AbstractRational agency is of central interest to philosophy, with evolutionary accounts of the cognitive underpinnings of rational agency being much debated. Yet one building block—our ability to argue—is less studied, except Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory (Mercier and Sperber in Behav Brain Sci 34(02):57–74,10.1017/s0140525x10000968, 2011, in The enigma of reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2017). I discuss their account and argue that it faces a lacuna: It cannot explain the origin of argumentation as a series of small steps that reveal how hominins with baseline abilities of the trait in question could turn into full-blown owners of it. This paper then provides a first sketch of the desired evolutionary trajectory. I argue that reasoning coevolves with the ability to coordinate behavior. After that, I establish a model based on niche construction theory. This model yields a story with following claims. First, argumentation came into being during the Oldowan period as a tool for justifying information ‘out of sight’. Second, argumentation enabled hominins to solve collective action problems with collaborators out of sight, which stabilized argumentative practices eventually. Archeological findings are discussed to substantiate both claims. I conclude with outlining changes resultant from my model for the concept of rational agency.

328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi­ losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre­ scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita­ tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...

C-SAW (Computer-Supported Argumentative Writer) is an online authoring software embodying design principles derived from theories on written argumentation, self-regulation and conceptual change as well as feedback from practitioners and users, in line with a design-based research approach. Designed to scaffold writing processes, C-SAW is intended as additional support in instructional designs using argumentative writing for learning. This article presents the results of a mixed-method study comparing undergraduate students writing with C-SAW or a text editor. Outcome measures included the number of arguments and the degree of their completion, knowledge of argument components, topic knowledge and changes in epistemic beliefs. Participants writing with C-SAW elaborated arguments to a greater degree, but there were otherwise no significant differences between conditions for other measured outcomes. Furthermore, results were influenced by informal reasoning skills that outweighed the effects of condition. These results are discussed with respect to the difficulties of studying the effects of digital tools on writing and learning in controlled first-use contexts and the importance of developing instructional designs with explicit learning outcomes that are aligned to the instructional principles embedded in digital tools.

Writing an argumentation about a controversial issue from contradictory sources is a challenging task. It involves understanding, managing, and generating arguments and counterarguments from different sources to support a final position, conveyed in a formal structure. Despite its difficulty, argumentative writing is not often taught in higher education in Spain. Furthermore, online interventions regarding this type of task are scarce. For this reason, we designed and evaluated virtual training aimed at writing integrative and well-structured arguments in a distance learning university. Sixty-eight undergraduates participated in this pre-post with a control group design. The training included explicit instruction through video lectures and practice exercises with immediate feedback using open online resources (e.g., Moodle). The results show that after the instruction the participants' written products improved both in their structure, the number of arguments for the against-position, and the degree of integration of the two perspectives. However, those products that presented medium or maximum integration were still limited. These results illustrate how online instruction of argumentative writing can be implemented in higher education with positive results. However, students still need more support to expand their skills for generating integrative synthesis. Considering these results, we propose further improvements in the designed training.

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

Between 1842 and 1890, 23 women wrote 33 memoirs about their time spent incarcerated in American insane asylums. While a handful of these memoirs have been studied, there has not been a recognition of how many asylum mem­oirs exist and their significance as a collective body of work. Grounded in an inductive analysis of the collective 33 works, this article begins a process of recovering a mostly forgotten moment in time when former patients took agency over their experience, ethos, and rhetoricity to break down the institutional wall of silence and give the public the first patient-centered memoirs. I argue that these women rhetors did this by foregrounding their own identity as patient and by creating a rhetorical position from which their readers would feel the trauma of asylum life. Both rhetorical moves countered institutionalization’s dehumanizing effects by placing the patient experience at the center of understanding the asy­lum experience.

This pilot study of a mental health call center clinician’s workplace tools, processes, and organizational structures proposes a preliminary theory of “distributed and mediated ethos.” A distributed and mediated ethos refers to how an organization uses various resources—artifacts, technologies, and processes—situated across dis¬parate locations in order to expand and control their identity in the service of extend¬ing their reach and capacity to render essential services. An analysis of a participant clinician’s rhetorical context flowcharts and network pictures shows how an agency’s ethos is mediated through various technologies. Findings suggest that a distributed ethos (1) projects the impression of being “always there”; (2) relies on dexterity across several human and nonhuman actors; and (3) necessitates targeted tasks from branches that extend ethos farther from the organization. This pilot study, thus, provides researchers of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) with a new tool for exploring the intricate and complex nature of health at a distance and other complicated 21st century healthcare delivery formats.

Using primary source materials from medical, government, and journalism archives, this study of public medical discourse reveals the role of argumentation in posi­tively shaping public perceptions of traumatized soldiers and locates the contem­porary origins of the trope of “soldier as psychological victim of war”—a perception that continues to inform public policy and medical research. Using Jasinski’s (1998) concepts of interior and exterior constitutive potential to analyze the public writ­ings, interviews, and Congressional testimony of VVAW-affiliated psychiatrists, the study finds that the radical psychiatrists’ interior (directed at veterans) and exte­rior (directed at public and medical institutions) rhetorics were (and arguably remain) mutually effective in creating an identity for veterans to occupy that exculpated them from their involvement in war, while allowing them to garner benefits for their ser­vice. The article concludes with two examples of the “veteran as psychological vic­tim of war” trope as it shapes the contemporary rhetorical ecology of former servicemembers.

A highly visual social media platform such as Instagram is incorporated by many companies in their marketing communications strategies to advertise their products and services employing digital visual rhetoric. The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of visual framing strategies, sentiment, and product presentation modality in the multicultural context by examining social media practices of influencers belonging to two cultural backgrounds, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Using content analysis, this study reveals visual rhetorical strategies practiced by Instagram influencers that can equip digital marketing practitioners with effective devices of persuasion. The study provides a useful contribution to the theory of digital visual rhetoric.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

This essay recounts the origins of Reflections and considers the first seven years of the journal’s publication from the perspective of its first editor. Arguing that Reflections serves as a barometer of changes in our field, the academy, and the production of knowledge over the past two decades, it recounts the journal’s initial mandate to provide a forum for communication and inquiry and characterizes the unique ethos of the journal. It assesses the generative role of special issues in using a community organizing approach to publication to connect scholars, practitioners, and participants around a theme, developing many of the now-thriving subfields of community-engaged writing. The journal, it concludes, thanks to its inclusive, experimental, and multigenerational approach and deep roots in communities where we have built lasting relationships, provides a mirror in which we can see our field deepen our questions and extend our reach. It celebrates Reflections for cultivating the brave space we continue to need to collaboratively and critically craft our crucial places within and beyond the university.

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move from an “informal” to a “formal” academic structure also echoed the emerging status of community partnership scholarship in the field. Increasingly, academic and community-based scholars were finding that interest in such work was expanding beyond the capability of traditional journals and series to publish. Reflections’ expansion was designed to meet that need and to provide it a formal “disciplinary” space. Indeed, this moment also marked the emergence of Community Literacy Journal. And it speaks to the ethos of community partnership work that, since that time, the two journals have fostered a collaborative ethos, both finding a home in the Coalition for Community Writing.

In the “post-truth” moment, educators need to cultivate writerly habits, which include attention to language, precision, imagination, questioning, and sustained inquiry. Writerly habits can foster compassion, creativity, critical thinking, and a politics of hope. The hope is that these habits move students toward a more just future.

To ascertain the risk assessments parents use when making vaccine decisions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers of young children. Treating these interviews as texts, I rhetorically analyzed how parents talk about their chil­dren’s vaccination in order to better understand reasons for vaccine hesitancy. My analysis reveals that despite the difference in behavior between parents who vac­cinate and parents who hesitate, there is a commonality in discourse. Three topoi emerged within these mothers’ explanation of their vaccination decisions: percep­tions of diseases, perceptions of environmental threats, and assessment of their child’s vulnerability. Considering the common ground these topoi reflect, I explore possible alternative messaging about vaccines that might better encourage vaccine uptake. Ultimately, I argue a rhetorical approach to studying public and personal discourses about health issues can prove useful for identifying key topoi, which can generate communication strategies for addressing public concerns while potentially improving support for public health initiatives

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that it persists in literary studies and under the quasi-philosophical heading “critical theory.” Meanwhile, if Brian Leiter offers any indication in his Avital Ronell-scandal quip about theory—what they call “bad philosophy in literature departments”1—then the very question “Why theory now?” would be challenged by professional philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, if not ignored altogether. How and to what extent has Theory consumed territory that was once occupied by philosophy per se? Is “Continental philosophy” now practically synonymous with Theory, and if so, how does that work from the two very different philosophical perspectives? From a global perspective, is professional philosophy small and getting smaller, while “theory”—until recently associated with Europeans and others who indeed consider themselves “philosophers”—large and getting larger? In what ways are theories like postcolonial, queer, and critical race related historically to philosophy? That is to say the question of philosophy/theory raised by the Frankfurt School and recently reiterated by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory speaks to people in rhetoric and to many others across the humanities and social sciences. In this forum I join Martin Jay, Nancy Struever, D'Angelo Bridges, Steven Mailloux, Peter Simonson, and Catherine Chaput as we address this question “Why theory now?” paying special attention to the relevant histories we need to untangle “theory” on the recent scene.One might imagine how a single question posed to seven scholars in a forum invites debate, with the answers pitched against one another. Since we can only buy one answer, it would seem the others can't be right—we are faced with an argumentative scheme of the mutually exclusive. And no doubt there are moments both within and among these essays that don't allow for easy agreement. My essay is set up polemically, so the reader is faced with a choice between a prevailing take on rhetorical theory that invokes classical antiquity, and my own contrary place and date: Ann Arbor, 1900. Bridges recalls for this P&R readership how in 1985 the literary critic Barbara Christian made us choose between Theory then consolidating in the elite practices and institutions where traditional forms of power—including most prominently white, male, and colonial—came at the expense of theory that has long been practiced elsewhere (formatively in Douglass's explicitly rhetorical My Bondage and My Freedom, Bridges will argue). And then there are familiar divides within the essays themselves, and into their presumed readership. At the end of this forum, for example, Catherine Chaput forces a question that has been percolating throughout: Isn't theory as we mean it now originally and essentially critical, running from Marx through Adorno et al., so that any other uptake like the new materialism must explain itself under pressure, or appear suspiciously uncritical and hence a quiet advocate for the powers that be?Ultimately, however, the argumentative scheme of the forum as a whole is not mutually exclusive as it might appear in a more systematic philosophical imaginary, but is rather genealogical. And we each try to be critical, while avoiding master narratives in their reductive forms—whether Marxist, colonial/decolonial, or epic as in the battle between rhetoric and philosophy—so that the essays surprise. The biggest problem with master narratives as a form of scholarship is that they can become predictable and render the scholarly work practically unnecessary: once the master narrative begins you know pretty much where it will end.Instead “Why theory now?” is purposefully polyvalent, and the answers given depend upon the scholarly uptake, which is itself an embedded practice. As the question is picked up distinctly by an intellectual historian Martin Jay, we are returned to the nineteenth-century critique of psychologism that would simultaneously produce philosophy in its most universal aspirations, along with its critique that would come by way of “theory.” Then understood through this formative moment, current conversations around post-critique, and Berkeley-style pragmatic philosophy, appear productively different. Nancy Struever, a very different type of intellectual historian, comes at the question characteristically askew by way of “not theory” and Collingwood/Noë. From the get-go according to Struever, theory has been hampered in its abstraction that is then, inevitably, subsumed into various dumb ideologies. Instead, by way of Collingwood's work on art, we see the possibilities of particular modes of inquiry that are practical all the way down. This is theory in another key, or perhaps not theory at all (just modes of inquiry). Then my piece, inspired in part by Struever's work on history and theory over the decades, hammers at an equivocation whereby we apply the term rhetorical theory indiscriminately to any systematic reflection upon language use or some other type of communication. Instead my goal is to gather inductively what we currently tend to mean when we use the term rhetorical theory, and then locate when exactly it took on its current scope that can include all sorts of things beyond such reflexive activity mentioned above. For the sake of argument, the answer I come up with is Gertrude Buck (Ann Arbor, 1900), and the Strueverite phrase I land on is “reality figured by way of its alternatives,” metaphor most prominently. D'Angelo Bridges, alternatively, foregrounds the “critical” in (critical) theory as a decolonial fact that isn't just a legacy of Hegel and Marx, but fundamentally a legacy of racialized slavery in the United States and its imperative for thought: hence Douglass and the dating 1855. Thus answering “Why theory now?” for Bridges is an account of a decolonial and antiracist imperative that works only when its history becomes legible. And in this reading it turns out that our theory is now and has always been more American than usually recognized, which would help explain much of the critical edge it has now in the book publications of Duke, Minnesota, Fordham, Routledge, now Ohio State, and so on. Then also on the genealogical front we have the piece by Steven Mailloux, which I understand this way: There is no premodern theory, in our more recent, critical sense of the term. Theory emerges out of secular modernity and its others, initiated most famously by Hegel and then worked out in various detail by midcentury German and French thinkers including Fessard, who is especially noteworthy because he makes this confrontation with modernity explicit postwar (hence the dating 1945 if we need one) and in ways indebted to but not politically aligned with Schmitt's political theology. For us beyond the historical argument, this means we would be wise to consider regularly how some version of our contemporary (critical) theory, including rhetorical, negotiates this challenge of secular modernity. Or in a formula: no secular modernity, no theory.Finally and differently we have the piece on rhetorical theory by Peter Simonson, which considers itself most prominently a “sociology of knowledge.” His work is thus historical in the sociological mode, insofar as it persistently asks the questions who is doing rhetorical theory and where exactly, and who is not doing rhetorical theory and why exactly. That said, sociology of knowledge is not indigenous to Simonson's field and those fields that name this journal—philosophy and rhetoric—so Simonson must experiment methodologically. In the end, a reductive sociological formula (e.g., knowledge = power, where power is understood, against Foucault, as unidirectional) cannot prevail. (That might give us, for example, a predictable narrative where rhetorical theory is the product of white privilege and hence can be read only as a tool of oppression.) Instead, the rhetorician that he is, Simonson offers a more circuitous story, which ultimately foregrounds the trope “irony” and the historical turn that has pitched theory, and rhetorical theory in particular, against the powers that be.So instead of systematic on the order of logical argumentation, what lies before you is in itself deeply rhetorical. We work from the places we are as only we can, while narrating for others what that work entails. In this case, we can only hope that you find that work worthwhile.

Early days, things fallen asleep, hidden things, possibilities, melodies of the past and the future, timeless plans, float by, one after the other, and I feel rich under a hoard of gifts and must have hope. Then the day wakes, the nearness, the sharpness, and I am disturbed. I close my eyes in order not to see it, fall asleep again, heavily, am assailed by dreams, and frequently awaken only in the course of the afternoon without feeling restored.—Paul Klee, Diary II, 1902 Now is never quite here, at least as we might hope, or as we might insist. Its inspiration is riddled with disappointment that provokes. And so on—never quite here, this now that both enlivens and restrains, an experience of chance and a moment of choice, a question of conditions and consequences that defies full reply. Perhaps this is one beginning of theory, one way that it begins again, for now.One way—a path then, not least the path that was held in antiquity to lead outside the city, past the wall, without the comfort of given topoi and taken for granted logos, beyond the reach of law and its exception. The theoros took leave, in uncertain direction, and with no assurance of comprehension let alone recognition. Theory thus struggles, not least to overcome the entrenched expectation of (its) utility and discover a question.Here, for now, theory appears with space. It appears with a certain indifference—its distinction from “method”—if not a commitment to resistance—a stance that provokes the banal claim that it is just so much “bad writing.” And yet, theory's own history betrays that its promise has often been reserved for those who were deemed to “properly” belong to the city in the first place, just as its power has frequently come at the expense of those whom it has “encountered” along its way. Theory is never far from the problem of (its) violence.The fifty-third volume of Philosophy & Rhetoric begins with an extended and wholly engaging forum—Why Theory Now? As forum editor Daniel Gross notes in the introduction, the essays that follow contain a number of crucial arguments. And they feature significant argumentation, rhetorical and philosophical clash that raises important questions about the contested power of theoretical expression and the potential of theory's contention. There is then, as Gross suggests, the beginning of a genealogy here, an inquiry that not only discloses but performs something of the uncertain ways in which theory unfolds, that is, how it is imagined, undertaken, articulated, and troubled, sometimes in the name (and sometimes against the name) of both rhetoric and philosophy—perhaps to the satisfaction of neither. Today, it is this how that may press, a call to grasp and give way to theory's ways of beginning again—for now.

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.

In this assignment, students create a podcast episode in which they make an argument on a topic in current events. Through this process, students develop traditional rhetorical skills such as awareness of audience, formulation of a thesis, and inclusion of compelling evidence, in a new context that allows them room for creativity and for approaching these techniques from a different angle. Accustomed to composing analysis essays and research papers on a computer screen, students who create an argument in the aural medium must consider the best way to grab and hold the listener's attention so that the listener's mind does not wander, and to convey information clearly and concisely so that the listener never needs to rewind. Additionally, students become familiar with audio editing software and other aspects of digital composition, and they explore a medium that may feel like a refuge in today's screen-saturated world.

This article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food insecurity for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse.

"Function" is a vitally important concept in the scientific community. Scientists use it to describe and address a wide variety of research problems. In publications, however, scientists within and across disciplines interpret function differently. For example, intense debate surrounds what percentage of the human genome should be deemed "functional" rather than "junk DNA." In this essay, we analyze the use of function in the research of de novo gene birth, a budding scientific field that studies how novel genes can emerge in non-genic sequences. Our research team, composed of a rhetorical scholar, philosopher, structural biologist and systems biologist, crafts a taxonomy of how "function" is variously constituted in de novo gene birth publications, including as expressions, capacities, interactions, physiological implications and evolutionary implications. We argue function is shaped by the diverse onto-epistemological perspectives of scientists and is both a recalcitrant and resilient concept of scientific practice. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's writings on a scientific mode of thinking, functions are time-space scales of objects under investigation that make possible references to scientific measurements.

Review of Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics by editors Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch.

Review of Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion By Candice Rai & Caroline Gottschalk Druschke.

Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...

Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.

In this webtext, we explore how Magic and other complex analog systems operate rhetorically as activity networks. Our scrutiny of Magic’s protocols leads us to consider and compare the game’s anticipated activities (as described in its game rules and our social expectations, conventions, and norms involved in playing the game) with its realized expressions of those activities (as encountered when actually playing one or more iterations of the game itself).

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

AbstractBy explaining the argument from ignorance in terms of thepresumption of innocence, many textbooks in argumentation theory suggest that some arguments from ignorance might share essential features with some types of presumptive reasoning. The stronger version of this view, suggesting that arguments from ignorance and presumptive reasoning are almost indistinguishable, is occasionally proposed by Douglas Walton. This paper explores the nature and limits of the stronger proposal and argues that initial presumptions and arguments from ignorance arenotclosely connected. There are three main reasons. First, the argument from ignorance, unlike typical presumptive reasoning, is a negative kind of inference. Second, the typical initial presumption is sensitive to a broader set of defeaters and thus assumes a higher (negative) standard of acceptability. Third, in dialectical terms, initial presumption and argument from ignorance bring different attacking rights and obligations. I conclude that Waltonian intuition is unsupported or, at best, is limited only to practical presumptions and practical arguments from ignorance.

In order for students to effectively transfer oral communication skills from academic to professional settings, they must have high oral communication self-efficacy. We significantly increased oral communication self-efficacy in a sample of 97 undergraduate business majors by incorporating enactive mastery, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological arousal into a business communication course. Self-efficacy was positively and significantly correlated with course performance, and increases in self-efficacy were positively and significantly correlated with changes in overall grade point average. By targeting self-efficacy, instructors can improve students’ oral communication skills and help them transfer these skills from academic to professional settings.

This study examined the perceptions and expressions of learning of 18 undergraduate students who participated in case study competitions through qualitative inquiry. The participants articulated learning outcomes based on their participation in a case competition, including enhanced communication, critical thinking, and analytical skills; viewing diversity as an educational benefit; and gaining a deeper understanding of business fields such as consulting. These findings suggest case study competitions are a viable tool for business educators to aid students in preparing for competitive work environments.

The current study examined the relationships among self-regulated learning, metacognitive awareness, and EFL learners’ performance in argumentative writing. We collected data through two questionnaires (i.e., Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ); Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI)), and an argumentative writing task administered to 250 Iranian graduate students of TEFL in 11 universities across Iran. Using LISREL version 8.8, we ran structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the hypothesized relationships. The results revealed that although the SEM enjoyed a good fit on the hypothesized relationships among selfregulated learning, metacognitive awareness, and argumentative writing, the significant influence of metacognitive awareness and self-regulated learning on students’ argumentative writing performance could not be postulated. Finally, the pedagogical implications for writing instruction and research are discussed.

Celeste Michelle Condit's Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 is a complex and challenging contribution to the understudied area of public emotion that charts the course for an arduous but rewarding journey toward a greater synthesis between the study of human biological and material existence and the study of our symbolic world. Condit maintains that “shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular paths … shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of ‘being angry together’ as a pervasive social phenomenon” and that the “sharing of that anger” is a communicative process requiring that one “attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion” (1–2). Condit develops a “script” for public anger: “(1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy), (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made), (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!” (5–6). Her analysis of the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag reveals that “the most resonant versions of this script … promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations” (6).While it is often the case that one of the important tests of rhetorical theory is its ability to elucidate texts, what is perhaps most compelling about Condit's book is not its critical engagement with the texts, but rather its ambitious epistemological framework. Indeed what makes the book compelling (and occasionally results in somewhat infelicitous moments) is its unabashed ambition to adopt an epistemological framework that incorporates dispositions and findings from all three of the major research methodologies—natural science, social science, and humanities.Such a pan-methodological approach is necessary insofar as Condit's goal is not modest, as it is to “build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground” (150), requiring “reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most … operate” (15). Along these lines Condit relies upon an “onto-epistemological stance” (developed with Bruce Railback) termed “‘transilience’ (rather than E. O. Wilson's ‘consilience’) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being” (17). Transilience takes seriously the biological and symbolic dimensions of human experience and hence requires that scholars show a willingness to move across the gaps separating academic disciplines and research methodologies.Condit's understanding of the “symbolic” elements is informed by her humanistic training in rhetorical studies, while her attempt to grasp “physiological” elements is informed by her more recent explorations and work in the natural sciences. Insofar as “biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities” (26), she aims at a theory of emotions that is materially grounded in both biology and symbol systems. This biosymbolic approach aims to reconcile biological sciences and the humanities, but Condit is also interested in what has always been a central concern of social scientists in communication: the empirical effects of communicative messages: “The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human affect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics” (20). Alongside the book's transilient fusion of humanistic and natural science into a biosymbolic perspective, it also employs social scientific methodologies in the form of frequent reviews of empirical research in order to assess the effects of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. In the end her “view of humans as biosymbolic beings … has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged” (41).While Condit is centrally concerned with “public anger,” that is, how emotion circulates among collectivities in communities, the foundation of her approach is the millennia of philosophical reflections regarding the character of emotions as experienced by individuals: “Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion … (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural versus other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved … as well” (49). Beginning from this well-established philosophical typology, Condit overlays a wide range of insights drawn from the biological study of emotions, enabling resolution of many of the tensions between biological and neurological approaches to emotions that see them as universal species traits, and cultural and symbolic approaches that view emotions as emerging from particular cultural milieus.But since “collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals” (70), putting the “public” in public anger requires that the author explore territory that is much less well studied and understood. Public anger is complex, and “occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, an antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about events and their causes” (72). Public anger involves not only collective perceptions and understandings, but collective action. Based on the study of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag, Condit concludes that “to be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. Circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways” (216). While this particular set of cases seems to line up with “most humanistic engagements of social emotions” that “have described them as undesirable” (224), Condit also observes that public anger can have positive functions: “Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectivities … the historians' accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people” (73).The author is focused on biology and neurology, but communication and rhetoric remain at the center of shared public emotions: “With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included)” (94). Indeed, it is through symbol systems that emotions are shared and made public: “It is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences” (32). Accordingly, the channels of discourse function as a sort of circulatory system within which public emotions move: “Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Not only are symbols of primary focus for analysis, her framework assumes that “the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action,” and she uses “the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters” (209).In the end Condit calls for the programmatic study of other public emotions: “The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotion and political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope, compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. The detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes” (236). Condit reiterates “that good theory requires familiarity with both rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language” (236).What is particularly new and challenging in this book is that Condit is aiming to genuinely bring together the sciences and the humanities. For decades humanities scholars in several disciplines have earnestly sought to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, but usually on their own humanistic grounds. Philosophers of science have long bridged the gap by examining the philosophical assumptions animating science and the scientific method, usually within philosophical frames centered on epistemology. So too historians of science have brought science and history together by making science an object of historical study. Finally, scholarship on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, in which humanities scholars explore the central role of rhetoric and communication in the discovery and development of scientific knowledge, undoubtedly effects a sort of union of science and rhetoric, but does so solidly under the sign of rhetoric.What makes Condit's work unique is that it is not merely appropriating science as an object of study under the sign of the humanities. Condit's scholarship, informed by her graduate level experiences in genetics courses and lab work, aspires to something that could be described as a genuinely synthetic view of the biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This work aims at a perspective that is pan- or meta-methodological. Critics might express concern that it is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for a scholar to move beyond and transcend a methodological and disciplinary paradigm that has been instilled through decades of study, credentialing, and training within a particular kind of academic community. Indeed Condit recognizes these very barriers, and in other works on transilience has advocated the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different disciplines despite the institutional disciplinary and methodological barriers that divide them.It can be hoped that this book itself can be a place that scholars from many disciplines not only can find theories and concepts that can contribute to their own work, but also can begin to imagine themselves as potential participants in larger and profoundly more enlightening networks of knowledge discovery and creation. But such potential adventurers are to be warned that this journey is not without its infelicitous moments. This reviewer's experiences and stocks of disciplinary knowledge (informed by an undergraduate degree in biology and a PhD in communication and rhetorical studies) were an effective preparation for a positive and engaged response to the overall bio-symbolic approach. However, having only recently completely overcome my epistemological insecurity that a humanist scholar's particular interpretation of a text or message's meaning is meaningless unless empirically verified by a scientific experiment, my inward embattled humanist rhetorical scholar cringed at Condit's repeated concern to back up what would seem to be perfectly reasonable interpretive claims with empirical verification (see for instance 100, 135, 174–78). Such moments of discomfort, born of disciplinary and methodological biases, may be inevitable to most readers at different points in this book. These moments of discomfort or skepticism, one should recognize, are inevitable when one is reading a book that quite deliberately takes the readers out of their academically proscribed comfort zones. Moments of discomfort, however, are a small price to pay for a project of epistemological and disciplinary integration. Such an integration is undoubtedly necessary for the study of emotion—a phenomenon that has long been recognized to have neurological and cultural components. In terms of the much more recent explorations of “shared” and “public” emotion, the complexity of interactions between the emotions of particular organisms, the discourses by which they circulate, and the various political, cultural, and economic contexts within which these discourses circulate will undoubtedly require the insights of many disciplines and all the major research methodologies.One area that remains underdeveloped in Angry Public Rhetorics is a more systematic model of the “public” in public emotion. Thinking about the emotions as a phenomenon of public collectivities as opposed to just individuals requires more effective ways to theorize about how emotions are shared in publics and other communities. One natural way to think about this transition is to imagine communities as being like individual organisms. For instance, it is well established that one of the biological and evolutionary functions of fear is to allow individual organisms to better detect and respond to danger. So too it has been suggested that fear can serve a similar function for societies and polities—alerting us to threats that should engage our collective attention and deliberative political efforts. Condit seems to take this view, at least in the organic metaphors frequently used to describe publics and communities, speaking as she does of “the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Such organismic imagery is promising in many respects, for it suggests that the assemblages of human beings comprising polities, communities, and societies are akin to the complexes of cells, organs, and symbiots that work together within the body of an organism. If we take the organic metaphor seriously, discourse, communication, and rhetoric will remain central concepts that help us to understand how the “body” of a community is constituted and maintained in the face of the forces of entropy that threaten both bodies and human communities. However, such organic imagery might also distract from alternative conceptions of society, community, and polity that more completely capture the complexity and uniqueness of human communal life.Notwithstanding epistemological complexities or occasionally ambiguous organismic imagery, Condit's “biosymbolic” approach is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies and the humanities generally because it is another reminder of the continued relevance of biological materiality. Humanistic scholars that treat categories like “the body” and “embodiment” as completely open signifiers that can be construed in any way by the power of culture and convention will be disappointed to bump up against a central material fact of human existence—we have bodies (real bodies, not just cultural representations thereof). Scholars that are already sensitive to the importance of materialist philosophies like Marxism will undoubtedly welcome another reminder that our cultural world is connected in fundamental ways to our material existence within human bodies and societies. In the end the study of language, rhetoric, and culture will be enriched, not eclipsed, by works like Condit's that take the realities of our biological existence seriously.

Tushar Irani's Plato on the Value of Philosophy seeks to put our understanding of Plato's critique of rhetoric on a new footing by turning our attention to what we might call the social dimension of that critique. Irani reads the Gorgias and Phaedrus as complementary dialogues connected not only by their focus on rhetoric but also by their treatment of love (erōs) and friendship (philia) as integral to Plato's incipient model of a philosophical art of argument. Irani's most important contribution is to emphasize the centrality of “the different interpersonal attitudes that Plato believes distinguish the rhetorical ethos from the philosophical ethos: whereas the former seeks to dominate or otherwise win over an audience, the latter seeks to benefit others. A philosophical attitude towards argument thus fundamentally requires a form of care [for others] according to Plato” (6).Irani's introduction provides helpful context (8–18), including a brief treatment of the most important fifth- and fourth-century views of rhetoric, including those of Gorgias of Leontini, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. Isocrates's model of rhetoric receives a more detailed analysis (13–18), which locates Isocrates squarely in the camp of Gorgias and other “conventional” rhetoricians, whose views Irani will contrast with Plato's model of the “philosophical attitude towards argument.”The body of the study is divided into two parts: part 1 (chapters 1–4) treats the Gorgias, and part 2 (chapters 5–8) turns to the Phaedrus. In part 1, Irani argues that Plato's critique of Gorgianic rhetoric consists of two main interconnected arguments. First, Gorgias and his students Polus and Callicles share an “attitude towards argument” grounded in an instrumental “attitude towards others” that seeks to dominate them in the rhetorician's own interest. And second, this Gorgianic attitude fails to develop an account of the soul, the object both the rhetorician and the philosopher aim to affect through their different approaches to the art of argument. Part 2 turns to the Phaedrus in order to examine the Platonic model of the soul, upon which, Irani argues, a properly philosophical “attitude towards argument” and its concomitant “attitude towards others” is founded. For Irani, the Phaedrus provides a necessary supplement to the Gorgias by offering the detailed account of the soul to which the Gorgias gestures without elaborating. Moreover, by focusing on the Phaedrus's analysis of the soul and the soul's relationship to the forms, Irani seeks to connect Plato's critique of rhetoric to his metaphysics in an innovative way.Chapter 1 explores Socrates's contrast between two ways of life dedicated to “the practice of argument” in the Gorgias, that of the rhetorician and that of the philosopher. Irani's key claim here is that “for both the rhetorician and the philosopher, the practice of argument brings with it a distinctive political outlook and disposition towards others” (31). While the rhetorician is motivated by the goal of “securing [his] personal interests or desires,” the philosopher engages in “a use of argument aimed at mutual understanding” (33).Chapter 2 develops this contrast by focusing on Socrates's claim that he is the only practitioner of the true political art (Gorgias 521d), which he characterizes as therapeia, a “form of care for the soul” (46). Irani argues that all three interlocutors in the Gorgias confirm that “while a conventional rhetorician will calibrate his efforts at persuasion to the desires of those with whom he engages, his attitude towards argument is marked … by self-interested concerns, particularly a desire for dominance over others” (53). Hence the rhetorician sees his audience as a means to his own ends, unlike the philosopher, who seeks to benefit his interlocutors because he sees them as ends in themselves.In chapter 3, Irani begins with the well-known passage from the Gorgias in which Socrates claims to share with Callicles the unusual situation of having two beloved objects: Socrates loves philosophy and Alcibiades just as Callicles loves the people (dēmos) of Athens and a young man named Demos (481c–d). The approach the two lovers take to their twin beloveds exemplifies their contrasting “ways of approaching the human soul,” which is central to their “two different ways of approaching politics” (69).An analysis of Callicles's “great speech” follows (70–75), in which Irani shows that Callicles's account of rhetoric contains a fundamental contradiction or “disharmony” (76). While the purpose of rhetoric, according to Callicles, is to satisfy the rhetorician's desires, the practice of rhetoric subjects the rhetorician to his audience's desires, which he must satisfy through pandering and flattery (77). The philosophical life, Irani emphasizes, suffers no such disharmony, since by practicing philosophy “Socrates sees himself fulfilling not only his own good but the good of others as well” (87).Chapter 4 concludes Irani's analysis of the Gorgias by connecting Callicles's immoralism and hedonism by showing how both emerge from his commitment to the rhetorical way of life and, in particular, the role of rhetoric in a model of politics in which the ultimate goal is to dominate others in a zero-sum game. Socrates's examination of Callicles, according to Irani, exposes an underlying “unreflectiveness” about what the good for humans actually is. This unreflectiveness is, in turn, connected to the absence of an adequate account of the soul and human motivation in the Gorgianic model of rhetoric. For Plato's alternative account of the soul, the reader must turn to the Phaedrus.Picking up on the discussion in chapter 4, Irani begins his reading of the Phaedrus in chapter 5 with an analysis of two models of love (erōs) presented in the three speeches in the first half of the dialogue. Lysias's speech and Socrates's first speech present love as a “purely pleasure-seeking drive,” while Socrates's second speech (his palinode) offers “an account of love grounded in the appreciation of matters of real value” (113). Irani's analysis of the three speeches emerges organically from his reading of the Gorgias and its contrast between two different views of human motivation that characterize the “rhetorical ethos” and the “philosophical ethos.” “The main import of Socrates' account of interpersonal love in the palinode,” according to Irani, is that the “genuine lover” described in the myth of the charioteer regards “his partner as a fellow companion in learning … rather than as a mere provider of pleasure” (129).Irani further argues that this view of the beloved object as a partner depends on Plato's model of psychology and, in particular, its account of human desire and motivation. Irani emphasizes Plato's analysis of the soul's complex form, in which “reason functions as an independent source of motivation in pursuing matters of value” (129, emphasis original). The chapter ends by suggesting that Plato's characterization of the forms as “the proper objects of desire for the rational part of the soul” is key to understanding how reason can constitute such an independent source of motivation (130).Accordingly, chapter 6 elaborates the psychological model of motivation sketched out in the previous chapter by adducing evidence from elsewhere in the Platonic corpus, including the Republic and Symposium. Irani argues that, for Plato, the forms are objects of desire independent of any satisfaction the philosopher derives from them: “The value or goodness of the forms … cannot consist in us desiring them, but must be self-contained” (134). Thus the philosopher's love of the forms provides a model for his love of other people, since both kinds of beloved objects are viewed as ends with intrinsic value rather than merely as means of the lover's satisfaction.Moreover, the forms exercise what Irani calls an “internal compulsion” on the philosopher, since the soul, by its nature, desires the forms. Hence Irani attributes to Plato the view “that those who are compelled in philosophical argument are in an important sense compelled by themselves” (139, emphasis original). The philosopher's deployment of argument to arouse such “internal compulsion” in the interlocutor therefore differs sharply from the manipulative or coercive force of the rhetorician's argument. “In contrast to the power of a merely rhetorical argument that moves us as if by external force,” concludes Irani, “the power of a philosophical argument is found in its ability to provoke independent thought, such that the dialectician can be said to engage in a cultivation rather than an indoctrination of his interlocutor” (143).Chapter 7 focuses on Socrates's well-known chariot allegory (Phaedrus 246a and following) as a model for the philosophical practice of “soul leading” (psuchagōgia) that recognizes and attends to the rational nature of the interlocutor. Irani departs from other readers of the Phaedrus, who tend to see Socrates's second speech (the palinode) as a more or less complete rejection of his first speech. Instead, Irani reads Socrates's two speeches together as “an example of rational compulsion” (152) through which Socrates attempts to direct Phaedrus toward the love of wisdom and the practice of philosophy. By depicting Socrates attending to Phaedrus's rational nature—an expression of his love for him—the Phaedrus stages an example of the care for others (therapeia) that, according to Irani, is central to a properly philosophical art of argument.Chapter 8 concludes Irani's analysis of the Phaedrus with a focus on Plato's understanding of the soul as defined by the principle of self-motion. Irani connects this idea of self-motion especially with the rational part of the soul as the essence of human nature, suggesting that the philosophical orientation toward others recognizes and attends to them as “self-movers.” Thus Irani understands the appeal to Phaedrus in both of Socrates's speeches as displaying “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” directed at his “capacity for independent movement” through his rational nature (178).A brief conclusion considers the implications of Irani's arguments for some broader questions in Platonic scholarship. Two elements stand out here. First, if the essential feature that distinguishes philosophical argument from rhetoric is its orientation toward others as rational “self-movers,” we need not assess its success or failure based on whether or not it results in persuasion or conviction (185–88). The ultimate aim of philosophical argument, as a form of care, is to advance the interlocutor's own capacity to pursue wisdom, the ultimate human good. Second, Irani's emphasis on the mutually beneficial nature of the dialectic encounter allows him to put forward a nuanced version of Socratic eudaimonism that avoids both an anachronistic characterization of Socrates as a “pure altruist” and an overly egoistic reading of Socratic ethics (188–90). Unlike Gorgianic rhetoric, in which the orator's domination of his audience is a zero-sum affair, the dialectic model of philosophical argument allows for both partners to interrogate their beliefs and desires and to benefit from the exercise of the rational element of the soul in pursuit of wisdom.While Irani's exploration of the connections between the ethical and metaphysical elements of Plato's critique of rhetoric represents an important contribution, some readers will not find all the details of this argument equally persuasive. For example, taking the principle of self-motion as the basis for Socrates's view of his interlocutors as independent thinkers, as Irani does when he claims that Socrates's two speeches in the Phaedrus show “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” (178), seems somewhat forced. Socrates adduces the argument about self-motion as proof of the soul's immortality (Phaedrus 245c–246a), but an individual's capacity for independent thought seems not to depend on this view of the soul as a “self-mover” but rather arises from the interaction of the soul's constituent parts and its experiences with the forms when disembodied and traveling in the company of the gods. Others may take issue with his unusually optimistic assessment of Socrates's achievements in the Gorgias: does Socrates really succeed in moving Polus and Callicles “just a little closer to understanding” by “thwarting their desire to win in argument” or in leading Callicles, in particular, “to reconsider his account of natural justice” (187)? The text provides scant evidence for such reconsideration, since the Gorgias ends not with continued argument but with Socrates's mythic account of the soul's experience after death. This mythic narrative, like the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, relies upon fear of punishment—as opposed to rational argument—as a motivation for ethical behavior in life. Socrates's interlocutors in the Gorgias do not respond to the myth, but Socrates himself suggests Callicles's most likely reaction: “Perhaps you consider this account like a story told by an old lady and despise it” (527a).Such reservations, however, do not detract from the overall value of Irani's nuanced treatment of these two central works in the history of rhetoric. Throughout the book, Irani lays out his argument in clear, relatively jargon-free prose that readers will find easy to follow, regardless of their background. Those who are interested in the social and ethical dimensions of Plato's critique of rhetoric will find many insights in Irani's detailed readings of the Gorgias and Phaedrus. In addition, Irani's attention to Plato's theory of the forms and the nature of the soul will provide much food for thought and further debate about the relationship between Plato's metaphysics and his model of philosophical argument.

Read and considered thoughtfully, Safiya Umoja Noble'sAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racismis devastating. It reduces to rubble the notion that technology is neutral and ideology-free. Noble's crushing the neutrality myth does several things. First, this act lays foundations for her argument: only if you recognize and understand that technology is built with, and integrates, bias, can you then be open to her primary thesis: search engines advance discriminatory and often racist content. Second, it banishes a convenient response for many self-identified meritocratic Silicon Valley "winners" and their supporters. Post-reading, some individuals may retain their beliefs in a neutral and ideology-free technology in spite of the overwhelming evidence and citations Noble brings to bear. Effective countering of Noble's claims is unlikely to occur. For professionals working in technology, information, argumentation, and/or rhetorical studies,Algorithms of Oppressionis refreshing. Agonistic towards structural racism and its defenses, single-minded in its evidentiary presentation, collaborative in its acknowledgement of others' scholarship and research, Noble models many academic, critical, and social moves. Technology scholars and writers will find inAlgorithms of Oppressiona masterful mentor text on how to be an activist researcher scholar. Noble also makes this enjoyable reading. It is uncommon to find academic books that can simultaneously be read, used, and applied by academics and non-academics alike.

“Together, these two books present a strong justification for incorporating social media into schooled literacies because youth are engaging with social media, and bringing them into schooled literacies allows educators to foster critical thinking and awareness of these technologies.”

When representatives from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage program approved Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley for inclusion on its list of World Heritage sites in 2004, they did not anticipate that the area—selected as a model of sustainable development—would be delisted five years later. Plans for construction of Waldschlösschen Bridge (Waldschlößchenbrücke) on the site sparked a debate between the World Heritage Committee and Dresden’s city council over the best possible future for the site. This controversy is indicative of the challenges involved in maintaining international conservation efforts. I analyze how urban planners, Dresden’s city council, World Heritage representatives, and citizens navigated competing visions of Dresden’s past and future during the bridge controversy. Each party’s reliance on memories of Dresden’s past at the expense of other possibilities for invention reveals the limits of the topos of historical legitimacy as a determining factor for the future of a space.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric launches two features. The first is a dedicated Special Section, a space for shorter articles addressed to a specific theme, problem, or question. The second, In Focus, is a book forum in which several scholars take up a recent leading monograph and the author of the monograph offers a reply to their reflections. These new features will appear regularly in coming issues. Individually and together, they seek to encourage directed study and hopefully a bit of debate on pressing issues and contested questions that appear at the nexus of rhetoric and philosophy.The inaugural Special Section is addressed to a question that was frequently and somewhat famously posed by Paul Ricoeur—From where do you speak? It is a timely question—and perhaps a pressing one, at least as the grounds of expression feel more and more unstable, perhaps less as a function of inspired invention that takes flight from the given topoi than deepening divisions over whether there remain any common commonplaces. The matter of where and how to stand—and find standing—in the name of expression is on our minds, especially in the midst of historical and emergent forms of violence that work to contain language, dislocate the power of words, and displace the potential of speech.Co-edited and introduced by Louise du Toit, the three articles that compose the section emerged from the 2018 meeting of the Society of Ricoeur Studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the first time that the society gathered on the African continent. In different and often subtle ways, each article both recalls Ricoeur's influence on South African political thought and reflects on the struggle to overcome apartheid (apartness) and turn South Africa into a “home for all.” In 2019, now twenty-five years since the formal end of the regime and the beginning of nonracial democracy, apartheid's colonization remains evident. There are many who remain trapped and so without a place to speak in a way that might make a difference. Between past and future, the question of the transformative commonplace looms large.What then to say in the midst of violence? What is a plausible and proper response to rhetorical violence?With an evident concern for these questions and showing marked divergence over how they are best answered, the inaugural In Focus is addressed to Philippe-Joseph Salazar's book Words Are Weapons: Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror. Published first under the title Parole Armées: Comprendere et combattre la propagande terroriste, the French edition of the work was recognized with the 2015 Prix Bristol des Lumières.As with its counterpart, Salazar begins the English translation with a challenge to a long-standing topos, the “pacifist illusion: that weapons yield to words,” and closes with a difficult call to arms. The four essays addressed to Salazar's work, along with the author's own reply, reflect closely and carefully on this difficulty, the challenge of how to hear, interpret, and respond to the caliphate's rhetoric. The debate that ensues—and it is a debate, not least over whether Salazar is somehow guilty of “rhetoric”—turns not a little on how to best understand rhetoric itself and how to grasp its potential in the midst of terror. The topoi are not stable and the signs are difficult to read, all of which suggests a need to recall Jean Paulhan's concern as to the human “rendered speechless” (6). Are there too many or not enough flowers in the park?

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

In our current cultural era of numerous social movements, it is often easy to lose sight of what drives individuals and collectives toward action. As the editors and contributors of Unruly Rhetoric...

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine the level of authorial voice strength among Iranian second language (L2) writers; and (b) to investigate the relationship between L2 learners’ authorial voice strength and the quality of their argumentative written task performances. Argumentative writing samples were elicited from 129 upper-intermediate L2 learners in writing courses. To quantify learners’ voice strength, these samples were scored by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Raters also provided a holistic rating of the overall authorial voice strength in written argumentations. The quality of argumentations was measured using the TOEFL scoring rubric. While descriptive results indicated that learners demonstrated a low level of voice strength in their argumentations, results from Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) suggested positive associations between voice strength along with two of its dimensions and the quality of writings. Moreover, results from Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) pointed to the association of low and mid-level of writing quality and low voice strength, and the prevalence of high and mid voice strength in learners with high proficiency in writing. Finally, while an Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis revealed that the ‘presence’ dimension of authorial voice was the most difficult one for L2 learners, a Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis showed that the difficulty of the three voice dimensions did not differ significantly across genders. The findings were discussed regarding English L2 writing within the Iranian context.

Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.