Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

“Using what he calls the “Caribbean Carnivalseque” as a rhetorical trope that defines the essence of being Caribbean, Browne grounds his analysis in Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives and the concept of human beings as symbol-using animals.”

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

ABSTRACT The emplacements of rhetoric are manifold and the inquiries into the topologies of rhetoric are ways of understanding developments in rhetorical theory. To these ends, I contrast in this article the invocations of place in rhetorical theory old and new. In this long view, the spatiality of rhetoric appears to be multifaceted. I show that in Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, spatiality is topical, figured metaphorically and literally, and functions as a precedent condition for rhetoric. I argue that modern/postmodern theories differ from traditional theories of rhetoric not because they rely more or less on the materiality or immateriality of place, but because of their orientations to place as heterotopic, that is, as fluid and contingent. I then offer an account of how heterotopic rhetoric challenges orders of knowledge allowing for ever-new articulations through a close reading of Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. The heterotopology of rhetoric proposed here expands understandings of the heuristic function of place. The essay considers the implications heterotopic place holds for identity and subjectivity.

Edward Schiappa published a series of articles and a book in 1990 and 1991 that, collectively, challenged the dominant narrative concerning the Older Sophists and early Greek Rhetorical Theory as well as calling into question certain revisionist historical accounts. In this essay the author provides a narrative about those projects and the responses they elicited in the hope that it provides insights about the production of those publications, as well as an opportunity to revisit certain theoretical and methodological concerns that continue to be relevant to historians of rhetoric and philosophy.

Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

This review essay places Stephanie Kerschbaum’s Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference and Shannon Walters’s Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics in a conversation about how we can more productively identify with and across difference. While they have different theoretical approaches and applications, both Kerschbaum and Walters discuss identification, embracing rather than erasing difference, and the importance of eschewing stereotypes that are harmful to the multiple ways that we encounter and interact with disability and difference in the classroom and in our rhetorical histories and theories.

Research problem: Deciding whether to accept or reject contract clauses in software purchasing contracts is a complex communication-related task, which is likely faced daily by a multitude of software purchasing professionals in a variety of organizations. Research question: What are the effects of viewing contract clauses as video clips, compared to viewing clauses as text only, in terms of cognitive effort, communication ambiguity, and correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts? Literature review: The literature on the Media Richness and Media Naturalness theories suggest that viewing contract clauses as video clips should reduce cognitive effort and communication ambiguity. However, while Media Richness theory suggests that correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts should increase with the use of video clips, Media Naturalness theory suggests a neutral overall effect. Methodology: An experiment was conducted in which student participants were asked to either accept or reject 20 clauses from a software contract, placing themselves in the position of buyers. Of the 20 clauses, 6 were intentionally deceitful and potentially harmful to the buyer. Approximately half of the participants reviewed the contract clauses as web-based text, and the remaining as web-based video clips. Results and conclusions: Viewing contract clauses as video clips was associated with significantly less cognitive effort and less communication ambiguity than viewing the clauses as text only. Counterintuitively, increases in perceived cognitive effort and communication ambiguity were associated with more successful identification and rejection of deceitful contract clauses. The combination of these competing effects led to an overall neutral effect of the medium on the correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses. These findings are consistent with expectations based on Media Naturalness theory, particularly its compensatory adaptation proposition, and inconsistent with expectations based on Media Richness theory.

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s  The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

Greater attention to methods and methodologies when studying writing in religious contexts is needed to help researchers navigate ethical issues specific to faith communities and religious practices; to improve knowledge regarding the relationships among writing, religion, and faith; and to encourage respect for religious and nonreligious beliefs. To that end, I present findings from a study based on interviews of 14 scholars who have published results from their empirical studies on writing and religion or faith. Specifically, interview data show, first, researchers’ religious positionalities acting as terministic screens and promoting identification with participants, and, second, researchers’ efforts to fairly represent participants’ beliefs and the methods they use to do so. The article also offers a heuristic, based on findings from the interviews, for maintaining a reflective position when conducting research on writing and religious contexts.

Reviews Kathleen S. Lamp. A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome. South Carolina, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN 9781611172775 What is the relationship between rhetoric, both spoken and visual, and ci\'ic participation in Augustan Rome? A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome, attempts to address this question, beginning in the intro­ duction by examining Augustus' Famous assertion that he "entered Rome a city of brick and left it a citv of marble". The study goes on to examine how visual displays function themselves as a form of persuasion that, in Augustus' case, helped him to win and maintain power. Her argument is that Augustan culture was heavilv influenced bv rhetorical theory, which in turn "guided ci\ ic participation and rhetorical practice" (p. 5), and fur­ ther, that the synthesis of rhetoric to image and politics in so sweeping a manner was a central aspect of Augustus' accomplishment. The first chapter surveys Rome's "rhetorical situation" upon Augustus' assumption of sole command. One of the conundrums Augustus faced was how to maintain the goodwill of those he governed. Lamp asserts (p. 13) that Augustus' attempts to gain acceptance were rhetorical from the standpoint that "thev represented a tvpe of persuasive communication between the peo­ ple and the government about the workings of the state". A significant part of his rhetorical strategy7 was his reliance on various mythological traditions such as those of Aeneas, Romulus, and of the monarchy and its demise. Chapter two ("Seeing Rhetorical Theory") argues that the ancient theory of rhetoric broadened under the empire to include other literary genres beyond oratorv, including non-traditional forms of media not usually associated with rhetoric, including coins, monuments, and city planning. The chapter inclu­ des a good discussion of the relationship between the visual and memory in rhetorical theorists, focusing on Quintilian and Cicero who clearly associ­ ated the two, and who, in addition, addressed the role of monuments and urban spaces in creating collective public memory. The next chapter ("The Augustan Political Myth") builds on the first two, and starts with a close examination of the Ara Pads as a piece of Augustan rhetoric, examining how it constructed myth and memory in Augustan Rome. She argues that the altar used conventions of rhetoric that were roughly analogous to those expounded in the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian with a view to addressing its audience. Chapter four Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIII, Issue 4, pp. 431-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. C 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/joumals.php7p—reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.2015.33.4.431. 432 RHETORICA ("Let Us Now Praise Great Men") similarly examines the Forum of Augustus and its rhetorical function; the chapter begins with a discussion of Isocrates theory of rhetoric that argued against the use of visual media or static representative forms of rhetoric, such as statuary. Of course, this is precisely what Augustus' forum was - a monument that employed a permanent, visual record intended to educate the audience in a particular set of values with a view to imitation, something that had a long-standing tradition in Rome, particularly with the use of funerary images. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how the rhetoric of the forum itself parallels its function as an administrative and judicial center where oratory would be practiced. Lamp then turns in chapter five ("Coins, Material Rhetoric, and Circu­ lation") to the dissemination of the Augustan political myth. She traces, via the numismatic record, the creation of that myth, but further argues that it evolved over time, noting that the coins issued at the end of his reign indi­ cate a popular acceptance of that myth. She focuses on three aspects of Augustus' program prior to 13 BC: pietas, succession, and the trifecta of peace, victory, and prosperity. In the numismatic record after 9 BC we find emblems designed to emphasize Augustus' pietas and his role as poutifex maximus, while she notes that prior to...

Reviews 437 proposta d identificazione dell autore di questa declamazione con uno dei piu importanti maestri di retorica del tempo: Mario Vittorino. Conformemente ai criteri delle Edizioni dell'Universita di Cassino, entrambi i volumi propongono delle traduzioni che combinano felicemente limpidezza espressiva e riproduzione delle peculiaritá dello stile declamato­ rio, spesso aspro ed ellittico. Entrambi propongono poi un apparato biblio­ gráfico ricco e di grande ntilita, aggiornato al 2013. Si tratta nel complesso di due opere che riescono a coniugare con grande armonía la ricchezza e profonditá del commento filológico con una puntúale trattazione e contestualizzazione anche di problematiche di carattere piu generale. L'argomentazione e sempre esaustiva e di grande chiarezza . Grazie a queste doti tanto il Matheniaticus curato da Stramaglia, quanto il Sepulcnini incantation curato da Schneider risultano al tempo stesso un prezioso strumento di lavoro per gli specialisti e un valido mezzo di diffusione delle declamazioni presso un pubblico studentesco purtroppo ancora raramente sensibilizzato verso questo tipo di testi. Ai i ssandra Rolle, Université de Lausanne James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 424. Cloth $105.00, paper $35.00 ISBhf(paper) 9780226016481 There is a narrative that portrays rhetoric as an often-maligned theory of human discourse, educational regime, and practice. It is a superficial narra­ tive that has been under increasing assault since the new rhetoric's birth dur­ ing the 1920s and 30s. I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke began the revision with novel conceptions of rhetoric as a social practice; Richard McKeon, Henry W. Johnstone, Ch. Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Ernesto Grassi advanced it in mid-century with reflections on rhetoric as at the core of philosophy (or philosophy of a certain sort); by late century John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, among others, were rebuffing the subjugation of rhetoric to philosophy with an aesthetic interpretation based on a recuperation of the elder sophists' vision; and in this century scholars such as Diane Davis and Thomas Rickert continue the assault with formulations that carry rhetoric beyond the human and into such domains as the ambience of materiality. Although these thinkers conceptualize the new rhetoric from divergent start­ ing points and in different frames, they share a common desire to disclose what lies beneath a facile rendition of rhetoric as mere persuasion, namely its abiding centrality to what makes us human. This is the animus of James Crosswhite's Deep Rhetoric. Beginning with the observation that "we are rhe­ torical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other" (p. 17), Crosswhite seeks to understand how ordinary rhetoric, whereby we seek to influence and provide direction, assu­ mes a world with "dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, 438 RHETORICA human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so brings the very possibility of philosophy and science into its realm" (p. 17). This is the realm of deep rhetoric, a realm that plumbs the depth of what makes us human and aligns with a transcendent aspiration of the new rhetoricians that by striving to understand rhetoric as an intellectual, educational, political, and social pur­ suit we will come to better understand the human condition. Deep Rhetoric has as its subtitle a list of terms that serve as its organizing discussions: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. These are not ran­ dom choices. At its core, Crosswhite's book is concerned with the central problem that has been to the fore of rhetorical thought since World War I: overcoming through public argument the quest by power to gain a monopoly on violence and to use its monopoly to dominate others. Deep Rhetoric seeks a worldly stance open to and that opens the possibihty for transcending the narrow logoi of instrumental rationality, logoi constituting the calculus of a system logic that dehumanizes others by excluding those dimensions of pathos and ethos that make humanity and community possible. The book opens with a consideration of what deep rhetoric means. Crosswhite draws contrasts between historicist views that position rhetoric in terms of its origins at a specific time and under specific conditions, such as...

440 RHETORIC A and justice. It offers an aspirational vision for the new rhetoric that has been unfolding for nearly a century. Hannah Arendt famously wrote of the human condition as in the world. Crosswhite's project embraces her vision as synonymous with the deep insight into the human condition that is offered by a philosophical rhetoric and the world its insights might instigate. Gerard A. Hauser University of Colorado Boulder Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 368 pp. ISBN: 978-0199558247 Quentin Skinner last devoted a monograph to theories of rhetoric almost twenty years ago, in his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy ofHobbes (1996). Forensic Shakespeare is in the same vein, deviating from the attention Skinner gives to republican liberty in his two more recent works (Liberty Before Liberalism, 1997 and Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 2008). Those look­ ing for further commentary on these themes within the scope of the history of political thought will not find it here; it is not Skinner's purpose. Forensic Shakespeare at no point treads this familiar ground of the history of political thought; the analysis, however, remains thoroughly within the realm of intellectual history. There are questions literary scholars might be keen to ask of this book, especially related to interpretation and theatrical staging, but Skinner makes clear from the outset that these are outside his remit. He is interested in what he calls "explanation" rather than "interpretation", in treating Shakespeare's works as historical texts, open to the sort of histor­ ical analysis Skinner is known for. The central claim of the book is that "among Shakespeare's plays there are several in which the dramaturgy is extensively drawn from clas­ sical and Renaissance treatises on judicial rhetoric" (p. 1). Skinner's focus is on two periods in Shakespeare's career - between 1594 and 1600, and between the summer of 1603 and the beginning of 1605 - covering plays such as Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Othello. These, especially Hamlet and those belonging to the Jacobean period, Skinner sug­ gests can be referred to as Shakespeare's "forensic plays" for their use of the rules and styles of forensic rhetoric - the rhetoric of the courtroom. This should immediately resonate with any reader familiar with these plays; the climax of the plot often involves a court scene in which the guilt of characters is disputed, whether in the courtroom of The Merchant of Venice or the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. But the question of why Shakespeare turns to forensic rhetoric in these periods of his career is a question that Skinner leaves open. As he 'states in his introduction, he intends this book as a foundational one - he will argue that Shakespeare was using these rhetorical sources in his plays, any further questions or conclusions are left for future studies. Reviews 441 Aftei a shoi t inti eduction, setting out his purpose, giving fulsome acknowledgement to the existing literature on the subject, and establishing his methodological boundaries, Skinner opens with a description of the clas­ sical rhetorical tiadition in Shakespeare s England, giving a thorough over­ view on the topic for those not otherwise familiar with it. Already Skinner begins to hint at Shakespeare's deviation from such traditional rhetorical norms, a topic to which he returns in the final pages of the book. This first chapter almost stands alone as a useful introduction to the revival, teaching and debates of classical rhetoric in Renaissance England, and is of itself demonstrative of Skinner's rich knowledge of the topic. The second chapter introduces the forensic plays, which are distin­ guished from the rest of Shakespeare's work in their focus on the forensic yem/s of rhetoric. Skinner makes the tantalizing suggestion that "Shakes­ peare is interested at most stages of his literary career in the full range of distinctively rhetorical utterance" (p. 48), but focuses on Shakespeare's use of forensic rhetoric in this selection of plays, leaving space for a study of Shakespeare and his engagement with the other two types of rhetoric - epideictic and deliberative, both which have a strong relationship with the political. The remaining chapters explore the parts of...

Reviews 433 The study is in general good, but not without some flaws and omis­ sions. For example, in chapter one she asserts with little argument that Augustus sought to associate himself with Servius and his reforms in partic­ ular. Her short history of rhetoric under Augustus relies too much on Tacitus' Dialogits and on relatively later sources, (Cassius Dio and Quintilian), omitting Seneca the Elder and Seutonius' lives of famous rhetoricians that bring us closer to Augustus. She asserts in chapter two that history started to become recognized as a rhetorical theory under Augustus, something already clearly understood by Cicero (one thinks of his letter to Lucceius, Ad fanuliares 5.12). Chapter three relies too much on Ann Vasaly and not enough on other scholarship (e.g. Catherine Edwards, Mary Jaeger, and Andrew Feldherr to cite a few) who look at Rome as a "text", and the chapter seems to make a conclusion long since established - that the city could be read as such. Indeed, it seems to me a general flaw of the book that the biblio­ graphy is frequently jejune, while the study itself covers a good deal of ter­ ritory that has already' been traversed. Still, Kathleen Lamp's study will help us to rethink the connections between the visual and the rhetorical during this crucial epoch. Steve Rutledge, Sheridan, Oregon [Quintiliano], L'astrologo (Declamazioni maggiori, 4), a cura di Antonio Stramaglia. Cassino : Edizioni dell'Università degli Studi di Cassino, 2013,251 pp. ISBN 9788883170713, e [Quintilien], Le tombeau ensorcelé, (Grandes déclamations, 10), a cura di Catherine Schneider. Cassino: Edizioni delTUniversità degli Studi di Cassino, 2013, 359 pp. ISBN 9788883170683 1 volumi 4 e 10 delle Declamazioni maggiori, rispettivamente curati da A. Stramaglia e C. Schneider, usciti nel maggio 2013 per le Edizioni dell'Università di Cassino, si iscrivono all'interno di un progetto internazionale di traduzione e commento delle diciannove Maiores che raggiunge cosi un totale di undid tomi pubblicati. Entrambi i volumi presentano la stessa struttura, comune a tutta la serie. Nell'introduzione è esposto in modo sintético lo sviluppo dell'argomentazione di ciascun discorso e sono analizzate le principali caratteristiche delle diverse parti in cui si articola. Seguono poi considerazioni generali sulla lingua e sullo stile, e quindi ipotesi sulla datazione e riflessioni sulla fortuna. Successivamente viene proposto il testo latino affiancato da traduzione, in italiano in un caso e in francese nell'altro, e corredato da un ricco apparato di note critiche e di commento. Per entrambi i volumi, il testo latino assunto come base è quello dell edizione teubneriana curata da Hâkanson nel 1982, ma in numerosi passi entrambi gli studiosi se ne discostano, sempre segnalandolo e dandone dovuto conto nelle note di commento. Nella Declamazione maggiore 4 Stramaglia 434 RHETORICA introduce anche una suddivisione degli ampi capitoli dell'edizione critica di Hâkanson in paragrafi di più breve estensione: questa mise en page del testo risulta particolarmente utile per il reperimento e la citazione dei passi. La Declamazione maggiore 4, curata da Stramaglia, è incentrata sul tema dell'astrologia. Si tratta di un discorso pronunciato da un vir fortis che chiede alio Stato, come ricompensa per i suoi atti di valore, il permesso di suicidarsi senza essere per questo condannato a restare privo di sepoltura, secondo quanto previsto dalla legge. La sua decisione deriva dalla volontà di contrastare una funesta profezia fatta da un astrólogo prima délia sua nascita e secondo la quale, dopo essere diventato un eroe di guerra per la sua patria, si sarebbe macchiato di parricidio. L'azione giudiziaria nasce dalLopposizione del padre alla richiesta del figlio. Questa controversia è caratterizzata da un sapiente equilibrio tra terni declamatori tradizionali (contrasto padre-figlio; motivo del parricidio; figura del vir fortis e suo diritto a scegliere la propria ricompensa) e motivi (almeno per noi) più originali, corne il rilievo dato appunto alla temática délia astrologia. Nell'Introduzione Stramaglia nota in particolare corne la scelta del soggetto principale si presenti quale un'evidente concessione a gusti declamatori moderni, anche se poi la declamazione resta rigorosa­ mente « classica » nel suo sviluppo e nella sua articolazione. Se infatti il rilievo dato all'astrologia non avrebbe certo incontrato il plauso...

Applying a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters circulated transnationally from 1859–1866 by the leadership of the revolutionary Irish nationalist Fenian movement, this essay argues that constitutive rhetorical theory's assumed ideological effects must be modified to account for the transnational rhetorical practices of movements like the Fenians. The essay first traces how Fenian identification practices seek to fix the entire diaspora as the "Irish people" and Ireland as the true homeland. It then examines how the movement transcodes its constitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United States and Ireland, and how these strategies hamper the organization's ability to sustain the unity required for success. While the constituted Irish Revolutionary remained in each national context, their strategies for fulfilling the constitutive narrative had splintered, helping to doom the cause. The Fenian case demonstrates the need to render constitutive rhetorical theory in more dialogic terms, especially for transnational audiences.

Book Review| August 01 2015 Review: The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers, by Tarik Wareh Tarik Wareh, The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2012, viii + 236 pp. ISBN 9780674067134 David Depew David Depew University of Iowa Project of the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI). 230 North Clinton, 100 Bowman House, Iowa City, Iowa 52242 USA david-depew@uiowa.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2015) 33 (3): 320–322. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2015.33.3.320 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David Depew; Review: The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers, by Tarik Wareh. Rhetorica 1 August 2015; 33 (3): 320–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2015.33.3.320 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2015 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 Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The arrival of digital technologies, along with the subsequent proliferation of new communication media enabled by these technologies, has brought new attention to the connection between networks and the rhetoric/writing they support. Network writing and networked rhetorics are intimately bound up with digital networks, and as such a theory of either must make use of new tools to address the unique characteristics of the rhetorical situation presented by digital networks.

ABSTRACT Freedom is a contested concept, at once bound up with and promising transcendence of social bonds. This article examines the understanding of freedom particular to rhetorical theory, a troubled freedom that is the negotiation of constraint. Articulating this concept in negotiation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “universal audience,” the article explores a key implication of troubled freedom for the governance of human persons. Given that human personhood is a rhetorical phenomenon, that persons emerge in flows of tendentious discourse, the article urges a rhetorical approach to democratic constitution writing. Constitution should be composed to foster the rhetorical capabilities of demoi.

Looking back at my four years as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am thankful to all the authors, reviewers, and special issue editors whose hard work we see represented in volumes 15 through 18. I am also proud of the diversity and high quality of scholarship included in these volumes. I think that the journal’s contents prove that the history of rhetoric as a field has evolved beyond its original preoccupation with ancient and medieval rhetoric into a robust scholarly enterprise that illuminates rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy in all historical periods. What binds this diverse set of studies together is the historical lens, a perspective that is sensitive to discontinuities and disruptions, to power struggles, and to the performative complexity of rhetoric as an embodied practice.This is not to say that we all abide by a fixed methodology. On the contrary, historians of rhetoric do not take their approach for granted but instead continue to debate how their scholarly habituation and lived experiences influence their theories and methods of historical research. Witness, for example, Practicing Histories: On the Doing of History and the Making of Historians in Rhetoric, a special issue guest edited by Christa J. Olson (volume 15, number 1, 2012). As Olson remarks in her introduction, “historiographers take aim at points of disconnection” (3) and stitch together places and moments that may not appear related.That this sort of opportune stitching together can generate powerful insights is apparent in the journal’s special issues, most of which began as American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) symposia. Rhetoric and Its Masses (guest edited by Dave Tell) and Rhetoric and Freedom (guest edited by Susan C. Jarratt) offer not only broad-ranging explorations of their respective topics but also demonstrate the value of historical inquiry into some of the most abiding issues in rhetorical studies. ASHR symposia and special issues that grow out of them allow us to bring together the work of established and young scholars alike, and as such they illustrate the value of ASHR and its journal as sites of scholarly training of historians of rhetoric.In addition to themed special issues, I would like to highlight some of the exciting trends that I believe are gaining prominence in the history of rhetoric. One such trend is the exploration of spatial and visual practices in different historical periods. For example, Diana Eidson’s study of the Celsus Library at Ephesus probes the power of spatial rhetoric to address its historical audiences, both elite and nonelite. Or take Julia Marie Smith’s article on The Book of Margery Kempe, in which she examines the contributions of multiple hands to this medieval manuscript’s central narrative. Not incidentally, both authors use images to support their arguments. Although Advances can accommodate only black-and-white illustrations in print, the journal’s online version allows one to view their color versions.Another trend is the investigation of the relationship between rhetoric and religion in diverse historical and cultural contexts. In the past three years, the journal published studies of theological influences on rhetorical theories and pedagogical doctrines of such figures as Augustine, Austin Phelps, and William Enfield; analyses of the argumentative strategies used by medieval rabbis and Jaina mystics; and essays on the use of religious appeals deployed by nineteenth-century African American speakers. Besides being “sermonic” to begin with (Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks 1970), rhetoric often derives much of its poignancy from a connection to religious rituals and imaginaries. Examples of this connection are ubiquitous in contemporary culture; consider President Barack Obama’s spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the slain parishioners of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on climate change. Historians of rhetoric are particularly well positioned to shine the light on such interventions.I do not mean to suggest, of course, that classical and medieval rhetoric have been exhausted as areas of inquiry; quite the opposite. If recent publications are any indication, we still have much to learn from reinterpreting Plato and Aristotle as well as from revisiting the Middle Ages. As someone who is personally invested in regarding afresh rhetoric’s ancient heritage, I wholeheartedly agree with Olson’s (2012) claim: “we look again at old ideas and find ourselves with new questions” (7).This is why I am thrilled to welcome Art Walzer, a renowned scholar of Greek and Roman rhetoric and a beloved mentor to many historians of rhetoric, as the journal’s incoming editor in chief. I am confident that under Art’s guidance the journal will continue to deepen our understanding of traditional sites of historical inquiry as well as grow in promising new directions.Ekaterina V. HaskinsRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, 2.36Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of MotivesCome, taste freedom with us.—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom is the precondition of choice and will, essential to his sense of the human; Pussy Riot, on a more celebratory note, extends an invitation to freedom’s banquet but tacitly acknowledges that that invitation needs to be accepted. The sixty and more rhetoricians who gathered to mull over this pairing of rhetoric and freedom in San Antonio in May 2014 at the biennial symposium of the American Society of the History of Rhetoric brought with them that open spirit—a utopian urge to pursue freedom as a ground, a practice, and a potential outcome of rhetorical action. They also brought their deep rhetorical knowledge of the complexities of this subject: their awareness that this long-standing relationship between rhetoric and freedom is paradoxical, fraught with deception, and at times a spur to violence.The distortions of the term in political/popular discourse since 9/11 suggest that the time is right for a scholarly return to “freedom.” Casting himself as “author” of and “worker” for freedom, George W. Bush (2003) has now branded his own presidency and its legacy as a “Freedom Agenda.” Can freedom be authored, or forced, by one state onto another? Does “working for” freedom through military invasion not constitute the most basic violation of freedom? Although it is unlikely that such questions will be posed within the Bush Institute, a think tank “separately managed” by the Bush Foundation over the objections of trustees at Southern Methodist University adjacent to which it is housed (Traub 2009), we rhetoricians have the space, time, and conditions for contemplating and working through questions that the creation and naming of the Bush Institute raises. What is the relationship between freedom and the state, especially states that purport to be democratic? What are the personal conditions that enable rhetorical acts? Who are rhetorical persons and to what extent can we grasp their “freedom,” or lack thereof? And what will we rhetorical beings, or at least some of us, risk to win the pleasures and rewards of collective freedom?The articles brought together here, expanded versions of talks delivered at the symposium, explore these questions through an impressively diverse range of rhetorical approaches. To get a grasp on rhetoric and freedom, as these scholars demonstrate so compellingly, requires making fine distinctions, paying close, critical attention to stance and voice in historical texts and material culture, especially with regard to the state (Pernot; Lamp); it requires attending to questions about rhetorical personhood in relationship to governance as presented in Early Modern and Enlightenment political philosophy (O’Gorman; Stroud; Allen); and it demands that we direct our analysis beyond the page to the significance of space and body in the performance of protest under conditions of unfreedom (Trasciatti; Haskins). In what follows I introduce the articles offered here by reflecting on the topoi of freedom and rhetoric emerging from them—as a report on what I have learned from them and in hopes of framing and enhancing your reading experience.Freedom enters into rhetorical history and theory early on through a founding statement and performance of Athenian democracy: the funeral oration Thucydides (1954) attributes to Pericles, Athenian general and statesman, delivered early in the course of the war against Sparta, 431 BCE. Honoring the first to fall in the traditional state funeral, Pericles offers an encomium of the polis that celebrates several different kinds of freedom. As soon as he designates Athens as a free country (in the epigraph above), Pericles notes with praise that the fathers added to the city an empire; thus, the freedom of the first democracy was from the beginning contaminated by conquest and slavery. It is appropriate then that our issue begins with studies of the constraints on free speech and expression under empire. Laurent Pernot unveils the intricate processes through which Greek rhetors under the Roman empire were able to weave critical perspectives into their orations: a practice of using “figured discourse.” Kathleen S. Lamp approaches the question of freedom and captivity from the Roman side, reading state art in the Roman empire—representations of captives and conquest in sculpture, painting, and architecture—not merely to comment on the images but to ask: What happens when Roman citizens view this art? As citizenship becomes more and more available to subjects across many categories of difference, does the experience of viewing produce anything like freedom? Or does it rather foster imperial relations?The word for “free” in the passage from Pericles previously quoted is the superlative form of autarkês, meaning self-supporting or independent, as a sovereign. The same roots serve to designate imperial sovereignty (autokratoria) and the emperor (autokratês). It therefore is not surprising and is symptomatic of the state of rhetoric studies at present that the Athenian democracy praised by Pericles is, for the some of the authors in this special issue (e.g., O’Gorman; Allen; Trasciatti), a point of reference, sometimes an inspiration for the historical figures they study, but not a sanctified origin. And it is also fitting that this special issue closes as it opens, with essays that focus on the ways repressive states—the United States during World War I (Trasciatti) and Russia in the contemporary era (Haskins)—limit and punish free expression especially through the control of space and bodies. In each case, the analysis draws out the power of collective action and the rhetorical impact of bodies “prepared for freedom” (Trasciatti).As the ancient funeral oration proceeds, Pericles declares that “in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 1954, 2.41). Here it seems (eidê) that each man appears to be self-sufficient with reference to his body (to sôma). The general, like so many leaders since, must obscure the cruel paradox of destroying persons in the service of the freedom of the state. The “seeming” to be free and the reference to the body intrude as an unconscious into Pericles’s glorification of the solider who is “owner of his own person.”Burke’s (1950) sense of the person (in the second epigraph) is like and unlike that presented in the ancient Greek oration. Couching his project within the extreme limits of war, killing, and enslavement to dictatorship, Burke acknowledges the ultimate boundaries of freedom as life or survival—“good to remember, in these days of dictatorship” (50). The self imagined here might be that self-sufficient or sovereign: the solitary and defended self who can arm himself or herself against persuasion as aggression. And yet as Burke begins the section on “traditional principles of rhetoric,” he introduces the notion of persuasion “to attitude,” “attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination” (50), qualities of a different sort of rhetorical actor. Several articles offered here in a similar fashion explore and expand the concept of rhetorical freedom as a practice, an activity, and a capacity of the person. Ned O’Gorman, for example, reads Milton against Hobbes to find in the former the concept of rhetorical freedom as a quality rather than a state. Scott R. Stroud discovers in Kant a rhetoric wherein autonomy is enacted across multiple agents toward an educative end. And Ira J. Allen presents rhetorical personhood as the characteristic of citizens who are capable of crafting collectively new forms of democratic governance.In all the articles we gain a sense of freedom as an incomplete process, a struggle requiring risk and effort but one with rewards worth savoring (as in the third epigraph). Freedom is an enticement: something sweet to taste and something to be shared. In praising Athens, Pericles remarks not only on the polis and its warriors but on daily life: “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other” (2.37). Here the word for “freedom” is eleutherôs, coming from a verb that means to loose or let go. This freedom is available to all and reminds us of the creativity and open expression that draws rhetorical thinkers of all eras to the ancient polis despite its limits. We might find a modern parallel in Burke’s (1950) ideas about the sublime: “by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own comparative futility. The identification thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations (though the effect is made possible only by our awareness of these limitations)” (325). The courageous activists presented in Mary Anne Trasciatti’s work on antiwar protestors who defied the Espionage Act during World War I and in Ekaterina V. Haskins’s study of Pussy Riot’s daring performances aimed at Putin’s authoritarian regime and the Church patriarchy supporting it give us a sense of the dangerous lengths to which rhetors will go, in the face of limitations and futility, to seek a common freedom.Through this fine work, we readers are offered more than a taste but rather strong draughts of rhetorical scholarship on freedom. I invite you to imbibe, to slake a thirst, but at the same time to whet your appetite for evermore rhetoric and freedom.

Reading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay "Semantic and Poetic Meaning," this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a "mathematical" ideology of language is an attempt to render language "neutral" and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

This article addresses how nondisabled people identify with and become disability advocates and how this identification can also fail to occur. The advocacy work of a group of fraternity brothers in the late 1960s highlights both the local successes that personal connections to disability offer and the shortcomings of large-scale advocacy efforts that lack meaningful engagement with disabled groups. Situated histories of advocacy offer models for how we can build and sustain solidarity across difference, craft more inclusive understandings of accessibility and disability, and engage more thoughtfully in our advocacy work.

Using the methodology of third-wave feminist linguistic analysis, this article studies how one undergraduate writer, “Polly,” brings about her gendered identity as a leader of a social sorority through writing emails to motivate members to attend events. I offer a six-item taxonomy of the rhetorical strategies Polly uses to articulate the shared values of the sorority; excite members about events; and craft a unique, interesting, and relatable peer persona for herself. I connect each of Polly’s rhetorical strategies to research on gendered communication to understand how she uses the strategies to navigate her audience’s expectations of her gender and her leadership. A quantitative, temporal analysis of Polly’s use of all six strategies over the course of a year suggests that sororities (and other student organizations that offer leadership roles to students) present time and space for participants to try out a range of intellectual tools for different leadership personas, which can transfer to future rhetorical situations. This opportunity for rhetorical experimentation allows students to play and experiment with their public selves and group affinities.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

322 RHETORICA differently in theology, mathematics, natural science, politics, ethics, poetics, and-Isocrates's home turf-rhetoric. Aristotle's Rhetoric, for example, focuses on enthymematic forms of syllogismos as appropriate responses to contin­ gent situations. It thereby contrasts with Isocrates's tendency, as Aristotle sees it, to heighten emotions by assimilating deliberative and forensic forms of public address to panoramic epideictic displays (Rhetoric I.9.1368a20-33). I trust it is not just because I am less familiar than Wareh with the fortunes of Academics and Isocrateans in the mid 340s, when Philip began to exercise hegemony over Greek poleis, that I was effortlessly drawn along by his discus­ sion of this subject in the second half of his book. I have no trouble believing that the rise of a courtly style of politics with the Macedonian ascendency had, being Macedonian, its vulgar side. Still, the translation Wareh includes of a remark­ ably sycophantic letter Plato's successor Speusippus wrote to Phillip urging him to purge his court of Isocrateans and give the Academy an exclusive lock on knowledge viewed as cultural capital makes for pretty depressing reading. Wareh sees the same tangle of intrigue in Aristotle's ties to Hermias, the tyrant of Atarnea near Lesbos. Isocrates's pleas for influence were no less attuned to court life. In fact, in the forms of address that emerged when philosophers were first turned into courtiers, Wareh concludes by showing, was born the mirror-of-princes rhetoric that gave Isocrates a rebirth in the Renaissance. David Depew University of Iowa Rachel Ahern Knudsen, Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 230 pp. ISBN 9781421412269 Rachel Ahem Knudsen's Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric (hereafter Homeric Speech) provides a new, detailed perspective on an old debate: how ought we to regard the works of Homer when considering the beginnings of rhetoric in ancient Greece? The standard accounts of rhe­ toric's origins are represented by the traditional scholarship of George Kennedy (The Art of Persuasion in Greece, 1963) and Laurent Pemot (Rhetoric in Antiquity, 2005). These works offer the received view that, while rhetori­ cal techniques are evident in the earliest forms of extant Greek literature, the formalization of rhetoric as a disciplinary art (techne) began in the Fifth Century BCE when it was "invented" by Corax and Tisias on the island of Sicily. Current scholarship by historians of rhetoric—represented by the works of Thomas Cole (The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, 1991) and Edward Schiappa (The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, 1999)—have challenged traditional views on the origins of rhetoric. Cole argues that the actual founders of rhetoric are Plato and Aristotle, while Schiappa argues that the term rhetorike did not even exist until Plato created Reviews 323 the term in his dialogue Goryias (pp. 18, 19). Additionally, the traditional distinctions separating rhetoric and poetry have been reconsidered because of such excellent research as Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000), a work that Knudsen "has affinities with" in support of her own views (p. 20). Knudsen's objective is clearly stated: The contention of this book is ... that Homer not only demonstrates rhetorical practice in the speech of his characters, but that the patterns of persuasion that he depicts embody, in very specific ways, the rheto­ ric identified in theoretical treatises from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and that reached its fullest expression in Aristotle's Rhetoric" (pp. 3-4). Knudsen presents impressive scholarship in support of her position, but the merits of her contributions have some qualifications. Knudsen presents a detailed examination of the formal speeches of the Iliad in which she reveals systematic patterns of discourse using the following rhetorical concepts: enthymeme, diathesis, ethos, gnome, paradeigma, and topics. Her findings, appearing in both her criticism and also the frequencycharts citing the use of concepts and speakers, make it clear that the formal speech passages in the Iliad demonstrate the employment of rhetorical techni­ ques throughout the work (pp. 78, 80, 82). The obvious counter-argument to Knudsen's position is that rhetoric can and is employed without a conscious application but rather...

Book Review| June 01 2015 The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Edited by John T. Gage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011; pp. 272. $60.00 cloth. Janice W. Fernheimer Janice W. Fernheimer University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (2): 402–406. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0402 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Janice W. Fernheimer; The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2015; 18 (2): 402–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0402 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In 1934, Kenneth Burke published an essay, "The Matter of the Document," as an introduction to Charles Reznikoff's book Testimony . The text is not included in standard bibliographies of Burke's writings. This note examines the circumstances of the composition, publication, and failure of Testimony , which may help explain why Burke's introduction has been overlooked. The note then offers an overview of Burke's argument, which characterizes documentary forms of literary composition as both artful and moral. This assessment anticipated Prokofieff's development as a poet, as well as later critical assessments of his work. Burke's view of literary composition from existing documents may be valuable in critically assessing the wide range of contemporary documentary and conceptual poetics in the United States.

This special issue of KB Journal is the second of two issues that offer a compilation of papers presented at the conference Rhetoric as Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education, which was held in May 2013 at Ghent University, Belgium. In part II of the special issue we will continue with a more theoretical examination of Burke's international legacy, by giving a stage to scholars who confront Burke's ideas with the work of European thinkers such as François Lyotard, Chaim Perelman and Augustine but also non-western thinkers such as the Ehtiopean scholar Maimire Mennsasemay. Other contributions in this issue confront the work of Burke with more contemporary theoretical perspectives.

Western education has always stressed the need for an intelligent use of literalness, especially in the fields of natural sciences. Plain style, clear expressions, transparent meanings, and methods of disambiguation were held in high esteem while tropes and figures like metaphor, hyperbole, irony, chiasmus etc. were viewed with suspicion, and their use was discouraged. Yet, in the writings of Kenneth Burke, especially his essay "Linguistic approaches to problems of education"(1955), and subsequently in other publications such as The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey ed. 1990), and The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Herbert Simons ed. 1990), it has been shown that rhetoric pertains to all domains of teaching, learning and research. It is from here that the present paper departs in order to recall some of Kenneth Burke's flamboyant contributions to the study of rhetoric, which help us to better understand how figurative forms of expression are indispensible not only in educational practice but also when we think and argue about the discipline itself. Can Western forms of education claim universal relevance, or are they in other cultural contexts inappropriate - even destructive? The search for an answer will lead us to Maimire Mennasemay, an eminent Ethiopian scholar who more than anyone else has tried to figure out what the development of genuine forms of education in his country may involve.

This article offers a contrastive reading of Burke’s chapter on Augustine’s Confessions in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) with Lyotard’s posthumous La Confession d’Augustin (1998). Burke’s chapter on Augustine throws new light on his logology, in particular its gendered character. Central to the interpretations of Burke and Lyotard is the notion of negativity that Burke explores in order to understand the human subject as a social actor, whereas Lyotard unfolds the radical non-identity of the writing subject.

Burke and the Bakhtin School both proposed sociological approaches to poetry. Both start from an unsituated word for which they construe a situation. For Burke, the poet responds dramatistically to the scene of writing; for the Bakhtin School, the poem's speaker responds enthymematically to assumed social values and understandings.

Readers of KB Journal likely know Richard McKeon mainly through his essays on rhetoric and his relationship to Kenneth Burke. But McKeon was first and foremost a philosopher who came to rhetoric in mid-career, so that his work is a philosophical path to and defense of rhetoric. This path, moreover, precisely because of its philosophical depth, offers insight into why "the linguistic turn," which began sooner than is commonly thought today, culminated in "the rhetorical turn" that informs constructivist theorizing in general and that is perhaps best  exemplified by Burke's "rhetorical realism" in particular.

This article explores Burke’s concept of attitude through an overview of its use in his writings, connecting it to the concept of literature as equipment for living, using the comic frame and research into the practical impact of attitudes in rhetorical situations, in order to better understand both concepts.

Distinguishing between Object Oriented Philosophy and Actor-Network Theory this essay applies Burkean theory to question whether in the former Objects as actants can have agency if not motive. Burkean concepts of pentadic ratios, entelechy, Spinoza’s method, intrinsic/extrinsic, symbolic of the body, and catharsis are used to rhetorically analyze claims of Object Oriented Philosophy.

This article uses a short reflection on the life and work of Father António Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony’s impact on the teaching, theory, and practice of rhetoric since 1492. Specifically, my reflection focuses on Vieira’s Le Lacrime d’Eraclito, a text that suggests that for rhetorical theory and practice the colonial encounter had ramifications on the European continent as profound as those on the American. We cannot speak of an American or Western rhetorical tradition and history without considering this interplay in which the American colonies were active participants, not passive subjects.

We often confuse commercial representation with political intervention. For instance, a recent Cheerios advertisement featuring a biracial family provided many people the evidence of a welcomed cultural shift, recognition of a growing acceptance of what might have been taboo and even illegal in the United States a handful of decades ago. We stumble upon another example as we realize that washing down a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich with a 7–11 BigGulp has somehow become not one but two political acts of cultural defiance. While companies aligning themselves explicitly or implicitly for or against cultural politics might seem odd, the frequency of such events demonstrates a noticeable—and increasing—overlap between economic production and political intervention. At the risk of sounding clichéd, these cases remind us that we are what we eat. That said, what “we are” and “what we eat” are both at stake in contemporary culture because technological and media innovation have made that culture more malleable. Jeff Pruchnic's Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition does not delve directly into these particular events, but the problems the book engages help us better understand and respond to modes of cultural production that we must come to see as increasingly heterogeneous. What is the role of rhetoric in an economy of “just-in-time” accommodation?Tacking widely across cultural, economic, and biological registers, Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age seeks to theorize rhetorical possibility after cybernetics, a field in which every thing seems open to redesign and reinvention. Toward these ends, the book traffics in micro-studies: embryotic stem cell manipulation, a Burkebot, video game effects, stock market algorithms, political redistricting, a collection of shoes, among many more. What links these various items is the extent to which biological, cultural, social phenomena once considered autonomous are now susceptible to direct intervention through and as technological innovation. Pruchnic's central claim in response to this development is simple, albeit counterintuitive: contemporary technologies and media are evidence of an increased humanization of social and technological processes and are not inhuman forces of calculation and computation. This is to say that the proliferation of and increased reliance on information media and technological processes allow contemporary cultural practices to more effectively mimic the complexity and vitality of biological processes. While such a claim might be simply stated, its implications for understanding ethical engagement with technics may be quite profound for humanities study in general and for rhetorical scholarship in particular. Put differently, the implications concern the extent to which epistemological categories have always been shaped by supposedly inhuman forces of techne, which then refigure a host of available responses to changing technological conditions. The position allows us to explore and respond to cultural institutions that have markedly become less concerned with establishing mass markets than with identifying and intensifying market subsets that are fueled, in part, by more efficient methods of demographic research and more effective deployment of marketing techniques.Pruchnic's response to this moment is two-pronged. First—in a task occupying the book's first two chapters—he broadly traces how epistemological and technical domains are becoming conflated in contemporary culture. Second—in a series of case studies through the book's final three chapters—he articulates a version of rhetorical ethics robust enough to respond to such a conflation by engaging in specific analyses of contemporary culture. Taken as a whole, the book offers a theory of rhetorical practice and cultural analysis that moves away from logics of exclusion (classification, division, and separation) and instead emphasizes inclusionary logics that seek to establish and maintain ongoing processes of interaction.In the initial chapters, Pruchnic offers analyses of the conditions of contemporary culture, especially with regard to the ways in which cultural life is steeped in technological advancement. Key to this work is a genealogy that Pruchnic constructs and that he uses to trace how, through technics and media, “forms of knowledge/representation are not based on quantification or calculation but on dynamics processes for maintaining relationships” (13). Pruchnic arrives at this claim by arguing that we are witnessing an increasing overlap between the two previously distinct domains of logos and techne, the former largely encompassing reason and communication—traditional human activities—and the latter the material technologies and what has long thought to be nonhuman mechanics. These chapters propose that the traditional separation between these two domains allowed entire systems of ethical and political practice to be founded and sustained. We need not look too far to witness that these divisions play out explicitly in the university, where liberal arts, social sciences, and hard science are well instituted as distinct lines of inquiry. That these two domains now find themselves to be overlapping and have become less distinct is the cause of a great many of our contemporary “problems,” which include the fracturing of democratic processes and anthropocentric effects such as global climate change and armed unrest. Far from claiming that today is unlike any other, Pruchnic instead maintains that the logic undergirding much of these activities is different in kind only because of the speed and complexity with which these operations are undertaken. In response, he proposes that contemporary culture should be understood and characterized as a “technologic,” that is, as “forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human ‘higher reason’ and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought” (9).As it combines two terms, the “technologic” helps refigure the many debates and problems we find ourselves a part of. Pruchnic finds a basis for this refiguring through a careful reading of Martin Heidegger's work concerning technology, especially as it pertains to the ontological. Toward this reading, Pruchnic goes on to argue that Heidegger's critique of technology's increasing centrality in human affairs has less force now because it regards contemporary technology as only calculation, reductionism, or standardization. Pruchnic instead revisits Heidegger's ontological approach to historical analysis and proposes that we might consider the developments that Heidegger casts as epochs of self-understanding as a “history of techniques” (71). The turn toward techniques is buoyed, as Pruchnic contends, contra many of the criticisms of Heidegger's conflation of material technologies and conceptual frameworks, by the fact that such a conflation may actually be a strength in reorganizing our capacities for responding to technological innovation. Recasting Heidegger's historical analysis as one that traces techniques eliminates issues of authenticity and emphasizes instead “elements of rhetorical thought and praxis that were largely crowded out by Platonic thought” (64). Rhetoric, considered thusly, then is better understood to be “a vector of forces or practices … premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment” (17). This analysis expands Pruchnic's initial proposal, suggesting that many of our humanistic programs and modes of cultural critique—for which Heidegger serves as the most productive example—that privileged the rational, political actor may now be compelled to contend with affective or “subrational” forces as a necessary part of cultural work.Taking affective force seriously has several consequences. In particular, affective approaches focus on processes over individuals as well as asignification alongside signification. The first among these had follows from and led to a revaluation of the importance of ecological relations. Pruchnic locates our interest in ecology, as it regards our understanding of technologic, in the Macy conferences, a series of interdisciplinary discussions regarding the future of science that took place from 1941 to 1960. While the organizers hoped that they would unify disparate branches of science and theory, the conferences are remembered mostly for their work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Pruchnic finds in the Macy conferences two primary imports for rhetorical theory. First is the shift toward considering the ecological interaction between actor and environment. This shift gave rise to accounts of homeostatic processes that treated human and technological interactions as a circulation of agency and not the result of a central human actor controlling a nonhuman environment. Second, the conference revised notions of teleological aims often at the core of instrumental orientations to technology, a switch that especially impacts how telos may be related to technologies whose own “purpose” shares functions with many of our own in that they have changed over time. Together, these two findings have much significance for rhetorical theory and practice, as they undercut the reductive communication models that rhetoric is often charged as facilitating.In addition to outlining the conceptual work done by the conferences, much of which the humanities are only now coming around to appreciate, Pruchnic shows how early cybernetic thinkers drew heavily on rhetorical technique to conceptualize cybernetic theory. Both cybernetics and rhetorical practice invent, develop, and encourage robust and flexible techniques for organizing processes of interaction. Pruchnic focuses on how “techniques” may enable theory to be applied through rhetorical and humanities practice, defining the term as a set of “flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium” (16). “Techniques” as a term and concept allows for the development of a technologic that recognizes, Pruchnic notes, that “the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment” (31). Pruchnic's approach both widens the scope of his project, allowing him to include a wide array of interdisciplinary discussions, and it also does the important work of refiguring some of the practices we experience as central to rhetorical work.Pruchnic's understanding of techniques and his alignment with the complexity that subtends cybernetics leads him to outline an ethical response that affirms its imbrication within those same modes of technological production that it seeks to change rather than to adopt a critical practice that seeks its intervention from a position outside. Why this is a crucial pairing is evident in how Pruchnic understands rhetoric's role in contemporary culture: “The fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions … but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes” (38). Such a task is even more pressing when we consider that scientific authority to produce and maintain what counts as fact vies with the demand to prioritize “direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production” (25). While Pruchnic often cites the work that science does, by no means is the cybernetic moment restricted to lab coats and electrical circuitry. What is true in science is also true in other realms. For example, the granular redistricting of voting districts preselects the voters charged with voting for certain politicians, and manufacturing is able to produce more specific goods for more specific subsets of markets. Basic business notions of supply and demand have become as complex and intertwined as communication's outdated sender-receiver model.These realizations lead Pruchnic to enter an ongoing conversation regarding the role of humanism in rhetoric and cultural analysis. Pruchnic carefully traces the development of posthumanism (an analysis that I cannot do justice to here), noting a tension in most posthuman thought insofar as it “ends up reinforcing [humanism's] superiority or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who ‘decides’” (50). This tension leads him to posit that “we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine” (54) and to propose the “transhuman condition” as a key organizing principle to explain contemporary culture. Working from Julian Huxley's short essay “Transhumanism,” Pruchnic posits that the increase in and proliferation of technological intervention helps displace categories of natural and artificial in favor of the idea of flexible but robust processes. “Transhuman” as a term allows Pruchnic to articulate four connected processes of interaction that characterize our contemporary technologic: transition, which details the ways that the continuing process of defining what is and can be human has accelerated in recent decades; transference, which denotes the ways that functional operations can be shared and joined between previously separated domains (human, nonhuman animals, and technologies); transactional, which refers to common processes and procedures for establishing equilibrium rather than a discrete object to be passed along; and transversal, which describes the unusual connections between separated domains of activity such as nature and culture, logos and techne. These terms are threaded throughout the book as a way to organize the intense intermingling of previously separate domains. Although these operations are distinct enough to warrant separate terms, they become confused, as each relies on the others to articulate its own operation. This, however, may be a strength as well, since the confusion performs something of the complexity that the book seeks to trace.Pruchnic's move to the transhuman as a controlling concept in place of others more commonly used today (e.g., posthumanism, antihumanism) opens an avenue of inquiry in which human activity is marked less by periodization than by processes. This avenue then positions cybernetics not as a distinct break but as an intensification of a technologic that extends far beyond our contemporary moment. Pruchnic closes the general framing of the transhuman condition with the aforementioned “history of techniques.” Our “parametric present” is a condition heralded by the standardization of time through clocks and the development of now fundamental physics, a perspective that challenges that idea that we have only recently broken away from more humanism. What characterizes the “parametric present” has been hinted at throughout this review. The conflation of techne and logos provides a greater capacity for miming biological processes in connection with markets, science, media, and democratic governance by its admission of previously nonhuman technology into our approach to epistemological structures. Such a conflation resists a reduction of technologics to mere quantification or calculation and instead gestures toward contemporary culture as concerned with algorithmically managing associations with granular detail.So, where does rhetoric fit in again?While the initial chapters sketch the broad terms of the conditions of contemporary culture in the cybernetic age, the three final chapters isolate important threads for rhetorical ethics. To start, chapter 3, “Rhetoric and the Age of Intelligent Machines,” offers a specific site in which rhetoric and cybernetic theory converse, revisiting Kenneth Burke's response to cybernetics and information technology to show how rhetoric might be revised with respects to technological innovation and social power. While Burke's anxieties about technology are well documented, Pruchnic finds that offers ways of responding to our technological moment. This response a of technology and instead demonstrates the for an technologic in the book's early a process of and Pruchnic on Burke's early to show that Burke's with cybernetics for responses that are not simply critical of technology as something and to human but that as of for social In particular, Pruchnic in on Burke's of the concept of and how that through as a that to the cybernetics moment. subtends a it allows Pruchnic to out of the idea that the of the but from the of their Pruchnic this concept provides with a to a that the that Pruchnic also seeks to work of arguing against phenomena such as and us to in these processes themselves rather than their What this means for rhetoric is that instead of to inhuman forces of technological we can instead ways to that force through the of the Pruchnic how such as and that have circulation in rhetoric over the now into the present that by logics of rather than For this Pruchnic engages the concept of as it through the of and chapter with a recognition of the rhetorical of and this chapter up by that affective is no a means of because it has become a force by those many of Pruchnic's affective is as to and as it is to political is the for when uses already and by Pruchnic focuses on how a tension in of concept of might be by rhetorical In understands as a whose are as productive as the it Pruchnic to to out for within Pruchnic his for a case study on marketing techniques to show how might a flexible of to that can and forces offers a of that would seek to through those forces in of a or into play not only because as Pruchnic time as a for a marketing but also because is central to the of contemporary Pruchnic shows how offers a series of in which to does not look an to a but instead an of that to out other ways it might be The chapter by a handful of for rhetorical practice in a critique as a to a and an engagement with the final chapter on the four by ethics in an of global media, and While the chapter with a of the possibility of to or from of and it first through a crucial for ethical engagement in a time of technical This through an engagement with market logics and in particular While and biological intervention is one of a toward so too is the more common material in contemporary cultural from a for material and a in the analysis through the of ethics and economics, a with the early This analysis how since leads to ontological of and heavily on the extent to which and an ethical Pruchnic by ethics over and against the common and material of the contemporary social would be our most or most efficient to ethics Pruchnic these by out a series of to the to transhuman instead of human careful analyses of of and even a of the his own shoes, Pruchnic provides an kind of with shows how with ethics such as and with the logic of What this final is the extent to which the transhuman condition functions as a kind of shared that even the most of as a productive should not a on the of the While the book a of different registers, it as it is out of its reason this might be the case is that the of any is a kind of work done through the This is not a against the book in terms of critical but is a on the of the book's That is, the book's and seem in many to mimic the of complexity that the are themselves with and that we might with cybernetics and complexity theory. are often broken into a for the that emphasizes a claim in one moment even as that very claim in the While the is not to a it provides the a of ethical of contemporary Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age offers a to a of areas in rhetorical the primary be to of rhetorical theory and practice in and through This much from Pruchnic's instead of on this or that particular technology and then rhetorical analyses that and the provides much historical work in the and logics that the kind of media effects we witness that the should also interest rhetorical who might not with of contemporary media technology, as it provides and historical of the development of logics that any of in which rhetorical study especially economics, cultural studies most of ethical

A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

ABSTRACTRalph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together.

Living with global terrorism, global epidemics, and new medical technologies has made risk a dominant theme in the 21st century in terms of both individual action and public policy.This condition has led us to become more occupied with debating, preventing, and managing risks.Risk Society, 1996 Any time we read or watch the news, the global, scientifically saturated nature of the world becomes apparent.Current events pertaining to medical risks in particular have become increasingly significant.Take, for example, the recent Ebola situation in which we have witnessed how infectious disease threat and communication of risk ignite and stoke public frenzy about how to act and whom to blame.Think of the news coverage on whether the "infected Dallas nurse and other innocent bystanders vulnerable to contracting Ebola.Also consider the treatment politically issuedwent for a bike ride.Perceptions of harm get encased in public talk where case scenario" storylines not only dominate and d but also lead to action.In this regard, and in response to her quarantine orders specifically, the

The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values.

Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

Pragmatically, for most of us, “history” consists perhaps primarily of chronotopes, accumulations of symbols and shorthand associations that invest temporality with meaning: 1776, 1848, the 1960s, 1968, 1989. The chronotope 1968, for instance, consists, for many Americans, of symbols of the hippie movement, images of the Chicago Democratic Convention, the escalation of the Vietnam War. For the French, 1968 means primarily the month of May and the student revolt. For Poles, 1968 signifies March: student demonstrations in Warsaw followed by a paroxysm of official anti-Semitism that forced thousands out of their jobs and even out of the country. For Romanians, 1968 represents the political turn away from Moscow, as Nicolae Ceausescu aligned the country with the West in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.1 Each society, regime, generation, perhaps even each locality, group, or family, has its own “time capsules” that to a large extent constitute the shared sense of history.2This special issue attempts to unpack and interrogate, from a variety of rhetorical perspectives, the chronotope of 1989—one of the more significant chronotopes that continues to haunt contemporary history and public discourse. It is also intended to serve as one possible time capsule of reflections on the year 1989.According to the American historian John Lukacs, the year 1989 marks the de facto end of the twentieth century. Lukacs argues that history does not observe neat divisions. The twentieth century did not actually start on January 1, 1901, because nothing happened on that date to make people think they were suddenly living in a different century. It was World War I that ushered in a different era: massive casualties, mass propaganda, the beginnings of “mass society,” the crisis of traditional values, mechanization of death and life, nagging doubts about the “civilizing” value of education and “civilization” itself, and the concomitant beginnings of new intellectual and political trends. Empires and monarchies (Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, Czarist Russia) that had defined the political order in Europe fell, while a new regime arose in Russia. Both Soviet Communism and German Nazism have their roots in World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, the Western world changed profoundly, only to change again in 1945, and then again in 1989 to 1991.The twentieth century, Lukacs claims, was a “short” century, one characterized by utopian experiments and totalitarian nightmares, punctuated by two of the bloodiest wars and greatest genocides in history, including both the Nazi and Communist genocides. As a direct or indirect result of the former, about 60 million people lost their lives (Romane 2006); as a result of the latter, about 100 million worldwide, including 20 million in the Soviet Union and 1 million in Central/Eastern Europe (Courtois et al. 1999). The century ended with the fall of the Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. Anyone who left for Mars in 1983, following the premiere of the film The Day After about the putative nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, would hardly recognize the world a mere decade later. Poland was a fully sovereign country once again, and the European Union was heading toward another extension. Tismaneanu (1992) has called the breakdown of Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe “one of the most important events in this [the twentieth] century” (ix).British anthropologist Anthony Cohen has argued that human communities cohere around symbols. Symbols, however, Cohen (1985) argues, “do not so much express meaning” as “give us the capacity to make meaning” (15; emphasis added). They are capacious containers, so to speak, that people invest with a diversity of meanings and interpretations. Human collectivities, Cohen (1985) suggests, share symbols, but they do not necessarily share their meanings. While most Americans, for example, profess the belief in freedom, few could probably agree as to its exact meaning. (Michael McGee [1980] refers to such specifically ideological symbols as ideographs). Cohen (1985) argues that “the reality of ‘community’ in people’s experience inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols”; yet “the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning” (16).Indeed, 1989 has become such a symbol, one whose multiple meanings continue to both unite and divide. While in the West, especially in the United States, 1989 is associated mainly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, in countries ranging from Russia, Poland, and Romania to China and Tibet its meanings are much more local and diverse, and its symbolic currency and potency in the political field are far from diminished by the passage of more than two decades—in fact, just the opposite. In many of these countries (for instance, in Poland or Romania) attitudes toward 1989 have become a major determinant of political orientation, a key element of public memory, and a clue to the interpretation of the contemporary political scene.In his contribution to this special issue, Philippe-Joseph Salazar captures the dual articulation of such symbolic dates: On the one hand, to date something is to recognize a “moment” as a movement, the passage of a force … [and] on the other hand, a date fixes a “moment” as a static pause, an interval in time. A date carries therefore the force of history, as something hits something else, the dynamic of politics, and the sense we have that, for a date to be imprinted in our experience of the world, some motion has to pass from one to another, through, literally, an act of force and, plainly, violence.The aim of the present issue is thus to interrogate 1989 as both, on the one hand, a fixed moment “imprinted in our experience of the world” and in the memories of its different “stakeholders,” and, on the other hand, as a “movement”—not only a “passage” from one state to another but as a movement, a transformative symbol, that continues to haunt the rhetorical imagination and to animate the political debates in much of Europe and beyond.As a historical moment, 1989 represents not only a revolutionary time—if by revolution one understands “a fundamental, deep change in the social order and organization of the state”—but also as a historical and rhetorical context for a variety of historical experiments, which “did not necessarily have to succeed” (Baczynski 2009, 8).As a metaphor (thus a “figure of perspective,” according to Burke [1966]), 1989 represents a past in perpetual return as a lens for the present, a creative rhetorical space (not unlike anniversaries, which are rhetorical occasions during which narratives and symbols of the past are used to nourish and shape the present, as well as the future).3 As one Polish member of parliament put it almost a year after the transition: “In every national yesterday there is a national today.”4 Indeed, for many Central/Eastern European countries, 1989 remains very much a part of the national today.However, 1989 also constitutes a potent symbol and creative rhetorical space to be exploited in strategic, geopolitical contexts. On June 4, 2014, Poland celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the June 4, 1989, semidemocratic elections that effectively ended Communist domination. The celebrations coincided with the political crisis in Ukraine: the Russian occupation of Crimea and struggle with Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Both U.S. president Barack Obama and Ukrainian president-elect Petr Poroshenko attended, and many Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd in Warsaw’s Castle Square during the main celebration. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in his speech in reference to Ukraine, opening the ubiquitous Polish slogan from the 1980s to a new interpretative twist: solidarity with Ukrainian struggle against Russian aggression. While President-Elect Poroshenko emphasized the analogy between Poland’s Solidarity and the Ukrainian Majdan (a reference to the recent bloody demonstrations on Kiev’s Majdan Square against pro-Russian president Janukovitch), Barack Obama suggested that “the story of this nation [Poland] reminds us that freedom is not guaranteed” and that “the blessings of liberty must be earned and renewed by every generation—including our own. This is the work to which we rededicate ourselves today”; Obama’s words were reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address. “The Ukrainians today are the heirs of Solidarity,” Obama declared, cementing the analogy between the struggles of 1989 and the situation in Ukraine. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” he ended, echoing Komorowski, but now from the geopolitical perspective of an outsider to the region and a world leader.Many of the articles in this issue (Matthew deTar, Senkou Chou) address this symbolic and metaphoric quality of 1989. Others, especially Anna Szilágyi and András Bozóki, note the persistence of the “force of history” contained in the 1989 moment in the post-1989 rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—a “revolutionary” force that, as Bozóki and Szilágyi note, had “once been used to initiate a transition to democracy” and is “now [being] used to complete a constitutional coup d’état against an established democracy.”Dialogue around the events of 1989 often assumes a static Cold War space and then, conversely, some sort of definable post–Cold War space. Yet if we see transition as a process by which political communities and their leaders forge new rhetorical spaces and articulate new visions, as well as create ways to marshal and integrate complex histories into these visions, we gain a richer sense of how profound changes in collective identities and imaginaries are negotiated. This process is, as Cezar M. Ornatowski points out in his contribution, dialectical and rife with multiple ironies. (It is worth remembering here that Kenneth Burke [1969] considered irony to be the master trope of history—an insight borne out by the complex events of the transitions and the complexities of the posttransitional period). Noemi Marin’s contribution proposes rhetorical space as central to the examination of the Romanian 1989 scene, where totalitarian rhetoric enforced by Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime clashes with democratic opposition to redefine Romanian identity. Jason A. Edwards’s contribution investigates how the rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic modified the national myths of Kosovo as a redemptive argument for the Serb pre-1989 national identity. David Cratis Williams and Marilyn J. Young’s article emphasizes the challenges Soviet/Russian leaders such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev faced in finding a suitable lexicon of politics to invent, and articulate, the novel shapes of freedom and democratic life. Their article highlights another rhetorical dimension of the transitions of 1989: the challenge of “shaping freedom.” That challenge, according to Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, proved to be even more difficult than the winning of freedom. “For years,” Mazowiecki (2009) remembers, “it seemed that winning freedom is so dreadfully difficult. Then it turned out that the shaping of freedom is not much easier” (13). Speaking from, and about, another place altogether, Jane Robinett analyzes the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize speech by the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, looking at how the discourse on freedom continues to remain in tension with political histories and cultural narratives that conflate national and nationalistic platforms of public action.The Cold War and the post–Cold War, however we define these terms, do not exist without culturally bound, ideologically explosive, discursive contestations that bring them to life. The transition between these two periods becomes a tense site of ideological struggle between competing articulations of national history, as both Timothy Barney and Martina Klicperová-Baker demonstrate in their articles on Czech pre- and post-1989 political rhetoric. However, as Barney emphasizes in a comment that applies to all the articles in this special issue, and perhaps also to all attempts to come to terms once and for all with as complex a phenomenon as 1989, The historical arguments in the case of a changing (and ultimately disintegrating) Czechoslovakia … [are], of course, only one small piece of an entire spatial and temporal reimagining of Central and Eastern Europe, one that is still in process. Yet, by examining the implications of the rhetorical tensions in democratizing nations during the crumbling of the Cold War, we can perhaps reach a bolder cartography of transition that gets us further out of the binaries that both Cold War and even post–Cold War constructs create.Ultimately, 1989 represents what historians Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (2004) refer to as a “transnational moment of change,” alongside 1848 or 1968. Such moments foreground the “question of commonality” and, one may add, difference, which, for Horn and Kenney, become “central, a window into the processes of history” (ix).5 In terms of the complex relationships between rhetoric and history, which belong to the central problematic of rhetorical studies, such moments are thus momentous from a rhetorical, not just historical, standpoint.Rhetorically, explorations of such windows provide an opportunity for comparative studies—not, however, in the vein of comparative rhetoric (which has a specific meaning in rhetorical studies) but in the vein of what one may perhaps conceive of as comparative rhetorical histories, somewhat loosely analogous to what Horn and Kenney (2004) advocate as “comparative history.” In terms of such histories, the transnational moment of 1989 appears to consist largely, and paradoxically, of returns to, or perhaps reinventions of, national histories. Horn and Kenney (2004) note, “[I]t is in the modern era that one begins to observe moments in which social, political, and cultural movements, and even entire societies, even as they are bound within a narrative of the nation-state, consciously or unconsciously embrace similar experiences or express similar aspirations across distinctly national frontiers” (x).In the cases of all such modern transnational/national moments, as Horn and Kenney (2004) point out, the underlying processes of change predated the particular date associated with the change and continued after it—sometimes long after it. In fact, in the cases of most of the Central/Eastern European transformations associated with the year 1989, the processes continue to shape internal politics and to reverberate through the cultures, signaling perhaps not the Fukuyamasque (1992) “end of history” but rather its continuation “by other means.” For the denizens of such countries as Poland, the year 1989 marked not the “end of history” but the end of the utopia of an ideal state based on enforced monocentric unity that could transform human relations and human nature itself—a utopia that began, in Western political imagination, with Plato’s Republic. Ornatowski’s article examines the dialectics of the dissolution of such a utopian vision in the case of Poland. This dissolution, Ornatowski suggests, marked in effect a revolutionary return from utopia back to history in an ironic reversal of the dialectical process followed by Plato in his Republic.The articles in this issue, beginning with Salazar’s whimsical musings on the tradition and meanings of dating itself, thus in various ways and from various perspectives interrogate the received narratives of 1989 from the distance of the twenty-five years that separate us from these historic events. While many of the authors note the centrality of the ubiquitous theme of return in 1989 and post-1989 discourses (return to Europe, return of/to politics, return of the people, and so on), they note that such returns also mark new beginnings that present alternatives and/or transformative possibilities in different historical contexts, such as former Yugoslavia, Soviet/Post-Soviet nations, or the “new Europe.”Twenty-five years later, 1989 continues to remain a thriving locus of rhetorical inquiry, as debates over “post-Communism” (the situation after Communism) and/or “postcommunism” (the sociopolitical situation characterized by the persistent presence of the past) continue to define transitional dimensions of political life and remain an open field of political persuasion. Attempting to reconstruct the relationship between history and rhetoric during and after 1989 as a referential anchor for transitional studies, this issue addresses both past and present, the historical moment of 1989, and the broader pre- and post-1989 historical contexts as a temporal framework within which political and rhetorical dynamics of transition can be examined. How these dynamics continue to play out on the local and global scenes still remains to be seen and depends very much on the evolving and contested perceptions and interpretations of the meanings of 1989.

McCracken explores how material conditions encountered by sex workers-realities that "are created and disrupted by discourse and rhetoric" (xxviii)-have the potential to both deny and construct agential choice. To do this, she used an ethnographic design to embed herself within a community of sex workers as a method for asking questions and spending time "with women who exchange sex for money or drugs and the myriad people who come in contact with them" (191). Consequently, as a researcher and a self-identified advocate for sex workers, McCracken argues for more complex interpretations of the stories, ones that can lead to robust solutions to the systemic and individual traumas experienced by them. Through critical discourse analysis, she disrupts the historical and cultural interpretations of sex workers, showing how these constructed realities have led to ineffective or limited solutions because they have historically been hindered by an over-reliance on the archetypal binary of victim/ survivor. This binary obscures not only the kaleidoscopic meaning of these workers' lives, but also limits opportunities for responsible rhetorical agency, or what McCracken calls agential choice.

Reviews 215 Hanvelt, Marc, The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume's Polite Rhetoric, Toronto, University of Toronto Tress, 2012. 217pp. ISBN 978-1-44264379 -6 In this closely reasoned and commendably lucid book Marc Hanvelt acknowledges more explicitly than most historians of eloquence that his study of the rhetorical past is shaped by a preoccupation with the poli­ tics of the present. Hume's thinking about persuasion is important to him not only because it is unusually subtle, philosophically grounded, and dis­ tinctive in its own time, but also because it can tell us something about how we might better conduct our politics today. A key to Hume's thought, Hanvelt argues, is his enduring hostilitv towards a religious and political fanaticism which "has its parallels in our contemporary world" (p. 6). We need Hume's "accurate, just, and polite rhetoric" as an alternative or, as Hanvelt puts it, "antidote" (p. 75) to the "low rhetoric" of zealotry and fac­ tion which threatens to undermine the balanced opposition of interests on which modern democracies depend. As Hanvelt explains, the conclusions Hume reaches in his philosophical writings, which famously emphasize the relative weakness of reason as an influence in human nature, commits him to a conception of rhetoric in which the passions must play a lead­ ing role. But unlike the rhetoric of the zealots, Hanvelt argues, Hume's is an appeal to the passions modified bv politeness. Transferred from its eighteenth-century context, and stripped of its restrictive associations with an elitist code of manners, this "polite rhetoric" refuses to manipulate its audiences by oversimplifying or closing down choices, respects their capac­ ity for making judgements, and engages them on equal terms in sociable discourse. Other scholars have commented on what Arthur Walzer well de­ scribes as "Hume's rhetoric-friendly epistemology" and have assessed its eighteenth-century influence. Hanvelt's ambition is to proceed a step further and retrieve a coherent conception of rhetoric from Hume's own writings. Although he does not restrict himself to Hume's philosophical works, and indeed examines the later volumes of the History as an important source for Hume's thinking about rhetoric, the philosophy of mind Hume formulates in the Treatise and Enquiries is at the heart of his study. In its central chapters (2-5) Hanvelt teases out the rhetorical implications of Hume's conception of belief as a "lively idea" and elucidates Hume's view that eloquence can reproduce the "feeling" of belief that is more usually derived by means of association from custom and experience. By raising vivid and forceful ideas in the mind eloquence excites the passions and operates on the will. What, then, sets Hume's conception of rhetoric apart from the oratory of the fanatics (Hume's and, one infers, Hanvelt's antagonists) who work singlemindedly on the passions of their audiences? Hanvelt finds the answer to this question in Hume's conception of politeness, a moderating influence which equips the orator with the gentlemanly attributes of trustworthiness of character, conversational ease, and enlarged views. With the arguments of 216 RHETORICA Adam Potkay's The Fate ofEloquence in the Age ofHume (1994) in mind, he ac­ knowledges that in the eighteenth century "the polite virtues of manners and moderation . . . were generally considered to be incompatible with impas­ sioned rhetoric" (pp. 54—55). But Hume's politeness, like Hume s rhetoric, was distinctive. He associated politeness with moderation but unlike his friend Adam Smith he did not conceive of moderation as necessarily dis­ passionate. Politeness modified but did not repudiate the models of ancient eloquence, which Hume held in high regard. While Hume "distrusted impo­ lite rhetoric," Hanvelt concludes, he did not distrust rhetoric 'because it is impolite' (p. 76). The clarity with which Hanvelt disentangles complex ideas and explains how Hume differed from contemporary rhetoricians such as Campbell and Smith is one of the strengths of this book. He demonstrates beyond doubt that the idea of eloquence was unusually important to Hume, not least as an illustration and confirmation of his discoveries in the science of mind. But the approach he has taken to reading Hume's texts is not unproblematic. Acknowledging that "Hume never laid...

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.