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3992 articlesJune 2021
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Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...
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Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...
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Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...
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This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.
Subjects: antiracism , mindfulness
May 2021
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In 2013, Rhetoric Society Quarterly published an early review of relevant books in sound studies. In “Auscultating Again,” Joshua Gunn et al. carefully read relevant texts in the amorphous field kn...
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Kate Rich Kate Rich University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 240–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kate Rich; Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 240–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The War of Words</i>, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 M. Elizabeth Weiser M. Elizabeth Weiser The Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 242–244. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation M. Elizabeth Weiser; Review: The War of Words, by Kenneth Burke, edited by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, and Jack Selzer. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 242–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.242 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices</i>, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 Mudiwa Pettus Mudiwa Pettus City University of New York, Medgar Evers College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 237–240. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mudiwa Pettus; Review: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 237–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.237 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Pierre Chiron; Pierre Chiron Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Daniel Delattre Daniel Delattre Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 234–237. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Pierre Chiron, Daniel Delattre; Review: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica, edited by Federica Nicolardi. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 234–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.234 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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The book “Writing motivation research, measurement and pedagogy”, written by Muhammad M. M. Abdel Latif (2021) and published by Routledge, summarises and integrates literature on the role of motivation in writing over the last four decades. This book emerges out of the author’s experience and interest in writing motivation research—including a doctoral thesis on writing self-efficacy and apprehension—and out of his experience in teaching writing courses at the university level. Throughout six chapters, the author delves into research focused on eight main writing motivation constructs: writing apprehension, attitude, anxiety, self-efficacy, self-concept, achievement goals, perceived value of writing, and motivational regulation. Specifically, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are devoted to the conceptualization and measurement of writing motivation constructs. Chapter 3 focuses on the correlates and sources of students’ writing motivation. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 describe the effectiveness of different instructional practices and provide clear guidelines on how to motivate students to write. Finally, Chapter 6 presents directions to advance writing motivation research, measurement, and pedagogy. The book closes with a glossary of writing motivation constructs and other relevant concepts. The contents of all six chapters are reviewed below.
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Review: Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy and A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment ↗
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Preview this article: Review: Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy and A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/48/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege31353-1.gif
April 2021
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n Roxane Gay's CCCC 2021 keynote address she praised academic writing that people actually want to read, which
March 2021
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Other| March 12 2021 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2021) 54 (1): 101–106. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.1.0101 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 12 March 2021; 54 (1): 101–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.1.0101 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search You do not currently have access to this content.
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The Construction of Interpersonal Meanings in the <i>iPhone 1</i> Product Launch Presentation: Integrating Verbal and Visual Semiotics ↗
Abstract
Research problem: Discourse bridges between the speakers and the audience in product launches. However, how the verbals and the visuals work together in the construction of interpersonal meanings in such communication remains largely underexplored. Research question: How were interpersonal meanings constructed via verbal and visual semiotics in the iPhone 1 product launch presentation?. Literature review: Despite the recognized importance of innovation communication, communication at the launch phase is underexplored. Moreover, communication and management studies have generally neglected the role of grammar-based discourse in promoting innovation, while linguistic studies have paid inadequate attention to language's implications for innovation communication and management. Thus, we address the discursive building of interpersonal meanings in product launch presentations to fill such gaps. Methodology: Integrating Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen's Systemic Visual Grammar, we conduct both verbal and visual analyses to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Steve Jobs' iPhone 1 launch presentation. Results: Analysis of the verbal strategies suggests that Jobs built different interactive roles as an authority innovation leader and as a close “friend” willing to engage with the audience. Moreover, by combining verbal semiotics with the delicate arrangement of image act, size of frame, and angle, the presentation video was carefully planned to create offer contact, produce close social distance, and present equal and objective attitudes to further enhance the construction of interpersonal meanings, thus contributing to the audience's understanding and recognition of the innovative product. Conclusions: This article offers insights into innovation discourse and communication by investigating the semiotic features of the iPhone 1 product launch presentation, thus adding to the extant literature on professional communication and innovation management.
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A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers: Sentence Algebra & Document Algorithms: Brad Henderson: [Book Review] ↗
Abstract
Most textbooks and trade press books on engineering communication are genre based, proscription based, or some are a combination of the two. Henderson takes a different approach to teaching the rules of English grammar and how to apply those rules to craft effective sentences. His approach is mathematics based, presenting the rules of English grammar as sentence equations. This approach makes the book particularly intriguing as a resource for teaching students of engineering and science. Henderson's "A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers: Sentence Algebra & Document Algorithms" presents a distinctive approach and methodology for clear engineering communication, particularly suited to its specific audience. Henderson's methodology, grounded in the "universal language" of mathematics, is unique and refreshing. The book is a welcome addition to available resources for these students and their instructors.
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This book offers a welcome teaching and learning resource in Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The author is a Professor and Director ofThe Transdisciplinary Initiatives with the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. The author takes the reader through the history, design, and implementation of a relatively new variation of DITA, known as Lightweight DITA. Lightweight DITA was developed and is maintained by OASIS, the same standards body responsible for DITA, and differs from DITA in two particularly distinctive ways.
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Engineers Taking a Stance on Technical Communication: Peer Review of Oral Presentations via the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project ↗
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Introduction: To present technical content clearly and effectively for global users of English, engineering students need to learn how. About the case: Technical communication classes in Spain and the US engaged in an international telecollaborative project between cross-cultural virtual teams in which students in Spain developed oral presentations that were then peer-reviewed by counterparts in the US. Situating the case: Research on international professional communication and, more specifically, virtual exchange is rapidly growing to explore how instructors can help students gain key competencies such as audience awareness, intercultural sensitivity, and an understanding of English as a lingua franca. Approach/methods: As part of the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project network, this project focused on spoken communication. Data were analyzed from feedback forms used by US students to evaluate oral presentations, and on prelearning and postlearning reports completed by students in Spain, as well as from class discussions accompanying the project. Results/discussion: Through reflections on pragmatic strategies that facilitate exchange and collaboration in English as a lingua franca, the engineering students became more fully aware of the importance of rhetorical and linguistic factors that affect meaning-making for engineers internationally. Conclusion: Results suggest that students who participate in transnational virtual exchange projects integrate their desire to acquire knowledge with an awareness of the importance of sharing knowledge through mindful and inclusive communication practices. Technical and engineering communication instructors from different countries can heighten their students' audience awareness, and cultural and language sensitivities through such projects.
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Effective Scientific Communication: The Other Half of Science: Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Kelleen Flaherty: [Book Review] ↗
Abstract
The reviewer concludes that, overall, Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty’s "Effective Scientific Communication: The Other Half of Science" is an excellent introduction to scientific communication. Genre move analysis blended with step-by-step guidance and genre examples make this book a valuable guide for helping students in STEM fields acquire basic scientific communication skills. The book also provides food for thought for ESP teachers to foster research and encourage better-informed teaching practices.
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AbstractThis paper offers a review of the argumentation-theoretical literature on metaphor in argumentative discourse. Two methodologies are combined: the pragma-dialectical theory is used to study the argumentative functions attributed to metaphor, and distinctions made in metaphor theory and the three-dimensional model of metaphor are used to compare the conceptions of metaphor taken as starting point in the reviewed literature. An overview is provided of all types of metaphors distinguished and their possible argumentative functions. The study reveals that not all possible argumentative functions of metaphor have been taken into account, such as the role of conventional direct metaphors in standpoint and starting point. Novel direct metaphor as part of an analogy argument has received most attention, while indirect metaphor can constitute argumentative moves as well, such as the introduction of a standpoint, starting point or connection premise. The overview also shows that certain combinations of variables seem to be impossible of unlikely to occur. These results have a bearing on the analysis of metaphors in argumentative discourse and show the omission in current studies of metaphor. Being aware of these dimensions of metaphor ánd of its potential in argumentation would enrich argumentation studies and metaphor studies alike.
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Reviewed by: Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica ed. by Federica Nicolardi Pierre Chiron and Daniel Delattre Filodemo. Il primo libro della retorica. Edizione, traduzione e commento a cura di Federica Nicolardi (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2018). 464 pp. ISBN 978-88-7088-658-0 Le volume est dédié à “qui a vu ce livre grandir de jour en jour.” C’est une entreprise de patience, en effet, dont Federica Nicolardi livre le résultat. Un résultat spectaculaire, puisque, pour la première fois, sur une maquette glissée dans le volume imprimé, on peut appréhender le livre entier en deux coups d’œil, Tun pour les col. 1–147, l’autre au verso pour les col. 148–238. Jadis, en raison de la dispersion des fragments, l’attention se focalisait sur les morceaux présentant une certaine continuité, à savoir les quatre fragments et les sept colonnes de la partie centrale, la mieux conservée, du PHerc. 1427. Les autres bribes étaient éditées à part, en tant que fragments à contenu rhétorique, souvent sans même être rattachées à la Rhétorique. Sur cette large maquette synthétique (à trois plis), chaque fragment est dûment localisé et reproduit soit sous forme de photographie infrarouge, soit sous forme de la transcription réalisée en son temps à Naples ou à Oxford, quand l’original n’est plus disponible. Les lacunes prédominent, on le sait, et certaines pièces sont reproduites à l’écart, avec leur numérotation traditionnelle, faute d’avoir pu trouver leur place et un nouveau numéro dans la reconstitution, mais une telle vue d’ensemble représente un progrès indiscu-table par rapport aux éditions antérieures. La contrepartie est que la fin de la tâche, pour l’ensemble de la Rhétorique, s’éloigne quelque peu dans le temps, puisque le même travail n’a pas encore été fait pour ce qui subsiste des sept autres livres. On rappellera à ce propos que, dans le cadre du Philodemus’ Aesthetics Project initié au début des années 1990 par R. Janko, D. Obbink et D. Blank, le traitement de la Rhétorique a pris, en effet, beaucoup de retard, même si J. Hammerstaedt a fourni (dans les Cronache ercolanesi 22 (1992) : 9–117) une édition exemplaire de la fin (conservée de façon suivie) du livre III, et que D. Blank continue de travailler activement à la reconstruction et à l’édition fort délicates du livre VIII. L’état des papyrus, qui est souvent très problématique, explique évidemment la lenteur (apparente) du travail des érudits, qui disposent désormais – depuis seulement une vingtaine d’années –de moyens nouveaux et efficaces (dont les images infrarouges ne sont pas le moindre) pour entreprendre une reconstruction virtuelle, bibliologiquement fondée, des rouleaux ouverts, et tous aujourd’hui démembrés : cela exige des efforts et un temps considérables ! [End Page 234] Un appareil philologique substantiel accompagne la maquette : après un sommaire (p. 7–9), un avertissement (p. 11) et une liste des abréviations utilisée pour la bibliographie (p. 13–21), figurent une liste des éditions de référence des papyrus d’Herculanum citées dans le volume (p. 23–25) ainsi qu’une liste des abréviations des inventaires et autres catalogues édités depuis la découverte, au XVIIIe siècle, de la bibliothèque de Philodème (p. 27). Suit une précieuse reconstitution du contenu de cette partie de l’ouvrage de Philodème, compte tenu de ce que Ton sait du reste (p. 31–48). Après une table de concordances entre les différents numéros des fragments (p. 167–182), un conspectus siglorum (p. 183–185) et un conspectus signorum (p. 187 : il s’agit des signes critiques utilisés), Federica Nicolardi propose ensuite (p. 189–272) une édition critique, accompagnée d’une traduction – là où le texte l’autorise –, ce qui permet à la fois de lire plus confortablement le texte restitué, et de réfléchir aux variantes ainsi qu’à l’histoire de la reconstitution présentée. Les sources les plus fréquemment utilisées sont bien sûr...
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Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...
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The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson ↗
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Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...
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Review of "Rhetoric of health and medicine as/is: Theories and approaches for the field by Lisa Melonçon, S. Scott Graham, Jenell Johnson, John A. Lynch, and Cynthia Ryan," Melonçon, L. Graham, S.S, Johnson, J., Lynch, J., & Ryan, S. (Eds). (2020). Rhetoric of health and medicine as/is: Theories and approaches for the field. The Ohio State University Press. https://doi.org/10.26818/9780814214466 ↗
Abstract
The foreword, written by Judy Z. Segal, begins with a brief dialogue between a patient and a nurse that illustrates the effects of discursive actions on health and medicine. It is a dialogue between a patient and a nurse, reminiscent of stories of ancient cartographers who mapped their changing and uncertain worlds through stories, discovering ever new riches in a world that wasn't flat. In the same way, contemporary thinkers in health and medicine are discovering the treasure in exploring rhetoric and technical communication across traditional boundaries. These authors move through previously uncharted territory with story and new questions that extend the boundaries of our individual bodies. They explore important questions of individual human agency and how that intersects with social and rhetorical theory. Critical questions new to medicine in the twenty-first century, such as resistance, power of representation, and where advocacy for health justice lies, are topics explored through a variety of lenses in this collection.
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Review of "The science of communicating science by Craig Cormick," Cormick, C. (2019). The science of communicating science. CSIRO publishing ↗
Abstract
The Science of Communicating Science by Dr. Craig Cormick is a lively introduction to the foundational principles of science communications, particularly those oriented towards the public. Dr. Craig Cormick is a well-known science communicator and former president of the Australian Science Communicators, a network of science communicators and journalists. Cormick has also written over 30 books of fiction and non-fiction---in addition to academic articles---and has worked with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which incidentally also published his textbook. The Science of Communicating Science operates on the premise that science communication is a complex process requiring extensive and time-consuming interdisciplinary research. Cormick's textbook aims to simplify the learning process by distilling well over 400 sources into a compact volume so that novice science communicators may learn important skills for informing and empowering the public by telling engaging stories, fostering interdisciplinary skills, and understanding the audience.
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Review of "Rhetorical work in emergency medical services: Communicating in the unpredictable workplace by Elizabeth Angeli," Angeli, E. L. (2019). Rhetorical work in emergency medical services: communicating in the unpredictable workplace. Routledge ↗
Abstract
In Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace (2019), Elizabeth L. Angeli explores the unpredictable workplaces which are the locations of emergency medical services provided by first responders, the EMS personnel who receive 911 calls but may have little idea about what to expect once they arrive at the site of the emergency. While rhetoric of health medicine (RHM) is not a new area of rhetoric, Angeli found little research about EMS professional rhetoric, leaving a void in understanding the modes of communication in these ever-changing, life-altering workplaces. Her text began as part of her dissertation project but morphed into a rhetorical analysis/EMS rhetorical training pedagogy for Technical Professional Communication (TPC) and RHM as well as EMS trainers and trainees.
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Review of "Nihilism and technology by Nolen Gertz," Gertz, N. (2018). Nihilism and technology. Rowman & littlefield ↗
Abstract
Nolen Gertz's Nihilism and Technology is a commendable book the analyzes the human-technology relations by applying Nietzsche's nihilistic views to technology. By exploring the intertwinement of technology and nihilism, the book underscores its thesis that technologies are our means of escapism from the meaninglessness of our lives. This book turns away from the technophilic and technophobic views of technology and instead moves us toward questioning "how technologies both shape and are the result of... ideological definitions" (Gertz, 2018, p. 7). This is an awakening read that leaves the readers pondering over the numbing effects of technologies.
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Preview this article: Review: Sixteen Teachers Teaching: Two-Year College Perspectives, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/48/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege31206-1.gif
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Preview this article: Review: Circulating Ethical Digital Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/83/4/collegeenglish31197-1.gif
February 2021
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Book review
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Review of "Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families" by Kate Vieira ↗
Abstract
Book review.