Abstract Royster and Cochran use the words of African American women writers to enrich our view of intersections between American civil rights discourses and the discourses of human rights as a global concept. They focus on both individual and collective activities of the women and contextualize this activism within the larger framework of the rise of individual human rights language in twentieth century international relations. Notes 1Sam Occom (1723–1792), a progenitor of Native-American literature, was a Mohegan minister and political leader who worked to protect the cultures, traditions, and practices of indigenous peoples. He was an advocate for their political autonomy, spiritual well-being, and their education, as evidenced by his associations with Dartmouth College. 2A simplistic measure of this positioning is a keyword search of a top-ranked research university's library (The Ohio State University). "African Americans Civil Rights" yielded 1,346 entries. "African Americans Human Rights" yielded 194 entries. 3For a complementary argument about connections between civil rights and human rights, see Kirt Wilson's Keynote Address at the 2010 Public Address Conference on Human Rights, "More than Civil Rights: The Fight for Black Freedom as a Human Rights Struggle." Also, as noted below we are distinguishing between human rights as a set of values, policies, and practices exercised by individuals and groups and human rights values, policies, and practices that function universally in international relations and thereby beyond the boundaries of nation-states. 4In presenting this analytical framework, we note the persistent ways in which the master narrative of self-determination, peace, and justice for all gave rise to special allowances among the Western powers, creating various illogicalities for those not in power, a situation that, as we explain with more detail below, has pushed persistently the double-edged sword of hope and rage/despair. 5The analytical framework for this essay is drawn from Royster's larger manuscript project, currently entitled A Nation Within: Utopian Desire, Radical Action, and the Voices of African American Women. 6In addition to its linkages with Christian discourses, Wheatley's quotation also suggests the impact of Enlightenment values on human rights discourses and a more inclusive approach to human dignity and human rights. Further, a case can be made that Wheatley positions herself as a witness to this "absurdity," the discontinuity between the words and actions that prevailed so dramatically during her era. 7For a book-length treatment of affective mapping, see Flately. 8This use of "museum piece" mirrors the use of this term by Spitzack and Carter (407). 9Insightful and compelling as a discursive framework, the quest for "civil rights" as a response to the disempowering conditions and effects of slavery, rather than the quest for "human rights" as a global concept, has been the norm in scholarly analyses of racial oppression in the United States. Examples of civil rights scholarship include leading scholars, such as: Stampp; Woodward; Gutman; Franklin; Sundquist; and others. More attention to the connection of struggles in the United States for civil rights to struggles globally for human rights include: Eric Foner; Anderson; Henry J. Richardson, III; Shuler; Soohoo, Albisa, and Davis; and others. 10Space limitations do not permit a full explanation of how transnational feminist scholarship (e.g., Alexander and Mohanty) has enriched contemporary human rights discourses or how women of African descent, including African-American women writers, continue to be pacesetters in making insightful connections, analyses, and interpretations. 11This explanation is based on Eleanor Hinton Hoytt. 12Note that elite African-American women broadened their horizons in the twentieth century through foreign travel, with increasing numbers participating in both individual and organized trips. By the mid-twentieth century, foreign travel had become a booming business among this group, as evidenced by the highly successful Henderson Travel Agency, founded in 1955 by African-American woman entrepreneur Freddye Henderson in Atlanta, Georgia. Furthermore, the push to be philanthropic was very much in motion, as verified by Gill's discussion of the community activism of beauticians in Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (2009). 13For example, prominent writer H. G. Wells drafted an international bill of rights in his New World Order. 14The drafting subcommittee was composed of eight individuals from the United States, Lebanon, Great Britain, France, China, Australia, Chile, and the U.S.S.R., which appointed a "working group" of the first four state representatives listed. Rene Cassin, the lead author in drafting the UDHR, states all 58 nations contributed to the final shape of the UDHR. The UDHR was adopted unanimously, albeit with eight abstentions from the Eastern bloc, on 10 December 1948. 15Dorothy Jones discusses why the positioning of the term dignity in the Preamble and Article 1 is significant as a statement of intent for the whole document. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline Jones Royster Jacqueline Jones Royster is Ivan Allen Jr. Chair and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0525, USA. Molly Cochran Molly Cochran is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610, USA.

Abstract The 1930s in America abounded with debates about language and communication. Interest in the effects of propaganda and the problems of miscommunication prompted the development of organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937) and Count Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics (1938). Albeit in different ways, each of these groups aimed to increase the public's awareness of the effects of language and to improve its ability to communicate. But the assumptions about language and communication held by these organizations would ultimately render them short-lived in terms of public and scholarly attention. This article examines the work of these organizations in relation to that of Kenneth Burke, and demonstrates how Burke developed his rhetorically oriented theories of communication against and in response to this rich background. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Selzer for his encouragement and advice on earlier drafts of this article (as well as for inspiration, as in its original version this was written for his Kenneth Burke graduate seminar at Penn State). Thanks also to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1For more thorough elaborations and further discussions, see, for example, Crowley; Sproule; George and Selzer. 2See, for instance, “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The Journal of Philosophy 31 (February 1, 1934): 80–81; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” International Journal of Ethics 44 (April 1934): 377–384; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The New Republic 79 (August 1, 1934): 327; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” Supplement to Nature (October 20, 1934): 617. 3Korzybski has a curious predilection for not capitalizing names of systems (the aristotelian, newtonian, and euclidian being the most commonly used). Because most adherents to General Semantics use the same convention, I will follow it as well in this article. 4Of course, “orientation” is also a key word for Burke, especially in Permanence and Change. Burke's idea of “orientation” appears to have come directly from Korzybski: “Orientation can go wrong. Consider, for instance, what conquest over the environment we have attained through our powers of abstraction, of generalization; and then consider the stupid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these abstractions were mistaken for realities” (6). Burke's term, via Veblen, for problematic orientations is “trained incapacities,” or, as he defines it more completely, “a faulty selection of means due to a faulty theory of causal relationships” (9), as, for example, chickens who have been trained to eat when a bell rings will still come running when the bell signals punishment instead of food. 5In an unpublished manuscript (recently discovered, edited, and published by James Zappen), Burke notes that Korzybski's structural differential “is valuable for calling attention to an important abstractive process of language, but cannot of itself replace a mature linguistic analysis.” 6Also, while the IPA definitely experienced failure as an organization (although certainly, as I pointed out earlier, communication departments and composition programs still find value in the seven propaganda devices), it should be noted here that contrary to Condit's assertion that “I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir” (“Post-Burke” 350), in fact the Institute of General Semantics is still quite active, and has been varyingly influential in the fields of cognitive psychology, popular psychology, linguistics, and education. Inarguably, though, it has lost most of its credibility (and even name recognition) with scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition and communication. 7In the same letter, Burke explains to Josephson that he was going to attend one of Korzybski's General Semantics seminars in Chicago upon the offer of the “Semanticists” to pay his expenses, but decided against it because it would have consumed nearly two weeks. He writes, “Hated to pass it up—for these are the days when one yearns for his band of the like-minded—and Hayakawa writes me: ‘Both the students of General Semantics of my acquaintance and the students of linguistics are enthusiastic about your work.' Hayakawa teaches at a school in Chicago that recently offered me a job, though alas! at no such handsome salary as I could easily imagine” (Burke to Josephson 17 Dec. Citation1941). In a letter of several years earlier, Burke had complained to Richard McKeon about Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words (which he was then writing the review for); he quips, “how he does tyrannize with words!” Burke goes on to write, “Rule of thumb: Anyone who takes Korzybski's ‘Science and Sanity’ for anything more than half a book on the subject of semantics is a public calamity. Taken as half a book, it is excellent. Taken as a whole book, it is far worse than no book at all, far inferior to naïve words uttered at random” (Burke to McKeon 13 Dec. 1937). Perhaps reviewing Chase's book (which presented a fairly skewed view of Korzybski's ideas) helped to highlight for Burke the problems with General Semantics. Both of these statements taken together, though, indicate fairly clearly that Burke saw himself not so much rejecting General Semantics, perhaps, as negotiating with it. 8Although he focuses explicitly on the “semanticists” here, Burke is also implicitly responding to the New Critics, a fact suggested by the initial appearance of the essay in The Southern Review, a journal colonized at the time by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. Burke's double purpose can be ascertained in small jabs elsewhere in The Philosophy of Literary Form; for instance, he remarks, “It is ‘poetic’ to develop method; it is ‘scientific’ to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a ‘scientific’ ideal.)” (130). As Ann George and Jack Selzer point out, “That distinction between scientific and poetic language, based on the Agrarian distrust of science and on the positivist assumption that science and poetry lead to two different and complementary approaches to knowledge and derived at least in part from I.A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), was fast becoming a central tenet of the nascent New Criticism, as the movement would officially be dubbed by Ransom in his 1941 book of that name” (Kenneth Burke 193). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441102, Moscow, ID 83844-1102, USA.

ABSTRACT Starting from a chance quotation in William Dean Howells' “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading,” this essay reflects on the differences (and relations) between what classical tradition would call “grammatical” and “rhetorical” approaches to discourse—and, likewise, what might be called “hermeneutic” and “productive” approaches to rhetoric. The grammatical/hermeneutic approach is oriented towards reaching an understanding of what a text says or means, or what its argument is, while the rhetorical/productive approach is characterized by the questions, How was it done? and How can I do that? It is this latter approach—the orientation toward the cultivation of productive discursive skill—that disciplinarily makes rhetoric, as opposed to a variety of philosophy or literary criticism. This notion is further aligned, on one hand, with a revisionist “sophist's history of rhetoric,” and, on the other hand, with a “sophistic” approach to rhetorical education derived from the tradition of Isocrates.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. This emphasis on pedagogy is consistent with the consensus formed at the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies Conference held in Evanston, Illinois, summed up in Jeffrey Walker's statement there, “What makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition.” For more on this position, see the essays in the Summer 2004 (volume 34, issue 3) issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, especially Gerard A. Hauser's Hauser , Gerard A. “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn't Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 ( 2004 ): 39 – 53 . [CSA] [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn't Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism.”

Abstract At the conclusion of the Evanston conference, the groups that had been working on Pedagogy affirmed the position: ‘ “What makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition.” The formation of an alliance among the various scholarly societies with a self‐identified interest in rhetoric offers a unique opportunity to advance a collective assertion of what rhetoric scholars study and teach, what binds our several traditions together as a disciplinary practice, what are its disciplinary strengths in the development of our students’ capacity (dunamis) as individuals, and why this mode of education is valuable for a free society. Three pedagogy groups developed far‐reaching proposals for the ways we might reassert rhetoric education's centrality in the modern university. Spanning these was their call for ARS to commission a manifesto recovering the value of rhetoric education as central to civic education.

Abstract Close readings of passages addressing "books" and "authors" in 20th Century renditions of Plato's dialogues reveal highly variable translations. These translations track along with the rise and fall of literary! critical movements celebrating and critiquing the figure of the author, and respond to the increasingly dominant understanding of the Fifth Century BCE as a predominantly oral culture. These ultimately contradictory representations of the same Platonic texts illustrate how translators craft texts tailored to their times 'favored theoretical constructs. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these variable translations is to suggest the degree to which Plato's treatment of questions of authorship shapes and circumscribes putatively modern discussions of these questions.

Plato on Rhetoric and Language by Jean Nienkamp. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates for Hermagoras Press, 1999. 220 + ix pp. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. 381 + xii pp. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature and Culture by Caroline Field Levander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 186 pp. The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture by Carey McIntosh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 276 + xi pp.

Abstract This article explores the ways in which Romantic literary theory offers contemporary rhetoricians a balanced answer to the question of audience, . an answer that allows for prose which reflects a private vision at the same time that it strives for social transformation. In connecting Coleridge's and Keats's hostile reactions to their nineteenth‐century readers with current expressivist theories, especially the work of Peter Elbow, the need to avoid audience at certain stages in the writing process becomes apparent. Yet ultimately the most powerful writing is audience‐centered, as Shelley's A Defence of Poetry illustrates through its call for imaginative empathy.

The early works of I. A. Richards, while not committed to hard-line verificationism, nonetheless seem persuaded of the central tenet of logical positivism, that the only truth strictly so-called is the truth disclosed by the methods of empirical science. This minimal positivism, coupled with a non-physicalist form of behaviorism, is evident in books like Science and Poetry (1926) and Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). However, if Richards was a positivist, he was a positivist who wanted to save poetry from positivism. Primitive positivists like A. J. Ayer impenitently regarded poetic discourse as meaningless. Since they are neither analytic nor available for empirical testing, the statements found in poems are really pseudo-statements, expressions of feeling and no more. Richards, who loved poetry, feared that people would cease to read it or write it if they were convinced that it was nothing but emotional gush. And so, in his early books, he developed an affectivism in which poetry, by helping us order our conflicting impulses, acquires a value distinct from the value of science. On this view, poetry is not a means of expressing and communicating propositional truth-only science does that-but a device for constructive behavior-modification by means of language. Meanwhile, from the very beginning of his career, Richards had been a diligent student of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was convinced that the works of Coleridge contained many important insights into the nature and effects of poetry which, in order to be made generally accessible and secure wider appreciation, needed only to be disentangled from the metaphysics of romantic idealism in which they were embedded. Quotations from Coleridge appeared with great frequency in his own writing and teaching. Kathleen Coburn predicted that sooner or later Richards would have to write a book on Coleridge, and eventually her prophecy was fulfilled. Setting out to rewrite Coleridge in the language of empiricism, Richards produced Coleridge on Imagination (1934), which suggested to some of his readers that Richards had not converted Coleridge to empiricism but that Coleridge had made Richards an idealist, if not a metaphysical then at least a linguistic idealist. It is the Richards thus baptized in the Alphean flood who speaks in the lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) delivered two years after the publication of the Coleridge book.' From first to last, in all his writings and through all his changes of mind, Richards insisted that he was a pragmatist. And indeed, in every project he undertakes, from Basic English to literary theory, he is unfailingly preoccupied with the practice of reading and the possibilities of communication. If behaviorism and romanticism are just the low-mimetic (preterite) and high-mimetic (elite) forms of pragmatism, respectively, then Richards' progress from the former to

Norms of Rhetorical Culture by Thomas B. Farrell. New Haven and London: Yale UP 1993; x + 374pp. Hermogenes On Issues; Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric, by Malcolm Heath, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995; pp. ix + 274. The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642–1660, by Elizabeth Skerpan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992; 264 pages. The Rhetoric of Courtship: Courting and Courtliness in Elizabethan Language and Literature; by Catherine Bates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 236 pages. Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism: (Inter)views edited Gary A. Olson, with a foreword by Clifford Geertz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1994. 250 pp. Understanding Scientific Prose ed. Jack Selzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993; 388 pp. Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Winifred Bryan Horner, ed. Theresa Enos. Southern Illinois UP; 1993; 200 pp. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, by Richard Enos. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993. 159 pages.

(1993). Selected bibliography: The concept of “author” in rhetoric/composition and literary theory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 71-75.

death of the is a familiar refrain among poststructuralists, a phrase used to mean nonhermeneutic approaches to textsa label against which to react in the name of the historical subject (Kamuf 5). Probably the source of this controversial slogan is Barthes' precisely titled, brief essay, Death of the Author, in which he charts the postmodern move from a literature tyrannically centred on the author.... [where] the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, to the ascendancy of the reader (143). When Barthes replaces the terms authori scriptor with critic/reader, he suggests that the future movement of literary theory requires the author's death to enable the reader's birth. Foucault, also making a distinction between the author and what happens in the text, offers the term author-function as being outside and preceding the text itself. True, the author is maker of text, but disappears once this is performed, only the function remaining, that is, being outside and preceding the text. In this role the author must accept in the text. Whereas the author in the epic form accepted early death because the epic itself would bring immortality, Foucault says that modem writing no longer is linked to death but to sacrifice of life because the author must accept obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the (117). More and more we're hearing another slogan: The tyranny of the author has been replaced by that of the reader. Yet I think one has to accept autonomy of neither author nor reader if we approach poststructuralist theory rhetorically. To do this we need to (1) broaden thinking about literature not only to include the discursive nature of language but also to accept its persuasive nature; (2) attempt distinctions between author and writer; (3) acknowledge the presence of the writer in the text itself (ethos); (4) embrace the concept of the world as language.

The metaphor has gained much importance as of late. No longer simply a decorative feature of discourse, the trope has obtained an epistemological and ontological dimension. No longer merely a figural flourish of prose, the metaphor has acquired an important role in the study of human understanding. Hence, thanks to theoretical rehabilitation and philosophical reconsideration, metaphorical analysis has become an important and popular pursuit for many disciplines--philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, rhetoric, et al.2 While the insights generated and the discoveries made by metaphorical analysis are significant and worthy of much study, we will take as our point of departure the limits of such critical inquiry. This essay offers another perspective, a sort of theoretical intervention which examines from another angle the study of discourse. Rhetorical theory, it will be reasoned, benefits from a perspective which considers the metonymical features of discourse. As such, the comparative advantages of either metaphorical or metonymical analysis are not measured by which one is true, but rather by which one is most useful for a given project. Simply put, a metonymical perspective can recognize and explain a terrain outside the scope of metaphorical analysis. The change we consider in this essay does not render useless or inadequate previous explanations, but rather opens a space or a zone from which to critically evaluate what has been previously overlooked. As noted, the popularity and importance of the metaphor has never been greater. Whether it be conceived as function, cluster, or nature, the research has sought, and continues to seek, the habitation of the metaphor within all symbolic discourse. Indeed, it may be safe to assume that the study of metaphors remains an important and integral component of contemporary rhetorical theory. As a result of theoretician diligence and persistence, a wide array of techniques exist for the study of metaphors within discourse. For examples of such metaphorical research we turn briefly to the work of I.A. Richards, Max Black, Edwin Black, and Paul Ricoeur. Perhaps no one should figure more prominently than I.A. Richards in the reappraisal of the trope. Using the metaphor, his New Rhetoric, seeks to recover meaning, to stabilize and neutralize the somewhat figural moments of discourse.

Tantalizing and provocative questions about classical systems of topical invention continue to receive well-deserved scholarly attention. Recently, Corbett, explored how the topics can inform the teaching of writing and Trimpi2 analyzed the possible connections between the topics and literary theory. Whether or not the topics divide themselves into material and formal received differing answers from Conley3 and Grimaldi.4 Moreover, investigations to discover how the tradition of topics shifted and changed across time has been addressed by Stump,5 Cogan,6 and Leff.7 The intellectual richness of such studies stems from many sources. Aristotle, for example, authors a topical system for dialectic and another, somewhat similar somewhat dissimilar, for the art of rhetoric. Cicero, in his early work offered a topical system based on persons and actions for rhetorical practice. Later, in his Topica something resembling Aristotle's dialectical method appears and then, even more problematic, in his later treatises a topical system uniting rhetoric and philosophy emerges, but in a truncated, fragmented form. As Buckley noted: