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).

Rhetoric is a trace retained in and by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This concept illuminates how rhetoric and AI have faced issues related to information abundance, entrenched social inequalities, discriminatory biases, and the reproduction of repressive ideologies. Drawing on their shared root terminology (stochastic/artifice), common logic (zero-agency), and similar forms of organization (trope+algorithm), this essay urges readers to consider the etymological, ontological, and formal dimensions of rhetoric as inherent features of contemporary AI.

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThe former Badger Army Ammunition Plant in rural southern Wisconsin has long been a landscape mired in settler colonial and industrial attempts to sever social and cultural relations between land and bodies. After the plant was decommissioned, the community decided it should be ecologically restored given the landscape’s legacy of harm. Through inter views with 17 local stakeholders and storytellers, this essay reveals how toxic containment as both metaphor and topoi, grounded in the materiality of toxins, brings visibility to the landscape’s history while at the same time providing a model of local resistance. For those in the Badger landscape, metaphor and topoi lead to personal and social actions that support culturally conscious relationship building with a direct impact on the scientific restoration process. Ultimately, this essay argues that how stories shape spatial experiences matters, especially given the way communities are guided by the metaphor-turned-topoi process.KEYWORDS: Environmental rhetoricmetaphorspatial rhetorictopoitoxic AcknowledgmentsI thank Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Morris Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in developing this project.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Locals widely refer to the plant’s footprint as “Badger”; however, there is a developing effort to call it by its Ho-Chunk name, Mąą Wakącąk (Maa-wa-kun-chunk), which means “Sacred Earth.”2 “Re-story-ation” is a term theorized by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan (p. 4) and Potawatomi and environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 9) to represent the need for ecological restoration to better account for the relationships between landscapes and people. Stories play a central role in bridging scientific and cultural perspectives.3 The committee was biased in favor of US governmental officials while the remaining seats were distributed between cultural and advocacy groups. Although I hoped to include more Ho-Chunk participants than the original committee (one seat), I was only able to interview two storytellers given limitations related to funding, time, and COVID-19.4 Industrial solvents from a deterrent burning ground plume of toxins discharge to Weigand’s Bay, which connects to Lake Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River.5 Documented health complaints by workers at the plant included headaches and chest pains due to nitroglycerin exposure, as well as cancer deaths (Citizens for Safe Water; Gould).6 Community Conservation Coalition for the Sauk Prairie.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as the Department of English, The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center, and the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, all of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.

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Communicative acts that deliberately disrupt how an audience understands them as either fiction or nonfiction are well-known phenomena. Still, the rhetoric of such disruptions has yet to be systematically investigated. This essay treats the experience of such disruptions as a distinct form of reflexivity, conceptualizing it as metanoic reflexivity. Drawing on recent work on fictionality theory and on theories of metanoia, the essay uses this concept to describe the reading effect that is produced when a rhetor uses nonconventional forms of fictionality to disrupt how an audience ascribes relevance to a communicative act. Through readings of Democratic campaign rhetoric from the US presidential election of 2020, the essay directs attention to how this reflexivity has moved from artistic practices to the communicative mainstream, investigates how it operates, and discusses its potential deliberative ramifications.

Ida B. Wells uses what critical race theorists call counterstory to expose contradictions in majoritarian assumptions about race in her statistical rhetoric. By using rhetorically forceful characteristics of the African American Verbal Tradition in counterstories about the victims of lynching, Wells leverages embodiment and emotion to amplify statistics of lynching. This essay examines the rhetorical properties of different versions of statistics of Black victims of lynchings from 1883 to 1891 that Wells used in the early 1890s to show how Wells’s approach to amplification in quantitative rhetoric honors and advocates for the people that can make up a statistic.

In September 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing inviting comments on the regulation of human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products. This essay uses Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecularization to show the rhetorical conflicts that emerged between lay public arguments and biomedical experts’ claims about the limits of personal autonomy, ownership, and the definition of cells and tissues as products. By analyzing how public actors negotiate the regulation of human tissues, I argue that a rhetorical account of molecularization shows how and for whom bodies are commodified and physically distributed. Through this rhetorical account of molecularization, I move between the molecular level of the body (the micro) and the situatedness of human bodies (the macro) to rethink the ways bodies are defined, even at the level of the cell.

Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.

In the two decades since Bruno Latour imagined the “gun-citizen” as an emergent combination of human and object, the number of US civilians carrying firearms daily has increased fivefold. This essay analyzes discourses of “carry culture” and argues that within it good citizenship comprises the twinned acts of submission to the gun and aggression toward othered groups, defining carry culture as fundamentally authoritarian. The essay further argues that carriers’ submission to their weapons is a corrupted form of care, prompting rhetoricians to reconsider what constitutes ethical relations with objects. Viewing guns in these ways reveals carrying, despite gun culture’s preoccupation with “freedom,” as physically and mentally constricting and puts forth the idea that firearms carried in public are dangerous whether or not they are ever fired.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, reviewing the first translated, unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf for The Southern Review, complained in the introduction that earlier reviews were long on condemnation and...

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

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.

Marouf Hasian, Jr.’s Forensic Rhetorics and Satellite Surveillance is timely and relevant to contemporary issues of human rights violations and crises in the wake of emergent terrorist organization...

This essay assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s response to Booker T. Washington based on the economic principles structuring public-intellectual intervention in social crisis. Arguing that public-intellectual work relies on ethos-driven rhetorical engagement that conflates the public intellectual and his conceptual intervention as a single product to be marketed, I recontextualize the debate between the two thinkers in order to account for the intersection of their discursive activities in terms of competing public-intellectual models. While Washington relied on a closed-market model that situated him as the spokesperson for an otherwise silent black community, Du Bois worked to create opportunity for deliberation among a number of black publics, and Du Bois’s more democratically minded rhetorical modeling offers a version of public-intellectual work that resonates with the needs of the current moment.

The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement, by Jay P. Childers. University Park: Penn State UP, 2012. 220 pp. $56.95 (cloth).After the Public Turn: Composi...

Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric opens by invoking the spirits of historical methodology, conjuring the pinnacle of concern over historical methods in the 1980s and 1990s. In panels of the Conferen...

Comparative rhetoricians are heavily involved in textual interpretation, and the quality of the interpretation largely depends on how self-reflexive the interpreter is. However, within the disciplines of textual studies there is little specific guidance on how to improve self-reflexivity. This essay is intended to ameliorate this situation by drawing on and synthesizing the relevant literatures from such areas as cultural anthropology, qualitative research, and critical theory. I begin by outlining the disputes over the concept of self-reflexivity. I then move to the different spheres that have been proposed for self-reflexivity; these spheres range from accidents of individual psychology to historical circumstances to webs of power and privilege. Next I describe the most useful techniques for refining self-reflexivity, mapping out their theoretical and practical complexities. Throughout the essay I pull from my work on traditional Chinese rhetoric for cautionary examples. I conclude with some words of warning and of encouragement.

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.

This essay analyzes Myriad Genetics’ marketing of the BRACAnalysis genetic test to argue that the campaign creates a unique and problematic understanding of choice and decision making in the domain of applied genetic biotechnologies. The essay identifies how the campaign creates a subject position that invites audiences into a double bind of action and moral obligation, where specific decisions to make powerful medical choices become circumscribed as a necessity. A reduction and oversimplification of technical, scientific complexity replaces deliberative processes and phronetic understandings of complex situations and exigencies with intuition and feeling as warrants for action; in turn, a resultant appearance of empowerment becomes dialectically invested in an invocation of moral urgency and necessity.

Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler's edited collection, Agency in the Margins, is a welcome contribution to scholarship on rhetorical agency, adding to debates regarding “ownership” of rhetoric and what ...

Rhetorics of Display marshals diverse subject matter and methodological orientations in order to demonstrate the omnipresent significance of display as a contemporary persuasive phenomenon. “[M]uch...

Deanna Sellnow's new textbook is Brummett-lite, equal parts rhetorical theory sampler and criticism handbook for popular culture. In both of these parts, it is a valuable book to teach from, with s...

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

Abstract A Rhetoric of Motives is Kenneth Burke's only published work to consistently focus upon the subject of race. Although encouraged by the book's topic, this treatment was significantly shaped by Burke's friendship with African American novelist and critic, Ralph Ellison. Consequently, this essay offers one history of Burke's Rhetoric, drawing on both published work and unpublished correspondence between and concerning these two men. Based upon these materials, I isolate three texts as the central moments of the Burke/Ellison dialogue on race: Ellison's essay, “Richard Wright's Blues,”; Ellison's letter to Burke of November 23, 1945, and, finally. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives.

Abstract Although belletristic rhetoric constitutes à response to concerns that are unique to the eighteenth century, its fundamental principles carry forward Stoic views concerning the relationships among the individual's perceptions, moral sense, and civic duty. Stoic philosophy had particular appeal for eighteenth‐century thinkers searching for stability in the midst of rapid change. Examining the philosophical links between belletristic rhetoric and Stoic thought provides a more complete understanding of the beliefs about language, virtue, and society that shape the development of belletristic rhetoric.

Abstract This work uses rhetoric's fourth canon to “read”; the cemetery, a bricolage that can tell us both how memory is shaped and some of what is forgotten. As ideal memory sites, cemeteries show how kairos merges with chronos as well as how memory is linked to power and truth. Looking most specifically at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this work analyzes several gravesites as well as the cemetery itself to see how such readings of cemeteries might help us develop a more critical perspective on memory.

Abstract This article examines the rhetoric of labor activist Leonora O'Reilly for the ways she reconstituted her audience through a second persona of “intelligent workers.”; By balancing concrete contextualization with abstract visions of a future democracy, O'Reilly established identification with her audience of young, uneducated, poor women while simultaneously encouraging them to become a group of outspoken agents capable of transforming their oppressive circumstances. This article also explores the ways firsthand experiences influenced the process of reconstitution. To recognize the influences of extra‐verbal phenomena does not downplay rhetoric's role in the creation of an audience but rather calls attention to the dialectical relationship between language and an extra‐discursive reality and encourages scholars to examine a number of factors which can precipitate, impede, or otherwise shape the process of reconstitution.

Abstract As the discourse of traditionally marginalized voices becomes increasingly salient in rhetorical studies, standpoint theory—which emphasizes the epistemological importance of the perspectives of oppressed groups—could play a significant role in textual analysis. This essay first outlines the central tenets of standpoint theory and the debate they have generated. We then suggest how standpoint theory, with some significant modifications and expansions, may function as a productive methodology for rhetorical analysis. We demonstrate this potential contribution to our field through analyses of two nineteenth‐century texts: Jane Austen's Persuasion and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Abstract After the thousands of years in which a masculine canon of rhetoric has been constructed, feminist scholars have recently worked to create a more inclusive tradition. While problems and concerns have arisen with regard to this change, my work with nineteenth‐century primary texts has convinced me that more time to explore extant texts can alleviate many of the apprehensions associated with this new research. Further time to recover, evaluate, and make meaning from additional information will allow for a more complete picture of women's rhetorical history. In addition, a greater breadth of knowledge will allow us not only to add figures to a more inclusive tradition, but to redefine what counts as evidence in evaluating rhetoric and rhetoricians. In this way we may create a more complete, honest, and interesting picture of the rhetorical tradition.