Rhetorica

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January 2022

  1. Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva Mark Clavier Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Few images have carried as much rhetorical power as corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. Originating in Jesus’ performative presentation of his own Body at the Last Supper and interpreted through the lens of the crucifixion, it quickly became one of the primary theological metaphors for the church. For example, Paul draws on the imagery of Christ’s Body in 1 Corinthians to demonstrate the mutual dependence and deep communion that should characterize the Corinthian church. Paul’s own use points to an integrative understanding of the image that not only promotes Christian unity but also establishes that unity as integral to Christian identity. In this way, the Body of Christ has been used to persuade would-be schismatics and heretics to “submit themselves one to another.” In short, Christ’s Body is more than simply an object of veneration—it contains rhetorical potency. In Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, Olga Solovieva demonstrates how this rhetorical power has also been regularly and paradoxically deployed subversively, even iconoclastically. She does this by rooting her study of the rhetorical power of Christ’s Body in Paul’s highly rhetorical argument in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31 that Christ’s crucified Body profoundly challenges the powers of the world. Drawing on Dale Martin, Alam Badiou, and J. L. Austin, she proposes that Christ’s Body serves here a performative function—what she terms “an ideological operator” (10)—that both inaugurates and persuades: “It means not the destruction but the substitution of one system of meaning by another within a shared cultural horizon” (11). But because these rhetorical practices invariably result in the weakening of power, she interprets them as subversive rather than substitutionary. In Chapters 1–6, Solovieva carefully studies and explains how Christ’s Body is employed in this way in six completely disconnected historical situations: the iconoclasm of Epiphanius of Salamis, the 15th-century alchemical Book of the Holy Trinity, in the aesthetics of Johann Caspar Lavater, Dostoevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness, the cinematography of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and by the Right in contemporary American politics. The span of genres covered here speaks not only to the breadth of Solovieva’s [End Page 88] expertise but also her particular perspective as a scholar of comparative literature. While some who may be interested in the underlying theology or ideological power of corpus Christi may find the basis for her broad comparative approach problematic, it would be hard to deny her ability to draw key insights from each of her case studies. Collectively, they also highlight how Christ’s Body has transcended confessional boundaries to shape the rhetoric and practices of people and groups even on the margins of Christian orthodoxy. For example, in her chapter on Epiphanius, Solovieva persuasively argues that one of the foundations for Epiphanius’s iconoclasm was his concern about the rhetorical impact of venerating the image of Christ on the Christian’s self-awareness of being part of the Body of Christ—in effect, seeing Christ’s Body compromised the worshiper’s sense of being Christ’s Body. Articulating this in the context of contemporary arguments (as in Eusebius) of church buildings functioning symbolically as Christ’s Body in zvhich Christians worship is enormously helpful. It allows the iconoclastic argument to move beyond mere aversion to idolatry (though that remains) and stand out more starkly as a challenge to Roman imperial power, the rhetoric of which was based in part on the worship of imperial images. Similar striking analyses abound in this volume. Solvovieva’s overall argument, however, is weakened by the disparity of her examples. While she does fine work in each chapter of demonstrating the cultural subversiveness of Christ’s Body, her lack of a conclusion that draws her argument together is striking in light of the expanse of time and genres she covers. Although each chapter is masterly in its grasp of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0004
  2. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Denise Stodola Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 It is unusual but incredibly useful when authors challenge their readers to think about familiar terms in unfamiliar ways, which is what Steele Nowlin has done here. Calling upon his readers to view the terms “affect” and “invention” through a different lens, he shows us that these two concepts are intimately linked even though “affect” is often used as a synonym for emotion. For Nowlin, affect and emotion are separate concepts that interact with each other. In fact, in his configuration, affect [End Page 98] is a type of “emergence” that precedes an actual feeling or emotion. Because affect concerns an “emerging” potential, it is thus linked to invention, which is, itself, an emerging potential. More specifically, affect emerges and then “collapses” into emotion, and this is analogous to the way in which invention “collapses” into poetic form. By reshaping our perceptions of how affect precedes emotion and is therefore analogous to invention preceding form, we are then able to view poetic invention differently. Ultimately, invention not only shapes poetic form, but can, in many cases, expose cultural narratives that are themselves in need of revision. Moreover, Nowlin does a fine job of contextualizing his theoretical approach within the introductory chapter. He asserts that his work relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, as well as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick. He also uses the work of scholars like Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, Lauren Berlant, Mary Carruthers, and Rita Copeland. By showing the relationship of his work to that of other scholars—not only those focused on critical theory, but also those who specialize in “feeling theory,” as well as medieval scholars and rhetoricians— Nowlin provides a solid foundation for his theoretical approach. On the other hand, the order of the subsequent chapters is somewhat strained. In the first two chapters, he focuses on Chaucer, first on House of Fame in Chapter 1, and then on Legend of Good Women in Chapter 2. The placement of these chapters makes sense insofar as they both focus on Chaucer and illustrate not only how Chaucer’s works can been seen to deploy Nowlin’s formulation but also how neither of the works pushes past a potential realization of cultural narratives into any sort of action. In House of Fame, physical movement aligns affect with invention, bringing together the literary with the political and ultimately illustrating how the affective dynamic helps us to understand “patterns of cultural power.” In this case, that power is the power of literary men to find their own fame by using women. Dido, in fact, becomes a symbol for what Nowlin calls the “coemergence” of affect and invention, and the form resulting from invention does not provide any answer to Dido’s plight. Legend of Good Women, however, addresses misogyny and antifeminism more fully. Ultimately, though, it does not move past its own misogyny, but rather leaves the reader understanding how unethical that misogyny is. As such, it reveals the cultural narratives in which the work itself exists. By putting these two chapters next to each other, we are able to see both poems rely on affective invention and how the Legend of Good Women moves closer to an invention that more clearly articulates the misogyny of the culture in which it was produced. Chapters 3 and 4 could be brought together into one chapter as both focus on Gower’s Gonfessio Amantis, and both illustrate Gower’s success with the use of affective invention to effect potential change. Chapter 3 shows that the affective invention in the Confessio reveals masculinist cultural discourses and how they shape cultural reality, suggesting a potential need to transform the culture in which it was produced. Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that the chronicle form as a means of codifying significant cultural events and providing an authoritative version of those events has fundamentally opposite [End Page 99] impulses from what Gower’s poem ultimately achieves: invention of not only a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0009
  3. The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0005

November 2021

  1. Review: <i>Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology</i>, by William C. Kirlinkus
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology, by William C. Kirlinkus William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 Logan Blizzard Logan Blizzard University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 464–466. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.464 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Logan Blizzard; Review: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology, by William C. Kirlinkus. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 464–466. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.464 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.464
  2. Review: <i>Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes</i>, edited by Tom F. Wright
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes, edited by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 Gero Guttzeit Gero Guttzeit Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 470–472. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.470 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gero Guttzeit; Review: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes, edited by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 470–472. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.470 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.470
  3. Review: <i>Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo</i>, by C. Cody Barteet
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Sarah J. Constant Sarah J. Constant University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 466–468. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.466 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sarah J. Constant; Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 466–468. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.466 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.466
  4. Review: <i>The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970</i>, by Sara Hillin
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 Jennifer Keohane Jennifer Keohane University of Baltimore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 472–474. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Keohane; Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 472–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472
  5. Review: <i>A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind</i>, by Sean Ross Meehan
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind, by Sean Ross Meehan Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 468–470. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.468 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nathan Crick; Review: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind, by Sean Ross Meehan. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 468–470. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.468 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.468

September 2021

  1. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0025
  2. The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin Jennifer Keohane Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 It is easy to see why Amelia Earhart has soared over the public memory of women in aviation. She was charismatic, committed to promoting women in flight, and left behind a trove of speeches, articles, and books to analyze. Yet, this valorization of Earhart’s accomplishments as the main story of women in aviation is exactly what Sara Hillin writes against in her new book. Instead, Hillin argues, there are a number of female aviators who were not [End Page 472] only taking to the skies against stacked odds, but writing and speaking about it too. Hillin’s project is primarily based in recovery. She seeks to add the words of the rhetors covered here to fill gaps in feminist rhetorical historiography (1). Earhart does not feature prominently in the analysis; although the 99s—a vocal and organized group of female aviators—are covered, and Earhart was their first president. Instead, Hillin focuses on lesser-known writers and flyers including Harriet Quimby, the first women licensed as a pilot in the United States and a transportation columnist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Other important aviators include Bessie Coleman and Willa Beatrice Brown, African American stunt pilots covered extensively in the Chicago Defender; Mary Alexander, a flying mother who threw birthday parties for her children in the air; and Jerrie Cobb, a pilot who passed all the tests to join the Mercury program but was never allowed to go to space. The book follows a loosely chronological structure, moving from the 1910s to the 1970s, and features eight analytical chapters, each of which focus on a different woman or group of women. While these women confronted a variety of obstacles in taking to the air, the driving similarity is their rhetorical acumen. As Hillin writes, “Rather than simply describing their experiences, they harnessed their rhetorical intuition to get others to act—to accept women as aviators, to train them as equals with men, and to influence the overall development of aviation and space exploration” (10). The narrative Hillin tells is not one of slow but steady progress throughout the twentieth century. In fact, in its infancy, flight had not yet been gendered masculine. As per Hillin’s telling, “there was something uniquely magic, even divine” in the fact that Harriet Quimby was taken so seriously as an expert on flying in her columns for Leslie’s (22). Indeed, like many of the women examined here, Quimby relied on her personal experience as an aviator to build her ethos, which Hillin defines as an embodied rhetoric in which “her physical self and its connection with the tool (airplane)” granted credibility (35). The world wars of the twentieth century also provide an important backdrop. Many women wrote against using the airplane as a tool for war, while others took advantage of the need for trained aviators to expand their place in the field (49). Other aviators had to negotiate the unique demands of race politics in addition to gender. African American flyer Bessie Coleman engaged in barnstorming tours and stunt flying, visual rhetorics that proved her skill, while white female aviators could skip these dangerous venues for flight because they had access to other forms of funding, training, and media outlets (62). Likewise, by the time Jerrie Cobb sought access to space, the Cold War competitive mentality had hardened space travel as solely a masculine achievement (137). To study the first few decades of women’s involvement in aviation is to see women doing painstaking and effective rhetorical work to grab and maintain a place in a field in which they have consistently excelled since its inception,” Hillin concludes (165). [End Page 473] Hillin has undertaken an impressive amount of archival research, and the sources she uses to recover the rhetorical actions of these female aviators are wide-ranging. She analyzes personal letters, news coverage, books, speeches, and press releases (6). The theoretical through-line for Hillin’s rhetorical analysis is Kenneth Burke’s pentad (11). This orients...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0026
  3. Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0022
  4. A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind by Sean Ross Meehan
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind by Sean Ross Meehan Nathan Crick Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a hero of metaphor but a metonymic poet. This is the central, provocative, and novel insight offered by Sean [End Page 468] Ross Meehan. One might miss this contribution looking only at the title or the outline of the book. A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind seems to promise a broad treatment of Emerson’s late writings, while the tripartite structure of the book describes three purposes: 1) a reconsideration of Emerson’s interest in rhetoric as “a broader, organizing principle of mind,” 2) a reconsideration of his engagement “with the ideas and pedagogy of the classical liberal arts college and curriculum,” and 3) a reconsideration of “Emerson’s influence on other writers and thinkers in the same period of transformation” (5). Meehan’s book delivers on these promises. We find extended treatments of Emerson’s influence on William James, Walt Whitman, and W. E. B. Dubois, as well as a case study in his differences with the reform agenda of Harvard president Charles W. Elliott as he redesigned the University in the model of disciplinary specialization. Each of these chapters correct what Meehan sees as an injustice done to Emerson, who “as a theorist of rhetoric’s older pedagogy of relation, is marginalized in the isolated departments of the university” (66). Through his book, Meehan seeks to enshrine Emerson as one of the founding figures of the American liberal arts tradition in order to make real a vision of the well-rounded student with training in rhetorical deliberation and eloquence. He pursues this goal with passion and thoroughness. It is his treatment of Emerson’s conception of metonymy, though, that I believe makes this book unique and groundbreaking. Yet Meehan does not make this discovery easy on the reader. The book promises a study of the “rhetoric of mind,” but it addresses the meaning of this phrase on one page with these two sentences: “There is a ‘rhetoric of mind’—so Emerson describes what he also called a ‘philosophy of mind’ in his essay ‘Intellect’—that serves as an organizing principle of this writer’s style of fluid thinking . . . This ‘rhetoric of mind’ informs and organizes the poetics that transgresses the conventional definitions of philosophic logic” (22). The actual substance of this “rhetoric of mind” remains elusive, but the following paragraph gives a clue: “Emerson argues that metonymy, the rhetorical figure of association by way of context and contiguity, provides the analogical foundation and purpose for all rhetoric, indeed for all writing and thinking” (22). For Meehan, metonymy “is not just a particular figure of speech or even a figure of thought, but a name for the very figuring of thought” (22). These assertions are bold enough to arouse interest but ambiguous enough to keep one reading. It takes Meehan almost half of the book to return to this subject in earnest. Although interim treatments of James and Whitman and Elliott are historically and philosophically relevant and insightful, their purpose is less to describe this metonymic rhetoric of mind and more to establish relationships of influence and to define ethical and pedagogical principles. By the time we reach Whitman in the third chapter, metonymy reappears in full. For Meehan as for Emerson, metonymy represents more than just a trope; even the phrase a “rhetoric of mind does not really do it justice. Metonymy has almost an existential connotation. For instance, when interpreting a passage in which Emerson discusses the relationship between [End Page 469] nature, the parts of the body, memory, and mind, Meehan writes: “Emerson uses ‘this metonomy’ in the passage to illustrate the way that thought, as an active part of nature, moves through the condensations (nebulae becoming blood) and contingencies of the mind’s relation to matter in the various forms of becoming in which it shares . . . The world is a rock, loam, chyle; it is body, blood, mind, action; it is...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0024
  5. Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet Sarah J. Constant C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo is a tale of two cities—the Xui Maya city of Tihó and the Spanish colony of Mérida—ultimately united through a series of cultural campaigns that sought to exert Spanish authority in colonial Mexico. In this book, Barteet expands upon his previous dissertation research on Early Modern Latin American visual culture as well as past historical studies of the Casa de Montejo that “have mainly considered the façade as a reflection of European aesthetics with limited analysis of its iconography” (11). Lucid descriptions, original photographs, and dozens of archival artifacts evidence colonial anxieties in sixteenth-century Yucatán. Architectural Rhetoric strives to provide a bridge between two cognate disciplines: architectural history and rhetorical studies. Notably, Barteet understands the construction of the Casa de Montejo through Henri Lefebvre’s [End Page 466] “spatial triad” and describes how it may be used to explain the tensions that arose between the center and periphery of Mérida (18). Barteet explains how spatial practices (e.g., architectural styles), representations of space (e.g., the grid-planned city), and spaces of representation (e.g., real and imagined spaces) function as part of a causal loop. In this way, Barteet positions the Casa de Montejo as a social space for reading and understanding conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers, and the Spanish monarchy. Architectural Rhetoric is divided into two main sections: the first “considers the significance of the building to a Hispanic audience,” and the second considers “how the façade and its urban location resonated among the Xiu Maya of Yucatán” (22). Barteet argues that Spanish conqueror Francisco de Montejo intentionally built the Casa de Montejo on the sacrosanct plaza mayor to symbolically diminish the influence of the Spanish monarchy in the New World and to exert his individual authority as governor over the Indigenous peoples. Barteet illustrates how the construction of the Casa de Montejo may be placed within Lefebvre’s imagination of the spatial triad in order to identify exactly how this building defied Spanish monarchical traditions and initiated a struggle for authority in the Yucatanean province. Barteet extends his analysis of the Casa de Montejo beyond the realm of architectural history and into the field of architectural rhetoric, revealing what different examples of iconography in the Casa de Montejo uncover about colonial tensions within and between Yucatán and the transatlantic world. For example, Barteet argues that Herculean imagery in the Plateresque façade exalts Montejo as the protagonist in the ongoing Yucatanean colonization narrative. Later, Barteet examines both the political and social contexts in which Montejo operated as Yucatán’s adelantado, or governor, through an analysis of “multivocal” iconography in the Plateresque façade (93). Barteet introduces a rhetorical text—the requerimiento—an official policy document concerned with the proper treatment of Indigenous peoples that encouraged the colonizers to “establish alliances through peace accords and gift-giving practices in order to foster a climate capable of hosting a successful colony” (92). Here, connections between the virtuous iconography discussed in earlier chapters and the requerimiento arise, strengthening Barteet’s case for an architectural rhetoric, or a connection between what is written in policy texts and what is therefore “declare[d] in stone” (93). In the second half of Architectural Rhetoric, Barteet examines Maya perceptions of the Plateresque façade and its place in the oft-contested city center. Barteet recalls that Mérida’s identity was “neither solely Spanish nor solely Maya” but existed somewhere in between, occupying a sort of “dual identity” (116). Barteet discusses the social and political importance of mapping practices, which may include the mapping of metaphorical or conceptual spaces such as books, art objects, and geographical locations where “two or more cultures engage one another” (116). In the penultimate chapter, a story of a power struggle often defined by dichotomous...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0023

August 2021

  1. Review: <i>Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work</i>, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Jennifer Keohane Jennifer Keohane The University of Baltimore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 342–344. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.342 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Keohane; Review: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 342–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.342 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.342
  2. Review: <i>Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash</i>, edited by Richard Hidary
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Brandon Katzir Brandon Katzir Oklahoma City University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 340–342. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brandon Katzir; Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 340–342. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340
  3. Review: <i>Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions</i>, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Christoph Pieper Christoph Pieper Leiden University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 346–349. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christoph Pieper; Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 346–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346
  4. Review: <i>Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom</i>, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Mount St. Mary's University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 344–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.344 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jordan Loveridge; Review: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, edited by Marjorie Curry Woods. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 344–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.344 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.344
  5. Review: <i>Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics</i>, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 William P. Weaver William P. Weaver Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 350–353. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William P. Weaver; Review: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, edited by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 350–353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.350

June 2021

  1. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0027
  2. Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0017
  3. Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0030
  4. Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0029
  5. Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0028

May 2021

  1. Review: <i>Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work</i>, by Jessica Enoch
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Kate Rich Kate Rich University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 240–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kate Rich; Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 240–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240
  2. Review: <i>The War of Words</i>, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 M. Elizabeth Weiser M. Elizabeth Weiser The Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 242–244. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation M. Elizabeth Weiser; Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 242–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242
  3. Review: <i>The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices</i>, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 Mudiwa Pettus Mudiwa Pettus City University of New York, Medgar Evers College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 237–240. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mudiwa Pettus; Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 237–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237
  4. Review: <i>Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica</i>, edited by Federica Nicolardi
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Pierre Chiron; Pierre Chiron Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Daniel Delattre Daniel Delattre Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 234–237. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Pierre Chiron, Daniel Delattre; Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 234–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234

March 2021

  1. Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica ed. by Federica Nicolardi
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica ed. by Federica Nicolardi Pierre Chiron and Daniel Delattre Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Le volume est dédié à “qui a vu ce livre grandir de jour en jour.” C’est une entreprise de patience, en effet, dont Federica Nicolardi livre le résultat. Un résultat spectaculaire, puisque, pour la première fois, sur une maquette glissée dans le volume imprimé, on peut appréhender le livre entier en deux coups d’œil, Tun pour les col. 1–147, l’autre au verso pour les col. 148–238. Jadis, en raison de la dispersion des fragments, l’attention se focalisait sur les morceaux présentant une certaine continuité, à savoir les quatre fragments et les sept colonnes de la partie centrale, la mieux conservée, du PHerc. 1427. Les autres bribes étaient éditées à part, en tant que fragments à contenu rhétorique, souvent sans même être rattachées à la Rhétorique. Sur cette large maquette synthétique (à trois plis), chaque fragment est dûment localisé et reproduit soit sous forme de photographie infrarouge, soit sous forme de la transcription réalisée en son temps à Naples ou à Oxford, quand l’original n’est plus disponible. Les lacunes prédominent, on le sait, et certaines pièces sont reproduites à l’écart, avec leur numérotation traditionnelle, faute d’avoir pu trouver leur place et un nouveau numéro dans la reconstitution, mais une telle vue d’ensemble représente un progrès indiscu-table par rapport aux éditions antérieures. La contrepartie est que la fin de la tâche, pour l’ensemble de la Rhétorique, s’éloigne quelque peu dans le temps, puisque le même travail n’a pas encore été fait pour ce qui subsiste des sept autres livres. On rappellera à ce propos que, dans le cadre du Philodemus’ Aesthetics Project initié au début des années 1990 par R. Janko, D. Obbink et D. Blank, le traitement de la Rhétorique a pris, en effet, beaucoup de retard, même si J. Hammerstaedt a fourni (dans les Cronache ercolanesi 22 (1992) : 9–117) une édition exemplaire de la fin (conservée de façon suivie) du livre III, et que D. Blank continue de travailler activement à la reconstruction et à l’édition fort délicates du livre VIII. L’état des papyrus, qui est souvent très problématique, explique évidemment la lenteur (apparente) du travail des érudits, qui disposent désormais – depuis seulement une vingtaine d’années –de moyens nouveaux et efficaces (dont les images infrarouges ne sont pas le moindre) pour entreprendre une reconstruction virtuelle, bibliologiquement fondée, des rouleaux ouverts, et tous aujourd’hui démembrés : cela exige des efforts et un temps considérables ! [End Page 234] Un appareil philologique substantiel accompagne la maquette : après un sommaire (p. 7–9), un avertissement (p. 11) et une liste des abréviations utilisée pour la bibliographie (p. 13–21), figurent une liste des éditions de référence des papyrus d’Herculanum citées dans le volume (p. 23–25) ainsi qu’une liste des abréviations des inventaires et autres catalogues édités depuis la découverte, au XVIIIe siècle, de la bibliothèque de Philodème (p. 27). Suit une précieuse reconstitution du contenu de cette partie de l’ouvrage de Philodème, compte tenu de ce que Ton sait du reste (p. 31–48). Après une table de concordances entre les différents numéros des fragments (p. 167–182), un conspectus siglorum (p. 183–185) et un conspectus signorum (p. 187 : il s’agit des signes critiques utilisés), Federica Nicolardi propose ensuite (p. 189–272) une édition critique, accompagnée d’une traduction – là où le texte l’autorise –, ce qui permet à la fois de lire plus confortablement le texte restitué, et de réfléchir aux variantes ainsi qu’à l’histoire de la reconstitution présentée. Les sources les plus fréquemment utilisées sont bien sûr...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0012
  2. Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0032
  3. The War of Words by Kenneth Burke
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0033
  4. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0031

February 2021

  1. Review: <i>Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion</i>, by Ann George
    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.1.116
  2. Review: <i>Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes</i>, by Timothy Raylor
    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.1.121
  3. Review: <i>Attic Oratory and Performance</i>, by Andreas Serafim
    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.1.114
  4. Review: <i>Principal Writings on Rhetoric</i>, Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels
    doi:10.1525/rh.2021.39.1.118

January 2021

  1. Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0035
  2. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George Kyle Jensen Ann George. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018. xvi + 279 pp. ISBN 9781611179316 It is difficult to appreciate the full achievement of Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion unless one has firsthand experience with Kenneth Burke’s extant papers. All archival research is challenging, of course. But Burke’s papers are especially difficult to manage because of the volume and fecundity of his drafting materials. These materials encourage a persistent feeling of insecurity, that hard-won moments of clarity will be run off by new and unexpected variables. I am not surprised that it took George twenty years to track “P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy” (24). Her erudite analysis indicates the time was well spent. George navigates the complicated arguments of Permanence and Change with characteristic precision and grace. In Part I, she addresses the core concepts of Burke’s argument such as piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, and the art of living. In Part II, she presents an extended archival account of the book’s production and reception history that complicates prevailing assumptions about Burke’s work as a critic. The two parts are connected by George’s claim that Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change is the originating work of the New Rhetoric. [End Page 116] To make payment on this claim, George emphasizes the value of reading Burke in context. In each chapter, she presents Burke as a writer responding to the problems posed by his historical moment and needing to revise his perspectives as the scene evolved. Because Burke’s interpretation of key events and their resolutions underwent constant revision, critics hoping to understand his arguments must engage with not only his published works but also his extant drafting materials. In between the drafts, we discover a groundbreaking civic pedagogy that will compel new and expert Burke scholars alike. George identifies metabiology as the “ethical grounding for [Burke’s] proposed cultural reorientation.” In doing so, she claims that his insights remain relevant for the contemporary moment (56). George makes this case convincingly, arguing that Burke’s account of human motives “creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values” (224). Forum constraints prevent me from listing the full array of praiseworthy features in George’s book. So, I will focus on what seem to me her most profound contributions. First, George presents perspective by incongruity as a multi-layered concept. There is a reasonable temptation to limit the scope of perspective by incongruity by noting its capacity to denaturalize well established cultural “truths.” But within Burke’s civic pedagogy, perspective by incongruity has “different levels . . . for different situations”: “a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an ‘analyst’/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing” (50). Second, when discussing metabiology as purification of war, George presents five different scenes that elucidate the nuances of Burke’s thinking and thus add considerable depth to our understanding of his civic pedagogy. According to George, the purification of war demands that we address simultaneously the interconnections between our biological, cultural, pragmatic, economic, and militaristic assumptions. George’s claim is particularly suggestive because it implies that later works such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives evolve from Permanence & Change. Having spent nearly a decade working on the archival histories of A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, I concur with this assertion. Much of what appears in A Rhetoric of Motives is an extension and/or revision of Burke’s earlier arguments. Finally, George claims that Burke’s civic pedagogy is both m extension and revision of epideictic rhetoric. It extends by examining how particular orientations “train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0034
  3. Attic Oratory and Performance by Andreas Serafim
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Attic Oratory and Performance by Andreas Serafim Matteo Barbato Andreas Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies), London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 156 pp. ISBN 9780367871277 In this slim book, Andreas Serafim sets out to provide a holistic perspective on the performative aspects of Attic oratory through an analysis of two pairs of interrelated judicial speeches: Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ respective speeches On the Embassy; and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes’ On the Crown. As stated in his introduction, Serafim believes that the speeches of the Attic orators, despite surviving as written texts, can only be fully appreciated if one gives appropriate weight to the interaction between speaker and audience. He adopts an approach based on linguistics and performance studies. This leads him to define performance as the “interactive communication, explicit or otherwise, between the transmitter of a message and its receiver” (pp. 16–17)—in other words, as anything that enables the speaker to elicit a reaction in the audience. Serafim distinguishes between two types of performance techniques (direct/sensory and indirect/emotional) and proposes to look at both in combination. In Chapter 1, Serafim lays out the methodology of his study. He identifies the main areas of performance (rhetorical construction of the audience; relationship between oratory and theatre; inter-generic character portraiture; delivery) that provide the subjects of Chapters 2–5, and he illustrates them through references to ancient and modern scholarship. The discussion, though mostly solid, is at times undertheorized. This is most evident in the analysis of emotions in pp. 21–3. Despite rightly stressing the significance of emotions for performance,i Serafim overlooks an important body of scholarship that highlights the complex nature of emotions, which encompass [End Page 114] social and cognitive as well as bodily aspects.ii Engaging with such studies could have nuanced the distinction between sensory and emotional performance techniques and could have offered an interesting lens for investigating delivery. Chapter 2 examines the strategies (e.g. emotional appeals; imperatives and questions) deployed by the orators to construct the identity of their audience and invite them to act accordingly. Chapter 3 analyses the interrelationship between oratory and theatre, with a focus on the characterisation of one’s opponents as deceitful actors on the judicial stage. While Serafim provides a good discussion of Demosthenes’ use of poetic quotations to stress Aeschines’ connection with theatre, it is surprising that no comparison is made with Aeschines’ own use of quotations in Against Timarchus. This would have allowed Serafim to investigate Aeschines’ negotiation of his image as an actor and its significance for our understanding of Athenian attitudes to theatre. Chapter 4 looks at the orators’ construction of their own and their opponents’ character through patterns borrowed from comedy as well as tragedv and epics. Serafim rightly notes that the judges had experience as theatregoers, which he suggests was exploited by the orators to create favourable and unfavourable dispositions towards themselves and their opponents respectively. Chapter 5 focuses on delivery and is the most effective in stressing the interconnection between the different aspects of performance analysed in the book. Through comparison between rhetorical theory and oratorical practice, Serafim convincingly shows how some rhetorical features of the speeches may be taken as indicative of the gestural and vocal ploys adopted by the orators as part of their performance. Chapter 6 briefly summarises the book’s findings and delineates possible areas for future research. Serafim is at his best when providing rhetorical analyses of specific passages, and he makes a convincing case for understanding performance as a multidimensional phenomenon. The book, however, is somewhat lacking in conceptual breadth, as its main merit lies in combining existing strands in scholarship that focus respectively on oratorical delivery and on rhetoric’s relationship with drama. Serafim’s arguments are sometimes weakened by a lack of engagement with the institutional nature of judicial oratory. At pp. 48–9, for example, Serafim argues that Aeschin. 3.8 addresses the judges with the civic address (“men of Athens”) as opposed to the judicial address (“judges”) in order to make them “realise that both their duty and their status as judges is wholly intertwined with the best interests of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0005
  4. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor Torrey Shanks Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvii + 334 pp. ISBN 9780198829690 In a meticulous and learned account of Thomas Hobbes’s lifelong relationship to rhetoric and humanism, Timothy Raylor takes up the peculiar but important challenge of proving that something did not happen. That something is Hobbes’s famed double turn, his rejection of humanist rhetoric followed later by a modified return to rhetoric, as defended in Quentin Skinner’s influential study, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Raylor presents a [End Page 121] Hobbes steadfast in his relationship to both rhetoric and humanism, in contrast to his sharper and unrepentant philosophical turn. The book is provocative in its scrutinizing and overturning of Skinner’s thesis, where it largely sets its sights. It also provokes questions beyond that horizon for the theory and practice of rhetoric in putatively rationalist philosophy. One of several important contributions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is its laser-like focus on the specific rhetorical and humanist traditions from which Hobbes drew insight over the long span of his life. Attending closely to his early pedagogical pursuits with the Cavendish family, the book discerns Hobbes’s commitments among a broad range of humanist and rhetorical approaches available to him. It speaks of Raylor’s attunement to the rhetorical tradition that he weighs pedagogical activities and topics so significantly. The examination of Hobbes’s work as a young tutor and nascent poet take up his incontrovertibly rhetorical humanist phase, during which, Raylor emphasizes, he harbored the pragmatic and skeptical tendencies of a Tacitean more than a Ciceronian civic republican. While Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides distances him from Cicero, the The Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique reveals his enduring commitment to Aristotelian notions of rhetoric. Though he was no ethical Aristotelian, Hobbes found in the Rhetoric a guiding structure of thought that was further inflected through Francis Bacon. Drawing Bacon into the humanist fold, Raylor rightly challenges anachronistic habits of opposing aesthetics and reason, poetry and science, in seventeenth-century philosophy. One benefit is in his richly layered reading of an early poem, De mirabilibus pecci. The poem incorporates catalogue of wonders, travel writing, and epideictic rhetoric, intertwining aesthetic pleasure, knowledge of natural history, and currying favour. Hobbes’s humanism takes new shape here as a contribution to the concerns and methods of an emerging natural scientific inquiry. This is a less familiar Hobbes and a path not taken for a thinker who later championed materialism at the expense of experiential knowledge. Hobbes abandoned natural history, but other Aristotelian tenets endured: a division of knowledge into scientia and opinio and a rhetoric attuned to the passions and pragmatically aimed at persuasion over loftier ethical goals. Crucial evidence for this is found in Hobbes’s choice to teach Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to prepare a Latin Digest and English Briefe. The documents, Raylor argues, do not reject rhetorical humanist (read Ciceronian) culture, but rather offer “a reasonable interpretation and apt condensation of Aristotle” (169). Aristotelian rhetoric is instead the structure through which Hobbes would effect a momentous change a decade later. Reorienting Hobbes’s rhetorical humanist phase around a Baconian Aristotelianism leads to the conclusion that “[i]t is not rhetoric that Hobbes, at the end of the 1630s, rejects, but philosophy—philosophy as it has traditionally been practiced” (176). Philosophy becomes the problem and object of transformation, not rhetoric. Moreover, rhetorical study becomes the driving factor in this reconceptualization of ratiocination. [End Page 122] The Rhetoric helped Hobbes to see that too much of what passed for philosophy was not certain or universal but drawn upon arguments meant to persuade, yielding, at best, probable truths. The natural histories that once interested him are based merely on “experience of fact,” producing only appearances of knowledge (201). With the demotion of natural philosophy, Hobbes elevates and transforms the study of politics into a science grounded in logical demonstration of causes from clearly defined terms, like geometry. Civil philosophy, in other words, is torn from its rhetorical roots in dialectical reasoning, experiential or prudential knowledge, and persuasion...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2021.0036

November 2020

  1. Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 Hilary J. C. Lehmann Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 437–439. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hilary J. C. Lehmann; Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 437–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437
  2. Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 Anna Dudney Deeb Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 435–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna Dudney Deeb; Review: Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, by Kristy Maddux. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 435–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.435
  3. Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas A. Quiroga Puertas ed., Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, (Mnemosyne Supplements 406), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 227 pp. ISBN 9789004340091 Francesco Berardi Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 432–435. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Francesco Berardi; Review: Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, edited by A. Quiroga Puertas. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 432–435. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432
  4. Review: Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile, by Fabio Roscalla
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile, by Fabio Roscalla Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Mauro Serra Mauro Serra Università degli Studi di Salerno Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 439–442. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.439 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mauro Serra; Review: Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile, by Fabio Roscalla. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 439–442. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.439 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.439

September 2020

  1. Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation ed. by A. Quiroga Puertas
    Abstract

    Book Reviews A. Quiroga Puertas ed.z Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, (Mnemosyne Supplements 406), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 227 pp. ISBN 9789004340091 Gli studi sulla letteratura nel tardo-antico si arricchiscono di un prezioso e agile strumento di ricerca grazie alia pubblicazione, a cura di A. Quiroga Puertas, di una raccolta di saggi su testi e autori di II-V sec. L'approccio esegetico e di natura retorica e tende a individuare nelle fonti le diverse soluzioni adottate dagli scrittori per rispondere alle istanze che le mutate condizioni sociali, politiche e culturali hanno imposto alia comunicazione letteraria. L'introduzione di Lieve Van Hoof (pp. 1-6) apprezza il contributo che la mis­ cellanea porta alia bibliografia di settore: l'analisi di testi trascurati, come il Simposio di Metodio o le Vite di Eunapio, ma anche il ricorso a un'ampia gamma di "interpretative strategies'' che, aggiungiamo noi, e possibile declinare in rapporto ai tre motivi-guida evocati nel sottotitolo. L'interesse per le immagini e in generale per gli effetti di evidenza visiva provocati dal testo sostanzia i lavori di J. B. Torres Guerra, A. Quiroga Puertas, L. Miguelez Cavero. J. B. Torres Guerra (Image and Word in Eusebius of Caesarea, VC 3.4-24: Constantine in Nicaea, pp. 73-89) prende in esame la descrizione dell'ingresso solenne di Costantino al concilio di Nicea nel terzo libro della Vita omonima per analizzare le tecniche ecfrastiche usate da Eusebio di Cesarea per rappresentare vividamente la scena. L'attenzione alia registrazione dei dati visivi si traduce nella costruzione di un autentico tableau vivant in cui ogni particolare assume valore simbolico per esprimere l'idea di ordine e armonia assicurati all'impero e alia cristianita dal monarca. A. Quiroga Puertas (In Heaven unlike on Earth. Rhetorical Strategies in Julian's Caesars, pp. 90-103) ritrova la stessa relazione tra ekphrasis e propaganda politica nelle Vite dei Cesari di Giuliano dove l'allusione si carica di valenze filosofiche legate al Neoplatonismo nella scena del banchetto di dei e imperatori (307c-308b), mentre il riuso dei procedimenti encomiastici codificati dalla precettistica (Menandro) e applicati da Giuliano per costruire la galleria dei ritratti imperiali, talora fortemente sarcastici , e finalizzato alia restaurazione dei vecchi ideali di moralita pubblica e pagana. Anche nello studio di L. Miguelez-Cavero, che considera la des­ crizione della collana di Armonia nelle Dionisiache di Nonno di Panopoli (Harmonia s Necklace, Nonn. D. 5, 135-189: a Set of Jewellery, ekphrasis and a Narrative Node, pp. 165-197), l'analisi delle tecniche di visualizzazione si Rheforzczz, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 4, pp. 432-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Book Reviews 433 allarga a considerare le relazioni con il contesto di circolazione dell'opera e Yekphrasis diviene uno spazio per interrogarsi sull'intersezione tra retorica e societa. Attraverso una serie di puntuali raffronti con la produzione artistica di eta imperiale e con la tradizione della manualistica retorica, l'autrice indica gli elementi che realizzano la scrittura visiva di Nonno di Panopoli individuando modelli iconografici e letterari senza rinunciare a contestualizzare il brano nell'economia narrativa del poema. L'intertestualita e l'elemento su cui vertono gli studi di R. C. Fowler, B. MacDougall e J. Campos Daroca. R. C. Fowler (Ecyppoouvr) and Self-Knowledge in Methodius' Sym­ posium, pp. 26-43) si propone di ricostruire l'ampio spettro di significati che il termine acocppoabv^ assume nel Symposium di Metodio e che non e possibile sintetizzare in traduzione con un singolo vocabolo. L'analisi degli echi platonici presenti nell'opera supporta l'interpretazione di questo ter­ mine che non si identifica semplicemente con la castita, ma interessa anche la conoscenza di se e il rapporto che l'uomo ha con la realta circostante . La soluzione adottata da Metodio smorza l'intransigenza di alcune posizioni cristiane in tema di verginita in contrasto...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0004
  2. The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric ed. by Sophia Papaioannou, et al
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 437 brush to reveal how these women's collective voices defined women's citi­ zenship in an era that suppressed it. Maddux aims to account for women's diverse practices of citizenship and civic roles at the time of the fair. This book is ultimately successful in deepening our understanding of what constitutes citizenship by accounting for multiple practices of women's citizenship. Maddux recognizes that her work can only account for a small fraction of the robust event, but her accounting is fruitful and informative. Her work certainly adds to public address and citizenship scholarship, and offers many points of departure for future study. For example, she includes a brief discussion of the interna­ tional nature of the women's congresses in the conclusion chapter, leaving the door open for others to take up her call to pay more attention to the fair from a transnational perspective. In Practical Citizenship, Maddux achieves her goal of recovering new forms of women's citizenship at the fair, which should encourage future scholarship and therefore an even greater under­ standing of women's contributions to this rich rhetorical event. Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 This collected volume is an exciting and timely contribution to the study of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. The introduction lays out the work's premise: oratory, like theater, is always a performance involving a triangular dialogue between performer, opponent or co-actor, and audience. Influenced by the field of Performance Studies, the editors regard rhetorical texts as events rather than objects. As such, the texts can be used to recapture ele­ ments of the original performance and to reveal aspects of performance beyond oral delivery. The chapters represent a wide range of approaches to analyzing performative aspects of oratory. The majority of the chapters are on Attic oratory, with one chapter on Thucydides and five excellent chapters on Roman oratory. The following brief sketches of the contents will demon­ strate the breadth of approaches contained in this volume. The book's first section, "Speakers—Audience," contains five chapters. Ian Worthington suggests that speakers appearing before the Assembly required more skill in acting than those who spoke in the courts because deliberative speakers could be more versatile in responding to the audience and other politicians. Andreas Serafim examines Demosthenes s use of direct address, arguing that Demosthenes uses the address ta VApsc AOfjwioi in order to create a "rhetoric of community," establishing himself and the jurors 438 RHETORIC A as an in-group while excluding his opponent (31). In contrast, the address & devSpec; dixacFToci would remind the jurors that they were themselves being judged by the watching populace. Brenda Griffith-Williams claims that theat­ rical elements in Isaios 6 (the scheming hetaira, the bumbling old man) served to distract from the case's relatively flimsy evidence by building a sense of familiarity among the jurors in their capacity as theatergoers. Guy Westwood considers the dearth of examples of eidolapoeia, the impersonation of a dead person, in Classical Athenian oratory. He suggests that this practice might have been considered undemocratic, if a speaker was thought of as personally appropriating an ancestor who should belong to all. Catherine Steel demonstrates that Cicero's published speeches are misleading: in live performance, informal elements would have interrupted the speakers, requiring them to reveal their ability to successfully interact with the people and to gauge the attitude of the judges and spectators. In fact, oratory is unlike theater in that its performance is never fully scripted. The second section, "Ethopoiia," has two chapters. Christos Kremmydas demonstrates that Thucydides reveals the character and intentions of indivi­ duals and cities through dialogue—especially their style of argumentation and use of gnomic statements—as much as through narrative. Henriette van der Blom shows how Metellus Numidicus reinvented himself after being recal­ led from Africa in 107 bce. An examination of the fragments of his speeches reveals that Metellus used the "rhetoric of inclusion" to bring the people to his side while simultaneously...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0006
  3. Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair by Kristy Maddux
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 435 Nazianzo attraverso le categorie della stilistica antica sulla falsariga della polemica tra retori asiani e retori atticisti! Questo volume, che si conclude con utili indici di nomi e luoghi notevoli, offre un'interessante sintesi suggerendo con i suoi contributi proficue linee di indirizzo e metodologie d'indagine per le future ricerche sul tardo-antico. Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Womens Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 The 1893 Chicago World's Fair lasted a mere five months, but the copi­ ous records of speeches and programs from the event capture the tremen­ dous social, economic, and political evolution that took place during the Gilded Age. In Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Kristy Maddux zeros in on this fascinating period during which women were "caught in a dilemma of citizenship" (vii), meaning that they were legally full citizens but were not allowed to vote. The fair marked an almost unprecedented occasion for women's public address. Close to 800 women spoke as part of the fair's congresses on issues such as education, government, and religion. Maddux argues that the participation of these women enacted diverse citizenship practices that complicate previous understandings of women's citizenship in this era. To uncover how women negotiated greater participation in public life, Maddux analyzes a large batch of texts to identify "interrelationships or overlaps and how they wor­ ked together to project ideas of women's citizenship" during the fair (46). Maddux brings together the subjects of practicing citizenship, which has been of ongoing interest to rhetorical scholars, and women's public address at the fair, which is a subject that is ripe for analysis but has yet to receive extensive consideration from rhetorical scholars. Maddux conducts a rhetorical analysis of a discursive event that has largely been the purview of English and history scholars. She also moves away from what has been a traditional focus on suffragist rhetoric and toward previously unconsidered or undervalued women's citizenship practices. She argues that scholars have previously limited their focus to women's citizenship as the fight for suffrage, which fails to account for all the other ways in which women were organiz­ ing together and defining their public roles in the late nineteenth century. To recover women's citizenship practices, Maddux considers the fair as a "multivocal projection of the circulating discourses of the Gilded Age," rather than more common readings of the fair as a representation of contem­ poraneous ideas or an illusory vision of a perfect United States (25). Maddux identifies four practices of women's citizenship that frame the remaining analysis chapters: deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organized womanhood, 436 RHETORICA and economic participation. In Chapter 2, Maddux analyzes programs and promotional documents that demonstrate how the fair's congresses "pro­ jected a vision for deliberative democracy" for women (52). The congresses served as spaces for women's self-government and for defining their civic role. Women could celebrate their identities as women but also depart from their gendered identities when they spoke about their accomplishments in civil, scientific, and educational work. Chapter 3 considers how sixteen Congress speeches characterized acts of racial uplift as practices of citizen­ ship. For these women, the goal of racial uplift was to help women of vari­ ous ethnicities, races, and classes succeed, which in turn would benefit all of humankind. African American and white women forwarded discourses based on evolutionary progress against a backdrop of racial oppression that infused the fair and projected a model of racial uplift through working together. Chapter 4 examines how women considered membership and ser­ vice in voluntary organizations as platforms for citizenship. Women partic­ ipated in civil society and shaped their futures, and the futures of their nations, through organized womanhood. Finally, Maddux focuses on women's industrial participation and financial leadership as political prac­ tice in Chapter 5. Through speeches based in liberalism and republicanism, says Maddux, "these speakers offered models of female financial leader­ ship" and portrayed this leadership as an act of citizenship (172). The con­ clusion attends to...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0005
  4. Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile by Fabio Roscalla
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 439 collection. Edward Harris argues that, unlike tragedy, Athenian oratory avoided the excessive expression of emotions and other histrionics because it would distract from the legal issues. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction between poetry and oratory, Harris claims that the numerous examples of emoting in the court were exceptions, rather than examples, of typical court­ room behavior. Jon Hall uses evidence from Cicero's letters and other sour­ ces to argue that judicial proceedings in the Late Republic were far more interactive and even chaotic than their modern British and American coun­ terparts. Because judges were selected publicly and were frequently wellknown politicians, they could use their service on the court to advance their own political interests. The final section, "Language and Style," also contains three chapters. Chris Carey argues that Aeschines uses a series of antitheses to cast Timarchus as feminized, depraved, and anti-democratic. He conflates Timarchus's appearance with his actions, a full-body assault that moves beyond narrative and becomes a reality seen and enacted. In contrast, Aeschines characterizes himself as metrios and a model of sophrosyne, like Solon. Konstantinos Kapparis analyzes the corpus of Apollodoros for perfor­ mance elements, arguing that Apollodoros uses vivid narrative as well as direct and indirect speech to create psychologically complex personae and to bring the action before the mind's eyes of the jurors. Finally, Alessandro Vatri uses syntax analysis to distinguish between Antiphon's forensic speeches, written for delivery, and his Tetralogies, written for publication. While the Tetralogies tend to have the more complex structures expected of a logographic text, the performed texts feature semantic ambiguities that gestures and other paralinguistic features would have clarified. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this book, more questions and ambiguities are raised than answers given. Interestingly, several chap­ ters use similar pieces of evidence to come up with opposite conclusions (Harris and Kremmydas) or to cast light on two sides of the same perfor­ mance context (Clark and Hall). While no doubt many readers will only read selections based on their research interests, the collection as a whole provides a thought-provoking roadmap of the current state of the question and indicates several intriguing avenues of future research. Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Nel corso degli ultimi anni la categoria deWeikos e stata oggetto di un crescente, giustificato, interesse. Il recente libro di Fabio Roscalla (d ora in poi R.), che viene ad arricchire ulteriormente il dibattito relativo alYeikos, si segnala per due tratti peculiari: 1) la serrata analisi testuale dei contesti 440 RHETORICA d'occorrenza del termine; 2) il zcorto circuited che viene proposto tra due ambiti apparentemente molto distanti tra loro, e non solo per ragioni cronologiche : il tribunale attico del V e IV secolo a.C. e l'oratoria cristiana dei primi secoli della nostra era. Per anticipare le conclusioni, si pud senza dubbio affermare che le analisi proposte dall'autore permettono al lettore di farsi un'idea particolarmente approfondita dell'intricato complesso di ques­ tion! sollevato dalla nozione di eikos. Da questo punto di vista, quindi, pur rifuggendo volontariamente dall'intenzione di fornire «una nuova riconsiderazione generate delYeikos» (p. 1), esse vi contribuiscono, sia pure indirettamente , mostrando come questa nozione generate si vada articolando nella dimensione concreta e variegata dei suoi usi. Non essendo naturalmente possibile ripercorrere la minuziosa disamina testuale svolta da R., mi limitero ad evidenziare, per ciascuno dei due capitoli in cui e diviso il libro, uno tra i possibili fili conduttori in grado di rendere conto della ricchezza degli spunti che esso offre. Il primo capitolo e dedicato all'oratoria ateniese e, dopo alcune considerazioni introduttive, prende le mosse da una delle piu note orazioni lisiane, la Contro Eratostene, che ha come oggetto «un evento centrale della recente storia ateniese, su cui il dibattito doveva essere ancora aperto e acceso», cosicche «Eeikos diventa [. . .] in mancanza di testimoni diretti, lo strumento di persuasione privilegiato in possesso dell'oratore» (p. 7). E' quindi particolarmente interessante osservare che in questo contesto la nozione di eikos serve non solo ad indicare una categoria...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0007

August 2020

  1. Review: <i>Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus</i>, by Tushar Irani and <i>The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion</i>, by James L. Kastely
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Robin Reames Robin Reames University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robin Reames; Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 328–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328
  2. Review: <i>Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870</i>, by Tom F. Wright
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright. Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 245 pp. ISBN 9780190496791 Granville Ganter Granville Ganter St. John's University, Queens, New York Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 323–325. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Granville Ganter; Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 323–325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323
  3. Review: <i>La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus</i>, by Andrei Timotin
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin Timotin, Andrei, La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus. Turnhout, Brepols [coll. Recherches sur les rhétoriques religieuses], 2017, 296 pp. Jean-François Pradeau Jean-François Pradeau Université Lyon III – Jean Moulin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 325–328. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jean-François Pradeau; Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 325–328. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325