Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Anna Peterson Anna Peterson Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 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 Peterson; Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva 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 Mark Clavier Mark Clavier Brecon Cathedral Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 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 Mark Clavier; Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach by AlessandroVatri Vasiliki Zali-Schiel AlessandroVatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vatri has produced a well-researched book that helpfully and skilfully marries the cultural-historical and the linguistic character of his work. The excellent use and review of scholarship enables Vatri to achieve the purpose of the book, which is to examine, with the help of modem psycholinguistics, whether there is any linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. The book starts with a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between oral and written style (Chapter 1). The medium alone is not a decisive divisive factor because there is a great variety of communicative situations and priorities one needs to take into consideration even when the same medium is used. And this is indeed the case with Attic prose, where we cannot clearly distinguish between “literally” oral and written texts. However, the distinction between a written and a non-written conception can be traced very early in the development of ancient Greek stylistic theory (e.g., Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristotle). For example, Isocrates in his Philip clearly marks the difference between speeches meant to be read and those meant to be delivered: those meant to be read may not be timely, hence their persuasive ability is compromised. Speeches for reading may also not manage to persuade the listeners because they may not be successfully delivered by the reader. This affects the reception of a text and changes the emphasis of the distinction between writtenness and non-writtenness from composition to performance. [End Page 96] Chapter 2 turns to contexts of reception. In classical Athens, close scrutiny of prose texts was possible in solitary and private group reading (“off-line” perusal) but not in situations whose norms of interaction excluded this possibility, such as public oratorical performances and semi-formal small- scale epideixeis. In such public competitive contexts, there was no room for anything but clarity (saphēneia) to convince an audience unable to revisit the text (“on-line” reception). Public texts could therefore not afford obscurity of expression by contrast to private texts (“where off-line perusal is possible, there is no need to take excessive pains to ensure the optimal on-line comprehension of a text,” 35). Hence, the different contexts of reception may be associated with linguistic difference. In Chapter 3, Vatri looks at the distinction between texts that were meant for off-line perusal/reception (scriptures) and those meant for on-line reception (scripts). The writing of Attic prose texts was quite a complex process, with several oral stages—and plausibly even oral composition— preceding written dissemination. But there were also revisions of publicly delivered texts (scripts), such as deliberative and forensic speeches, after their performance and often for the purpose of making a new version of the text public through written dissemination. After examining literacy and reading in classical Athens, Vatri determines the conception of written prose texts as scripts or scriptures proceeding on a genre-by-genre basis. Chapter 4 focuses on clarity (saphēneia), which was extremely important for texts meant for on-line reception (scripts) and especially so for public speeches in particular. The centrality of clarity of expression is already highlighted in ancient Greek rhetorical literature. For “Demetrius” (for example), clarity and familiarity are key to persuasiveness; persuasiveness and clarity can be achieved through plain style—an idea that can be traced back to the criticism of Aeschylus’ obscure language in Aristophanes’ Frogs. According to “Demetrius,” plain style is distinguished not only by its clarity but also by a vividness generated by precision (aknbeia). Both Aristotle and Isocrates consider precision an important feature of texts meant for reading, which may also generate saphēneia. Vatri then looks closely at a range of examples from ancient Greek rhetorical literature to examine what they say about the rhetorical devices employed to produce saphēneia. A recurrent issue in ancient discussions is ambiguity, which can be generated by vocabulary (e.g., ambiguous character of certain...

Reviewed by: L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi by Laurent Pernot Mike Edwards Laurent Pernot, L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi. Paris: Fayard, 2018. 334 pp. ISBN: 9782213706054 In July 2008, on behalf of Laurent Pemot, I represented the International Society for the History of Rhetoric at The First Biennial Conference of the Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World. Since this global event was scheduled to take place less than a month before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, my first idea was to give a paper on ancient Olympic speeches. On second thoughts, I realized that talking about the content of Lysias 33, with its proposed attack on the despotic rulers of Persia and Syracuse, might be taken as a veiled reference to China’s socialist democracy—a sous-entendu. Twelve years later, with the Tokyo Olympics postponed because of a threat allegedly emanating from Japan’s old foe, I find myself reviewing a book written by Pemot that will become a standard work on the art of innuendo. Pemot covers an extensive range of material from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present, to which this review cannot hope to do justice, with examples drawn from rhetorical works, other genres of literature, and elsewhere. Thus, in chapter 1 Pemot discusses types of sous-entendu (as often, the French word is best) in daily life, with politeness such as “you shouldn’t have” to mean “thank you” for a gift. There is an understandable French bias throughout, but Pemot’s versatility is indicated by analyses of authors such as George Orwell, Boualem Sansal, and Arthur Miller. Other topics include politics (the subtle war of words between Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand in 1974); fables and riddles (the Sphinx, naturally, but also Jean Paulhan with his translations of enigmatic Malagasy poetry); and conspiracy theory (such as Kennedy, Coluche, the Da Vinci Code). An excellent opening. Sous-entendu in the ancient world is the subject of chapter 2, where Pemot discusses the unsettled place of figured speech in rhetorical theory, and the frequently difficult relationships in declamation between fathers and sons that led to ambiguous remarks like “I married the woman who [End Page 94] pleased my father” (57). Pernot returns to antiquity in a very strong chapter 5 that examines how Greek authors represented Rome with figured speech. Here, on his specialist research terrain, he offers perceptive discussions of Dio Chrysostom’s On Kingship (cf. the much earlier treatment of the theme in Isocrates) and Aelius Aristides’ To Rome, highlighting the latter’s numerous significant omissions, not least of the word “Rome” itself (similarly, the story of Paul Valéry’s grudging eulogy of his illustrious predecessor in the Académie française, Anatole France, in which he managed to avoid using the name “Francé” in reference to his subject, is a little gem). Among the interesting topics of chapter 3 is connotation, as in publicity slogans like “Tendre est la nuit à bord du France” (69), which for Pernot might recall a line of Keats, a novel of Scott Fitzgerald, a film of Henry King or a song by Jackson Browne (yes: type “tender is the night” into Google). Analysis of literary critics (Barthes, Luc Fraisse, William Empson, Roger Callois) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, with its expression mise en abyme, contributes to another excellent chapter. In chapter 4 Pernot turns to the risks attached to interpretation, especially when an unintended (often sexual) message is received. In the theatre this may be designed to cause laughter (Much Ado About Nothing), but there is nothing funny about De Clerambault’s Syndrome (erotomania). Pemot’s discussion references Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, but it made me think of Play Misty for Me. Arbeit macht frei? In chapter 6 Pernot turns to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, focusing on the intellectual resistance to the Nazis of Louis Aragon in a poetic method he called “contrabande.” How could such works have escaped the censor (not all did)? One way was the use of historical parallels, as with Jules Isaac’s Les Oligarques and its analogy between ancient Athens under the Thirty and the German Occupation...

This article examines the influence exerted by the Aristotelian cognitive metarhetoric over the treatment of memory in Book 3 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Sections 3.16.28-29, 3.19.32 and 3.22.35-37 are read against the backdrop of the core principles of Aristotle’s psychological treatises on mind and memory, De Anima and De Memoria et Remmiscentia, together with the multifaceted concept of energeia, found in these treatises as well as in the Rhetoric and the Metaphysics. The results suggest that the psychology of memory of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its rhetorical products are indebted to Aristotelian philosophy, with particular emphasis on the imagines agentes within the mnemonic system per locos et imagines.

Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...

Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...

Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...

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...

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...

How do we date the intellectual revival of rhetoric that has unfolded over the last century-plus? What were its early theoretical contours? This essay answers those questions by turning to the contemporaneous reinventions of rhetoric undertaken by Charles Sanders Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche that began in the mid-1860s. I discuss their work comparatively, throwing new light on each by historicizing them in relation to dual strands of modernism linked with scientific knowing and artistic making. In the process, I bring out physiological and naturalistic dimensions of their expansive theories of rhetoric, showing how they were anchored by sensing bodies interacting with evolving worlds.

As professor of Greek and theology at the University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) authored three of the most important rhetorical textbooks of his era. Melanchthon’s addition of a new genre of rhetoric, the didactic, to the classical genres of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory illuminates his view of rhetoric as an instrument for the renaissance and reformation of traditions and institutions. Cultivating faculties of judgment and understanding was Melanchthon’s prescription for survival amid theological and political chaos—a prescription that continues to hold value for rhetors in the current historical moment.

Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus' theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus’ theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

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.

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.

This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification—from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison's starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke's account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison's views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.

In ancient education, controversia was a form of declamation which engaged students in discussion of a fictional judicial case. As the apex of rhetorical training, it provided a high level of proficiency in composition and delivery techniques, and every young man of the Roman upper-class had to deal with this exercise and its deliberative counterpart (suasoria). This article explores the role of controversia within the didactic programme devised by Cornelius Fronto for Marcus Aurelius’ education. After an account of ‘indirect’ approaches to declamation, I will analyse the themes of controversia assigned by Fronto, outlining their historical and rhetorical background.

This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification— from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison’s starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke’s account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison’s views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.

In ancient education, controversia was a form of declamation which engaged students in discussion of a fictional judicial case. As the apex of rhetorical training, it provided a high level of proficiency in composition and delivery techniques, and every young man of the Roman upper-class had to deal with this exercise and its deliberative counterpart (suasoria). This article explores the role of controversia within the didactic programme devised by Cornelius Fronto for Marcus Aurelius’ education. After an account of ‘indirect’ approaches to declamation, I will analyse the themes of controversia assigned by Fronto, outlining their historical and rhetorical background.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

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.

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.

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.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

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.

Les études récentes sur Synesius de Cyrène rejettent de plus en plus la thèse traditionnelle qui le considérait comme un nouveau venu dans le christianisme, pour le considérer plutôt comme un chrétien flexible et antidogmatique. Cependant, tout en reflétant notre meilleure compréhension de l’expérience de la religion vécue à la fin de l’Antiquité, cette position néglige un aspect crucial de l’idenrité religieuse de Synesius: son auto-récit. À travers une étude des stratégies rhétoriques utilisées par Synesius pour communiquer son allégeance religieuse, cet article soutient que Synesius a plutôt cherché des moyens de se présenter comme un concurrent du christianisme et de ses représentants les plus éminents. Le « sophiste » Synesius (défini comme tel en dépit, ou mieux, en vertu de ses prétentions à ne pas en être un), caractérisé par la recherche d’une identite oppositionnelle construite a l’aide de la rhetorique traditionnelle, apparait ainsi comme incamant la tension entre innovation et continuite qui marque la Troisieme sophistique au IVe siecle.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilla in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

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...

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...

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...