Rhetoric Society Quarterly

14 articles
Year: Topic: Clear
Export:
grammar and mechanics ×

October 2023

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

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

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2233501

March 2021

  1. Products of US Performance: A Material Rhetorical Education at North Bennet Street Industrial School, 1890–1910
    Abstract

    This essay examines rhetorical education for children of immigrants at North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. NBSIS, located in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Boston’s North End, taught children of elementary and grammar school age through a manual training pedagogy and specifically, the Sloyd method of handiwork. I analyze archival documents using frameworks of Sloyd, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and usability theories to argue that products made during manual training and Sloyd taught children of immigrants how to become citizen workers as defined by white, middle-class values. Students’ material works were products of US performance intended to develop students into industrious, moral workers; influence immigrants’ households and other users of products; and direct students to self-correct and strive to become better workers. This essay highlights that materials help define, assess, and regulate learning, especially for young learners, within complex historical contexts.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1877801

August 2014

  1. Snapshots of Identification: Kenneth Burke’s Engagements with T.S. Eliot
    Abstract

    AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.938863

October 2011

  1. Piano and Pen: Music as Kenneth Burke's Secular Conversion
    Abstract

    Drawing on Kenneth Burke's music reviews in The Nation, this article argues that the shifting music scene of the 1930s heavily influenced Burke's development of the key term “secular conversion” in Permanence and Change. While reviewing works by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Burke also witnessed audience reactions to (and often acceptance of) jarring atonal works by Schönberg, Debussy, and others, leading to music reviews that focused on musical as well as rhetorical matters. Burke's interest in music provides a “perspective by incongruity” that illuminates the often-overlooked key term “graded series” as a type of secular conversion that informs Burke's dialectic in A Grammar of Motives. A greater understanding of “perspective by incongruity,” “piety,” and “graded series” through music provides a window into the possibilities of linguistic transformation that bridges Burke's continuously merging, dividing, and transcending dialectic in A Grammar of Motives.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2011.597819

July 2009

  1. Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation ofA Rhetoric of Motives
    Abstract

    Abstract Drawing upon published and unpublished texts from Kenneth Burke, this article argues that A Rhetoric of Motives represents the first, “Upward” half of his project on rhetoric. Emphasizing this unexpected connection between Burke and Plato, the article offers a dialectical rereading of the text, one that locates the ultimate rhetorical motive not in identification, but pure in persuasion. Interpreting the latter as a “‘mythic image,”’ it emerges as a non-empirical, imagistic portrayal of the formal conditions underlying persuasion, the origin of rhetoric. Rhetoric, dialectically redefined in terms of pure persuasion, produces the divisions that we humans would (paradoxically) discursively bridge. Notes 1This is from a letter contained in the Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The author expresses gratitude to Phoebe Pettingell Hyman for her permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “SH.” 2This manuscript is drawn from a folder in the Kenneth Burke Papers labeled: “R of M Drafts. Including final draft.” Apart from “The Rhetorical Radiance of the ‘Divine'” (and some scattered deletions in pencil), the manuscript indicated as the text's “final draft” is identical to the published version of the Rhetoric—and its 430 typed pages even include a table of contents. Thus it is quite clear that this was, until quite late in the process, the complete text of the Rhetoric. This material is taken from the archives of The Kenneth Burke Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. The author is grateful to Sandra Stelts, Jeannette Sabre, the Penn State Libraries, and the Burke Literary Trust for their help and for permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. 3Another appears during discussion of “timely topics” and the press: “We pass over it hastily here, as we plan to consider the two major aspects of it in later sections of this project (when we shall consider the new level of ‘reality’ which journalistic timeliness establishes, and shall study the relation between transient and permanent factors of appeal by taking the cartoons in The New Yorker as a test case)” (Rhetoric 63). 4Authorial intentions provide notoriously controversial evidence for reinterpretation. However, as the above-quoted header makes clear, Burke altered his initial plan late in the publication process. Although other Burkean texts were altered during composition (for example, the pentad was a later addition to the Grammar), the Rhetoric project is different; the material with which Burke began was postponed, not supplemented, as in the case of the Grammar. Most significantly, Burke's papers reveal an organizational framework linking the excised material to that which remained; thus, examination of Burke's original vision for the project as a whole sheds new light on the version of the Rhetoric that was published. 5This quote is from a letter from Burke to Cowley dated 26 January 1947, housed in the Burke Papers. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “KB.” 6Judging from this description, it seems that some of this material was published in Burke's essay, “Rhetoric: Old and New” (see especially the discussion of blandness [69–75]). 7Additionally, such interpretations of Burke's text often produce an artificial separation between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic. Having sharpened this difference into a distinction, effort is required to explain their connection (e.g., Crusius, “A Case,” “Orality”; Ercolini). 8Here one might object, also citing Burke's essay on the “new” rhetoric, whose “key term” is identification (“Rhetoric” 62–63). However, in both texts, identification is introduced in the first section (or “stage”), but is transcended by other sections/stages. Further, in the Rhetoric, Burke describes persuasion and identification as his “two interrelated themes” (x), and discusses his “generating principles,” “persuasion and/or identification” (169; emphasis added)—a point he later reaffirmed in letters to Cowley (e.g., Williams 12). Identification is undeniably important in Burke's rhetorical theory, but I contend it must be contextualized within Burke's foundational claim about the nature of rhetoric. 9See also “Rhetoric: Old and New,” which contains a dialogue patterned after the Platonic dialectic—including the character “Socraticus” and references to the “Upward” and “Downward Way” (63–66). 10Although I have not altered any quotations, contemporary scholarship recognizes that the masculine is not a universal, and so my own usage reflects this philosophical commitment. 11Although there is extensive debate regarding Platonic dialectic (e.g., Kahn; Benson), Gonzalez is cited here to demonstrate two things: that appropriation of Plato is not necessarily the adoption of Platonist metaphysics and that Burke's definition is neither idiosyncratic nor outdated. Gonzalez's recent study does not cite Burke, but is distinctly Burkean in its rejection of Platonist metaphysics, and its refusal to divorce Plato's dialectic from the dramatic form of the dialogues. Further, Gonzalez emphasizes the role played by ideas and images in Plato's dialectic (e.g., 129), echoing the book cited within the Rhetoric's discussion of Plato: Stewart's The Myths of Plato. 12These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth,” housed in the Kenneth Burke Papers. 14Here I draw on this essay because Burke identifies it as the foundation for this portion of the Rhetoric (e.g., Burke to Hyman, January 26, 1948, SH). 13Moreover, he argues that Mannheim's perspective gains much of its appeal—including “the feel of an ultimate order”—from its furtive resemblance to the Platonic dialectic, and (in its ambiguous concept of “Utopia”) an implicit foundation in chiliastic myth (A Rhetoric 200; cf. Burke, “Ideology” 306). 15These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth” in the Burke Papers. 16These notes are also from the “Myth” folder (but: cf. A Rhetoric 203; “Ideology” 306–307). 17Said another way, by retaining our myth's connection to the Platonic dialectic, we will recognize the narrative order of myth as an imagistic portrayal of a logical order—and not as an accurate, objective account of origins (cf. Grammar 430–440). 18Which is not to say that Burke rejects Kafka; Burke's account is designed to place Kafka's (and Kierkegaard's) vocabulary within a broader whole, not dismiss it. Although I cannot here respond to a recent essay by Ercolini, disputing Burke's interpretation of Fear and Trembling, I feel Ercolini misses the point of Burke's reading of Kierkegaard. Here Burke is moving toward dialectical transcendence, and thus his critique of Kierkegaard focuses on the difference between empirical and mythic images of courtship. 19For this reason, I would argue that the definitions of pure persuasion in the scholarly literature—designed for critical use—fail to see its ultimate, mythic significance (e.g., Hagen; Lee; Olson & Olson; Sweeney). 20This is again why, for Burke, Mannheim's approach falls short; Burke argues that unlike his own approach, Mannheim's sociology cannot provide an “ultimate ground of motivation” (Rhetoric 201). 21Of course, Biesecker is not the only scholar to draw on such statements to equate identification and pure persuasion. Robert Wess likewise does not recognize pure persuasion as a mythic image, and thus his formulation of it as the “identification of identifications” subordinates it to the latter concept (e.g., 214). Similarly, although Zappen's introduction to Burke's “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry” insists on the importance of the third section of the Rhetoric, he ultimately does not connect dialectic, “pure persuasion,” and “ultimate identification” (e.g., 334). 22For this reason, I would argue (pace Wess and Biesecker) that identification cannot be equated with pure persuasion; identification presumes a preexisting distance between persons, unlike pure persuasion, which symbolically introduces and maintains distance. This is, I would argue, a more rounded interpretation of Burke's famous statement—early in the Rhetoric, I would add, prior to arriving at his mythic image—that “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token, to confront the implications of division” (Rhetoric 22; Burke's emphasis). Thus, Burke's oft-cited discussion of the interrelation of identification and division in rhetoric follows from pure persuasion's more primary, ontological shattering of unity. This is also, I believe, why Burke later describes the most profound variant of identification as the partisan carving up of a situation through terminological means (see Burke, “The Rhetorical” 271). 23As per the “paradox of purity,” these would be identical (e.g., Grammar 35–36). 24For others beginning with symbols as introduction of division rather than unity, see Anton, Thayer, and Wilden. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBryan Crable Bryan Crable is Associate Professor

    doi:10.1080/02773940902991445

July 2008

  1. “Suppose a grammar uses invention”: Gertrude Stein's Theory of Rhetorical Grammar
    Abstract

    This article elucidates Gertrude Stein's theory of rhetorical grammar by locating it in her studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College in the mid-1890s and by demonstrating how for Stein the study of grammar correlates with rhetoric's first canon, invention. In her experimental primer, How to Write (1931), a book about the craft of composition, Stein devotes chapters to vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and forensics, but refuses to reduce writing to mechanical correctness. For Stein, a grammar that supposes invention as both discovering and creating does something much more than offer pre-existing rules for writers to follow. Placing Gertrude Stein's writing practices in the rhetorical traditions of the nineteenth century reveals a Gertrude Stein who is not necessarily or not only a literary figure, but rather a twentieth-century rhetorician who refigures past traditions to teach a new century how to write.

    doi:10.1080/02773940802167567

March 2002

  1. Logic, rhetoric, and discourse in the literary texts of nineteenth‐century women
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay traces the reception of a new grammatical‐rhetorical theory of personification in the canon of textbooks widely used to teach vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century. Invented, in 1751, by James Harris’ Hermes, a work in universal grammar, this new doctrine contributed to the increased masculinity of standard literate performance. Hermes increased the representivity of gendered pronouns and required a contradictory use of gendered personification as if it were both literal and figurative. As a result, two distinctive relations to language were made possible. For men, grammar and rhetoric appear in strict opposition and are always representative of their experience of language. Women literates, who were not taken into account by the masculinist sensibility of Hermes, were assigned, de facto, an anomalous position and a potentially more critical relation to language. The texts of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Sarah Willis ("Fanny Fern “) provide examples which demonstrate that women recognized and profited from their anomalous difference, which suggests the creation of a historically specific l'ecriture feminine.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391229

June 1991

  1. “Our meanings can never be the same”: Reflections on language and law
    Abstract

    For me it is a starting point in all thought about language that, whatever I say or do with words, my expression will never mean exactly the same thing to you that it does to me; and of course yours will never mean exactly the same thing to me that it does to you. It cannot: each act of expression is a gesture against a context; it derives its meaning largely, perhaps entirely, from its relation to that context; and for each of us the context of every gesture is different, if only because one of us is doing it, the other observing. Think of the tennis game, and how differently the same shot is experienced by you and by me. From your point of view, having made the play, the ball disappears across the net into the larger scene from which it is about to be returned; for me, the ball emerges from such a scene to become increasingly the object of focus and potential action. For you the shot is something done; for me it constitutes a challenge: Can I respond? This is to focus on the difference between the sender and the receiver, between the person who writes words in her study, on a pad, then sees them printed and sent forth into the world to merge with all the other books and articles out there, and the other person, who finds this book or article among the others, idly glances at it, or chooses to read it with care, and thus locates it within the world of the other texts that he has known. This is one difference, but not the only one, for our sense of context and action is different in many other ways as well: our sense of the words themselves is different, for they have different histories for each of us; our sense of the way words are related by syntax varies too, since, as any language teacher knows, we inhabit different syntactical worlds; and our experience of the natural world, of other people, of institutions, of other gestures on other occasions-all of which provide parts of the context against which the particular performance occursvary too. My meaning can never be your meaning; all writing is a way of addressing, or avoiding, that fact. It is this theme that I wish to pursue in responding to the various articles written about my work, beginning with that by Eugene Garver.

    doi:10.1080/02773949109390926

March 1990

  1. On refining the free modifier
    Abstract

    students. In 1966 Orin Seright, in On Defining the Appositive, contrasts the appositive with the adjectival, using this example of the adjective clause: My sister, whom we elected president, is here (108). Seright calls the italicized clause a non-restrictive although it is a modifier of sister rather than the main clause. (Seright points out that appositives, often presented as if they were always nominals, not only restate previous structures but also may substitute for them [109]; thus, verbs, adverbials, and adjectivals as well as nominals may function as appositives.) Seright's belief that the adjective clause is a modifier may follow directly from what I regard as an oversight by Seright's colleague Francis Christensen. In the 1968 article entitled The Problem of Defining a Mature Style, Christensen objects to the term modifiers--only because the constructions one another as well as sentences (143). He overlooks the possibility that many of these sentence actually modify a particular word in the (usually) preceding word-group. Indeed, calling them modifiers, in contrast to modifiers,' he explains that bound modifiers word They close or limiting or restrictive modifiers. But free modifiers are modifiers not of words but of constructions, from which they set off by junctures or punctuation. Grammatically, they loose or additive or nonessential or nonrestrictive (143). Free modifiers, Christensen seems to say, always modify the preceding main clause or free modifier, and concomitantly free modifiers do not modify a particular word in the preceding unit. But as I view these modifiers, they indeed seem to be loose; and they clearly additive, nonessential, and nonrestrictive. However, many of them do not modify consrucions but single words.

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390875

January 1989

  1. The rhetoric of the left
    Abstract

    Of all the bruising confrontations between the capitalist and communist power blocks perhaps none was so staggering as the Cuban missile crisis. Most Americans patriotically rallied around our determined young president in this great moment of crisis, but there were other Americans who spoke with a different voice then who presumed to disagree with the dominant opinion. These were the voices from the left, now the old left. Their rhetorical response is my subject. By concentrating on several specimens written from a leftist perspective in response to a single event, I create a framework for analyzing the discourse of an ideology to demonstrate the influence of that ideology on and argument, together with the usefulnesses of an analytic method. Antecedent to this analysis are particular considerations about style, argument and method which lead to other considerations peculiar to the relation of political discourse to the world. Because the event focused opinion strongly, and time gives perspective, I have chosen written and oral reactions to the Cuban missile crisis. In addition to selections of written from three leftist newspapers, the National Guardian, The Weekly People, and The Catholic Worker, I have included speech samples on the same topic from Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, as a contrast to the rhetoric of the left. To analyze this discourse I use Walker Gibson's style machine as he calls it developed to account for distinctions...in the voices addressing (115), distinctions which he breaks down into tough, sweet and stuffy talkers. Gibson's machine, consisting of sixteen grammatical-rhetorical qualities, is appended (A). Other available descriptions or classifications of or argument are Huntington Brown's deliberative, expository and prophetic, Edwin Black's exhortation and argument, and Aristotle's topics. Brown and Black analyze thought methodology with some consideration of style. The neo-Aristotelians, on the other hand, consider and thought combined into argumentative methods. I follow the classical topics in considering rhetorical argument (Rhetoric chs. 22, 23, 24; Corbett 94-132). My particular assumptions are that belief influences style, that while prose styles can be typed individual differences remain, that includes varieties of diction, syntax, and argument Further, I seek an attitude towards language, an attitude, however, influenced not by cultural or individual psychology, but by political belief. Because political writers argue, their arguments common to all rhetoric can also be typed. Argument creates patterns which shapes. For Gibson is a matter of sheer individual will, a desire for a particular kind of self-definition no matter what the circumstances (24). Political belief can condition will. For both Marie H. Nichols (75), and Edwin Black (Persona) reveals distinctive political personalities. In selecting a usable analytical methodology I had either to invent my own, or use an existing one. I chose Gibson's because we share similar concerns. I want to know what kind of voice speaks. What does the use of that voice imply? How do I determine trust? I also want to know the attitude of that voice towards subject and audience. If Gibson can help to answer these questions, then I accept his work saving the necessity of inventing yet another method, concentrating instead on the results produced. In general, stylistics seems more of a discourse on method than on results. Although we want to know what ails us, naming is not enough. To know that Dorothy Day talks tough does not suffice. We know there are other names than tough, sweet or stuffy. The point is not just to label, but to penetrate into the thought behind the voice aided by a given point of view. Gibson describes his work as primitive. Primitive, yet legitimate because applied he yields insight His method reveals attitude just as psychiatric categories, which might also be called primitive, reveal motive. If the arguments which pattern are traditional and discernible, their correlations with are not as clear. The advertiser, for example, speaks sweetly with recognizably dubious argument. Those political voices purring and storming at us must also be judged by how they argue so their trustworthiness can be determined. We can uncover falsehood by showing how a statement varies from reality--plain lying. We can discover understanding of mental illness by probing the discordance the aberrant mind creates

    doi:10.1080/02773948909390832

March 1988

  1. “Science”; and the “grammar wars”; of the 1930's
    doi:10.1080/02773948809390808

January 1985

  1. The cultural tradition of nineteenth‐century “traditional” grammar teaching
    Abstract

    (1985). The cultural tradition of nineteenth‐century “traditional” grammar teaching. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 15, No. 1-2, pp. 3-12.

    doi:10.1080/02773948509390717

January 1984

  1. Erikson on Freud on Irma: The rhetoric of the patriarchy
    Abstract

    Abstract In their writings about one of the most important cornerstones in the edifice of psychoanalysis, Freud's interpretation of his Irma Dream, Freud and Erikson act as apologists for the modern patriarchy. Using the rhetorical persona of the progressive, scientific hero, Freud and Erikson cast themselves as protagonists in the drama of modernization. Their rhetorical structures, syntax, and diction reveal their sexism. The strategy of their discourses invites their audience to believe that the audience is witnessing scientific discoveries in the making; the rhetoric of Freud and Erikson suggests that their discourse is not patriarchal rationalization, but rational analysis, the drama of the scientific method applied for progress. Their interpretation of Freud's Irma Dream disassociates Freud from women, assigning separate behaviors for rational, progressive males and irrational, traditional females. But the truth of the Irma Dream is that it associates Freud with females and reveals the irresponsibility of both his pharmacological and psychological prescriptions.

    doi:10.1080/02773948409390702

January 1978

  1. Rhetoric, grammar, and literature in England and Ireland before the Norman conquest: A select bibliography
    doi:10.1080/02773947809390489