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.

This essay reads the 2009 Climategate blogosphere through the rubric of visual style. We argue that Climategate bloggers used the stolen e-mails between prominent climate scientists to leverage claims about the proper perspective for seeing data, imitate institutional forms of climatological inquiry, and posit transparency as a moral imperative in many online forums. Rather than attacking science tout court, these appeals to visibility operated on the grounds of visuality and proof established by institutional forms of scientific inquiry, thus alleging climate change-denying bloggers were the “actual” scientists. By forwarding alternative visualizations of global temperature data and characterizing institutional climatology as secretive, Climategate bloggers significantly shaped public understandings of global warming. Ultimately, our purpose is to show how a visual style is an ambivalent form of rhetoric that scientific experts may also deploy in public science communication.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

This essay argues that the mechanical voice of Stephen Hawking requires theorizing the public as a voice object. I contend that Hawking’s mechanical voice threatened his audience with what Jacques Lacan called the object voice, a voice in excess of bodies and languages that functions as an elusive object-cause of desire. Upon showing how the psychoanalytic account of voice and rhetorical scholarship on publics may mutually inform one another, I argue that, due to the role of publics as an objet petit a, the strange qualities of Hawking’s synthesizer were rhetorically surmounted. In sum, this essay considers whether Hawking’s mechanical voice was really all that different from our own.

In his article “Wine Tasting is Bullshit,” Robbie Gonzalez cites a real wine review that reads, “Overall character is that of a sex-loaded starlet; endowed, jaunty and erotically scented, with ever...

My bookcase holds many contemporary books on “style”—or to use the Aristotelian term, lexis—in written communication. They are largely concentrated on such matters as clarity, conciseness, and cons...

Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.

Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.

A. Introduction In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates suggests that rhetoric is not only implicated in the continual pursuit of truth, but it is also the study of how truth is made known in (276a). Socrates warns Phaedrus not to suppose that because words are that they have therefore become reliable and permanent (275d). For Socrates, when living speech is down it becomes transformed or objectified into a representation of the real. In Socrates' view, living speech is a state of interiority, an articulation of self-understanding; when speech is alienated from its dialogic context it becomes discourse. Although Socrates argues that one must be exceedingly to believe that written words can do anything more than remind oneself what one already knows, this simple-minded approach to writing provides a means of exploring how discourse produces what Martin Heidegger calls a commemorative meaning. For Heidegger, discourse preserves the remembrance of an event; dead discourse reminds us of the event of living speech because it bears the design and inscribes historical occurrences. character of living speech does not change in its articulation; its character does not begin as an object, does not end as an object, and does not consist of any essential qualities of an object. In Part I of this paper I explore the impact of Heidegger's idea of discourse upon the traditional concept of style to argue, in accordance with Heidegger, that style is a reminder of living speech; style is a disclosure of incarnate thought, the presencing of a human's being that is structured by a two-fold process: first, a standing forth or unconcealing of its presence; and second, a holding back or concealing of its presence. Traditionally, discussions of style have been limited to representational theories of discourse that see style either solely in terms of outward appearance, beautiful form or in terms of some combination that sets form into a bipolar opposition with content. However, Heidegger's argument is that the traditional view of art as an aesthetic object is not adequate. In order to retrieve style from the confines of bipolarity, Heidegger develops a model of art that is based upon his disclosive theory of truth; his theory of art effectively removes beauty as a criterion for understanding art. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger develops a non-aesthetic approach to a work of art by arguing that truth, rather than beauty, is the origin of a work of art; his essay also suggests the outlines of a non-representational

Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America by Jasper Neel. Southern Illinois U P: Carbondale, 1994. 225 pp.

Rhetorical criticism, as it has developed over the past five decades or so, has taken on many agendas-for example, neo-Aristotelian criticism, movement studies, dramatistic criticism, genre criticism-all of which have been attempts to apply, reconstruct, or improve on a long tradition. What is striking about this body of critical literature is that none of it takes very seriously one of the paramount concerns of that tradition-namely, style. Indeed, a survey of the periodical literature shows that there persists a fundamental neglect of in both the theory and the practice of rhetorical criticism.1 Various theoretical and critical practices represented in this body of literature suggest that is a frustratingly elusive and amorphous creature, stubbornly resisting description. Most of the material does not venture much beyond theory and is, for the critic, consequently inadequate, for it falls short of a level of analysis that would reveal how rhetoric works. As a result, rhetorical criticism does not provide a useful critical approach to reading a discursive text. In one respect, this shows that some incisive remarks about the importance of in criticism and the neglect thereof which Donald Bryant made over thirty years ago have been either disregarded or forgotten. Moreover, I argue that both the interpretation of discourse (criticism) and the production of discourse (composition) can profit from careful attention to rhetorical style. For if, as Bryant2 has suggested, style is the final elaboration of meaning, then surely is the initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning. Does it not seem reasonable that ought play a major role in the critical act of the analysis of discourse? However, granting that has been neglected, I now must explain what I mean by style. To begin, Bryant has urged us to regard it not as the mere department of elocutio but that in dispositio and even inventio participate. Bryant argues: It is difficult at best to consider the functioning language of discourse without becoming involved at once with the ordering of the discourse. Furthermore, if we go beyond the static idea of disposition as arrangement, to the potentially dynamic idea of disposition as disposing, as Wagner thought necessary, we may conclude that for the critic the two names signify the two lenses for a stereopticon view of a

An interpretive strategy used in several recent studies of Gorgias involves attending to his style as a means of understanding his substantive ideas. This hermeneutic approach is not confined to studies of Gorgias, of course, for critics have frequently explored the ways in which a philosopher's manner of writinghis or her use of the aphorism, meditation, dialogue, philosophical poem, or remark, for example-may elucidate the content of his or her thinking. But the strategy has proved especially inviting for interpreting Gorgias for two reasons. First, the substance of Gorgias's thought is particularly elusive, not only because much of his writing is lost and his few extant texts are frequently fragmentary and corrupt, but because he leaves many key terms undefined and ambiguous, and he appears to make contradictory assertions and claims. In this context, a strategy of reading that purports to clarify and render coherent his enigmatic thought is understandably appealing. Second, the hermeneutic strategy is particularly inviting because Gorgias himself seems to have attached enormous importance to his style, one often associated with such figures of speech as antithesis, anadiplosis (repetition of words), homoeoteleuton (likeness of sound in final syllables of successive words or clauses) and parisosis (arrangement of words in nearly equal periods). Given Gorgias's attention to matters of style, it is not unreasonable to presume that they may offer a clue to understanding his enigmatic In this essay, I will examine two prominent schools of critics who employ this hermeneutic strategy, and who arrive at conflicting interpretations of Gorgias's overall philosophy. I then argue that each of these readings misconstrues the nature of Gorgias's writing, and I present an alternative reading of his style. I conclude by suggesting that given his stylistic practice, Gorgias may possess a different conception of philosophy than that presumed by many of his interpreters. Before examining these two schools of interpretation, it is useful to place them in respect to what may be termed the traditional construal of Gorgias's style and its implications about his putative For traditionally, most critics have seen Gorgias's style as poetic, and have viewed his apparent preoccupation with style as an indication that he not a serious philosopher at all, but rather a mere stylist, an orator who deploys poetic devices to embellish his speeches. This view is first suggested by Plato, who describes Gorgias's style as an elegant feast designed to please an audience rather than explore philosophical issues (Gorgias 447a). Aristotle echoes this portrayal of Gorgias as a poetic stylist lacking serious ideas, asserting that:

The verb in the title of James B. White's When Words Lose Their Meaning directs attention to one direction of change, decay. White takes for his emblem the passage from Thucydides from which derives his title, as defining a topic and suggesting a view of life that directs attention to the relation between language, on the one hand, and both the individual self and collective life on the (1961-62). That direction of change that is the focus of attention resembles the plot Alasdair MacIntyre recounts in After Virtue and elsewhere, in which virtues become vices, arts become skills, goods become commodities, and practices and norms lose their intelligibility.1 Neither White nor MacIntyre offers a narrative of the opposite direction of change, in which words and deeds gain, or regain, meaning. Because of this emphasis on decline, each is a conservative, although not necessarily politically conservative, since in each while the processes of corruption are detailed innovative and fructifying forces by contrast appear beyond explanation as heroic. The absence of stories in which meaning and community increase does not mean that each thinks that the world has moved away from a golden age and is going to the dogs, although I see each often misread in that way. It simply means that there is an intelligible plot to decline, but not to advances. Advances happen, but there is no pattern to them. It takes, in White's accounts, someone of the status of Thucydides or James Madison, beyond rational planning, to make words gain meaning, and Aquinas occupies a similar place in MacIntyre's story. The exemplary performances of great literary texts, including great legal literary texts, constitute White's account of how words gain their meaning. There is no overall narrative pattern or story in which these exempla live, while the story of decline has a plot, contains explanatory forces, and all the other rhetorical devices that make it appear more intelligible than the story of how words gain their meaning. We can learn how words gain meaning from exempla, although not necessarily learn to imitate them, and we can learn about decline and fall through generalizations and narratives. The patterns of decline make it possible to fight against those forces, while there are no programs for creativity. Exemplary and causal history are both reasonable ways of talking about and learning from the past, but their co-

(1991). Reforms of style: St. Augustine and the seventeenth century. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 26-37.

From 1887 to 1904, Science and The Popular Science Monthly published a series of articles on the characteristics of composition, articles pointed out an uneasy alliance between scientific methodology and traditional rhetorical assumptions about the nature of writing. This turn-of-the-century dispute between Robert Moritz and Thomas Mendenhall shows how early researchers in rhetoric cast their inquiries in scientific terms to gain the legitimacy of scientific findings. Further, the little-known debate can be read as a precursor to the many debates followed over whether and how quantitative methods can resolve questions in rhetorical inquiry, and more fundamentally, what vision of language underwrites the assumptions of such methods. The debate I want to focus on began with Mendenhall, who first argued for his version of composition analysis in the March 1887 issue of Science.' In this article, as well as in his papers of 1901 and 1904, he seeks to prove his hypothesis (based on a remark by Augustus DeMorgan) each author has a of composition. The curve is based on the frequency with which an author uses words of different lengths, is, one-letter words, two-letter words, and so on. The number of words of each length, when tabulated and graphed, shows the characteristic curve of author. Mendenhall was a noted nineteenth century scientist who published in a wide variety of areas, including geology, geography and science education. He was a president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and served for a time as an editor of Science. Thus a scientific approach to composition was for him merely an extension of methods he used in his daily work. Indeed, he originated his theory based on an analogy to spectral analysis, a method of determining the elements of a given physical substance. Just as each element gives forth a group of waves of definite length, and appearing in certain definite proportions (Mendenhall 1887, 238), so each person's style is marked by numerical constants--the frequency of words of each length. This analogy with spectral analysis reveals not only Mendenhall's procedure but also his notion of the inevitability of style. The style of people, like of elements, is determined by their nature and not their mode of existence; is, their texts are determined by inevitable displays of their fixed personality and not their rhetorical choices. The merits of this approach, according to Mendenhall, are that it offers a means of investigating and displaying the mere mechanism of composition, and it is purely mechanical in its application. (Mendenhall 1887, 245). Mechanism makes impossible human failings of choice and error: by focusing on a meaningless aspect of composition, the researcher can avoid the effects of deliberate changes by the author; by using a mechanistic data gathering method,

(1989). Voice merging and self‐making: The epistemology of “I have a dream”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 23-31.

(1986). The current‐traditional theory of style: An informal history. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 233-250.