Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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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

August 2023

  1. What Wizardry is this?: Somatic Listening and Verbal Metaphor in an Undergraduate Voice Studio
    Abstract

    Through the description of activity in an undergraduate voice studio, this essay posits the concept of somatic listening, an active and embodied engagement with verbal metaphor. Somatic listening, which includes aspects of multimodal and relational interlistening, opens singers’ mechanism to being moved by verbal metaphors suggested by their instructor or the text of their score. These movements are traceable through changes in a singer’s voice and in their embodied sensations.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2175023

January 2023

  1. Witnessing the Open Semiosis: A Method for Rhetorical Listening beyond the Human
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2078870

May 2022

  1. Caribbean Women’s Rhetorics: Voicing and Actions toward Cultural Representations
    Abstract

    In this essay, I argue for more representations of Caribbean women in rhetorical studies. In the effort toward representation, specifically for Haitian women, I developed a framework named Caribbean women’s rhetorics (CWR). CWR creates an interdisciplinary, multicultural, Black feminist framework and space where Caribbean women’s lived experiences are the primary focus of making, producing, sharing, and recognizing underrepresented rhetorical knowledges that offer rich representations. To do this work, the features of CWR uphold that value via voicing, proverbs, storytelling, reflection, linguistic practices, and multimodal composing. In providing an approach for the application of CWR, I analyze my interactive digital book The Cultivation of Haitian Women’s Sense of Selves: Toward a Field of Action. With CWR, I hope to expand the existing body of work on Caribbean women’s knowledges to disrupt sociocultural inequalities and improve the quality of life for Caribbean women.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2077628

March 2020

  1. A View from the Hill: “One Shot” Harris and the Pittsburgh Courier
    Abstract

    Charles "Teenie" Harris spent more than three decades as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, capturing through his camera lens both once-in-a-lifetime and everyday occurrences in the city. The Courier played an active role in the lives of many African Americans in Pittsburgh, promoting local and national news, sports, and entertainment that represented their communities. Using a selection of Harris's photos, this essay begins by identifying the self-evidently political images in his oeuvre. It then theorizes what I refer to as idiomatic visual rhetorical strategies of representation that manifest in less obvious places: images of women and children whose celebrations and struggles were not likely to be publicized outside their own neighborhoods. Through the introduction of idiomatic representational strategies, this essay contributes to efforts in visual rhetorics to refine methodologies for interpreting images, and it also furthers historiographies of African American rhetorics.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1725614

March 2019

  1. Witness to the Thousand-Yard Stare: Civilian Imagination of Service Members’ Mental Injuries in Wartime
    Abstract

    The thousand-yard stare is a commonplace rhetorical convention in visual representations of US wars. This essay analyzes the stare in Tom Lea’s, David Douglas Duncan’s, and Luis Sinco’s war images, and asks: How does circulation of such images encourage civilian spectators to imagine their military representatives’ wartime experiences? Does this imagination support or constrain civic action on behalf of veterans? Unlike prior analyses, which critique the stare for constraining protest, this essay argues that the stare can encourage civilian action by productively mediating civilians’ distance from war’s violence. The stare indexes traumatic violence not presented in the image yet calls on spectators to imagine that violence in spite of its absence. Although Duncan’s framing of the stare offers a masculine, stoic, and sacrificial vision constraining its critical potential, Lea’s and Sinco’s framings offer multimodal depth, rendering originary violence, traumatic dissociation, and mental injury as public problems in need of redress.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2019.1575461

August 2018

  1. Warburgian Maxims for Visual Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has been a tremendously influential thinker in the history and theory of art. Parts of his project have implications for the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric. For the most part, however, rhetoricians have not engaged with his work. This article seeks to persuade rhetoricians to engage with Warburg’s thought and legacy. In particular, it seeks to articulate his Mnemosyne image atlas as a theory and practice of visual topics. Discovered as part of a historical investigation and expressed in a theoretical register, Warburg’s account of visual topics is then exemplified in reference to the gestural politics of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in the twin contexts of contemporary media ecology and contemporary racial politics in the United States.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1411602

May 2018

  1. Genre: Permanence and Change
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2018.1454194

October 2017

  1. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, by Laurie E. Gries: Boulder, CO: UP of Colorado, 2015. $12.99 (Kindle); 336 pp. $27.93 (paper)
    Abstract

    Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosophy for the rhetorical analysis of what she terms “visual things.” For scholars and students who are l...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1371543

January 2017

  1. Rhetorical Commonsense and Child Molester Panic—A Queer Intervention
    Abstract

    This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1159720

August 2014

  1. Diocletian’s Victory Column: Megethos and the Rhetoric of Spectacular Disruption
    Abstract

    This essay explores how the powerful system of cultural references in the architecture of Alexandria is disrupted by Roman visual rhetoric. Specifically, the essay closely analyzes Diocletian’s Victory Column, a monument to the third-century Roman ruler who put down an Alexandrian uprising. The authors argue that Rome employed a visual rhetoric of spectacular disruption as a means to insert itself into the city’s historical identity even after its siege created widespread disease and starvation. The essay builds on the substantial scholarship on public memory by describing a kind of rhetoric that poses a political, existential challenge to a reigning cultural identity. As rhetorical scholars continue to study public memory and the persuasive powers of designed space, the concept of megethos appears to be uniquely and increasingly relevant.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.938865

May 2012

  1. Multimodality: A Social-Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, by Gunther Kress: New York: Routledge, 2010. xiii +197 pp.
    Abstract

    Multimodality is a provocative challenge to those of us who understand the primary concerns of our field to be speech and writing. At its most simplistic, Kress's work is an expansive account of ho...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2012.682848

November 2010

  1. A review ofPatient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry, by Carol Berkenkotter: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 201 pp.
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2010.504642

August 2010

  1. Totalitarian Visual “Monologue”: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin
    Abstract

    Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2010.499860

January 2009

  1. TheAra Pacis Augustae: Visual Rhetoric in Augustus' Principate
    Abstract

    Abstract Scholars of rhetoric have veered away from non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in the classical period. In this article I examine the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace, as one such overlooked rhetorical artifact. I argue the altar, although constructed as a war monument, shapes public memory to persuade the people of Rome to accept the dynastic succession of Augustus's heir. In addition, I show a variety of rhetorical theories operate on the altar in visual form including amplification, imitation, and enthymeme. Ultimately I contend that by focusing on non-traditional rhetorical artifacts, we can deepen our understanding of the rhetorical tradition in a period in which rhetoric is generally believed to have faded away. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen LampKathleen Lamp is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., 244 Lincoln Hall, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: lamp@uiuc.edu

    doi:10.1080/02773940802356624

December 2006

  1. TheWay, Multimodality of Ritual Symbols, and Social Change: Reading Confucius'sAnalectsas a Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Most rhetorical readings of Confucius's Analects have focused on his views on eloquence, reflecting an insuppressible impulse among comparative rhetoricians to match Confucian rhetoric to Greco–Roman rhetorical framework. My reading of the text argues that Confucius was more concerned about the suasory power of the multimodality of ritual symbols than narrowly verbal persuasion. To achieve the Way for restoring social unity and peace, Confucius emphasizes the ritualization of both the self and the others through studying history and performing rituals reflectively. I suggest, as the first Chinese rhetoric par excellence, the Analects shares some similar features with epideictic rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773940600868028

March 1991

  1. On the reefs: The verbal and visual rhetoric of Darwin's other big theory
    Abstract

    As with On the Origin of Species, we find that the work to be considered here-The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs-demonstrates Darwin's use of hedges to project the ethos of a cautious scientist. Hedges are linguistic elements such as perhaps, might, to a certain degree, or it is possible that. When people use hedges, they signal that they are taking a cautious stance on the truth-value of the referential matter they seek to convey. Hedges are a type of metadiscourse, a level of writing in which authors draw attention to the very art of writing itself-they discourse about their discourse (Crismore, Talking to Readers). This metadiscursive trait, however, represents only one aspect of Darwin's rhetoric. In Coral Reefs, he sculpts a key chapter into a Ciceronian form so pure that one might have to return to the Renaissance to find a parallel, and within this larger form, he strategically places hedges and other metadiscourse. He, further, employs visuals (drawings, diagrams, and maps) for persuasion at those points were the tension between his audiences preconceptions and the new theory being presented threatens to reach a dangerous level. The visuals and the metadiscursive commentary about them, also, help to establish his ethos and to build the argument for his theory of coral reefs. These elements, so perfectly embodied in Coral Reefs, were the rhetorical tools of an extremely sophisticated scientific mind which has much to pass down to our own conception of scientific writing. All too many of today's professional, academic, and textbook writers view exposition of findings as being all that is needed-and other parts of the written document, including visuals, can be handled even more perfunctorily: facts by themselves are enough, after all, according to this view. Darwin, however, believed that bald facts and blunt explanations were insufficient, as he clearly indicates in his A utobiography. There, he writes that in Origin he had first presented a short and rather vague discussion of his own innovative idea in the area of embryology. Later, other scientists got the for the new idea. Darwin felt no bitterness, for he knew that the fault had been his alone and that this fault was a rhetorical one: I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit (Barlow 125). Facts and blunt explanations were not enough-rhetorical strategies were needed to impress the reader-even (and we have some reason to say especially) professional scientists. Since, even granting the A utobiography, there will always remain a question about the precise nature of the intended audience for Origin, and since, moreover, a cloud of non-scientific, anachronistic controversy hangs over its theory of natural selection, we have turned to Darwin's work on coral reefs: this work was unquestionably intended for the professional scientists, and yet it also, like Origin, sets forth a theory that involves a historical development measured in geological time. Coral Reefs has, we think, some

    doi:10.1080/02773949109390913