Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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March 2025

  1. Epideictic Listening: From a Reflective Case Study to a Theory of Community Ethos
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2246949

May 2022

  1. From David Walker to John Chilembwe: Global Black Collectivity as Resisting Race and Affirming Culture
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2077630
  2. Blerd Knows Best: Black Family Rhetoric in Service of Anti-Racist Pedagogy
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2077629

October 2021

  1. Nostalgic Design: Making Memories in the Rhetoric Classroom
    Abstract

    What does it mean to be literate in contemporary rhetorics of nostalgia? How can such knowledge lead to a better-designed world? From scrutinizing digital technologies of longing like Facebook’s On This Day to pursuing Afrofuturistic traditions toward neostalgic tomorrows, this essay surveys the human need to bathe in lost pasts, how such longing is coded into our lives, and how it can be activated by rhetoric students to design equitable futures. In doing so, I propose five tenets of nostalgic design, a making-centric approach to the rhetoric of memory that (1) interrogates technologies of nostalgia, (2) learns from user longings, (3) urges solidarity across a design’s lifespan, (4) fragments isolated traditions, and (5) surveys the past for lost futures. Within each movement, I both introduce defining features of the rhetoric of nostalgia and assignments that aid students in remaking the memory systems around them.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1972133

May 2021

  1. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy: by April Baker-Bell, NCTE-Routledge, 2020, 128 pp., $44.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1138551022
    Abstract

    In the words of Etta James, “At Last.”April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy is, indeed, the book that many of us have been waiting for—not just in ...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1918518

March 2019

  1. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Peter N. Goggin
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2019.1577654

March 2018

  1. A Tightrope of Perfection: The Rhetoric and Risk of Black Women’s Intellectualism on Display in Television and Social Media
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1392037

August 2016

  1. The Prospects for Literacy Studies in the Revival of Rhetorical Education
    Abstract

    The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, by Deborah Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 196 pages. $29.99 (paper).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in Ameri...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2015.1090252

March 2012

  1. Reading and Writing Sor Juana's Arch: Rhetorics of Belonging,CriolloIdentity, and Feminist Histories
    Abstract

    Abstract Sor Juana's 1680 arch, designed and written in her role as professional writer for Church and state, consisted of commissioned words, art, and performance to celebrate the arrival of the new viceroy. It is significant as the remaining trace of a seventeenth-century female exerting high-level political influence on the closed, patriarchal society of New Spain. Reading and writing about the arch presents multiple challenges, including lack of the full "text" for what was an ephemeral event as well as a problem in recent feminist criticism, which insists on seeing Sor Juana as only a rebellious iconoclast. I argue that the work, and Sor Juana herself, must be read as having both a conservative, hegemonic agenda and radical critique of dominant ideology. This "both/and" move, which I position as necessary for a robust feminist approach, helps us better understand the complexity of Creole identity and belonging in colonial Mexico. Notes 1This is the only English translation of Neptuno alegórico, cited henceforth as "AN." I have consulted both the Spanish text and English version. Sor Juana's baroque Spanish is difficult, and this translation is often too literal and doesn't always make sense. It also renders the verse of the Explication in prose form. When necessary I provide my translation of the Spanish text from the fourth volume of Sor Juana's Obras completas (OC). 2 Obras completas vol. IV and Vincent Martin and Electa Arenal's recent edition of Neptuno alegórico contain select contemporary art work portraying the mythical themes Sor Juana uses, suggesting what the paintings may have looked like or drawn from. 3I'm indebted to Martínez-San Miguel's excellent discussion of criollismo and Sor Juana. 4In fact, the vicereine who was about to arrive was instrumental in fostering much of Sor Juana's subsequent work and was responsible for its publication in Europe. 5All translations of scholarship in Spanish are my own. 6Cf. Bacon, e.g.,: "Some praises come of good wishes and respects, which is a form due, in civility, to kings and great persons, laudando praecipere, when by telling men what they are, they represent to them, what they should be." 7Sor Juana may have copied many passages from a Spanish treatise on mythology without attribution, probably to foreground her Latin (over Spanish) knowledge and boost her affiliation with classical European learning (McNichols 6, 68–77). 8 Non is a negative meaning "not"; plus means "more"; and ultra can mean "beyond," "to an extent or degree exceeding," "on the farther side," and "on the other side." 9See Proverbs 31:10, which praises the virtuous (not strong or valiant) wife. I thank Thomas Hall for his assistance in translating this passage and identifying the source.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2012.659323

September 2006

  1. Announcements: Community Literacy Journal & Forum
    doi:10.1080/02773940600835506
  2. The Emergence of a Literate Rhetoric in Greece
    Abstract

    The “invention” of the alphabet is widely seen as the defining characteristic of literacy in Greece. This article examines the development of written rhetoric; that is, how alphabetic writing was structured for a variety of functions, and how such functions reveal the heuristics that were developed. The article argues that the paragraph is the earliest and dominant feature of an alphabetic rhetoric, and the source for understanding the recursive dynamics of oral and written expression that contributed to the development of a literate rhetoric in Greece.

    doi:10.1080/02773940500509144

March 2004

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    The rhetorical and poetic imaginations of Kenneth Burke The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke by James H. East. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 288 + xxxvii pp. The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke by Ross Wolin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 256 + xiii pp. George Campbell: Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment by Arthur E. Walzer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 175 + vii pp. Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, and Monboddo by Catherine L. Hobbs. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. 211 + vii pp. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 279

    doi:10.1080/02773940409391283

June 2002

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Fearless Speech by Michel Foucault. Edited by Joseph Pearson. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001. 183 pp. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working‐Class Children in Their Own Self‐Interest by Patrick J. Finn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 243 + xii pp. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth‐Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine by Susan Wells. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. 312 + xii pp. Black on Black: Twentieth‐Century African American Writing about Africa by John Cullen Gruesser. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 205 + xiii pp. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again by Bent Flyvbjerg. Trans. Steven Sampson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 214 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391236

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

January 2002

  1. The archaeology of women in rhetoric: Rhetorical sequencing as a research method for historical scholarship
    Abstract

    Abstract For well over a decade, a number of scholars have argued that a more thorough and representative account of the history of rhetoric can only take place after women are accurately included in the rhetorical tradition. If we are to provide a sensitive accounting of women in the rhetorical tradition, current methods of, and perspectives on, historical research need to be reconsidered and adjusted in three respects. First, our mentality toward rhetoric must expand beyond civic, agonistic discourse to include alternative modes of expression used by women. Second, our efforts to discover primary evidence must intensify so that a more representative body of sources becomes available. This expanded body of evidence must include non‐traditional sources that provide insight to the oral and literate practices of women. Third, historians of rhetoric must create methods of research and analysis that will provide a more sensitive accounting of primary material than current historical methods were designed to yield. This essay argues that these needs can be met by an archaeological approach to historical rhetoric. A method called “rhetorical sequencing”; is offered as an heuristic to facilitate historical research on women in the rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391221

September 2001

  1. Reading and the “written style”; in Aristotle'srhetoric
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391213

June 2001

  1. Disciplinary identifications/public identities: A response to Mailloux, Leff, and Keith
    Abstract

    Abstract Balancing the critiques of scientism in communications, this response notes how belletrism has marginalized rhetorical studies on the other side of the modern opposition of the arts and sciences. Such institutional divisions need to be assessed against broader changes in literacy if our disciplinary histories are to be a resource for assessing how rhetoricians in composition and communications can work together. The marginal positions of composition and speech courses may undermine the prestige of rhetoric as an academic discipline, but the margins can be a place of power if approached pragmatically. Looking beyond the pragmatic professionalism of disciplinary insiders such as Stanley Fish, we need to develop alliances with practitioners of the arts of rhetoric outside as well as within the academy if pragmatism is to contribute to the institutional work of making universities into institutions of public learning.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391209

September 2000

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218 + xv pp. Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 209 + xiii. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 130 pp. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 256 pages. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres by Gerard A. Hausen Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 335p. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois State University), 1998. 118 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940009391191

June 1998

  1. The art of rhetoric: Aesthetics and rhetoric in the American renaissance
    Abstract

    T he critical commonplace that rhetoric simply declined in direct proportion to rise of Romanticism has thankfully come under increasing scrutiny. In 1989, for example, Susan Jarratt questioned Donald C. Stewart's observation that the most notable feature of history of rhetoric in nineteenth century was its absence (73) and established constitutive role of rhetoric in literary and critical writings of Victorian Walter Pater. More recently, Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham have argued that the hesitancy of of rhetoric to consider political, cultural, or material factors when discussing rhetoric and Romanticism has been due to their willingness to accept at face value what Romantic authors have said about writing. For example, they have accepted uncritically pronouncements about Romantic genius that place author outside lines of dependency and relationship-and beyond concerns of rhetoric. Consequently, they write, historians of rhetoric have been curiously ahistorical in their accounts of rhetoric and Romanticism . (8). And just last year, almost as if in response to Bialostosky and Needham's assessment, Rex Veeder demonstrated how political and rhetorical principles informed Romantic pulpit practice in nineteenth century. He finds that What Romantics suggest is that purpose of art, including art of writing, is rhetorical in that it encourages act of identification and by so doing allows auditors to transcend their world view through imaginative participation with another (316). Rather than dismissing Romantic discourses as arhetorical or contentedly relegating Romantic texts to conservative pedagogies of taste, these rightly inquire into complex political and social conditions that impelled production and reception of Romanticism. Further, they implicitly or explicitly view their work as having important institutional consequences for literary studies, rhetoric, and composition. That is, if Romanticism has often been elided from histories of rhetoric for its aesthetic affiliations, this brand of revisionist historicism takes as its primary political motive opportunity to revisit-and to qualify-such founding Romantic oppositions as imaginary and factual, reading and writing, literary and rhetorical. In words of Bialostosky and Needham, A new investigation of relationship between Romanticism and rhetoric may lead to a rapprochement between literary and rhetorical branches of English studies (as well as between English and Rhetoric departments) whose separation was founded upon and is sustained by commonplace story of end of rhetoric and rise of literature in Romantic period (5).

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391122

March 1998

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip by Laura Gurak. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pp. Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work by Jane Maher. Urbana: NCTE, 1997. 331 pp. Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth, edited by Frederick J. Antczak. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1995. 335 pp. Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction by Jonathan Potter. London: SAGE Publications, 1996. The Emperor's New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style by Kathryn T. Flannery. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. 240 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391120

September 1996

  1. Review essay: Genre, Activity, and Expertise
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/02773949609391081

June 1996

  1. Reading novels: Toward a cognitive rhetoric
    Abstract

    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

    doi:10.1080/02773949609391072

June 1994

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Defining the New Rhetorics, edited by Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park: Sage, 1993; pp. 243 + Introduction, Index Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection by Winifred Bryan Horner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 211 Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama by Jody Enders. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992;xiv; 281. Rhetoric and Society Series, ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Peter Ramus's Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus's Brutinae Quaestiones. Ed. James J. Murphy.Trans. Carole Newlands. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1992. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art by Ruben Quintero. Newark: U of Delaware Press, 1992; 187. Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development by Bryan C. Short. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

    doi:10.1080/02773949409391001
  2. Monitoring Columbia's daughters: Writing as gendered conduct
    Abstract

    Recently, rhetoricians have engaged themselves in the project of revising histories of nineteenth-century American so as to account for the practices of women. We wish to enlarge the scope of this project to include the late eighteenth century. Yet, to discover women's place in (or outside of) the rhetorical tradition in late eighteenth-century America, we cannot turn to familiar sources: for example, the college curricula that schooled early political and religious leaders. From this particular schooling, women were excluded. Nor can we study those textbooks that promoted reading and writing as commercial skills. Women were, for the most part, scarce in this realm as well.' Rather, for women there developed a kind of rhetoric of use apart from other instrumental and secular literacies that were, in the late eighteenth century, practicable mainly by men.2

    doi:10.1080/02773949409390996

June 1992

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    (Inter)views: Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy edited by Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale, with an introduction by David Bleich.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 269 pp. Rhetorical Questions: Studies of Public Discourse by Edwin Black. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; 209 pp. $24.95 cloth. An Introduction to Composition Studies,> edited by Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 189. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research ed. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1992; ix+354. John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse by James S. Baumlin.Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991; 333 pages. Richard McKeon: A Study by George Kimball Plochmann.Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990; vi + 260pp. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon ed. By Thomas Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 318.

    doi:10.1080/02773949209390963

January 1992

  1. Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic reading in the academy
    Abstract

    My contribution to this issue of RSQ relates my thoughts and conclusions about the value of some of Bakhtin's ideas to conversations about reading and feminism, and in that respect it resembles a traditional academic essay., But what began as a traditional essay that presented and defended a thesis is now informed by an overt narration of the development of my thinking and reading. I make this statement not to disclaim but to explain my approach to writing as a woman about Bakhtin. To read or write about reading and writing processes is a difficult undertaking; as readers and writers in the academy we are hyperaware of the claims made by an author and the degree to which her text adheres to or embodies her claims. What follows is as much an attempt to recreate and relate the changing relationship between Bakhtin's work and my own thought as it is to outline and review feminist interpretations of Bakhtin's work. At some point after first reading Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and The Dialogic Imagination, when composing the first draft of my dissertation, I felt compelled to stop and consider my reading process because I was having trouble writing about what I had read. When stumbling through writing the section of my dissertation that explicated some of Bakhtin's concepts, I thought I was facing a case of writer's block, and when I questioned the cause of the block, I attributed it to lack of comprehension. So I began rereading, secretly hoping that careful reading-noting important concepts and topic sentences and underlining and looking up unfamiliar words as my elementary and high school teachers had suggested-would bring me better understanding. I found as I reread Bakhtin that my trouble wasn't lack of comprehension; I could reel off neat definitions and thorough explanationsthat's what passing my Ph.D orals was all about. The trouble was, I wasn't contributing anything. My writing was empty. Paragraph after paragraph did nothing but paraphrase and quote Bakhtin and his commentators, allowing them a monologue in my text. Some writing teachers would argue that I began writing too soon or that I hadn't spent enough time prewriting and formulating my own opinions about the material, and this is probably true to some extent. But more than a matter of the writing process, my difficulties resulted from my sense of myself as a reader and novice theorist and Bakhtin as a writer, master theorist, and authority. What I was encountering in my reading process is what I believe many students (particularly those designated developmental) experience. Teachers, textbook authors, counselors, administrators, parents-by virtue of

    doi:10.1080/02773949209390941

September 1991

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Abstract Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America by Nan Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 313. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric by Edward Schiappa. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xvii + 239. Rhetoric and Irony, Western Literacy and Western Lies by C. Jan Swearingen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; xiv + 323. Democracy and the Mass Media: A Collection of Essays ed. Judith Lichtenberg. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990; 410. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy by Albert O. Hirschman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. xi+197.

    doi:10.1080/02773949109390934

September 1990

  1. A re‐examination of George Yoos’ “role‐identity in reading and writing”
    Abstract

    When Edward P. J. Corbett was editor of College Composition and Communication, his fairly rigid standards for article length undoubtedly had the effect of forcing some loose thinking to a fairly sharp point. It also had the effect of pushing some discussions into an awesome degree of compression that made them less available to casual readers than they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, they offer a rewarding read now, if one is willing to commit the mental energy to put them together with the world. To my mind, a classic illustration of this sort of essay is George Yoos' An Identity of Roles in Writing and Reading from the fall, 1979 issue. In that paper, Yoos provided a model for reading and writing processes that finds reciprocity between writing and reading strategies at four different levels-at the level of objective expression or of content, at the level of face-adjustment or ethical appeal, at the level of audience, and at the level of logic or truth. Under this system, both writer and reader perform in roles defined by these four topics, and if one is generally accentuated in any specific situation, it is pretty clear that accommodation or sensitivity to all roles can provide a highly enriched perspective on writing. However, any conceptualizing like this, anchored in Collingwood, Croce, and George Herbert Meade (the names cited here) is probably going to seem rather alien and have some apparently rough points for present day readers. One of these is Yoos' flat assumption-deriving from Collingwood and Croce-that Kinneavy's effort to see expression as a mode of communication is wrong, and that the need to keep expression separate from communication is basic to an understanding of the writing process. Our present pedagogical tendency of using personal expression as a way to develop fluency and authenticity will tend to make readers unreceptive to the basic truth that writing will always be writing, that is, texts in which expression can be found, but which should never be confused with expression. To ignore this fact is to run a far graver risk of creating writing anxiety than would be possible by framing writing as an impersonal formalistic game. Another rough point would have to be Yoos' notion of the faceadjustment role, which he identifies with ethical appeal as a matter of clear about what one is doing. Yoos draws a clear distinction between this and the audience role which involves a strategic awareness and management of how different audiences will react, and, from the reading point of view, a reader's awareness of how these audiences are being managed. These are very subtle distinctions that take us quite a way back to a classical view of rhetorical operations (pace Knoblauch and Brannon). More generally, Yoos makes it clear that the relation between writing and reading is much deeper than writing scholars tend to acknowledge, in spite of the years of research into reading and writing connections. Certainly the kind of mirror-imaging that his essay provides-in which, say, an objective-expressive is one the writer plays by getting what he or she knows down into words, and that the reader reads for to see what the writer really knows, as a ground to be comprehended before processing rhetorical and logical acts-involves a complex conceptualizing of the communication process that promises a very rich critical

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390898

March 1990

  1. Seeing through metaphor: Teaching figurative literacy
    Abstract

    Bruce Fraser's metaphor for metaphor was nicely illustrated by its contexta multi-disciplinary discussion in which linguists, philosophers, psychologists, scientists, educators, and other academics trained their talents on that powerful but elusive trope. Though full of promising approaches, the symposium did not reach consensus on any of the major questions about metaphor: what it is, how it works, whether it is essential or inessential to communication--or, indeed, whether it is to be encouraged, discouraged, or simply tolerated. As symposia like Metaphor and Thought and On Metaphor show, scholars continue to differ strongly and vociferously about the nature, implications, and value of metaphor. But the complexity of metaphor--and the scholarly controversy it generates--should not discourage attempts to grapple with it in the college classroom, even-or especially-at the introductory level. On the contrary, metaphor is so essential to language and thought, so inescapable in everyday life, that it should be a prominent topic in any liberal arts curriculum--especially in those courses that purport to analyze human communication. trouble is not that metaphor is ignored in the current liberal arts curriculum--though it seems to receive little attention outside the study of languages and literature--but rather that it tends to be taught inconsistently or even misleadingly. Indeed, in a recent essay, J. Hillis Miller pointed out that many popular rhetorics reiterate well-exploded assumptions about metaphor: e. g., that it is supplemental or inessential to argument (primarily illustrative) and that it is clearly distinguishable from literal language (50-54). If composition teachers are likely to teach metaphor as an optional persuasive device, literature teachers are likely to present it primarily, if not exclusively, as a poetic device. For various reasons and in various ways, teachers and textbooks too often perpetuate inappropriate and outdated ideas about metaphor, it is as though, for the sake of simplicity, introductory physics confined itself to presenting a Newtonian view of the universe. Like many contemporary critics, Miller adopts a Nietzschean position, that metaphor is inescapable because language is fundamentally figurative: The pervasively figurative nature of language is the destructive element' in which, to borrow Stein's advice in Lord Jim, writers must immerse' themselves in order to swim at all (54). And he rejects the argument that it is impossible or impractical to teach this to beginning college students (55). What follows is an attempt to suggest how this might be done--to outline what an introductory college curriculum in metaphoric literacy ought to cover, and why, and how such a curriculum might be

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390877
  2. Reviews
    Abstract

    George Kimball Plochmann & Franklin E. Robinson, A Friendly Companion to Plato's GORGIAS. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 415 pp. Perspectives on Literacy. Edited by Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Pp. xix + 476.

    doi:10.1080/02773949009390881

June 1989

  1. Making meaning in literate conversations: A teachable sequence for reflective writing
    Abstract

    (1989). Making meaning in literate conversations: A teachable sequence for reflective writing. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 229-243.

    doi:10.1080/02773948909390850
  2. Concepts of memory in contemporary composition
    Abstract

    The five canons, parts, faculties, or functions of rhetoric are among the most constant features in the systematic treatment of the art (Scaglione 14). In many respects, they constitute the basic pattern of all theoretical and critical investigations into rhetorical art and practice (Thonssen 86). The five--invention (content, discovery), disposition (arrangement, organization), style (diction, elocution), memory, and delivery (presentation)--were canonized in Latin rhetoric as inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio or actio. They were important in Greek rhetoric as heurisis, taxis, lexis, mneme, and hypocrisis. While the exact origin of the canons is unknown, the five recur in rhetorical theory from antiquity to the present, where they command attention individually and collectively. Studying rhetoric, most agree, requires studying its canons. They are the sub-disciplines of the main, the lesser arts of the greater (Connors 64). They allow separate analysis and study of a complete five-part system (Murphy 83). They are the aspects of composing which work together in a recursive, synergistic, mutually dependent relationship (Welch Paradox 5-6). In part, the very history of rhetoric consists in changing relationships and interrelationships between them (Mahony 14). The canons apply to both encoding and decoding, forming a complete system for both generating and analyzing discourse (Welch Ideology 270). They represent not only the concepts with which the rhetor must deal and which he must master, but also the aspects of the rhetorical act which the critic examines and evaluates (Thonssen 86). In speech studies, minor changes in the meanings of the five terms have been developed in various treatises, but the pattern remains the same (Thonssen 86). In composition studies, the five canons are one of two prmary theories which dominate the discipline (Welch Ideology 269). The structure which has dominated both disciplines' textbooks, however, is a truncated one. Rarely has the five-part scheme been presented completely and explicitly. In speech studies, the fourth canon--memory--has virtually been dropped and usually receives incidental treatment (Thonssen 87). In composition studies, the first three canons--invention, arrangement, style--organize the vast majority of current textbooks, but the last two--memory and delivery--are typically deleted without a word of explanation (Welch Paradox 5, Ideology 270). This deletion, when explained, has been attributed to changed conditions in the law courts (Kennedy 105), to memory's absorption under disposition (Kennedy 210; Mahony 14) and, most often, to the western world's shift from orality to literacy. The tendency has been for modern rhetorical theory to abandon, remove, neglect, limit, or misunderstand both memory and delivery. On the other hand,

    doi:10.1080/02773948909390851

March 1987

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

    Fighting for Life; Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness. Walter J. Ong. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. The Muse Learns to Write; Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. Eric A. Havelock. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. 144.

    doi:10.1080/02773948709390780

June 1986

  1. Rhetoric, literacy and citizenship
    doi:10.1080/02773948609390745
  2. From crisis to crisis: The evolution toward higher standards of literacy in the United States
    doi:10.1080/02773948609390746

June 1984

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773948409390712

March 1983

  1. Book reviews
    Abstract

    On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. By Robert Pattison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 246 pp.). Revising: New Essays for Teachers of Writing. Ronald A. Sudol, Editor. (Urbana, IL: ERICINCTE, 1982.) ON METAPHOR. Sheldon Sachs, editor. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)

    doi:10.1080/02773948309390688

March 1980

  1. Media transforming media: Implications of Walter Ong's stages of literacy
    Abstract

    (1980). Media transforming media: Implications of Walter Ong's stages of literacy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 56-61.

    doi:10.1080/02773948009390562