Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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May 2023

  1. (An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon
    Abstract

    To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2023.2200701

October 2016

  1. Revisiting Edwin Black: Exhortation as a Prelude to Emotional–Material Rhetoric
    Abstract

    This essay extends efforts to facilitate emotional–material frameworks of rhetoric informed by strides in rhetorical and biological studies respectively. Specifically, I examine Edwin Black’s theory of exhortation in light of neurological theories of affect, emotion contagion, and embodiment. I argue Black’s theory offers a prescient precursor to emotional–material rhetoric but also demands revision in light of recent advances in neuroscience. I present two claims. First, I argue emotionally grounded rhetoric can exhort emotional–discursive connections and preference judgments absent the need to convert emotional experiences into formal beliefs. Second, I argue physiological indicators are at least as important as verbal discourse in facilitating emotional exhortation. Finally, I conclude with some theoretical implications for the emotional–material study of rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1151927

August 2014

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

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

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.938863

April 2009

  1. Resurrecting the Narrative Paradigm: Identification and the Case of Young Earth Creationism
    Abstract

    This article extends the work of conceptual revision of the narrative paradigm in order to more directly and completely account for the inventional possibilities of new narratives, the rhetorical revision of old narratives, and the appeal and acceptance of improbable narrative accounts. It does so by reconceptualizing Burke's concept of identification in the narrative paradigm by expanding identification's critical range. Reconceptualizing identification in the narrative paradigm further expands narrative rationality beyond “the logic of good reasons,” provides a theoretical mechanism that accounts for and complements prior theoretical extensions advanced in revision of the narrative paradigm, and provides greater conceptual flexibility for the critical use of narrative in light of poststructuralism. Reconceptualizing the role of identification in the narrative paradigm enriches our understanding of how narratives foster beliefs, attitudes, and actions by accounting more fully for the range of the symbolic resources and processes of identification.

    doi:10.1080/02773940902766771

February 2006

  1. Descendents of Africa, Sons of ′76: Exploring Early African-American Rhetoric
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT African-American rhetoric of the early Republic has been largely unexplored by rhetorical scholars. Addressing this gap in the scholarship, this study analyzes two intricately related forms of discourse: late eighteenth-century petitions and speeches celebrating the 1808 abolition of the international slave trade to the United States. Both sets of texts contribute to the expression of an African-American public voice, build upon and critique American ideals while retaining a proud sense of African heritage, exploit the available generic conventions, develop increasingly radical appeals, and feature arguments that transcend local issues to engage general questions of identity and history. Notes 1. Exceptions include Bacon, “Rhetoric”; Condit and Lucaites; Gordon; Ray. 2. Historical and/or literary treatments of the texts of this period include Bethel; Brooks; Bruce; Davis; Kachun; Saillant; Waldstreicher. 3. A petition of January 30, 1797, from four free African Americans living in Philadelphia is the first extant petition from African Americans to Congress (CitationAptheker 39–44; CitationKaplan and Kaplan 267–72). 4. Rosavich indicates that this petition, which was signed by slaves Prime and Prince (about whom little is known) and which describes itself as “The Petition of the Negroes in the Towns of Stratford and Fairfield,” was written in the hand of attorney Jonathan Sturges (80–82). Yet Rosavich remarks that the existence of other petitions of Connecticut African Americans “should caution us against overestimating the role of Sturges and underestimating that of Prime and Prince in drafting this document” (81–82). 5. This law gave rise to kidnappings of African Americans by allowing a master to seize a alleged fugitive slave anywhere in the country without a warrant, present him or her to a judge, and—if the master could “prove” that the person in question had escaped—take him or her into custody. The texts of the petitions are published in the following sources and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: the 1777 petition to the Massachusetts General Court is found in Collections and will be cited parenthetically as P1; the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut, is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P2; the 1779 New Hampshire petition is found in Hammond and will be cited as P3; the 1780 Connecticut petition is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P4; the 1780 Dartmouth petition is found in Nell and will be cited as P5; the 1799 petition to the President and the United States Congress is found in Kaplan and Kaplan and will be cited parenthetically as P6. Readers interested in historical information beyond that we provide here should consult the sources cited in this note. 6. Rosavich's transcriptions of the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut (P2), and the 1780 Connecticut petition (P4) include words that were erased or crossed out and indicate where words were added to the text. We omit these editorial notations in our quotes from the petitions. 7. Gates notes that the use of such rhetorical strategies is not “the exclusive province of black people” (Signifying 90). However, it assumes particular importance for African Americans, who often must use “double-voiced words,” create “double-voiced discourse,” and rely on “formal revision” and “intertextual relation[s]” (Signifying 50–51). For further discussion, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty,” 273–74. 8. On the general resonance of natural law for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century African Americans, see also Finseth 350; Gordon 93. 9. Scholars have established that African-American discourse often takes place within black counterpublics or alternative public spheres that are fundamentally connected to community civic, educational, and religious institutions; see Bacon, Humblest 10; Baker 13–26; Dawson 210–11; McClish 60. 10. The texts of the speeches featured in this section are published in Porter and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: Absalom Jones's sermon as S1; Peter Williams's oration as S2; Joseph Sidney's speech as S3; William Hamilton's 1809 oration as S4, Henry Sipkins's speech as S5; George Lawrence's address as S6; Russell Parrott's oration as S7; and William Hamilton's 1815 speech as S8. Several other speeches from this period celebrating the abolition of the slave trade are extant, including orations by William Miller, Adam Carman, and Henry Johnson. These significant texts include many of the same elements prevalent in the other eight; space limitations, however, do not permit us to feature them here. Finally, we note that although speeches celebrating the abolition of the slave trade were delivered for decades, we have featured orations written before 1816 in order to demonstrate the early manifestation of key components of African-American rhetoric. 11. For further discussion of Hamilton's signifying, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty” 278–79. 12. Miller in his 1810 address (8) and Carman in his 1811 speech (14) also marshal biblical parallels between African Americans and ancient Israel to suggest black nationhood.

    doi:10.1080/02773940500403603

March 1998

  1. “Do you understand your own language?” Revolutionarytopoiin the rhetoric of African‐American abolitionists
    Abstract

    In his 1829 Appeal to Coloured Citizens of World, a militant condemnation of evils of slavery and a prophetic call for a potentially violent end to institution, African-American abolitionist David Walker demands, See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you understand your own language? (75). Walker's question highlights a fundamental and enduring paradox: in spite of centrality of Declaration of Independence to our nation's founding and to America's self-definition, continual reinterpretation of text and controversies over its meaning and significance are endemic to national discourse. Antebellum Americans faced a particular theoretical and exegetical problem with respect to Declaration of Independence. Nineteenth-century rhetoric often elevates document to a religious significance in mythologizing founding of America, idealizing creation of a completely new nation dedicated to liberty and (Wills, Inventing xvi-xxii; Wills, Lincoln 86-89, 100-03, 10910). Yet many antebellum Americans supported slavery and opposed full civil rights for free African Americans. Supporters of slavery engaged in complicated gymnastics in order to support ideals of American Revolution as well as nation's peculiar institution. Many proslavery rhetors argued that, based on Founding Fathers' intentions, Declaration's promises of freedom and did not include African Americans. Another argument suggested that term equality did not connote that all Americans should have same rights. Some supporters of slavery even downplayed significance of articulation of certain rights in Declaration of Independence.' Within this context, African-American abolitionists who wished to feature Declaration of Independence and related themes of American Revolution in their antislavery rhetoric could not rely on conventional interpretations. They needed to appropriate these topoi, redefining them in service of abolition. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites demonstrate that antebellum AfricanAmerican men crafted a concept of that countered proslavery formulations, using rhetorical revision of Declaration of Independence to extend scope of terms such as equality, liberty, and human rights (69-98). Condit and Lucaites emphasize rhetoric that is, in Gary Woodward's terms, primarily adaptory-appealing to common ground with an audience and aiming to reduce dissonant messages that clash with their beliefs (28-30). In adaptory rhetoric, the expectations of others form basis of a persuasive situation, and rhetor attempts to adapt message to avoid a clash with audience's

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391119

January 1993

  1. Apologies and accommodations: Imitation and the writing process
    Abstract

    Imitation has long been a method and theoretical basis for rhetorical instruction. It has also enjoyed a complex, if not always glorious, history-a lineage which extends from the apprenticeship of sophists in Plato's Greece to the moral education of orators in Quintilian's Rome; from the nurturing of abundant expression in a Renaissance text by Erasmus to the cultivation of taste in an Enlightenment text by Hugh Blair. In the last few decades, however, we have witnessed dramatic changes in how we look upon imitation-changes largely influenced, we think, by the process movement, with its various emphases on invention and revision, expression and discovery, cognition and collaboration. In the wake of shifting so much of our attention to writing processes, we might well expect imitation to have been pronounced as dead as Nietzche's God was a century ago. But if the literature reviewed here is any indication, rumors of imitation's death have been greatly exaggerated. Most of the studies in our survey are favorablyand surprisingly-disposed to imitation's continued practice. Such studies typically call for a revised understanding of imitation, a novel approach which reveals the proponent's understanding of the need to somehow demonstrate imitation's acceptability to a community which presumably resists its use. Why? Most likely because imitation turns on assumptions about writing and learning which many find discomforting, if not altogether objectionable. There are, of course, fairly complex historical, cultural, and theoretical reasons for our current aversion to imitation, many of which we explore later in our review. But the important point for us is that those who argue for imitation-however much they may differ in their various arguments-share an awareness that its use must be justified in answer to, and anticipation of, its critical refusal by the community at large. What we infer from this awareness is the community's largely tacit rejection of imitation. That's not to say, of course, that explicit criticism of imitation is wholly absent from the literature.' But in a context where many readily assent to the idea that almost any form of direct imitation leads to a distortion of the writing process, there is little urgency to speak against its use in the writing classroom (Judy and Judy 127). Indeed, only those who desire a reevaluation of imitation need

    doi:10.1080/02773949309390976