Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.

As music reviewer for The Nation in 1934, Kenneth Burke attended the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, a symphony that Burke felt had the dangerous potential to merge Nazi ideology with other dissenting German voices. Through this review and his introduction of the theoretical term “identification” in Attitudes Toward History, Burke joins a growing body of sonic rhetorics scholarship that investigates the semiotics of sound. Burke’s attention to sonic identifications reveals the fragile nature of sound, meaning, and division.

Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a defining role in religions. Though science and religion are often seen as mutually exclusively (sometimes in opposition), identifying the ineffable experience as a shared ground can provide opportunities for science and religion to dialogue in new ways.

The gospel songs of Ralph Stanley offer solace by means of identifi cation with the singer’s losses and struggles, but they also offer a metaphoric framework of journey and homecoming found in many folk and country songs. The framework gives shape and meaning to the troubled aspects of life that make up much of the content of bluegrass songs, sacred and secular. Referencing Kenneth Burke’s early theories of rhetorical identifi cation and symbolic appeal, this study reads the inclusion of gospel songs in stage and recorded performance as a secularized means of self-definition: singers and listeners are linked as people with common origins and destinations. While expected themes of repentance and faith run throughout these gospel songs, the progressive form of home that is lost and then recovered sets up a secular analogy to the story of sin and redemption so common in American Protestant Evangelicalism. By scattering these songs throughout a bluegrass performance, the journey toward home becomes the pathway by which all the troubles of betrayal, heartbreak, conflict, and hard times are borne and transformed. In place of creed or practices of piety, all are invited to find common purpose in the experiences of disappointment, regret, and loss in the knowledge that they are on the “Long Journey Home.”

Using cultural empowerment as a conceptual framework, this study emphasizes the interrelated role of culture, rhetorical agency, and empowerment in discursive analysis and communicative practice. Twelve black business owners were interviewed using a narrative inquiry approach. Thematic analysis revealed that these entrepreneurs enacted rhetorical agency in ways that work within oppressive systems and resisted damaging dominate discourses about black businesses. By highlighting the rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs, this study also addresses the need for a more culturally sensitive approach in business, professional, and organizational communication.

368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.

370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

Book Review| June 01 2017 Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship. Edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014; pp. 5 + 349. $54.50 paper. Sara R. Kitsch Sara R. Kitsch Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 363–368. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0363 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sara R. Kitsch; Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 363–368. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0363 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

In chapters on the Gorgias and the Meno in his 1997From Plato to Postmodernism, James Kasterly argues that an important point made in the Gorgias is that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles. Its lesson is that philosophers will never succeed in persuading nonphilosophers if they rely on dialectic, with its premises grounded in epistemology (32, 34), and in the Meno, he finds a type of dialectic that functions rhetorically (67). In this new book, The Rhetoric of Plato's “Republic”: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, Kastely builds on his earlier work. He reads the Republic as Plato's effort to address the implicit challenge posed by Socrates' defeat in the Gorgias. Plato's purpose in the Republic, he claims, is to set forth and enact an alternative to dialectic, an alternative that he identifies as a philosophical rhetoric (that is, a rhetoric for philosophers), that would enable philosophers to persuade nonphilosophers to value justice and morality above all else. The Republic, on his reading, not only (if obliquely) argues for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic but also practices it and thus attempts to constitute interlocutors and engaged readers as the moral, justice-loving subjects of a new republic.The crucial passage that generates Kastely's reading occurs at the beginning of book 2, when Glaucon enters the conversation after Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus in book 1 has stalled. Thrasymachus, exhausted and frustrated by Socrates' dialectic interrogation and by Socrates' refusal to allow him to state his opinion directly (350e), has withdrawn from genuine engagement; instead, he placidly agrees with whatever Socrates proposes (351c). Glaucon challenges Socrates: does he want really to persuade them or just give the appearance of having persuaded them (357a–b)? Kastely argues that here Glaucon is referring to the kind of “persuasion” that Socrates has practiced on Thrasymachus—a nit-picking (from Thrasymachus's point of view) dialectic that wins on technical points but that changes few people's minds and hearts. Yet there is a potential problem with Kastely's interpretation, namely, that Glaucon does not state that the distinction he intends is between two types of persuasion (artificial and real); rather he states that the distinction is between two types of arguments on behalf of justice—arguments that propose behaving justly as prudent for the benefits that treating others well confers and arguments for living justly for its own sake, without reference to benefits. However, Glaucon may indeed mean both, as Kastely maintains. And in support of Kastely's interpretation, there are other references in the Republic to dialectic as a problematic way of convincing nonphilosophers: most noteworthy (among several) is Adeimantus's insistence that although philosophers can as a result of their training often defeat nonphilosophers in dialectical argument, this “victory” does not mean they have really persuaded their opponent or anyone (487b–d).For Kastely, the development and enactment of a rhetoric for philosophers is at the heart of the Republic: “Is it possible, then, for a philosopher to discover a rhetoric that would permit philosophy to have some sort of purchase on public opinion and persuade an audience of the truths philosophy has discovered? The Republic is aware of the importance of this question and has chosen to foreground it dramatically. It understands that, as a dialogue, it must provide an answer to that question, if philosophy is to be anything other than a deeply limited and esoteric activity. … For this dialogue simply not to self-destruct, Socrates has to make the case for a viable philosophical rhetoric” (122).The title of chapter 4, “Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion,” captures the major theme in much of the rest of Kastely's argument. The most formidable obstacle that the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers confronts is ideology, though Kastely does not use this term, perhaps regarding its usage in this context as ahistorical. In Kastely's words, it is the problem of our failure to recognize that “the desires of the soul have been shaped by a culture and are never encountered in innocent form” (66) or that “the work of political culture is masked, and it is mistakenly read as if current values and desires are the product of nature” (206). With regard to justice, in the view of most people we are just out of fear of punishment or of retaliation if we are unjust; if we could practice injustice to our advantage with impunity (the myth of Gyges's ring), we would, and, moreover, it would be natural for us to do so. Thus, the first challenge to the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers that it is in our interest to be just even if it means losing an advantage is to bring them to understand that all knowledge is “rhetorically mediated” (66). Rhetoric is not the problem but the means of cure: its duty is to make citizens aware of the rhetorical character of what they experience as natural.In chapters 5, 6 and 7, Kastely explores the particular obstacles Socrates faces if his aim is to persuade Athenians of what they may regard as ideologically counterintuitive and unnatural, namely, that a life grounded in justice is the best life. For instance, Socrates' advocacy of women serving as guardians (452a) is, on Kastely's reading, motivated not only by Socrates' belief that there is inherent value in women serving as guardians but also and primarily by his desire to illustrate how a reigning ideology blinds his interlocutors to alternative possibilities (101). While Socrates' interlocutors regard the proposal as unnatural, Socrates argues that thinking of women as guardians is only unconventional but nevertheless thoroughly reasonable.The greatest challenge Socrates faces in the Republic is persuading his listeners that philosophers should be kings. On hearing the proposal, Glaucon warns Socrates that were he to issue the proposal publicly he would be greeted with not only disbelief but also violent resistance (473e). Kastely observes that “Socrates is fully aware of the general population's low estimation of philosophy [and philosophers],” and his discussion of philosophy is a “self conscious rhetorical act designed to mollify an angry audience and to transform that anger into calmness” (109–10). If the response to the proposal were to be as extreme as Glaucon envisions, it is surely unlikely that the crowd would be prepared to engage in dialectic. The foremost rhetorical means Socrates uses to overcome these ideological prejudices are the famous images and analogies of books 6 and 7: the sun, the divided line, and the parable of the cave. Kastely reads these tropes as rhetorical versions of Platonic philosophy that can persuade nonphilosophers, treating them as evidence for his thesis that the Republic argues for and practices a rhetorical presentation of philosophy that is superior to dialectic, at least when it comes to discussing philosophy with nonphilosophers.But there is at least one problem with this interpretation of books 6 and 7 of the Republic. The argument that underpins Kastely's reading—that the Republic is about a search for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic—seems to me to rest on the assumption that Socrates could have presented a more technical and accurate description of these truths but instead took into consideration the limitations of his audience. He chose images because they were more effective than dialectic's definitions and divisions. But Socrates claims that the nature of the subject requires use of images. In a subsequent chapter, Kastely concedes that “even Socrates himself cannot claim with certainty that he has achieved a full philosophical vision” of goodness (157). At least through the period of the Republic, Socrates notoriously relies on analogies and images to describe the good. Socrates resorts to images because he has no choice, not because rhetorically images are the preferred means for a particular audience. In Kastely's defense, it is true that these images have an affective dimension that makes them appealing, and the fact that there are no alternative ways to express this vision does not make the images less rhetorical. They function rhetorically, neither dialectically as argument nor as the simplification of teaching.That a specific philosophical rhetoric is not thematized as such in the Republic leads Kastely almost necessarily to argue that Plato and Socrates enact their program through mimesis rather than overtly arguing for it. Socrates in effect says do as I do here rather than do what I say, since I don't say much about rhetoric. For Kastely, Socrates' criticism of the mimesis of epic poetry and drama is tacit admission of its effectiveness (210), and he would in fact employ it to a good end to advance his own program: “While the Republic ostensibly argues for a certain kind of rhetorical constitution through a specifically prescribed curriculum, what it offers its readers is in fact a different kind of education embodied in the mimetic presentation of an extended act of persuasion. Presumably, Plato intends this kind of education or rhetorical constitution for the actual readers of the dialogue—the readers who have already been subjected to the cultural influences that Socrates would undo or minimize” (79). At the heart of this mimetic theory is “an act of constitution or identification” (217). On Kastely's reading, the rhetoric Socrates enacts in the Republic is obviously not the rhetoric that Socrates criticizes in the Gorgias. The rhetoric that Kastely sees in the Republic is to be “understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). This Burkean description is not one that Plato would associate with rhetoric, though it is not impossible (given the way he envisions dialectic functioning) that Plato could imagine a type of dialectic that is similarly transformative. There are many varieties of dialectic in Plato, including less rule-driven varieties that resemble the semidisciplined conversation of the Republic. Kastely has appropriated for rhetoric what others (including Plato) might see as a version of dialectic. But perhaps this objection reduces to a quibble about names.Socrates' famous admission in book 9 that only divine intervention could bring about the rule of philosopher-kings would seem to announce the failure of the philosophical rhetoric that Socrates (on Kastely's reading) had hoped would mimetically persuade interlocutors and readers. Kastely's response to the challenge that book 9 presents is twofold. With most other commentators, he argues that Plato never intended to present an ideal polis in the Republic: the description of the guardians, the philosopher king, and so forth was never to be taken literally. The Republic is not about the formation of an ideal state; the description of the kallipolis that dominates is in fact a trope to show the formation of the properly ordered soul. If this is the case, then Socrates' admission does not thwart his purpose. Secondly, Kastely argues that Socrates' withdrawal from politics can be read as a rejection of the imposition of the philosophical life by a philosopher, who is, after all, a king, in favor of the transformation of individual citizens through the rhetorical means that he sees Socrates' enacting (181).Kastely's is a bold thesis. It asks us to accept not only that Plato came to accept a socially responsible role for rhetoric in the polis but also that in the Republic Plato acknowledges epistemologically that there is no escape from culture, that all “knowledge” is rhetorically mediated. It is also an honest book, as Kastely raises and addresses objections to his reading. Because it is an honest, rigorous book, I benefited immensely from the encounter with it, though I was ultimately not persuaded by its thesis.

ABSTRACTThe spread of mobile technologies and social media have contributed to making snapshot photography an ordinary part of everyday life. As snapshots become more omnipresent, asking why we take so many photos becomes less exigent than asking what might stop us from doing so. Drawing on insights from affect theory, new materialism, and studies of visual rhetoric, this article argues that deterrents to snapping pictures arise not only from the range of human rhetorics or “laws” that influence our actions or inactions, but also from a dynamic tangle of extrahuman factors, ineffable though this influence may be. Speculating about the implications of these extrahuman deterrents for how we understand rhetoric, I suggest that the ineffable enchantment of certain encounters exhibits a worldly rhetoricity in itself, one that conditions the possibility of—and sometimes prevents—the anthropogenic symbolic actions we are more accustomed to recognizing as rhetorical.

ABSTRACTThis article argues for closer dialogue between the work of Kenneth Burke and contemporary posthumanist philosophers, especially in the context of the small technologies of ubiquitous computing. A Burkean critique of commercial advertisements for the Motorola Droid phone demonstrates the potency of rhetorical criticism in unpacking the tropes of what I call “corporate posthumanism.” Informed by contemporary posthumanist philosophers and critical theorists of technology, I depart from Burke's too-sweeping claims about technology to identify a “critical posthumanist” practice that can be found in the “check-in.” By analogizing “checking in” through mobile phone technologies to canine marking strategies, I show how critical theories of technology ought to account for both the instrumentalizing and animalizing tendencies of digital media. The conclusion emphasizes the need for critical posthumanism to embrace a Burkean critique of efficiency, dramatistic analysis, and for a “definition of the animal (in a posthumanist spirit).”

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an unprecedented number of Gnostic manuscripts were unearthed at sites across Egypt. Discovered on the Cairo antiquities market, in ancient trash heaps, and in buried jars, these papyri have radically refigured the landscape of early Christian history. Rhetoric, however, has overlooked the Gnostics. Long denigrated as heretical, Gnostic texts invite historians of rhetoric to (re)consider the role of gender in the early Church, the interplay between gnōsis and contemporary rhetorical concepts, and the
development of early Christian rhetorical practice(s) within diverse historical contexts, including the Second Sophistic. In response to recent calls for rhetorical archaeology, this essay returns to Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi. These three locations refigure early Christian rhetoric(s) in situ.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the visual precepts of rhetoric’s fourth canon found themselves at odds with the iconoclasm of England’s Protestant elite. Under this negative influence, mnemonic imagery disappeared from rhetorical theory. Interest in the fourth canon declined, replaced with a Ramist conception of memory grounded in abstract (and imageless) order. A general outline of this history has been offered by several scholars—most notably, Frances Yates—but new bibliographic data along with recently digitized archives can verify its accuracy. Print, written culture, or “modernist” ideologies alone cannot explain the historical marginalization of the canon of memory.

This essay examines the rhetoric of an organized group of mentally disabled speakers who share their stories with the public to fight the stigma that adheres to psychiatric diagnoses. Their “deep disclosure” of the sometimes disturbing details of their disability-related experiences can make the speakers and their audience members vulnerable in distinct ways. Vulnerability in these rhetorical situations need not only be viewed as threatening, however. Rather, the essay argues, it has the potential to be highly productive when it encourages the speaker and audience member’s openness to each other’s influence.

Kenneth Burke scholars differ on what the meaning of Burke's concept of consummation is and how it relates to perfection and entelechy. This article argues that consummation is a third creative motive (transcending self-expression and communication) that requires a rigorous vocabulary in order to be an active motivational force.

This brief document introduces the Kenneth Burke Digital Archive (KBDA) that was established during a three-day seminar at the 2014 KBS conference in St. Louis, "Attitudes Toward Technology/Technology's Attitudes." A brief critical introduction to the KBDA, an explanation of goals, and an associated CFP are also included. Finally, this document also contains a list of all known audiovisual recordings of Kenneth Burke that are archived at various locations and universities across the country.

Following the Nat Turner rebellion, the Virginia State Legislature held a debate in early 1832 over the abolition of slavery in the state. Two sides, pro-abolitionists and traditionalists, sparred over a two-week period. Using dramatistic analysis, I undertake a case study of the debate, looking specifically for the terministic screens used by each side to ascertain their worldviews that ultimately led to a narrow defeat of the pro-abolitionists.

A discontinuity is sometimes claimed to exist between Burke's early literary aesthetics and his later work. I argue for a continuity: already in Counter-Statement (1931), the formal¸ aesthetically powerful properties of literature are among those that, in his later formulations, enable texts to be "equipment for living" and "symbolic action."

Kenneth Burke scholars differ on what the meaning of Burke's concept of consummation is and how it relates to perfection and entelechy. This article argues that consummation is a third creative motive (transcending self-expression and communication) that requires a rigorous vocabulary in order to be an active motivational force.

This brief document introduces the Kenneth Burke Digital Archive (KBDA) that was established during a three-day seminar at the 2014 KBS conference in St. Louis, "Attitudes Toward Technology/Technology's Attitudes." A brief critical introduction to the KBDA, an explanation of goals, and an associated CFP are also included. Finally, this document also contains a list of all known audiovisual recordings of Kenneth Burke that are archived at various locations and universities across the country.

Following the Nat Turner rebellion, the Virginia State Legislature held a debate in early 1832 over the abolition of slavery in the state. Two sides, pro-abolitionists and traditionalists, sparred over a two-week period. Using dramatistic analysis, I undertake a case study of the debate, looking specifically for the terministic screens used by each side to ascertain their worldviews that ultimately led to a narrow defeat of the pro-abolitionists.

A discontinuity is sometimes claimed to exist between Burke's early literary aesthetics and his later work. I argue for a continuity: already in Counter-Statement (1931), the formal¸ aesthetically powerful properties of literature are among those that, in his later formulations, enable texts to be "equipment for living" and "symbolic action."

Motherhood is often a source of guilt, conflict, and ambivalence, and any communication about motherhood must be governed by an ethic of care and principles that take into account the fraught nature of such an identity. Social media provide individuals with new ways to discuss aspects of and share information about motherhood in different communication settings. Within this context, this article presents the results of 18 qualitative interviews of "mommy bloggers" and reports on the communication design principles and techniques these individuals employ to reach audiences of women. It also takes into account the contexts of users through social media. Overall, these bloggers use communication strategies such as identification, a rejection of perfectionism, an ethic of care, stories and narratives, branding, interactions with users, and a conversational tone to reach the target audience of women. These women act as professional communicators online by understanding this audience, living the reality of this audience through their own experiences, and designing communication that appeals to and ultimately improves the lives of their users. A study of their communication patterns can provide communication designers with insights on what I call empathetic user design and the importance of lived experience as authority.

Friedrich Schiller may not be a household name among contemporary rhetoricians, yet since the 1960s Schiller’s critics have begun to take an interest in the rhetorical dimension of his aesthetic writings, particularly with respect to his Aesthetic Letters. These efforts, however, tend to focus on Schiller’s method of presentation rather than the possible rhetorical implications of the Letters’ key ideas and concepts. This essay proposes treating the Letters as an instance of implicit rhetorical theory, one that suggests an innovative model of rhetorical effectivity, according to which rhetoric enables people to experience the normative ideal of beauty as freedom.

Abstract The July 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States was heralded by many as the best possible chance of avoiding both a nuclear armed Iran and another war in the Middle East. Although success is far from certain, the path to the deal was even less so. That the Obama administration achieved a verifiable suspension of Iran’s enrichment activity in November 2013 was itself a major success. What is even more remarkable is that the Obama administration was able to do so while utilizing the same mix of policy tools, diplomacy, and pressure as the George W. Bush administration. The difference in outcomes is especially confusing given the tendency of foreign policy experts to hold that President Obama’s and President Bush’s foreign policy worldviews are relatively identical. I argue that a rhetorical perspective provides the answer. Specifically, President Obama responded to the challenge of Iran’s nuclear program by fashioning a frame of responsibility in a comic register, shifting the obligation to resolve the standoff peacefully onto both Iran and the United States. A crucial aspect of this rhetorical strategy was that it presented the Iranian regime with the option of rejoining the global community (albeit on restricted terms). Thus, Obama presented a hybrid of Kenneth Burke’s tragic and comic frames that chastised the Iranian regime for dangerous behavior while acknowledging American guilt, error, and responsibility for bringing the nuclear standoff to a peaceful end.

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke's blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke's works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke's rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.Clark models his book on a jazz performance. The book offers neither a linear argument nor a dialectical movement from antitheses to synthesis. Rather, Clark weaves an account where theory, the rhetoric of jazz advocacy, and jazz performances themselves resonate harmoniously. Jazz becomes a representative anecdote for unpacking the details of Burke's political aesthetics, even while this developing theory provides a means to understand jazz's aesthetic workings and civic significance.In “Setting Up,” his first and introductory chapter, Clark advances the thesis/theme that jazz calls forth an identity and a form of living that manifest e pluribus unum. He introduces Burke's work, its cultural critique of America, and its call for a redemptive art of living. Aligning Burke with critics ranging from Walt Whitman to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Clark explains how Burke looked at America and how when he saw division, turned to rhetoric and its capacity to overcome it by fostering identification through form. Clark then takes up the difficult task of extending rhetorical theory and criticism to jazz as a historically situated and significant art form and looks to jazz writers and musicians who describe such rhetorical processes in their music. Clark establishes his bona fides by citing broadly: he revisits Aristotle's and Suzanne Langer's reflections on music, gestures toward Ingrid Monson's recent jazz musicology, and takes up the African American reflections on jazz of Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis. These provide the means for him to develop the idea that jazz is constitutional and that its workings can be explained in terms of the rhetoric of form.Each chapter returns to, explores, and augments this initial theme, much as each chorus of a well-crafted jazz solo extends and develops those musical ideas that have preceded it and just as Burke notoriously returned, revised, and augmented own his prior efforts. In his second chapter, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark doubles down on Burke. While Burke never wrote on jazz, Clark finds in his work the means to capture jazz's civic function. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives describes the aesthetic experience of identification as “swinging along with the form” (58). In Clark's account, this link to jazz is more than fortuitous. Jazz was known as “swing” during its commercial heyday as America's main popular dance music, a reference to its pulsing, danceable rhythm and its contagious attitude, intensity, and energy. Furthermore, Burke was a young man during the “jazz age,” and was aware of African American musical styles, having favorably reviewed both a 1928 concert by the African American Jubilee Hall Singers and the 1933 African American Broadway musical Run, Little Chillun! Burke also corresponded regularly with African American intellectuals, notably Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and Albert Murray, Ellison's friend and author of both Stompin' the Blues and The Omni-Americans, canonical texts on jazz and race in America.Clark considers “swinging along” to be an apt term to describe the activity of both musicians and audiences, who are guided by a faith that the musical work in progress will continue to cohere as it unfolds. Burke presented swinging along as a needed corrective to the American civic sphere, where cooperation is difficult. For Clark, jazz offers a model for such cooperation. This is because “jazz is an act of hopeful defiance of the alienation and fear that makes us hold ourselves back to avoid judgment or rejection” (26). Throughout the book, Clark describes singularly eloquent jazz performances, including an impromptu restaurant performance of “Route 66” by his thirteen-year-old daughter with noted jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, to illustrate the process and form of life that jazz offers. He selects Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley's rendition of “Autumn Leaves” to illustrate swinging cooperation and hopeful defiance. The reader can easily find the track online and follow Clark's commentary, which offers a sensitive analysis of how Miles and Cannonball swing along: in their improvisation, they depart from this standard's original form to explore, extend, and deepen its melancholy, using it as a resource for moving beyond, for crafting an aesthetic pathē of upward transcendence.Paradoxically Clark's third chapter, “What Jazz Is,” does not begin with a discussion of jazz, but with Burke's preoccupation with identity and his turn from literary self-expression to rhetoric. Clark retells the story of Burke's response to the turmoil and conflicts of the twentieth century. Originally a writer of poetry and fiction, Burke became a theorist and critic who, seeing America as in need of some type of transcendence, spent a career exploring how understanding, common feeling, identification, and consummation might be fostered through form. The problem in America, and indeed in any democracy, is that individual will and aspiration are in many ways antagonistic to identification and the consummatory experience of community. America's founding sides with the existential truth that our pains, our goals, and our lives are ultimately our own. In all cultures, ritual and civic arts mediate the tension between individual and community. In America, such arts are faced with a particular challenge. They cannot demand the full subordination of individual voices to an idealized unity, as does a church choir. Clark counterpoises a performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO) to the unity of his church choir to illustrate how jazz negotiates this tension successfully. His choir follows a fixed arrangement and is guided by a choir master. In contrast, JALCO coordinates a complex of individual voices. JALCO is like a complex organism, where the written musical arrangements provide a basis for skilled jazz artists to make their own music, even as each artist and part coordinate with the whole.JALCO is for Clark exemplary of the art that Burke sought. Clark explains the jazz aesthetic by turning to jazz pedagogy, which encourages students to develop their own musical style, approaches, and voice, even though jazz is based in collective improvised performances. For Clark, jazz is singularly American in the way that it integrates the one in the many and also is forward looking, directed toward redemption. Clark turns to the blues to illustrate this American trait. Blues lyrics paint a bleak picture of pain and loss, even while the music's form and propulsive energy offer emotional coherence and hope. Robert Johnson may be standing at the crossroads and sinking down, but the music carries him and those who listen forward. As Albert Murray observed, borrowing from Burke, the blues are equipment for living, transforming desperation into defiance and joy.America's singular character is the theme of Clark's fourth chapter, “Where Jazz Comes From.” Clark focuses neither on New Orleans nor New York, neither on Chicago nor Kansas City, but on the conflict that Tocqueville saw at the center of the American spirit, where radical individualism leaves each person uprooted and solitary. This insight, first stated in his introduction, is Clark's original contribution to jazz studies. Jazz's origin is far more psychic than geographical or musicological. Jazz does not emerge from the mere musical encounter of African and European forms as much as from a reaction to American alienation, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Louis L'Amour's cowboy pulp function, and Burke's search for a redemptive civic art. Curiously, race is not central to Clark's account. He acknowledges the racial fact of jazz but does not reflect pointedly on slavery's legacy or on the link between American alienation and its original sin. His account, consistent with Wynton Marsalis's narrative, presents jazz as pointing to a world without racial division. Clark insists that jazz is concerned with transcendence and gives new meaning to jazz pianist Bill Evans's observation that “‘jazz is not a what, it is a how’” (14). Clark presents jazz as a form of collective problem solving. Jazz transcends difference by casting new modes of experience and forms of being, by relying on improvised augmentation and complexification rather than the imposition of static melodies and harmonies. Paraphrasing Whitman, we could say that Clark tells us that jazz is large and contains multitudes.While Clark offers a redemptive vision of jazz, he also reminds us that none of this is painless. He recounts the troubled 1963 recording session of Money Jungle by jazz greats Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Musical styles, professional egos, and creative visions clashed. Neither the session nor resultant tracks were marked by harmonious identifications. Nevertheless, the conflict was productive. Clark refers to the music as “eloquent” as it strains to keep it together. Just as the purpose of the session was to produce an album, so the art of democracy is directed toward enabling a life in common, not a common life. Putting a happy face on an at times agonistic and tortured process, Clark describes jazz as another occasion for ad bellum purificandum, “a war waged with an attitude of goodwill … in the bright hope that something better for everyone will follow” (75).A great deal of jazz writing is descriptive and anecdotal, with stories of great bands and singular recordings sessions, battles with drug addiction, brilliant creators, and visionary promoters. Critical and theoretical work in jazz is relatively recent, having emerged in the last two or three decades, but as in rhetorical studies, description and historical anecdote play a crucial role and remain necessary. One of the pleasures of this book is Clark's strategic use of anecdotes as he returns to and elaborates on its main theme. One might find Clark redundant, but only if one fails to grasp his strategy of augmentation and his rhetorical celebration of jazz. Each chapter continues the process of explaining the formal theory of rhetorical aesthetics that underpins Burke's oeuvre even as they clarify the demands and workings of jazz as a civic art. Thus, in his fifth chapter “What Jazz Does,” Clark returns to Tocqueville's pessimism regarding America, to which he counterpoises jazz's possibilities and potential: jazz offers an image of what America would look like if America's three “taboo” divisive issues—race, freedom, and religion—were faced openly and worked through collectively (90). Clark turns to Billy Holiday's signature performance of “Strange Fruit,” Louis Armstrong's rendition of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” and Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige suite as eloquent expressions of the African American experience. Clark devotes particular attention to Ellington's explicit attempt to reflect on “his people” as within the American people.Clark's account is compelling, although he does not fully resolve the underlying tension within rhetoric between identification and division. At one moment he praises jazz for offering a common aesthetic experience that offers, if only briefly, the upward transcendence that America requires to fulfill its democratic promise. Subsequently, however, he emphasizes the role of jazz in racial politics, in its lyrics of protest and in the musical expression of the pain of racism in the dissonance and wailing of free jazz. Clark attempts to resolve this tension by equating jazz with freedom, since each jazz performance raises the question of where to go next. Each soloist in part answers this question in tandem with the ensemble, and for Clark the American answer – and the jazz musician answer – is “to freedom, of course” (97). To many, jazz sounds free, which accounts for its appeal to dissidents in the USSR and Nazi Germany and for the American government's use of jazz in the Cold War. Clark notes the irony that black musicians were displayed as representatives of American freedom even while they suffered Jim Crow at home and offers free jazz and its challenge to conventional forms of expression as their rhetorical response.Of singular importance in Clark's fifth chapter is the idea that jazz is political and ethical not only because of its democratic performative pragmatics but because of its content, in both its musical forms and particular compositions. Jazz can be spiritual, in religious or secular terms, even as it is rhetorical, as in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Clark highlights the significance of the avant-garde and its embrace of self-expression as the best way to communicate. While spiritual experience is personal, familiarity with jazz, its traditions, and its musical figures makes shared experience possible. This is for Clark what John Dewey sought when he called on Americans collectively to search for the truth. Jazz can prompt reverence, civic humility, and awe. Jazz requires intense individualism and intense cooperation. Optimistically, Clark does not address the deeply competitive spirit at the heart of jazz and its “cutting contests,” jam sessions where each soloist seeks to best and at times show up the other. For Clark, the jazz situation is much like the rhetorical situation, but less agonistic, because each performance is a collective endeavor that ultimately requires cooperation. For Clark, jazz favors congregation over segregation. In America, the latter dominates and requires the corrective jazz offers.This book is about jazz, of course, but it is also concerned with extending Burke's rhetorical sensibility beyond the verbal arts. In his penultimate chapter, “How Jazz Works,” Clark turns to Burke's 1930s novel Towards a Better Life in order to work out the trajectory of his thought. In that early effort, a walk in the New England countryside summoned Burke's alienated protagonist to find happiness through living beyond himself. Burke revisited this path to happiness in his later critical and theoretical writings, working out the nature of being summoned or called. The summons has two related moments: One is summoned to summon others. For Clark, this is how music works. Clark follows Burke's constitutive turn in the Grammar of Motives. Clark incorporates Stanley Crouch's analogy of jazz to the Constitution as an “exercise of the ‘freedom to constantly reinterpret the meanings’” (20) that it provides, offering a way to perfect the American form of life. Resolutely American in his analysis, Clark cites Dewey, who argued that art provides immediate feeling through its structure and coherence. Clark suggests that for Burke, art's aim is not experience in itself but the organization of experience through form to create common sentiments and sensibilities. Art provides resources for better encountering and living with others. In other words, art offers the possibility of civic transcendence.Jazz is constitutive of democracy, as each in turn improvises over a given form, all the while responding to others and expanding the range of what is possible. Jazz musicians share a stock of knowledge and set of skills that enable them, without sheet music or a prior plan, to meet as strangers and play something new. The pragmatics or aesthetic constitution of jazz lets musicians call the tune in a way unheard of in the classical repertoire, just as the Constitution lets citizens call the tune.This insight is not new to Clark. Wynton Marsalis has said much the same thing, What Clark brings to the mix is a more sophisticated account of how jazz both is structured democratically and manifests a democratic aesthetic sensibility. To this end, Clark offers an innovative and well-developed account of Burke's project that links aesthetic form to attitude and identity. Indeed, Clark cites Burke's observation that music far more than speech adheres to the psychology of form. The power of music and other nonrepresentational arts arises not from cognitions but from the experience of form in the moment. Furthermore, jazz as an improvised music is always performed against the possibility of failure: its movement does not always produce the consummation that it seeks. Music opens onto changing the ways that people think. To illustrate, Clark turns to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane's rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” which offers a remarkable, and yet for jazz, everyday call to transcendence.Even though jazz is no longer a popular musical form, Clark insists that it offers precisely the form of interaction that Burke called for. He works this out again in his concluding chapter, entitled “So What,” after one of the most memorable tracks on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. With no rehearsals and no sheet music, that session produced brilliant and innovative music because each in his ensemble was supremely conscious of the others. In this, Clark's insight and optimism shine through. Clark is driven by an appreciation of possibility. At the same time, however, he does not consider the difficulty of the art. Jazz is less democratic than it is aristocratic and republican. As with all arts, it is practiced by the bold, whose eloquence make their work look easy. Its “citizenry” is not enfranchised by birth but earns a place on the stand through displays of which requires of and Jazz is American and and indeed can offer transcendence and new but like rhetoric requires a life to the art.

ABSTRACT This article gives an account of the nature and purpose of Kant's poetic rhetoric in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. I argue that Kant employs a poetic mode of rhetoric in order to provoke a passionate, enthusiastic response in his audience. I go on to show that Kant became increasingly skeptical of poetic rhetoric's pathetic power after publishing Dreams. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kant's confrontation with the Sturm und Drang led him to formulate a moral critique of poetic rhetoric and its tendency to undermine its audience's rational autonomy. I conclude by highlighting the significance of this critique in and for the development of Kant's mature rhetorical theory.

Lloyd Bitzer's passing came as deeply sad news. He was an exceptional person in all respects. I was fortunate to have been his student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and to have experienced Lloyd in my life as a mentor, a colleague in the discipline, a confidant, a friend, and a role model. The discipline of rhetoric was fortunate to have had him among its ranks as a leading theorist. He was among those most responsible for pushing rhetorical studies into new territory during the latter part of the twentieth century. Lloyd was the principle investigator on and driving force behind the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric, which involved forty scholars from philosophy, rhetoric, communication, English, and sociology at the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences at the beginning of the 1970s and which culminated in The Prospect of Rhetoric, the volume he coedited with his colleague Edwin Black. And Philosophy and Rhetoric was fortunate to have him grace its pages with his scholarship and editorial advice. His iconic essay “The Rhetorical Situation” inaugurated the journal in 1968 as the lead article. It set the stage for reconsidering rhetoric in terms of its philosophical commitments.Lloyd was not a prolific publisher, but each of his articles were gems of careful scholarship and tight reasoning, and they demonstrate an unfailing sense for ideas that matter and an understanding of the impact those ideas could have on future work. His 1959 Quarterly Journal of Speech article “Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited” broke new ground by decoupling the form of pisteis Aristotle regarded as the heart of persuasion from its logical form. His 1960 QJS article “A Re-evaluation Campbell's Doctrine of Evidence” argued that Campbell, in following Hume, had inverted the two-millennial-old Western tradition that established reason as the capital of right action and instead located it in the passions. His subsequent editor's introduction to the edited republication of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and his 1969 Philosophy and Rhetoric article “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric” meticulously made the case for Hume's role in introducing rhetoric into the new country wherein its study led to understanding human nature. In 1978, when consideration of the public sphere was just beginning to emerge as a scholarly topic in the literature on rhetoric, Lloyd published his award- winning essay “Rhetoric and Public Knowledge,” in which he considered the necessary conditions for distinguishing between audiences and publics. It was not a coincidence that two years earlier he broke form with the practice of association presidents in the then Speech Communication Association of offering as their presidential address reflections on the discipline when he presented a version of this paper as his presidential address. His choice was an expression of his belief that presidents of scholarly societies should lead by example of their scholarship.Lloyd's presidential address, as much as anything, captured his sense of himself as a scholar and teacher and spoke to what he considered the nobility of his and our work. Studying with him was at once exhilarating, fearsome, calming, and affirming. He was demanding of his students, excited by ideas, not given to tolerating sloppy thinking or unsupported argument, quick to affirm student insights and progress, able to express and inspire confidence in his students' work, and generous with his time and counsel, always willing to assist his students' growth and prosperity. My friend Tom Farrell, another of Lloyd's doctoral students, captured well how lasting an impact our mentor had when, in the prime of our careers, he commented “I still write for Lloyd.” So did I; so do I still.In May 2015, the Rhetoric Society of America held its biennial summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was filled with anticipation for the event, which is unique in its format and impact on its participants, for being once more in Madison where I had done my doctoral studies, and for the opportunity to spend time with colleagues, former students, and dear friends in the discipline. At the center of my excitement was the dinner date Lloyd and I had arranged. That evening was vintage Lloyd: he and his incomparable spouse Jo Ann arriving precisely on time, dinner at a favorite restaurant, lively and wide-ranging conversation covering shop talk, politics, the university, mutual friends, our children, and grandchildren. Too soon the evening ended, but Lloyd insisted that we should drive to his home outside Madison to drop off Jo Ann and have a nightcap before he took me back to my hotel on campus. He made certain we extended the evening so our conversation might continue. His characteristic care for how our time was spent conveyed more than words the intimacy of personal regard.Lloyd was not comfortable with warm expressions (he edited my dissertation acknowledgment of him, insisting I delete comments on what he meant to me—he meant the world—as something I might find embarrassing for their warmth in later years). But he knew how to convey his warmth and how to acknowledge it in return. He brought me to believe in myself as a young scholar, he filled me with admiration and trust, he inspired delight in intellectual work, and more than anyone he awakened my sense of its essential dignity. He touched the profession and this journal as a scholar. He touched me as a person. I shall remember Lloyd always with affection and gratitude. He enriched my life and I shall miss him dearly.

ABSTRACT This article examines the meaning of the subjective in rhetorical modes of inquiry in contrast to the other-oriented nature of social critique. I reopen the problem of consciousness for interpretation by examining challenges to scientific authority in the 1930s, specifically how Kenneth Burke and Alfred North Whitehead respond to a “crisis in mathematics” born out of Whitehead's attempt, with Bertrand Russell, to reconcile logic and mathematics. Whitehead uses Russell's paradox to demonstrate the necessary return of subjective inquiry as a legitimate mode of knowledge. Burke's Permanence and Change develops Whitehead's arguments to justify interpretative approaches to knowledge. Examining their arguments reveals an analogous “crisis in the humanities” in which language or culture is substituted for the examination of subjectivity. Such misplaced concreteness risks omitting interpretive aspects of rhetorical inquiry in favor of the social or political when such social aspects only emerge within the field of subjective experience.

ABSTRACT Lysias is best known for his portrayal of character (ethopoiia), his believable narratives, his plain or “Attic” style, and for the role he plays as inferior foil to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But he was also an important figure in developing, refining, and employing types of argument, including the rhetorical technique that would later be called the enthymeme. In On the Death of Eratosthenes, Lysias not only uses enthymemes, he highlights their use, selects a term (enthymizing), and demonstrates how “enthymizing” could be central to rhetorical artistry, to narrative development, to legal reasoning, and to political activism. Examining Lysias 1 not only deepens our understanding of Lysias’ rhetorical abilities, but it suggests that the orators had an important role to play in the development of rhetorical theory.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

The book Rhetorical Touch by Shannon Walters opens with a reference to 18th-century philosopher Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac’s Treatise of the Sensations in which he argues that all other sens...

Building on current theories of rhetorical agency, this essay analyzes two metaphors for aging found in public health information materials targeted to the elderly—aging is ageless and aging is pathology—concerning how these metaphors frame agency for older adults. The metaphors attribute limited agency to older adults by emphasizing short-term, biomedical solutions and expert knowledge and by not representing agency as situational, dynamic, and co-constructed. Exploring the limits of these metaphors both further exposes how public health discourse shapes the cultural perception of aging and offers an expanded understanding of older adults as dynamic rhetorical agents.

Technique Identification: A new graphical technique is presented for visualizing and assessing inter-rater agreement in discrete ordinal or categorical data, such as rubric ratings.  To that aim, a chance-corrected Kappa with two new features is derived. First, it is based on interpreting ratings for each subject as vectors to visualize the data. This is done by creating two-dimensional vectors from a subject-rating summary table, sorting the vectors by their slopes, and plotting them in that order to create a trajectory that displays all the data in context. Second, it presents a graph and accompanying statistics (Kappa, p -value) for each pair of ratings in an organized display so that all useful comparisons of the data are visually displayed and statistically assessed. This information is presented on a logical grid, usually called facets . Kappa is calculated in the usual way, by referencing the actual results with an average of random rating assignments. This average becomes a reference line on each graph as a visual cue, as well. The statistical basis for the Kappa and significance testing are derived, and the test assumptions are specified. Value Contribution: The most commonly used statistics for inter-rater agreement, such as the Cohen Kappa or Inter-Class Correlation, give only a single parameter estimate of reliability from which to make judgments about ratings data. The technique presented here constructs graphs of all the data that allow visual inspection of the ratings versus a reference curve that represents chance-matching. The detailed reports on inter-rater agreement can show how to fine-tune ratings systems, such as understanding which parts of an ordinal scale are working best. This solves a practical problem for researchers who rely on rating-type classification by revealing which overall aspects of the rating system need to be improved and adds to the list of tools available for assessing rating reliability. In creating this approach to analysis of rater data, human usability is emphasized. Specifically, the use of geometry is designed to facilitate interpretability rather than being a mathematical derivation from first principles. Technique Application: Two applications are given, both involving social meaning-making. The first uses data from wine-judging to illustrate how the method can illuminate expertise in that domain. The results reproduce published findings that were based on a classical statistical method. A second sample application uses data from a university assessment of student writing in which ratings on a developmental scale are assigned by course instructors to their students. The rating program is an example of social meaning-making that can be used to generate larger data sets than are typical for classroom-based assessment programs. The analysis shows the strengths and weaknesses of the rating system in terms of reliability and demonstrates how that knowledge leads to improvements in assessment. Directions for Further Research: An argument is made for a public library of inter-rater data for empirical use by researchers. The social aspects of rating are discussed, and there is an illustration of the potential to derive new measures of inter-rater agreement from the meaning-making program that produces the data.

Background: This study focuses on construct representation and inter-reader agreement and reliability in ePortfolio assessment of 1,315 writing portfolios. These portfolios were submitted by undergraduates enrolled in required writing seminars at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in the fall of 2014.  Penn is an Ivy League university with a diverse student population, half of whom identify as students of color. Over half of Penn’s students are women, 12% are international, and 12% are first-generation college students. The students’ portfolios are scored by the instructor and an outside reader drawn from a writing-in-the-disciplines faculty who represent 24 disciplines. The portfolios are the product of a shared curriculum that uses formative assessment and a program-wide multiple-trait rubric. The study contributes to scholarship on the inter-reader reliability and validity of multiple-trait portfolio assessments as well as to recent discussions about reconceptualizing evidence in ePortfolio assessment.  Research Questions: Four questions guided our study: What levels of interrater agreement and reliability can be achieved when assessing complex writing performances that a) contain several different documents to be assessed; b) use a construct-based, multi-trait rubric; c) are designed for formative assessment rather than testing; and d) are rated by a multidisciplinary writing faculty?   What can be learned from assessing agreement and reliability of individual traits? How might these measurements contribute to curriculum design, teacher development, and student learning? How might these findings contribute to research on fairness, reliability, and validity; rubrics; and multidisciplinary writing assessment? Literature Review: There is a long history of empirical work exploring the reliability of scoring highly controlled timed writings, particularly by test measurement specialists. However, until quite recently, there have been few instances of applying empirical assessment techniques to writing portfolios.  Developed by writing theorists, writing portfolios contain multiple documents and genres and are produced and assessed under conditions significantly different from those of timed essay measurement. Interrater reliability can be affected by the different approaches to reading texts depending on the background, training, and goals of the rater. While a few writing theorists question the use of rubrics, most quantitatively based scholarship points to their effectiveness for portfolio assessment and calls into question the meaningfulness of single score holistic grading, whether impressionistic or rubric-based. Increasing attention is being paid to multi-trait rubrics, including, in the field of writing portfolio assessment, the use of robust writing constructs based on psychometrics alongside the more conventional cognitive traits assessed in writing studies, and rubrics that can identify areas of opportunity as well as unfairness in relation to the background of the student or the assessor. Scholars in the emergent field of empirical portfolio assessment in writing advocate the use of reliability as a means to identify fairness and validity and to create great opportunities for portfolios to advance student learning and professional development of faculty.  They also note that while the writing assessment community has paid attention to the work of test measurement practitioners, the reverse has not been the case, and that conversations and collaborations between the two communities are long overdue. Methodology: We used two methods of calculating interrater agreement: absolute and adjacent percentages, and Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa, which calculates the extent to which interrater agreement is an effect of chance or expected outcome. For interrater reliability, we used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. We used SPSS to produce all of the calculations in this study.  Results: Interrater agreement and reliability rates of portfolio scores landed in the medium range of statistical significance.  Combined absolute and adjacent percentages of interrater reliability were above the 90% range recommended; however, absolute agreement was below the 70% ideal.  Furthermore, Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa rates were statistically significant but very low, which may be due to “kappa paradox.” Discussion: The study suggests that a formative, rubric-based approach to ePortfolio assessment that uses disciplinarily diverse raters can achieve medium-level rates of interrater agreement and reliability. It raises the question of the extent to which absolute agreement is a desirable or even relevant goal for authentic feedback processes of a complex set of documents, and in which the aim is to advance student learning. At the same time, our findings point to how agreement and reliability measures can significantly contribute to our assessment process, teacher training, and curriculum. Finally, the study highlights potential concerns about construct validity and rater training.  Conclusion: This study contributes to the emergent field of empirical writing portfolio assessment that calls into question the prevailing standard of reliability built upon timed essay measurement rather than the measurement, conditions, and objectives of complex writing performances.  It also contributes to recent research on multi-trait and discipline-based portfolio assessment.  We point to several directions for further research:  conducting “talk aloud” and recorded sessions with raters to obtain qualitative data on areas of disagreement; expanding the number of constructs assessed; increasing the range and granularity of the numeric scoring scale; and investigating traits that are receiving low interrater reliability scores. We also ask whether absolute agreement might be more useful for writing portfolio assessment than reliability and point to the potential “kappa paradox,” borrowed from the field of medicine, which examines interrater reliability in assessment of rare cases. Kappa paradox might be useful in assessing types of portfolios that are less frequently encountered by faculty readers. These, combined with the identification of jagged profiles and student demographics, hold considerable potential for rethinking how to work with and assess students from a range of backgrounds, preparation, and abilities.  Finally, our findings contribute to a growing effort to understand the role of rater background, particularly disciplinarity, in shaping writing assessment. The goals of our assessment process are to ensure that we are measuring what we intend to measure, specifically those things that students have an equal chance at achieving and that advance student learning.  Our findings suggest that interrater agreement and reliability measures, if thoughtfully approached, will contribute significantly to each of these goals.

Scholars in rhetoric have been slow to recognize children as capable of exercising rhetorical agency. This oversight inadvertently recapitulates the divestment of agency experienced by children who speak publicly about civic concerns. This essay examines the argumentative and organizational strategies of a group of children from New Mexico who worked in the early 1990s to publicize, design, and fund the Children’s Peace Statue and who repeatedly petitioned the Los Alamos County Council to accept the statue as a gift to the city of Los Alamos. Analyzing the children’s rhetorical strategies alongside responses of adult opponents, I show how opponents rejected the statue in part by resisting engaging with children as rhetorical agents. This research underscores the stakes of recognizing children’s agency as complexly meaningful.

This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

In light of the genuine disagreement between the seemingly non-rhetorical political philosophy of John Rawls and the philosophical rhetoric of the new rhetoric project I propose a re-reading of Rawls that will help move that project in a needed direction. This re-reading will make the case that (1) Rawls’s conception of justice implies a commitment to the reasonable that is very like the new rhetoric projects, that (2) their differences regarding distance—in particular the distancing strategies of impartiality and objectivity—can be reconciled, that (3) the major difference between them—that is, the role of the rational—comes down to Rawls’s willingness to try universalizing the good, and that (4) such universalizing is a resource of rhetorical particularity that adds value to the construction of the universal audience.

Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting an increased enrollment of students on the autism spectrum. This is in part thanks to increased efforts in early detection during childhood, where students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are then enrolled in services outside and within public schools to help integrate them into mainstream classrooms. Yet such integrative services, by and large, fall short in higher education, and many students find themselves without the support they once received in their primary school years. Writing demands are indeed challenging for many—without securing basic college-level composition skills, the likelihood of student success is placed in jeopardy. Writing centers can be regarded as gatekeepers for autistic students, since their assistance can greatly impact student success. Yet problems remain with access and inclusion based on rhetorical situations, as well as a lack of tutor education. This paper provides suggestions based on April Mann’s methods of inclusion for writing center tutees with ASD, including spatial awareness and tutor education. I also outline other possible methods, including outreach to students with ASD to prevent further isolation among the university population.

The Burkean parlor has been integrated into the lore of writing centers, showcasing how writing centers have both conversational and collaborative elements. However, the ease for students to enter into the academic conversation is not as simple as this metaphor suggests. To rethink this concept, kairos, or the opportune moment, must be considered. This article will investigate kairos as spatial and how that conceptualization can deepen the Burkean parlor and the conversations within it. Breaking down the Burkean parlor into three stages—questions, metacognition, and choices—can benefit the practicality of the tutoring session. Kairos complicates each of these three points of the student writer’s integration into the conversation. The creation of kairos depends upon the student and tutor being mindful of these conscious and unconscious interactions and understanding how to most effectively disrupt the spatial boundaries of the tutoring session. Connecting kairos into the Burkean parlor metaphor differentiates the perspective of the tutoring session, encouraging both student and tutor to become more aware of the spatiality of tutoring and to redefine these boundaries.