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880 articlesJune 2006
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Abstract
332 RHETORICA Adriano Pennacini, Forme del pensiero. Studi di retorica classica, a cura di Edoardo Bona e Gian Franco Gianotti (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2002), 449 pp.«The advent of Christianism in the form of Catholicism, the victory of St. Ambrosius against Symmachus in the battle for the liberty and preservation of paganism and the position of State religion that Christianism acquired in the same years, transformed the status of the Roman citizen by introduc ing a basic requirement consisting of being Catholic. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the French and American revolutions, religion remained a decisive element for citizenship. Before the Reformation, only Catholic religion; after the Reformation, cuius regio eius religio. A perverted and perverse use of the locus of quality, completed by the locus of uniqueness and reinforced by the locus of authority, with the premise, often implicit, that Catholic religion is the only true religion, offered the basis for an abnormal developing of ethnic and cultural differences derived and founded upon re ligions». Con queste parole, appassionate e amare, si chiude (p. 445) Tultimo saggio contenuto nella raccolta di scritti di Adriano Pennacini, raccolta con la quale i colleghi editori, Gian Franco Gianotti e Edoardo Bona, hanno voluto testimoniare Paffetto ed in qualche modo il dispiacere, ovviamente non solo personale, in occasione delle dimissioni (anticipate) di Pennacini dal servizio attivo di professore nell'universita di Torino (cfr. Prefazione di G.F. Gianotti, Retorica classica e scienzc della eomunicazione, pp. V-IX). Il saggio di cui ho citato la conclusione, Arguments about ethnical and cultural differences in ancient and modern oratory costituiva I'opening address al Symposium on rhetoric: persuasion and power, tenutosi a Cape Town dall'll al 13 luglio 1994. Adriano Pennacini aveva appena portato a termine il biennio di presidenza (1991-1993) della International Societv for the Historv of Rheto ric. La raccolta di saggi costituisce, in realta solo una piccola parte del contributo culturale e civile di Pennacini, fatto non solo di studi, ma anche di pratiche, di innovazioni didattiche, di idee generose per svecchiare l'impostazione tradizionale degli studi di antichistica. La bibliografia di Pen nacini (pp. XI-XVI), d'altra parte, offre l'eloquente riprova di un'attivita che va dall'organizzazione di convegni e volumi sulla retorica, tra antico e modemo , alia recente traduzione italiana, con testo a fronte, note e aggiornamenti , della Institutio oratoria di Quintiliano, per i tipi di Finaudi, coordinata da Pennacini con numerosi, validi collaborator! (cfr. la recensione di G.B. Conte in «Rhetorica» 22, 2004, pp. 297-300). Il volume Forme del pensiero raccoglie 25 saggi, apparsi tra il 1955 (Cercida e il secondo cinismo, pp. 3-22) e il 1998 (il saggio citato all'inizio, apparso in Studi di retorica oggi in Italia 1997, Bologna 1998), che rappresentano la parte piu consistente degli studi—come suggerisce il sottotitolo del volume—di retorica classica. La dizione 'retorica classica' si offre in realta ad un'interpretazione estensiva. Essa comprende, infatti, sia la teoria e i suoi tecnografi (Cicerone e Quintiliano in primo luogo, ma anche Frontone, accanto all'utilissimo L'arte della parola pp. 345-388, una breve storia della retorica romana), che la rhetorica utens, per cost dire (autori Reviews 333 e generi délia produzione culturale greca e latina: Lucilio, Persio e la satira; Tibullo e l'elegia; il romanzo latino, 1 epistolografia; Bione di Boristene tra retorica e filosofía; Vitruvio tra retorica e scienza). Ma non tralascia, d'altra parte, né 1 analisi particolare délia strumentazione técnica propria délia reto rica, in senso direi trasversale (il locus amoenus; figure di pensiero nell'oratoria di Catone Maggiore; strutture retoriche nelle biografié svetoniane; il paté tico nella narrazione virgiliana del mito di Orfeo e Puso dell'apostrofe nel discorso di Didone del IV libro delPEnéide), né alcuni problemi di definizione a proposito dei testi antichi, e qui la retorica diviene strumento di comprensione délia fattura di un testo e, per converso, délia sua tradizione in età moderna, anche attraverso il ricorso alla nuova tecnología elettronica (pensó, in particolare, ai contributi Le fragment comme enchatillon, pp. 73-77; Analyse structurale et recherche computationelle, pp...
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Reviews 329 Analyse verdeutlicht sich die zentrale Stellung von Hirschvelders modus epistolundi ." (S. 71). Auch hier wird der Begriff "überlieferungsgeschichtlich" falsch verwendet, und die Behauptung einer Spannung zwischen Latinitàt und Humanismus laPt sich wohl nur als unsinnig qualifizieren. Ich breche an dieser Stelle ab, ohne auf Details weiter einzugehen ("Ausgew àhlte Folii (!)", S. 287; "Peter Zainer" statt Johann Zainer, S. 326; kein Nachweis von GW-Nummern bei Inkunabeln, GW fehlt auch im Literaturverzeichnis ; Überbewertung von Wasserzeichenbefunden für Datierungsfragen , S. 55 u.ô.; unbrauchbarer Vergleich mit Sangspruchdichtung Boppes, S. 84). Letztlich bleibt als Mehrwert der Arbeit gegentiber der bisherigen Forschung allein der Textabdruck, der einen für Germanisten und (Bildungs-) Historiker interessanten Textbestand verfügbar macht und dem einen oder anderen die Reise nach München oder die Bestellung eines Microfilms erspart . Auch hier wird man allerdings fragen dürfen, ob der Hinweis auf die Richthnieii fiir die Edition lundesgescluchtlieher Quellen von Walter Heinemeyer (2. Aufl. Hannover: Selbstverlag des Gesamtvereins der Deutschen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine, 2000) als editionstheoretische Grundlage für eine germanistische Edition ausreichend ist. Insgesamt genügt das Buch den Anforderungen, die an eine historisch-philologische Arbeit gestellt werden müssen, nicht. Albrecht Hausmann Georg-Angust-Universitat Gottingen Michel Meyer, Lu rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 130 pages, ISBN 213053368X. As its title Lu rhétorique suggests, this little book has large ambitions only the most seasoned rhetorician can entertain seriously. And Michel Meyer is certainly that. Successor to Chaim Perelman in the Rhetoric Chair at the Brussels Free University and author of at least 16 related books (4 of which have been translated into English), Meyer is unarguably a leading figure in the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, especially in continental Europe. So Meyer clearly has the authority to take on such an ambitious project. The question is how successful is he in this case. Clearly the book is a success insofar as it succinctly summarizes and updates the original theory of rhetoric Meyer has been working on for at least twenty-five years. Judged on its novelty in comparison to his previously published work and judged by its potential impact in the field of rhetorical studies and beyond, my assessment is less rosy. First the strengths, which are substantial. Written for the popular series "Que sais-je?" (PUF) that seems to greet you just inside the door of every French bookstore, Lu rhétorique covers the field in a manner well designed for the educated nonexpert, and it does so in the systematic fashion that has become a hallmark of Meyer s work. After 330 RHETORICA defining rhetoric on page 10 as "the negotiation of the difference between individuals on a given question" (la rhétorique est la négociation de la différence entre des individus sur une question donnée), Meyer then recasts the entire history and theory of rhetoric from this point of view. And he does so with the confidence that can only come well into a lifetime of focused inquiry, when relevant hot points have been thought and rethought in a variety of contexts and with a variety of audiences in mind. Ancient rhetoric is recast to highlight Aristotle's placement of ethos, pathos, and logos on equal footing (versus those who would privilege the audience, the orator, or the speech); rhetoric's later history is briefly traced as it is "metastasized" in literature, politics, poetics and so on; a call is made for rhetoric's reunification in a systematic theory; and then Meyer delivers that theory with a final demonstration of how it can be used to recast our understanding of the human sciences, the study of literature, and the modern phenomena of propaganda and publicity. Quite a project in 123 pages! And no wonder it is not entirely successful. But let me further elaborate the strengths. Most important is Meyer's thorough commitment to question-andanswer as the motivating structure of all discourse. This perspective trulv sets him apart from both the classical rhetoricians he most admires, such as Aristotle, and his more immediate influences in the field of argumentation theory, such as Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman, it is this perspective that leads to Meyer...
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Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and possibilities “rhetorical, emotional, and material” of constructing narratives that “cross publics.”
May 2006
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Abstract This article considers the difficulties faced by Quintilian in classifying and understanding apostrophe. He treats it as both a figure of thought, with examples from oratory, and a figure of speech, with examples from Virgilin which the narrator addresses characters of the poem. By inserting the otherwise unobtrusive narrator into the narrative, the effect of the Virgilian examples is to collapse the distinction between narration and narrative. Since Quintilian does not have this means of linguistic analysis at his disposal, he defines apostrophe as a figure of speech by bringing it into relation with other figures that also produce an effect of rupture at the level of narration, and he uses other oppositions that offer an imperfect treatment of the problem.
April 2006
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This study examines the representations of nanoscale science and technology in written popular media from 1986 to 1999. Nanoscale science is an emergent field that examines the principles of matter at a molecular level. This article presents the representations through which nanoscale science and technology was initially introduced to the public. Written popular media influences the ways stakeholder groups perceive, support, and fund science and technology. From 1986 to 1999 this field was introduced to the general public through articles in newspapers, magazines, and other general interest publications. During this period, nanoscale science and technology had a fragmented public image as proponents of various representations of the field competed for legitimacy. The study demonstrates that the emergence of nanoscience and technology in the popular media occurred as a competitive and transitional social–rhetorical process in which the new emerged within existing and established understandings of science but was mediated by biographical and other social accounts of the research.
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Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision making in the Waco conflict in 1993 and then attempting to participate in and shape the public debates that followed it. To compare the practices of this humanities scholar to expectations from research on the rhetoric of expertise, a rhetorical analysis was conducted on the context, style, genre, and argument in the scholar’s public writings. This article discusses (a) the role of kairos in the policy cycle in determining the scholar’s bids for acceptance as an expert, (b) the use of narrative as a generic hybrid of intra- and interdisciplinary practice, and (c) the role of “understanding” asa special topic.
March 2006
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This article considers the difficulties faced by Quintilian in classifying and understanding apostrophe. He treats it as both a figure of thought, with examples from oratory, and a figure of speech, with examples from Virgilin which the narrator addresses characters of the poem. By inserting the otherwise unobtrusive narrator into the narrative, the effect of the Virgilian examples is to collapse the distinction between narration and narrative. Since Quintilian does not have this means of linguistic analysis at his disposal, he defines apostrophe as a figure of speech by bringing it into relation with other figures that also produce an effect of rupture at the level of narration, and he uses other oppositions that offer an imperfect treatment of the problem.
February 2006
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ABSTRACT African-American rhetoric of the early Republic has been largely unexplored by rhetorical scholars. Addressing this gap in the scholarship, this study analyzes two intricately related forms of discourse: late eighteenth-century petitions and speeches celebrating the 1808 abolition of the international slave trade to the United States. Both sets of texts contribute to the expression of an African-American public voice, build upon and critique American ideals while retaining a proud sense of African heritage, exploit the available generic conventions, develop increasingly radical appeals, and feature arguments that transcend local issues to engage general questions of identity and history. Notes 1. Exceptions include Bacon, “Rhetoric”; Condit and Lucaites; Gordon; Ray. 2. Historical and/or literary treatments of the texts of this period include Bethel; Brooks; Bruce; Davis; Kachun; Saillant; Waldstreicher. 3. A petition of January 30, 1797, from four free African Americans living in Philadelphia is the first extant petition from African Americans to Congress (CitationAptheker 39–44; CitationKaplan and Kaplan 267–72). 4. Rosavich indicates that this petition, which was signed by slaves Prime and Prince (about whom little is known) and which describes itself as “The Petition of the Negroes in the Towns of Stratford and Fairfield,” was written in the hand of attorney Jonathan Sturges (80–82). Yet Rosavich remarks that the existence of other petitions of Connecticut African Americans “should caution us against overestimating the role of Sturges and underestimating that of Prime and Prince in drafting this document” (81–82). 5. This law gave rise to kidnappings of African Americans by allowing a master to seize a alleged fugitive slave anywhere in the country without a warrant, present him or her to a judge, and—if the master could “prove” that the person in question had escaped—take him or her into custody. The texts of the petitions are published in the following sources and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: the 1777 petition to the Massachusetts General Court is found in Collections and will be cited parenthetically as P1; the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut, is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P2; the 1779 New Hampshire petition is found in Hammond and will be cited as P3; the 1780 Connecticut petition is found in Rosavich and will be cited as P4; the 1780 Dartmouth petition is found in Nell and will be cited as P5; the 1799 petition to the President and the United States Congress is found in Kaplan and Kaplan and will be cited parenthetically as P6. Readers interested in historical information beyond that we provide here should consult the sources cited in this note. 6. Rosavich's transcriptions of the 1779 petition of slaves of Fairfield County, Connecticut (P2), and the 1780 Connecticut petition (P4) include words that were erased or crossed out and indicate where words were added to the text. We omit these editorial notations in our quotes from the petitions. 7. Gates notes that the use of such rhetorical strategies is not “the exclusive province of black people” (Signifying 90). However, it assumes particular importance for African Americans, who often must use “double-voiced words,” create “double-voiced discourse,” and rely on “formal revision” and “intertextual relation[s]” (Signifying 50–51). For further discussion, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty,” 273–74. 8. On the general resonance of natural law for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century African Americans, see also Finseth 350; Gordon 93. 9. Scholars have established that African-American discourse often takes place within black counterpublics or alternative public spheres that are fundamentally connected to community civic, educational, and religious institutions; see Bacon, Humblest 10; Baker 13–26; Dawson 210–11; McClish 60. 10. The texts of the speeches featured in this section are published in Porter and will be hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as follows: Absalom Jones's sermon as S1; Peter Williams's oration as S2; Joseph Sidney's speech as S3; William Hamilton's 1809 oration as S4, Henry Sipkins's speech as S5; George Lawrence's address as S6; Russell Parrott's oration as S7; and William Hamilton's 1815 speech as S8. Several other speeches from this period celebrating the abolition of the slave trade are extant, including orations by William Miller, Adam Carman, and Henry Johnson. These significant texts include many of the same elements prevalent in the other eight; space limitations, however, do not permit us to feature them here. Finally, we note that although speeches celebrating the abolition of the slave trade were delivered for decades, we have featured orations written before 1816 in order to demonstrate the early manifestation of key components of African-American rhetoric. 11. For further discussion of Hamilton's signifying, see Bacon, “Taking Liberty” 278–79. 12. Miller in his 1810 address (8) and Carman in his 1811 speech (14) also marshal biblical parallels between African Americans and ancient Israel to suggest black nationhood.
January 2006
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Abstract This study features the contributions of nineteenth-century activist William Whipper to the African American rhetorical tradition. Through analyses of six texts written between 1828 and 1837, I detail Whipper's dedication to open civic discourse; his preference for appeals to reason; his Christian ethos; his appropriation of the rhetoric of white writers, which functions in service of his positive portrayal of black culture; and his mistrust of arguments based on expediency. I also demonstrate how these characteristics shape–and, to a certain extent, evolve in–Whipper's subsequent writings. The conclusion locates Whipper's rhetorical principles in the broader context of nineteenth-century African American rhetoric.
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Abstract This essay examines the debate regarding Pope Pius XII's lack of protest regarding ethnic massacres during World War II. By failing to publicly expose what was happening to Jews under Nazi occupation, Pius is seen as defaulting on his responsibility as moral leader. The mounting number of books on this subject indicates a persistent level of controversy that has not abated in the decades since the war. Criticisms about the Pope tend to attribute personal motives for his lack of oratory, indicative of malice or indifference. This conclusion is reached because contemporary critics assume that the pontiff, as head of his church, had a liberty of discourse and of personal independence in his style of rhetoric. This study, by contrast, posits the view that Pius was constrained rhetorically by the demands of his office. The statements of the previous pontiffs who were his predecessors indicate that Pius was conforming to a discursive style imposed by papal protocol and consistent with the ornately impersonal linguistic style that characterizes Vatican documents. Applying a rhetorical lens to the pontiff's peculiar reticence provides a way to penetrate the historical impasse surrounding this disputed figure.
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Reviewed are: A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, by Julie Lindquist Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education, by Catherine Prendergast.
September 2005
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Abstract Whereas earlier work on rhetorical situation focuses upon, the elements of audience, exigence, and constraints, this article argues that rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling. Placing the rhetorical “elements” within this wider context destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation. As an example of this wider context, this article explores the public rhetoric surrounding issues of urban sprawl in Austin, Texas. While public rhetorical movements can be seen as a response to the “exigence” of overdevelopment, it is also possible to situate the exigence's evocation within a wider context of affective ecologies comprised of material experiences and public feelings.
July 2005
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That's what the movies do. . . . They give us lines to say, they assign us parts:
June 2005
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Contradicting and complicating feminization of rhetoric narratives: Mary Yost and argument from a sociological perspective ↗
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Abstract This article adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship critiquing Robert J. Connors’ assertion that the entrance of women into higher education in the nineteenth century contributed to the decline of oratory and debate. It contradicts and complicates Connors’ claim by highlighting the efforts of Mary Yost, who taught English at Vassar College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yost promoted debate both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and she crafted a feminist theory of argument quite distinct from the traditional type of argument that Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education.
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Abstract Rhetorical conceptions of the public sphere emphasize conversation as central to democracy, yet the salience of conversation to public life is being diminished by changes in the forms and formats of information that U.S. publics receive. A proliferation of reflexive representations across genres, and changed media practices, contribute to a climate in which rhetorical deliberation is undermined and various U.S. publics’ ability to discern what to believe is greatly decreased. Manufactured risks illustrate the significance of these changes and they suggest that further scrutiny of media practices and advocacy of information that serves public interests is crucial for sustaining democracy.
May 2005
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Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.
March 2005
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If we are to believe Cicero’s reports in his Brutus, sentimental discourses were a staple of Roman legal and legislative proceedings. For example, he praised Servius Sulpicius Galba as an orator “who inflames the court, ” thus accomplishing “far more than the one who merely instructs it. ” When charged with massacring Lusitanians, “with tears in his eyes [Galba] commended to [the Roman people’s] protection his own children as well as the young son of Gaius Gallus. The presence of this orphan and his childish weeping excited great compassion ” (xxii, 89-90), and of course Galba was acquitted. Even casual readers of the Iliad discover speeches full of invective (Achilles ’ rage), patriotic encomium (Hector’s battle cry), and sententious disquisitions on the nature of life, love, death, and sociality (Achilles ’ vision of Patroclus). These can unify a people around sentiments of duty, patriotism, fidelity, and amity (books 1, 12, and
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If ethos is the word for our previous issue of Poroi (3, 2, December, 2004), pathos is the word for this one. Pathos appeals to passions; it stirs sentiments; it mobilizes emotions. All the essays in this sixth issue analyze public forms and personal capacities of pathos. Together they argue powerfully for greater attention to political aesthetics, particularly in coming to terms with public arguments. These reach from cultures to technologies and from campaigns to sciences.
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Abstract Chaim Perelman's concept of presence is extended and enriched by applying it to a historical museum exhibit that commemorated a watershed of Austrian history, the Anschluss of 1938. To understand the argumentative effect of presence in this exhibit, new rhetorical categories are deployed: foreground and background, space, and time. These are managed in the interest of an ideological position: to free the Austrian conscience and consciousness from the burden of memory created by the disproportionate participation of Austrians in the Holocaust. Finally, a basic problem with presence is addressed: its apparent incompatibility with any form of rational argumentation.
February 2005
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Λέξις ηθική (ethical style) in book III of Aristotle'sRhetoric? The uses of ηθικόϛ in the aristotelian corpus. ↗
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Abstract In Aristotle's works, the adjective ηθικός has two principal meanings: it can, namely, refer to (1) whatever is relative to ήθος, or (2) whatever is capable of expressing ήθος. This latter sense is what the present study proposes initially to delineate, by endeavoring to evaluate precisely the nature and meaning of ήθος as it is implied in each use of the adjective. This analysis will permit a subsequent isolation of the of the particular senses illustrated in the three occurrences of ηθικός which appear in the passages of the Rhetoric devoted to the λέξις of oratory. (Rhet. III, 7, 1408 a 11, 1408 a 25, et III, 1413 b 10). In effect: (1) when the notion of λέξις ηθική involves the ήθος of the speaker, the semantic extension of this latter term exhibits certain divergences, not only with regard to the way it is characterized in the rest of the treatise, as in the definition of πίστις εν τώι ήθει τού λέγοντος, but also with regard to the doctrine in the Ethics; (2) the way in which Rhet. III, 12 conceives of υπόκρισις—with which λέξις ηθική has close and privileged associations—implies a traditional, non-Aristotelian conception of ήθος. Taking into accound the discordant character of the three above-mentioned instances provides a new resource for critical studies devoted to questions about the dating and unity of the Rhetoric.
January 2005
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Abstract A case study of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, can inform nineteenth-century North American rhetorical history by exposing the interplay of rhetorical theory and practice in an educational setting during the antebellum period. Evidence of this interplay emerges in the subject matter of students' quarterly exhibition and commencement orations and of their literary society presentations from 1823 to 1845. When considered as a curricular whole, this evidence suggests a symbiotic relationship between the primarily moralistic and belletristic discourse favored by the college's curriculum and the more broadly civic judicial and deliberative discourse favored by its literary societies.
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“I Leapt over the Wall and They Made Me President”: Historical Context, Rhetorical Agency and the Amazing Career Of Lech Walesa ↗
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Abstract The rise of Lech Walesa from shipyard electrician to leader of “Solidarity,” international icon of freedom, and first president of democratic Poland was closely bound up with rhetoric. Walesa's idiosyncratic verbal style galvanized the masses and successfully confronted communist propaganda. The revolution of the workers on the Baltic coast was to a large extent a revolution in language. Walesa was also a skilled negotiator. As president, however, he was a controversial figure; his conception of democracy as a continuing war of words is widely credited with spelling the end of the idealistic “Solidarity” era. Today, allegations remain that Walesa was an agent provocateur and that the Polish revolution may have been a provocation that got out of hand. Some allege that Walesa's myth was a creation of Western media, a function of people's desires, and an accident of the historical moment. While there is no proof that any of these allegations are true and the documentary record reveals Walesa's undeniable rhetorical prowess and political talent, his case provides material for reflection on the relationship between history, rhetoric, and political agency.
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The ethics of epideictic rhetoric: Addressing the problem of presence through Derrida's funeral orations ↗
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Abstract I identify three modern approaches used to theorize epideictic rhetoric and suggest that each approach has difficulty dealing with the category of presence assigned to the genre by Aristotle. Drawing on Thucydides and, through him, Pericles' funeral oration, I suggest that Jacques Derrida's funeral speeches provide a way of rethinking the epideictic genre's presence as rhetorical ethics. More specifically, I argue that the function of presence in epideictic rhetoric is to provide an ethical interruption, and that Derrida, as one of our most accomplished funeral orators, helps us clarify the category of presence as it is described in Aristotle's and Thucydides' discussions of epideictic oratory.
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William G. Allen's “orators and oratory”: Inventional amalgamation, pathos, and the characterization of violence in African‐American abolitionist rhetoric ↗
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Abstract This study explores the rhetoric of African‐American educator and abolitionist William Grant Allen through an analysis of "Orators and Oratory," an address delivered to the Dialexian Society of New York Central College. I feature Allen's effort to meld a variety of traditions and approaches to enlist his student audience in the cause of abolition. Further, I take up two related, but distinct components of "Orators and Oratory": the emphasis on appeals to the emotions and the portrayal of violence. More generally, I suggest ways in which Allen's speech serves as a window onto the rhetoric of marginalized abolitionist rhetors.
2005
December 2004
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Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.
September 2004
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Reviews L art de parler: Anthologie de manuels d'éloquence, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, ed., Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. xxi+362 pp. In his introduction, Salazar points with envy to the United States for the liveliness of our rhetorical tradition and practice compared with France, especially the continuous place of rhetoric in higher education. Looking with corresponding envy from this side of the Atlantic, one advantage I see in this anthology over comparable American anthologies: greater apparent continu ity. Greece and Rome—I was glad to see an excerpt from Tacitus, an unjustly neglected source for the history of rhetoric—lead seamlessly into the Middle Ages; Erasmus and Calvin lead to French renaissance authors such as Ramus and Amyot. We see rhetoric employed in the education of princes (Amyot, la Motte le Vayer), and diplomacy (Lancelot). The rhetoric of the academy (Patru), of lawyers (Dubois de Bretteville), of literary studies (Rollin), of bu reaucratic reports (Andrieux), and even how bourgeois mothers should talk and their children listen (Mme. Dufrenoy) all have their place. The continuity of French rhetoric is also nicely emphasized by selections from the rhetoric of preaching not only from medieval and renaissance authors but writers up to the 20th century (Augustine, de Basevorn, Erasmus, Calvin, Maury, Bouchage, Morice). The diversity of places where rhetoric is exercised leads to interesting insights and surprises. For example, the short excerpt from Lancelot's Le Parfait Amassadeur is entitled, "one cannot be a good ambassador without being a good orator," and draws interesting connections between, as Salazar puts it, the art of speaking and the art of speaking in the name of someone. As he says in his introduction, rhetoric from the time of Gorgias has connected the art of speaking with the art of speaking in the name of someone. We only get three pages of Lancelot (1642), and that is a translation of a work of Zuniga (1620), but the treatment of the ambassador as the complete orator is enough to raise stimulating questions about personification, representation, and disguise. It would be worth connecting this handbook for speaking in the name of someone with current rhetorical problems of how to be a representative and how to be an advocate. Similarly, the selection from Olivier Patrus' Discours de reception (1640) introduces the peculiarly French rhetorical genre of the academic oration. Intellectuals occupy a different place in French culture from their role in Rhetorica, Vol. XXII, Issue 4, pp. 401-407, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2004 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 www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 401 402 RHETORICA Anglophone culture, and proficiency in this genre should be part of the accounting of the difference. Unusually, this anthology does not neglect the last part of rhetoricaction or delivery—and so we see excerpts from texts on pronunciation and self-presentation. This is the first time I have ever found the art of delivery interesting. Instead of looking to politics, where rhetoric should flourish, Salazar wisely looks at where rhetoric has flourished, and produced a fascinating anthology. Some of the selections will be as unfamiliar to French readers as they are to this American one. (The editor reports that the selection from Basevorn is here translated into French for the first time.) This anthology is exciting reading not only for readers interested in learning about rhetoric in a distinct tradition, but for anyone interested in the diversity of appearances that rhetoric has taken over the ages. The theme of his introduction is, I think, at odds with this ecumenical approach to the selections themselves. Rhetoric, Salazar notes, had a demo cratic birth. He claims that the persuasive tradition and practical politics of the west are fused with rhetoric, eloquence, the art of speaking, the art of oratory (vii). "Democracy gives each citizen the right to defend himself, by speech, if he sees himself injured, but which imposes on others, between equal citizens, to judge the case....Speech replaces violence" (ix-x). Conse quently, Salazar argues, rhetoric is a phenomenon unique...
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Rhetorical theory in Yale's graduate schools in the late nineteenth century: The example of William C. Robinson'sForensic Oratory ↗
Abstract
Abstract Although conventional views about nineteenth‐century rhetoric highlight a shift from oratory to composition and from classical rhetoric with origins in Cicero and Quintilian to a "new" rhetoric with origins in Campbell, Blair, and Whately (with an attendant loss of scholarship and quality), William C. Robinson's Forensic Oratory (1893) can be grouped with a growing number of works that complicate such views. Robinson continues to emphasize oratory and to derive his theory from Cicero and Quintilian, using a complex of ideas called "uniformitarianism" to justify his direct appropriation of classical ideas. The resulting rhetoric lacks neither responsible scholarship nor high quality.
August 2004
July 2004
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Abstract
After World War II, the United States government and citizenry were concerned with truth, propaganda, democracy, and national security as they entered the Cold War era. This was a time when technocrats, engineers, and scientists could lead our free-world government through the perils of our tense relationships with Russia, Red China, and Korea. In the early 1940s, Rudolf Flesch began developing what he termed a “scientific rhetoric” to help writers of functional documents more effectively communicate technical information to a general public. He came up with a readability formula to help writers evaluate whether their writing was effective and this readability formula has profoundly shaped notions of “clear writing” for the last 60 years. This article explores Flesch's development of this readability formula, placing his work in a historical context, as well as discussing how the readability formula fit into a larger project to make effective writing more of a science than an art.
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Abstract
This article encourages technical and professional communication programs to take on the challenge of educating students to become "community intellectuals." The notion of educating future professionals for a career needs to be reconsidered in light of both current research concerning civic rhetoric and past practices in moral humanism courses. The triumvirate of rhetoric, ethics, and moral philosophy provides an effective foundation for reconfiguring existing pedagogy in the field and offers insights for nurturing community intellectuals.
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What's Civic About Technical Communication? Technical Communication and the Rhetoric of "Community" ↗
Abstract
Although the concept of community has been advanced in technical communication as a moral reference point for civic rhetorical action, this concept is typically used in romantic, redemptive, and essentializing ways. This article argues for a radical and symbolic/rhetorical view of community, regarding it a discursive construct purposefully invoked by technical writers for strategic reasons.
June 2004
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Abstract
We report on an exploratory experimental comparison of two different thinking aloud approaches in a usability test that focused on navigation problems in a highly nonstandard Web site. One approach is a rigid application of Ericsson and Simon's (for original paper see Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data, MIT Press (1993)) procedure. The other is derived from Boren and Ramey's (for original paper see ibid., vol. 43, no. 3, p. 261-278 (2000)) proposal based on speech communication. The latter approach differs from the former in that the experimenter has more room for acknowledging (mm-hmm) contributions from subjects and has the possibility of asking for clarifications and offering encouragement. Comparing the verbal reports obtained with these two methods, we find that the process of thinking aloud while carrying out tasks is not affected by the type of approach that was used. The task performance does differ. More tasks were completed in the B and R condition, and subjects were less lost. Nevertheless, subjects' evaluations of the Web site quality did not differ, nor did the number of different navigation problems that were detected.
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Abstract
Reviews 301 Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics, ed. Olga Tellegen-Couperus (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003). While there is some evidence (pp. 1, 191) that the title of this book reflects its original scope (and that of the conference that underlies it), its actual contents range much more widely around the central figure of Quintilian. Many papers are entirely concerned with the history and analysis of rhetorical theory. Nonetheless, the papers concerning law are the most coherent group and, by and large, the most ambitiously argued. After making a few general observations on the whole volume and briefly treating the contents of the twenty-five individual papers, I will turn primarily to two questions regarding the utility of the Institutio Oratoria for lawyers which make up the most sustained topics of discussion. The essays collected here were written by scholars from diverse fields (law, classics, rhetoric, literary theory, comparative literature) and of diverse, mostly European, nationalities (Spain and Holland are particularly well represented). All papers have been rendered into what is for the most part very readable English. Also, despite their origin in a conference in 2001, most of the papers come equipped with the kind of scholarly apparatus one expects in a written work. Nearly all the papers treat a single book (or smaller segment of the text) as their subject, with a few verging on being running commentaries. Jorge Fernández Lopez studies sources of authority, both for texts and for persons. Serena Querzoli views Q.'s education project in the context of concrete evidence for contemporary educational practice. Tomás Albaladejo develops a theoretically informed analysis of the three genera of oratory, tying them to communicative function more than "occasion" (narrowly defined). Olivia Robinson investigates the opportunities and pitfalls of using Q. as a source for Roman law. Ida Mastrorosa argues Q.'s text is substantively shaped by his court-room experience. Giovanni Rossi discusses the reception of classical rhetoric by (mostly) seventeenth century Venetian lawyers (this piece has the least to do with Q. specifically). Belén Saiz Noeda treats the theory of proof within and according to Q., especially with respect to the use of topoi. Andrew Lewis clarifies a usually under-translated phrase at 5.13.7 by reference to the facts of legal procedure. Maria Silvana Celentano demonstrates the value of self-exemplification in book 6. Jeroen Bons and Robert Taylor Lane translate and analyze IO 6.2 from a philosophical point of view. Richard A. Katula discusses the means of exploiting emotion in venues (ancient and modern) in which that practice is normatively disfavored. José-Domingo Rodríguez Martín investigates the relative weight of oratory (especially pathos) and law in the Roman courtroom. (Katula's piece is to some extent "how to"; Rodríguez Martin's is relatively more historical.) David Pujante's discussion of status theory shows that dispositio is not just an afterthought to inventio, but is itself constitutive of interpretation. Maarten Henket advocates the use of Quintilianic strategies to bring more predictability to judicial law-making. Jan Willem Tellegen reinterprets the 302 RHETORICA casua Curiana by reevaluating the Quintilianic evidence. Francisco ChicoRico analyzes the virtues of style and their hidden connections to the other operations of rhetoric. The editor offers two contributions of her own. In one she offers a compelling rereading of a quoted sententia (8.5.19) by consideration of the legal context. In the other she gives a similarly constructed interpretation of a troubled passage at 9.2.65-6. Barend van Heusden gives a cognitive semantic account of the notion of figured discourse. James J. Murphy explains Q.'s plan for adult education. Sanne Taekema focuses more specifically on the motives behind Q.'s choice of canon, by way of a comparison with the goals of the modern Law and Literature movement. Peter Wiilfing gives an account of ancient and modern gestural culture. Esperanza Osaba tries to reconstruct the circumstance ofjudicial appeal alluded to at 11.1.76. Vincenzo Scarano Ussani shows how the Quintilianic perfect orator is fitted to the circumstances of the contemporary (i.e. imperial) community Willem Witteveen argues that Q.'s deep rhetoric...
March 2004
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Abstract
Reviews 209 The final contributions (Patrick Brasart, Maïté Bouyssy, Anne Vibert) take the self-same problems a little further on in history. Brasart attends to what Mme. de Staël, who placed political eloquence very high, saw as the "missed opportunity for a meeting between eloquence and the Revolution." What should have been simplicity and nobility became alas! the exact opposite of grandeur, being fated to illustrate that horrible paradox of a Republican language which had no intrinsic literary merit but which was nonetheless to become horribly effective: words (as Michelet was later to repeat) were no longer signs but signals. Bouyssy, exploiting the vast manuscript archive of the Anacréon de la guillotine (who was to be savaged by the historiography of the nineteenth century in general), shows how Bertrand Barère, reduced to silence, continued (with his impossiblefuite dans l'encre) to write incessantly with an eye to a posterity that one day (in a fortunate conjunction of text and reader) might be disposed to understand. Vibert brings the collection to a close with a panoramic, chronological overview of the fortunes (or misfortunes) of revolutionary eloquence in the nineteenth century as it struggled to free itself from the "contaminations" of the past. This engrossing volume, which will surely establish itself in the general bibliography of Revolutionary rhetoric, is remarkable for the consistently high quality of its scholarship and (with one or two exceptions) for the general legibility of its discourses. In an even more important sense, it is an état présent of this area of the discipline and serves to remind the reader that certain problèmes ponctuels need to be re-addressed, while others (identified by Françoise Douay and Jean-Paul Sermain in their lengthy preface) remain to receive that attention which is their due. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough to both specialist and non-specialist alike: both will read it with considerable profit. John Renwick University of Edinburgh Lucia Calboli Montefusco, ed., Papers on Rhetoric, vol. 4. Roma: Her der, 2002. Pp. viii + 286 Sous le titre Papers on Rhetorics IV, L. Calboli Montefusco recueille et pu blie certaines des communications présentées au congrès de l'International Society for the History of Rhetoric à Varsovie en juillet 2001. L'ouvrage comprend des articles stimulants en anglais, français, italien et allemand, témoignant ainsi de l'intérêt international que suscite l'étude de la rhéto rique. Les contributions, toutes suivies d'une bibliographie parfaitement à jour; couvrent un vaste laps de temps et concernent différents aspects de la rhétorique grecque et latine. Un classement chronologique des textes aurait peut-être facilité la lecture du volume. 210 RHETORICA Dans l'article intitulé "Aper's oratory in the Dialogus de oratoribus" (pp. 1-23), G. Calboli maintient que les trois interlocuteurs du dialogue expriment trois niveaux complémentaires de l'interprétation que donne Tacite de la rhétorique de son temps: la rhétorique comme moyen pour accéder à un statut social élevé (Aper), l'aspect moral de la rhétorique et la supériorité des orateurs anciens (Messala), l'explication sociale et historique du déclin actuel de la rhétorique (Maternus). Traitant de “Dionisio a Corinto: laconicità e serio-comico" (pp. 25-39), M. S. Celentano discute les caractéristiques de la parole des Lacédémoniens: l'approche communicative agressive, la concision et la condensation, le discours sentencieux mais toujours vigoureux et efficace. La tension agonistique et l'agressivité du discours laconique conçu en tant que confrontation directe des interlocuteurs se manifestent aussi dans le domaine du sérieux-comique (spoudogeloion), les Lacédémoniens apparaissant capables d'exprimer des contenus sérieux à travers une forme comique et de formuler des phrases ironiques et piquantes, sans jamais en devenir les victimes. A propos de "Lysias démagogue dans le Contre Eratosthène “ (pp· 4159 ), P. Chiron montre comment Lysias, afin de parvenir à la condamnation d'Eratosthène, recourt à la déformation historique, notamment quand il présente les Trente comme un groupe homogène radicalement extérieur à la communauté démocratique et quand il utilise l'antithèse de façon à éliminer...
February 2004
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Abstract
AbstractDuring the rise and growth of the Greek art of oratory in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the development of open and systematic techniques for awakening and encouraging a sense of pity can be observed both in rhetoric proper (the ten Attic orators) and in associated literary genres influenced by rhetoric (Historiography and Tragedy). These are classified—most notably by reference to the writings of Plato and Aristotle—in the light of rhetorical theory and significant examples are provided. Three techniques are investigated: (1.) the direct use of instances of pity, without elaboration, (2.) the development of axioms concerning the nature of pity, and (3.) systematic approaches to the awakening of pity.
January 2004
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(2004). Demosthenes' Renaissance Philipics: Thomas Wilson's 1570 Translation as Anti-Spanish Propaganda. Advances in the History of Rhetoric: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 111-137.
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AbstractJohn Genung's late nineteenth century rhetoric textbooks, although founded on an eighteenth century model of Scottish composition, present an original conception of oratory. Genung's theory breaks free of the classical models and lays out the path to be followed during the development of speech studies among American rhetoricians of the early twentieth century.
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Abstract In his essay “What is Poetry ?”(1833), John Stuart Mill described the difference between rhetoric and poetry using the antithesis, “rhetoric is heard; poetry is overheard.” In the twentieth century, scholars from the field of Speech Communication appropriated Mill's words as justification for the separation of Speech Communication (and rhetorical criticism) from English (and literary criticism). This essay argues that twentieth-century scholars misunderstood Mill's meaning. They failed to recognize that, for Mill, the key issue was not the frequently quoted distinction between rhetoric and poetry but a more problematic distinction between art and science.
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Abstract This essay offers an analysis of “The Truth about the Paterson Strike,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's 1914 speech containing her ideas about the nature of propaganda in radical working-class movements. Flynn defines propaganda as ideological education, and her speech highlights the importance of oratory to early twentieth century radical propaganda campaigns. These ideas belie fundamental principles of contemporary propaganda studies, which define propaganda as manipulative, mass mediated persuasion to advance the interests of powerful elites and institutions, and contain oratory within the ethical art of rhetoric. The study concludes by recommending that the purview of propaganda studies be expanded to include Flynn's activities and those of other radical propagandists.
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This essay focuses on the grammar–rhetoric–composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth–century institution of higher education in Mexico, to argue for a more amply conceived set of colonialist beginnings for American composition. As an emergent site for North American composition–rhetoric, Tlaltelolco launched phenomena familiar to contemporary scholarship, for example composition-rhetoric as attractor for public debates about race and class, as sponsor of debased curricula for people of color, and as re–enforcer of linkages among color, class, aptitude, and local discourse practices.
2004
December 2003
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Abstract
Bruce Herzberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Bentley College. He is the author of several articles on service learning, including "Community Service and Critical Teaching," published originally in CCC and reprinted in a number of anthologies, and "Public Discourse and Service Learning," published in JAC . He is also the author, with Patricia Bizzell, of The Rhetorical Tradition and Negotiating Difference. He began teaching service-learning courses in 1991, and one such course was a research site for Tom Deans's book on service-learning, Writing Partnerships.
September 2003
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Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred, Peter Mortensen ↗
Abstract
312 RHETORICA for Hume than for his moderate opponents. In his response, consistent with Common Sense philosophy, Campbell argues that the contest is not between two types of experience because our belief in testimony is prior to experience: we naturally accept witnesses' accounts in the absence of evidence that they are deceived or deceiving. As a philosophical point, Campbell's argument deserves the respect it has received. The problem is that Campbell does not consistently advance this view. As Suderman points out, Campbell dismissed Roman Catholic accounts of contemporary miracles—a blatant example, but hardly the only one, of Campbell's sacrificing philosophical consistency to defend his religious positions. I would argue for something closer to the reverse of Suderman's thesis. Campbell was an accomplished scholar, but he took as his mission defending and spreading the Word. As a thinker, he is most interesting when he feels most free of his mission. This explains why his relatively secular Philosophy of Rhetoric—a coherent synthesis of classical rhetoric with eighteenth-century empiricism—is his best and most important work, the one on which is reputation quite properly rests. My dissent does not, however, lessen my respect and gratitude for Sud erman's book. Suderman's exhaustive archival research and his intelligent reading of Campbell's works make Orthodoxy and Enlightenment a must read for scholars interested in Campbell. Arthur E. Walzer University ofMinnesota Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Com posing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xi + 279 pages. Imagining Rhetoric is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Amer ican rhetorics. Truly a first, this book provides the only full-length study of early American women's rhetorical education and composition practices. In attempting to "glimpse how composition came to be situated in the lives of the women in the new nation," Eldred and Mortensen achieve two im portant tasks: they draw upon a wide range of sources, some rhetorical and pedagogical, others fictional and personal; and they resist a seamless or heroic interpretation of women's use of neoclassical civic rhetoric, al lowing instead for the discontinuities and disappointments that accompany liberatory struggles and revisionist historiography. This study focuses on six women, some well known, others more ob scure, but all grappled to make liberatory civic rhetoric their own: Han nah Webster Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Car oline Tuthill, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Charlotte Forten. Eldred and Mortensen recover an array of these women's "schooling fictions" from the Reviews 313 1790s to the 1860s, including female textbooks, anthologies, theoretical texts, practical writing guides, and syllabi, as well as novels, novellas, diaries, political essays, and reflective narratives. The authors demonstrate that ex panding the scope of sources of women's rhetoric is crucial to revising history, and in this particular case they effectively challenge the standard thesis of neoclassical rhetoric's decline. Just as "schooling fictions" imagine the roles of writing in women's post-Revolutionarv lives, Imagining Rhetoric compels readers to contemplate the possibilities of historiography. The introduction outlines the primary argument that liberatory strains of neoclassical civic rhetoric were "indispensable" to these women's visions of female education. The first chapter also raises the book's central question: were these women's uses of this rhetoric liberatory? The following chapters do not answer this question directly but illustrate the complexity of the issue and maintain a productive tension between possible responses. Chapter two discusses how female textbooks and didactic novels, both appearing after the Revolution, conceive of women's education quite differently. Whereas Donald Fraser's schoolbook, The Mental Flower-Garden, dresses up a restric tive and superficial education for women in liberatory garb, Foster's The Boarding School imagines an ideal education that teaches women to use liber atory rhetoric themselves to shape the new nation. Yet for Murray, the subject of the next chapter, a vision like Foster's is complicated by fears of sophistry, nonstandard English, and poor teachers. To temper the seductive aspects of misguided liberatory rhetoric, Murray develops a classically oriented "com monplace rhetoric," a system of instruction based on literary borrowings, which Eldred and Mortensen...
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Abstract
Abstract An intricate network of collaborative relationships surrounded and supported nineteenth‐century American women's public discourse. Antebellum women worked closely with families, friends, and hired help to create and deliver rhetoric, negotiate conflicting private and public obligations, accommodate gender norms, and construct “feminine”; ethos. However, despite collaboration's central importance to women's rhetoric, scholars currently lack a model that accounts fully for its many forms and multiple functions. This article introduces a new model of collaboration capable of explaining how and why this cooperative method offers marginalized groups their most effective means to the public forum in resistant surroundings.