhetorical participation. This article extends that research by examining how one group of the psychiatrically disabled—those diagnosed with mood disorders—is using a particular narrative genre to engender participation, what I call the mood memoir. I argue here that mood memoirs can be read as narrative-based responses to the rhetorical exclusion suffered by the psychiatrically disabled. This study employs narrative and genre theory to reveal mood memoirists’ tactics for generating ethos in the face of the stigma of mental illness.

Carol Berkenkotter's Patient Tales sits at the intersection of at least two burgeoning areas of the medical humanities. It offers both a multimodal genre studies exemplar for scholars in the interd...

That a single author creates a rhetorical artifact is fundamental to traditional genre theory. This article draws on posthumanist notions of linguistic “citationality” in order to divest the epideictic rhetoric of the Minuteman Project of the fantasy of the original author. We argue that, in epideictic engagements, language is reinvigorated; it recurs and circulates infinitely, accumulating meaning in each new instantiation. Using a text with considerable ethical complexity, we examine three themes of particular interest to posthumanism: accountability/responsibility, the potential for (political) resistance, and community. Epideictic discourses tell us not only who to be, but how to be; from a posthumanist point of view, those constructs, we claim, are enfoldments of the exterior. By positing citationality as key dimensions of genre, and following the theoretical works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, we explicate the significance of subjectivity as a rhetorical outcome of the social.

Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles), like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed their identification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous, African, and mixed-race lower classes; the Enlightenment brought new fervor for scientific exploration and gave intellectual heft to the desire for independence, yet also facilitated administrative reforms that increased the Spanish monarchy's intervention in its subjects' lives. In the midst of this ferment, there appeared a popular but short-lived genre of art whose depictions of life in New Spain provide a powerful image of the rhetorical role of the colonial body. This article examines how that genre, casta painting, used topoi of family, publicity, and science to constitute and comment upon its moments' racialized common sense. The article suggests that taking seriously the rhetorical contribution of these artifacts contributes to a more complex understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly in the Spanish Americas.

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

Abstract This essay examines several disciplinary and pedagogical assumptions behind Aristotle's centrality in the classical rhetorical canon and calls for a reconsideration of the established hierarchical relation of Aristotle to Isocrates. Notes 1. For recent works in English see, for example, Terry Papillon; Takis Poulakos; Takis Poulakos and David Depew; Robert G. Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”); and Yun Lee Too. One must also mention a new two-volume translation of Isocrates' extant works by Mirhady and Too (volume 1) and Papillon (volume 2), published by the University of Texas Press. 2. See articles by Rummel, Papillon, and Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”). 3. For a more elaborate version of this argument, see chapter 2 in my Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle. 4. See David Depew's “The Inscription of Isocrates into Aristotle's Practical Philosophy” for a cogent explanation of Aristotle's hierarchical subordination of praxis to theoria and of techne to praxis. 5. A good example of scholarship in this vein is Andrea Nightingale's study Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy.

Abstract Rhetorical conceptions of the public sphere emphasize conversation as central to democracy, yet the salience of conversation to public life is being diminished by changes in the forms and formats of information that U.S. publics receive. A proliferation of reflexive representations across genres, and changed media practices, contribute to a climate in which rhetorical deliberation is undermined and various U.S. publics’ ability to discern what to believe is greatly decreased. Manufactured risks illustrate the significance of these changes and they suggest that further scrutiny of media practices and advocacy of information that serves public interests is crucial for sustaining democracy.

Abstract I identify three modern approaches used to theorize epideictic rhetoric and suggest that each approach has difficulty dealing with the category of presence assigned to the genre by Aristotle. Drawing on Thucydides and, through him, Pericles' funeral oration, I suggest that Jacques Derrida's funeral speeches provide a way of rethinking the epideictic genre's presence as rhetorical ethics. More specifically, I argue that the function of presence in epideictic rhetoric is to provide an ethical interruption, and that Derrida, as one of our most accomplished funeral orators, helps us clarify the category of presence as it is described in Aristotle's and Thucydides' discussions of epideictic oratory.

Abstract The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates’ writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a “philosopher” vis‐à‐vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of “philosophy” and discourses of their culture.

Abstract Recent scholars explain “genres”; as important sites of flux. Instances of instability or change in genres often reflect — and enact — critical power struggles. After tracing recent genre theory, 1 consider how the varied textual elements in the early bulletins of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor reflect and enact the power struggles that emerged as a particular group of American women labor activists attempted to gain authority within the federal bureaucracy.

Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.

The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 by James A. Herrick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997; 245 pp. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1998. 306 pp. Four recent studies of rhetoric in Socrates and Plato The Religion of Socrates. Mark McPheran. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 353 pp., (paperback, 1999). Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Charles H. Kahn. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 431 pp., (paperback, 1998). Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Andrea Wilson Nightingale. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 222 pp. The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates’ Philosophic Trial. Jacob Howland. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 (hardcover & paperback). 342 pp.

In the first half of On Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' mature critical essay, he presents the case that Isocrates, Plato and represent the three finest stylists when it comes to speaking with the diction approved by audiences. In the process of making an argument for the Demosthenic ideal, Dionysius needed to find commensurate speeches by Isocrates and Plato to compare with Demosthenes. For Isocrates, he compared the most elegant portion of On the Peace with a portion of an epideictic from Demosthenes' Third Olynthiac. It was a good choice. However, for Plato, finding an appropriate speech in the philosopher's writing proved more difficult. Of course, we would readily assume that by the first century BCE Dionysius should have felt compelled to use the Apology as the Platonic exemplar. It clearly ranks as one of the impressive speeches in all of history. For his part, were he not to use it, Dionysius was well aware critics would complain that the Apology presents itself as the ideal choice for this kind of analysis. So in anticipation of this objection and his otherwise obscure choice to use Socrates' funeral oration in the Menexenus, he dismisses Plato's Apology as something other than a true forensic and therefore not a viable candidate. He offers the following tantalizingly cryptic reason: There is one forensic by Plato, the Apology of Socrates; but this never saw even the threshold of a law-court or an open assembly, but was written for another purpose and belongs to the category neither of oratory nor of dialogue. I therefore pass over it. (On Dem. 23). Within his own lifetime Dionysius already felt compelled to respond to charges of impiety for committing the sin of suggesting that one could find infelicities in Plato's compositional style. In a letter responding to Gnaeus Pompeius' complaint that, You should not have exposed the faults of Plato when your purpose was to praise Demosthenes (Gn. Pomp. 1), Dionysius responded that had he not objectively compared the best discourses of Isocrates and Plato with those of his argument would have been unpersuasive as well as a criti

Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. Cheryl Geisler. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994. Constructing Experience. Charles Bazerman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.

pletely unavailable to conscious introspection, as Mark Turner explains (247). According to Turner, the paradigm emphasizes the ties between meaning (hence semantics) and conventional cultural and structures, in contrast to the generative paradigm, which places these structures outside its area of interest (21). Turner insists that we are designed as a species to notice in consciousness not the obvious and unoriginal but rather the novel and nuanced, but that of language and literature are for the most part ... acts of the unconscious mind (43). These acts are based on conceptual connections [which] are disclosed in our patterns of reading and writing (149). A cognitive rhetoric should provide as complete a description as possible of what drives an audience's reaction in the presence of different kinds of texts as well as what basic needs and expectations in readers cause some kinds of texts to be produced and others, logically possible, not to exist in the literary universe. The cognitive rhetoric I'm suggesting treats the novel genre as a linguistic

Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance by Nancy S. Struever.Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1992. xiv + 246 pp. The Rhetoric and Morality of Philosophy by Seth Benardete. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1991. 205 pp. Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Michael K. Gilbertson. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 1992. 257 pp. Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers by Stephen Doheny‐Farina.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992; 279 pp. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens by Jacqueline de Romilly. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992. 260 pp. Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation by Richard H. Haswell. Dallas: Southern Methodist U P. 1991. 412 pp.

I have often wondered what would happen if one of our students were to hand in an assessed essay which followed the form and style of one of Montaigne's. First and second marker would pronounce it so disorganised as to be unmarkable, and the external examiner would fail it. Only at the final examiners' meeting would we confront the fact that we had confidently rejected one of the masterpieces of the genre. This story illustrates potentially destructive paradox. When teachers are defending essay writing, they argue that their students are practising the same genre as such great writers as Montaigne, Addison, Lamb, Woolf and Orwell. But when we mark students' essays we have different and at times rigid expectations, expectations which many of the classic essayists would not meet. This paradox is related to another. most commonly accepted formulae for educational essays are extremely strict, and look as though they derive from rhetorical precepts on the outline of the oration. In the English model this is the four-part essay (Introduction, points for, points against, conclusion)' which appears to derive from the model of the four-part oration (exordium, narration, proof and refutation, peroration) by omitting the narration and altering the function of the refutation. American model of the five point essay (Introduction, three arguments, conclusion) presumably derives from the same source, together with the often repeated instruction to restrict divisions to three headings.2 These popular (and in their way appalling) instructions run quite counter to Montaigne's open hostility to the rules of rhetoric, when he founded the genre. They are also opposed to the views of many practitioners. Sir William Williams prefaces his A Book of English Essays (Harmondsworth 1951), by saying that the essay has multitude of forms and manners, and scarcely any rules and regulations (p. 11). It should be short piece of prose which is not devoted to narrative. (There are plenty of exceptions even to rule as permissive as this.) Maurice Hewlett's celebrated The Maypole and the Column describes the essay, as a theme set up, and hung with loving art; then round about it measure trodden, sedately for the most part, but with involuntary skips aside as the whim takes him (ibid., p. 238). He prefers dance and digression to order and structure. Lamb is his admired model. My argument in this essay is that rhetoric, argument and ideas of structure have been involved with the essay (often as imperatives to react against) right from the beginning and that rhetorical ideas can help us understand the relationship between the belles-lettres essay and the schoolroom exercise. I shall raise the historical question of how genre which originated in opposition to rhetoric came to be taken over by rhetoric. For the sake of brevity my narrative will concentrate on four moments of the story: the birth of the essay, the English essay of the

Rhetorical criticism, as it has developed over the past five decades or so, has taken on many agendas-for example, neo-Aristotelian criticism, movement studies, dramatistic criticism, genre criticism-all of which have been attempts to apply, reconstruct, or improve on a long tradition. What is striking about this body of critical literature is that none of it takes very seriously one of the paramount concerns of that tradition-namely, style. Indeed, a survey of the periodical literature shows that there persists a fundamental neglect of in both the theory and the practice of rhetorical criticism.1 Various theoretical and critical practices represented in this body of literature suggest that is a frustratingly elusive and amorphous creature, stubbornly resisting description. Most of the material does not venture much beyond theory and is, for the critic, consequently inadequate, for it falls short of a level of analysis that would reveal how rhetoric works. As a result, rhetorical criticism does not provide a useful critical approach to reading a discursive text. In one respect, this shows that some incisive remarks about the importance of in criticism and the neglect thereof which Donald Bryant made over thirty years ago have been either disregarded or forgotten. Moreover, I argue that both the interpretation of discourse (criticism) and the production of discourse (composition) can profit from careful attention to rhetorical style. For if, as Bryant2 has suggested, style is the final elaboration of meaning, then surely is the initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning. Does it not seem reasonable that ought play a major role in the critical act of the analysis of discourse? However, granting that has been neglected, I now must explain what I mean by style. To begin, Bryant has urged us to regard it not as the mere department of elocutio but that in dispositio and even inventio participate. Bryant argues: It is difficult at best to consider the functioning language of discourse without becoming involved at once with the ordering of the discourse. Furthermore, if we go beyond the static idea of disposition as arrangement, to the potentially dynamic idea of disposition as disposing, as Wagner thought necessary, we may conclude that for the critic the two names signify the two lenses for a stereopticon view of a

First, I'd like to offer analysis of Halasek's and Bernard-Donals' utterances, but it may also be taken as rhetorical or tendentious characterization of them. If we begin with the two points of reference provided by our session's title, and Rhetorical Criticism, I think we can say that Halasek identifies herself as rhetorical critic or theorist who belongs to community of like-minded rhetorical critics and theorists, one that together poststructuralist thought, social constructivism, and writing and pedagogy. For them Bakhtin's vilification of is problem and his alternative rhetorical tradition is an opportunity. Halasek can summarize the Bakhtin attacks and distance herself from it as a definition of that is not ours and she can appropriate as much more congenial to herself and her fellow rhetoricians the rhetorical tradition of oppositional genres and discourse moves with which Bakhtin identifies the novel. She imagines Bakhtin's hostility to as consequence of his hostility to the official languages of Russia during his lifetime and imagines herself and her colleagues as also opposed to a of oppression but apparently not confronted with similar authoritarian political situation. Instead of identifying herself exclusively with parodic rhetoric opposed to an official monologic she posits dialogic rhetoric which can contemplate the tensions between polemic and rhetorics in the professional and pedagogical tasks of textual and cultural analysis. Bakhtin offers her better way of doing what rhetorical critics were already doing. Halasek welcomes Bakhtin's tension-filled genres and joyful relativity in prose that is relatively free from tension and clear about where it stands. She can separate Bakhtin's vilification of from his celebration of it, choose one side over the other, and even explain away Bakhtin's adherence to the side she rejects as function of his particular historical situation. She is at home with the listeners she posits and brings them Bakhtin they can use without having to change their minds about or politics. Bemard-Donals, on the other hand, writes tension-filled and ambivalent prose in the name of escaping from relativism and uncertainty. He is not at one with what he takes to be the community of contemporary rhetorical but sees it as plagued by the collapse of distinction between science and that he somehow wants to reassert He persists in commitment to theory or science or dialectic or history that he believes rhetorical critics like Fish and Rorty have subsumed under rhetoric, and he turns to Bakhtin not to assimilate him to the consensus in current rhetorical but to find way out of the impasse of current rhetorical theory. The Bakhtin he needs for his purposes is not the celebrant of parody and joyful relativity but the theorist of the socially constituted subject who can provide rhetorical criticism with scientific model for understanding how subjects are formed in language. In effect, he wants to substitute Bakhtin's sociolinguistics of the subject for the psychology of the subject Plato calls for in the Phaedrus as the scientific foundation for that could then know, as he put it in his

(1992). Legitimating leadership: The rhetoric of succession as a genre of presidential discourse. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 25-38.

Erasmus uses female persona, named Folly, to deliver his written mock-encomium The Praise of Folly, published in 1511. Critics have taken little note of her gender, however. Walter Kaiser compares her briefly to Mother Nature (94-95), while still associating her fertility connotations with the phallus. Thomas 0. Sloane refers to her in passing as a kind of muse or other traditionally female and therefore nonrational spirit (67). It does seem somewhat anachronistic and historiographically to dwell on her gender, since, as Sloane notes, female personae were common in Renaissance written orations and dialogues, and they can be traced back through medieval and classical avatars. Female fools were not uncommon, either; William Willeford suggests that Erasmus's is derived from the fool named Mother Folly who figured prominently in carnivals of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods (177). But when I read The Praise of Folly, I can't take the persona's gender for granted, especially as she's depicted in Holbein's illustrations for an early edition of the Praise: woman in fool's cap and bells and an academic gown, speaking from rostrum to an audience of men similarly attired (see Moriae 1989). I became fascinated by this image of while doing research on Erasmus for Bruce Herzberg's and my recent anthology, The Rhetorical Tradition (1990). I couldn't figure out how to get my improper interest in the female persona into this book, however, because an anthology, while of course enacting an ideological agenda through its inclusions and exclusions, must pretend that its choices are not tendentious, that they always rely on arguments already made. Foregrounding in the anthology seemed to go too far in the direction of violation of these constraints of the anthology genre-or at least, so I was informed by my co-author and many of the readers thanked in our Preface, so I bowed to consensus. Now, however, I would like to elaborate the argument I wished had already been made, view that unabashedly articulates Erasmus and with postmodern feminist concerns. I'd like to explore the possibility that the persona of the female fool may have interesting implications for post-modern rhetors, particularly those of us who wish to espouse left-oriented or liberatory political values. My paper, therefore, will have two parts. First, I will consider the implications of Folly's gender as an aid to interpreting Erasmus's mock-encomium, notoriously difficult text. In the process of explaining the interpretive problems in The Praise of Folly, I will provide sort of anatomy of skepticism which, I believe, has bearing on the post-modern situation. Then in the second part, I will try to explain my fascination with The Praise of in terms of problems confronting contemporary rhetorical studies. The problem in which I am particularly interested is that of finding compelling version of rhetorical authority from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the

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This chapter draws distinctions somewhat unorthodox in discussing terms such as and with respect to rhetorical action. It suggests that the rules and conventions of linguistics and speech act theory are inadequate for a complete account of rhetorical phenomena. The chapter argues that the rules, conventions, and constraints of rhetorical action differ from those operating in conversation or dialogue. It also argues that in view of the fact that rhetorical action and strategies are in large part determined by constraints generated by aim, media, audience, and situation, rhetorical action is in large part not constrained by rules and conventions that are universal to human action or the language used. The chapter examines the effect that although linguistic conventions and rules, including speech act theory, are incidental to defining the felicity of certain rhetorical genre and modes, the main thrust of the art of rhetoric and rhetorical strategy deals with constraints not grounded in conventions and rules.