The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso, located on the U.S-Mexico border, employs mostly tutors who are bilingual, Spanish-English; however, there are a significant number of international tutors with different linguistic backgrounds. Using a qualitative method approach, this article discusses findings from focus groups and interviews with international multilingual student tutors who worked at the UWC. Through our analysis of the data, we found that international tutors face a unique set of challenges, but also bring a wealth of knowledge to working at the writing center. This article focuses on three major themes discussed by participants: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Tutors’ experiences in leveraging linguistic and cultural differences prompted the need for the UWC to implement changes to its tutor training and policies to support international tutors. As institutions in the United States become more diverse, writing centers need to challenge who best practices in the discipline were created for and who they serve, all while critically examining how we can leverage the experiences of international tutors to reshape writing center pedagogy. Keywords : international writing tutors; multilingualism; linguistic diversity; Hispanic-Serving Institution; writing center pedagogy; tutor training The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is located in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. El Paso, combined with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, make it one of the largest bi-national areas in the world. Residents of Juarez frequently commute over the international bridges daily for work; many of these commuters include students at UTEP. UTEP is a Hispanic-Serving Institution where 80% of the student population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx (UTEP, 2019). Furthermore, 20% of these students are students from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and an additional 5% of students are international students from around the world (UTEP, 2019). Due to the diverse and complex linguistic and cultural lived experiences of students at UTEP, the UWC is informed by theories on multilingualism, antiracism, and equity. It is often cited that writing centers are not just places that enact marginalization, but centers for those who are often marginalized in academia. The UWC has drawn from these theories to develop its programmatic identity, including its goals, tutor training and pedagogies, and professional development, in order to adopt socially just practices. This work, and the theories motivating the work at the UWC, serve as a direct response to our institution and to the students it supports. In a typical semester, the UWC assists over 8,000 students with their writing. The UWC offers face-to-face and synchronous online tutoring, employing about 30 writing tutors, undergraduate and graduate. The undergraduate writing tutors are all hired directly by the UWC, and the graduate students are those who have been awarded a master’s or doctoral teaching assistantship through the English Department or the Creative Writing Department. This year alone, over 40% of the 30+ tutors working at the Writing Center are international students and bi/multilingual with languages ranging from Spanish to Nepalese. Needless to say, this creates a linguistically and culturally diverse work environment as international writing tutors assist students with their writing at the center. This diversity of languages is at the core of our approach to training and pedagogy for writing center tutors. An intricate dynamic develops between writing center tutors and students who often have different home languages, many of whom are English language learners often working towards enacting Academic English as their writing assignments require. While the majority of writing center pedagogy focuses on how to tutor English as a Second Language students and many tutoring books include chapters on working with ESL students or multilingual writers (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie and Lerner, 2009; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2015; Bruce & Rafoth, 2016; Lape, 2020), very little has been written on the experiences of international tutors from the tutor side. This project started in 2017 when the UWC Director and Assistant Directors were approached by several international students who had been writing tutors, one who is currently the Assistant Director of the UWC and co-author of this piece, asking how training would account for the linguistic differences between the new students joining us from Nepal and the majority of the Spanish speaking students who visited the writing center. Through multiple conversations with international student tutors about their experiences working at the UWC, we were confronted with addressing the following questions: What are the experiences of international tutors working at the UWC? How do non-native English speakers navigate assisting students who are native English speakers, or, in the case of our institution, many non-native English speakers with a different home language? The UWC’s week-long training at the beginning of each academic year includes an entire day focused on tutoring multilingual students, with a larger emphasis on Spanish speakers and writers. However, this was a destabilizing question and set us on the path to try and learn about the experiences of international tutors working at the writing center. In an effort to learn how international writing center tutors navigate concerns about language usage, the UWC needed to reconceptualize training to better account for linguistically and culturally diverse interactions during tutoring sessions. Our article’s contributions to both this special issue and the writing center community opens with an overview of the theories which inform our work at the UWC. First, we came to realize that applying writing center theory and best practices in the UWC was problematic, as some of these best practices did not resonate within the context of UTEP and the UWC–a clear indication of the highly contextualized linguistic ecologies of writing centers on college campuses. Most importantly, these best practices were developed from the ground up and informed by the experiences of students and tutors. Next, we provided a brief description of our study and data collection process. We then structured our data findings into three themes: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Lastly, after discussing the most insightful aspects of our findings and how they informed changes to tutoring training at UWC training, we offer readers insight for how writing centers can reconceptualize and reframe the linguistic and cultural knowledges of international tutors as rich resources to learn from, and move away from the deficit rhetoric that has traditionally circulated about non-native English tutors.

As a writing center community, we are constantly striving for ways to address underrepresentation to help restore justice in our centers. In this article, I discuss how the current makeup of writing center administrators does not reflect the U.S. student population. As a response to this historic underrepresentation in writing center administration, I propose that we utilize structures from mentorship theory to develop actionable ways to bring diverse student voices to the forefront of writing center leadership. These methods for increased representation include tutor-led Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound (SMART) projects, tutors serving as professional development facilitators, and rap sessions. Ultimately, this article should serve as a guided starting point to help writing center administrators to continually critique and reflect on how they represent the voices of the student populations they serve. Keywords : administrative underrepresentation, peer mentorship, professional development, student diversity, writing center leadership

On June 12, 2020, the SIGDOC Executive Committee issued the following Response to Injustice on the SIGDOC website. We reprint the statement here in its entirety.

This experience report shares lessons learned from a multi-staged prototyping process, over a five-year period, that involved the creation and iterative development of a mobile platform and dozens of prototype examples of interactive locative-media artifacts, including locative journalism. Thematically linked to a public art collection, the mobile app was designed as a research instrument aimed at an external audience of passersby, actively using smartphones. This paper documents and outlines key decisions made about the platform and content in response to observed experiences. It also identifies emergent areas of research potential intertwined in the undertaking of such a prototyping process.

Coalitional politics have largely been examined across social and cultural differences that serve shared political commitments, and the rhetorical force of situated and material locations remains an open question. To provide a theoretical analytic for these excesses, I offer pluriversal and rhetorical understandings of divergence and diplomacy for coalitional politics. I demonstrate these concepts through a rhetorical analysis of a community organization from San Antonio, Texas, and their coalitional politics, which partially emerge as a response to extreme weather events and urban development. The upshot reveals that rhetorical approaches to divergence and diplomacy can help capture the material obligations and constraints across heterogeneous yet interdependent worlds. Such theoretical tools will be increasingly important for coalitional rhetorics and politics responding to climate breakdown.

“Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.”

Translingual scholarship emphasizes the temporal dimensions of language use, and frame language practices as emergent phenomena shaped by repertories of discursive activities sedimented through prior experience. This essay adapts Gee’s concept of lifeworld Discourse in order to theorize (1) how Discourse competencies are cultivated through the sedimentation of discourse practices over time, and (2) how actors occupy thresholds or dwell on borders while they draw on repertoires sedimented through prior experience in response to emergent rhetorical situations. I activate the lifeworld Discourse conceptual framework in an analytical approach that I call a Discourse genealogy in order to trace out the palimpsestic emergence and blending of Discursive competencies throughout labor and community organizer César Chávez’s life. The argument focuses on the archival record of Chávez’s literacy practices in order to understand his emergent lifeworld Discourses from birth in 1927 through the late 1950s, up to the point at which he began to organize the migrant farmworkers under the auspices of the Community Service Organization in Oxnard, California (1957-8). Using textual analysis of Chávez’s writings and oral history records, the following essay shows how one thread of Chávez’s lifeworld Discourse – responding to social injustice – binds together a number of Chávez’s varied Discursive repertoires. My central argument is that when we occupy thresholds that connect Discourses, our repertoires of practice may be blended with new practices to form emergent potentials for responding to rhetorical situations. The thread of repertoires sedimented throughout a lifetime bind together the various social Discourses we encounter and engage with in our public lives.

“If activists/rhetoricians don’t create and perform new rhetorical practices in response to visiting rhetors like Spencer, the American academy will be a crueler, more unjust place for it.”

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. The guest editors briefly overview intersections between comics and technical communication, then introduce the special issue’s contents and contributions to ongoing conversations in the field.

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others.

As you well know, the milieu is a notion that only appears in biology with Lamarck. However, it is a notion that already existed in physics…. What is the milieu? It is what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another. It is therefore the medium of an action and element in which it circulates.—Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 11 January 1978It's really hard to feel like you're saving the world when you are watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right nothing happens. Yeah. A successful shelter in place means you're going to feel like it was all for nothing. And you'd be right, because nothing means nothing happened to your family.—Emily Landon, MD, University of Chicago, 20 March 2020The choice of the new word indicates that everybody knows that something new and decisive has happened, whereas its ensuing use, the identification of the new and specific phenomena with something familiar and rather general, indicated unwillingness to admit that anything out of the ordinary has happened at all.—Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics” In the midst of … what?In the midst of that which does not (yet) have a singular let alone accepted name (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, pathology, pandemic, crisis, lockdown, depression, emergency), and so in the midst of something that recalls a poignant 1918 letter from Madrid, published in JAMA, “telling our friends how we had the … the…. What should we call what we had been having?” What to call, how to refer, what to grasp—all open questions, in a milieu in which so very much is happening inside and outside what is and is not happening.In the midst of what is wholly and no longer new, whether in the change of name from 2019 novel coronavirus to COVID-19, long weeks of sheltering in place, anxious and ambiguous lockdown, or harrowing work on the floor of the ward, warehouse, and grocery. And yet what is not new is hardly familiar. There is not yet a shared vocabulary, let alone stable topoi or a reliable grammar. What's between us are pieces of discourse and discourses in pieces. What circulates are fragments, along with so many clichés peddled by PR firms (how many times can one hear, “In these [insert adjective here] times …”?), even as the truth of the cliché is a felt need to “reach for ways of thinking and speaking that are easily recognizable” (Düttmann 2020), not least in the name of thin solidarities that sound Orwellian notes (e.g., #AloneTogether) and fail to consider what the moment defies. There is no adequate account, meaningful response, or right word, all the more so as what must be said cannot be said in one breath, in that very expression that has become so uncertain, so explicit.In the midst of the contingent, as the commons are empty and fraught, as there are basic questions, perhaps the most basic questions, as to how to discern and decide, how to assess, blame, and respond, how to understand and judge, the line between necessity and possibility appears, blurs, reappears, blurs again. But contingency does not reign, at least for long. Finitude is being allocated—decisively and not infrequently by default. Consider the influential guidelines published by the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care on 16 March: “As an extension of the principle of proportionality of care, allocation in a context of serious shortage of healthcare resources, we must aim at guaranteeing intensive treatments to patients with greater chances of therapeutic success. Therefore it is a matter of favoring the ‘greatest life expectancy.’ … This means, not necessarily having to follow a criterion for access to intensive care like ‘first come, first serve’” (Vergano et al. 2020, 3). Of course, as a matter of course, this is but one of the rations, so many of which are covered by the façade of “the virus does not discriminate,” a podium-spoken truism that cannot hide the fact that the dice were already loaded. In the midst of disproportionate death, undue sacrifice, and the lived reality (e.g., three-mile-long food lines) of alphabet soup economic recovery (will the other curve be a U, V, W, or L?), who is to say who draws the lines, makes the cuts, and parcels relief (as one searches through Rawls looking for a meaningful word about words)? And as these actions take shape in words, when and how are they said? Under what conditions can they (not) be heard?In the midst of an exceptional onslaught, an emergency that leads some to speak of battle and others to speak of care, all in the swirl of political leaders demonstrating better and worse understandings of executive power (compare, for instance, Mr. Trump's bleach-drinking “sarcasm” with President Ramaphosa's thoughtful though certainly not uncontroversial concern), while packs of journalists pretend to be epidemiologists from their Zoom-readied “studies,” and pundits proclaim certainty in the name of folding every question back into their account of the culture war. If the “normality” of emergency has become perhaps too familiar, not least in the pages of “theory,” it may now admit to new scrutiny, as big tech enters into surveillance agreements with government, as lockdown is granted presumption, and as nations close borders (African Union 2020), all in the face of an invisible dispersion, a movement of contagion from cases to clusters to communities to states, a movement whose existence is denied (implausibly) at cost.This special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric took shape in the midst of what may well prove to be some of the COVID-19 pandemic's earlier and yet perhaps decisive days. Each of the issue's remarkable contributions grapples with this uneven, frantic, and wholly uncertain turn. Each essay poses fundamental questions and takes up multiple and often competing concerns. These are not then works that strive for the last word. In some distinction to the “plague tracts” of old, these essays compose and constitute a proper beginning, a set of provisional and experimental disclosures that forgo certain conclusions in favor of imaginative and critical insight. Indeed, the pages that follow are both chronicle and guiding light, an inquiry into key rhetorical-philosophical questions provoked by COVID-19 and close reflection on theoretical, conceptual, and practical problems that must be figured into—and which indeed work to figure—responses to the pandemic and its aftermath. Unfolding within a number of idioms and a variety of gestures, this work holds a number of crucial debates, not least whether the pandemic amounts to a common experience and how it troubles the commonplace and the exception(al), perhaps in ways that upset the very taking place of language. One can hear sadness across these pages, as well as anger. And one can hear a certain quietude, a notable reserve about the meaning of the pandemic for the future of higher education—this question is close by and pressing, in a way that may deserve separate and dedicated attention, perhaps sooner rather than later.To be sure, this issue of the journal was not planned, or at least it was not planned in any traditional way. From within and looking a bit beyond P&R's specific interdisciplinary concern, it began with the wager that this is not a moment for humanities-based inquiry to take its (given) time or demand (social, or social-scientific) distance. Such inquiry must appear and work in the midst, perhaps not as so much (often functionalist) “activism,” but as a dedicated and tireless concern for grasping and grappling with what is now (not) happening, its conditions, meanings, and values. Part of this task may be that we need to hear one of Hippocrates's aphorisms anew: “Life is short, the Art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” If so, this will be shared work, a portion of which begins here. And indeed, this issue of the journal is the product of a remarkable collaboration, a collective effort to write in the midst of distraction, difficulty, and pain and a commitment to break the schedule in the name of publishing at speed (we hope that you will excuse whatever typos slipped through in the push). I am sincerely grateful to all of the contributing authors, and to the staff at Penn State University Press, especially Diana Pesek, Jessica Karp, and Joseph Dahm. It is an honor to work with each of you.

On behalf of SIGDOC and CDQ, we wanted to reach out to all of you and thank you for all you do in this difficult time. Our organization's greatest strength is in its members, and we hope you are all staying as safe and sane as possible while COVID-19 changes the way we work and play. SIGDOC has yet to reach an official decision on the viability or nature of our 2020 Conference in Denton, TX, but the Executive Committee along with this year's Conference Committee, lead by Stacey Pigg, are in consistent contact and weighing options. Above all else, our decision will be informed by the values that we have articulated as an organization, which are: valuing human well-being; engaging in financial stewardship; respecting labor; foregrounding accessibility; supporting early-career scholars; establishing continuity; managing community and networkbuilding; supporting innovation; valuing industry practices; and maintaining and facilitating interorganizational and international relationships. The option for SIGDOC 2020 that best addresses these core values will be the option we select. For now, we have confirmation that the proceedings publications will be moving forward and supported by ACM and included in the Digital Library regardless of the decision we make on the conference. This is great news, and fulfills our values in supporting scholarship and valuing the labor done by our authors, reviewers, and our program cochairs, Josephine Walwema and Daniel Hocutt, who have worked diligently in the midst of the pandemic. CDQ will continue to publish as often as we are able. We understand that our workflows have changed, dramatically for some of us. So while it may be that extra time is occasionally needed for a review, we remain committed to providing you as rapid turnaround as we can, and publishing cutting-edge research on communication design through our original articles, experience reports, and book reviews. In this issue, for example, we are pleased to share with you Sonia Stephens and Dan Richards' "Story mapping and sea level rise: Listening to global risks at street level," and Jennifer Roth Miller, Brandy Dieterle, Jennifer deWinter, and Stephanie Vie's "Social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs: A heuristic to guide future use." These two excellent articles are accompanied by reviews of Jonanna Boehnert's Design, ecology politics: Towards the ecocene, reviewed by Ryan Cheek, and Christa Teston's Bodies in flux: Scientific methods for negotiating medical uncertainty, reviewed by Ella Browning.

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Decentering and Decentralizing Literacy Studies: An Urgent Call for Our Field, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30735-1.gif

This article reports on a rhetorical analysis of media reports on campus sexual assault informed by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The analysis reveals patterns of narrative construction wherein those accused of campus sexual assault remain absent from reporting while universities and accusers are burdened with responsibility. Consequently, the “disappearing accused” contributes to public uncertainties about how to respond to the problem of campus sexual assault and complicates how governing policies, particularly Title IX, are perceived, wherein Title IX’s equity framework does not match expectations of justice in response to violence.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2020 issue.

We are thrilled to introduce this 20th anniversary issue of Reflections. Our tenure as coeditors has taught us a great deal about the journal, the growing subfield of community-engaged writing, and the pleasures and pitfalls of editing a biannual publication. As we embarked on editing this issue, we assumed we would learn a lot about the journal’s history, but we could not fully appreciate what that meant until we began to review submissions. The first round we got were in response to a call for articles directed mainly to those with a close association with the journal—former editors, contributors, board members, reviewers—or whose own career paths were influenced by reading it. These articles and several interviews, shorter pieces, and a dialogue provide valuable perspectives on the journal.

In our call for submissions for the Reflections’ 20th anniversary issue, we invited shorter considerations about the journal’s impact to be published as a textual roundtable. As is usually the case, we got what we asked for: a number of short pieces that praise, situate, look backward in order to predict going forward, illuminate, and otherwise comment on the journal’s history, contributions to the field, weaknesses, and strengths. Below are several of these commentaries in conversation with one another. Together, they provide a glimpse into the journal’s past and begin to imagine its future.

This interview is not the first in Reflections for Tom Deans, a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Connecticut. His first interview appeared in issue 1.1 of Reflections and focused on his work as chair of the recently created CCCC national service-learning committee dedicated to creating “disciplinary momentum” around service learning. He has a career-long interest in community-engaged writing and research, and served as both a Senior Editor and the Book Review Editor for Reflections over several years. In this interview, he reflects on the beginning of Reflections, the emergence of composition’s interest in service learning, and the growth of institutional support and recognition of community engagement. Overall, he finds that despite its early modest aspirations, the field’s trajectory has resulted in a large amount of exciting and important work, and provided a “real viable pathway” for educators who want to build a career around community engagement.

Other| April 01 2020 Contributors Pedagogy (2020) 20 (2): 397–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8091989 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 April 2020; 20 (2): 397–400. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8091989 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Today, diseases can spread internationally faster and farther than ever before, and a range of public health issues can “go global” quickly and easily. The challenge becomes communicating ideas of care—that is, issues of health and wellness—across different cultures, languages, and geopolitical contexts. Doing so involves understanding the dynamics of such factors and how to apply this knowledge effectively. The entries in this special issue examine such factors and provide readers with frameworks for understanding and strategies for addressing these issues.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

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

Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis­ cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit­ erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges­ tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte­ ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char­ ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu­ ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...

Creating her own assignments using openly licensed course materials allows this professor and her students to be more creative and to take greater advantage of digital resources.