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June 2014

  1. Urban Motives—Rhetorical Approaches to Spatial Orientation, Burke on Lynch’s “The Image of the City”
    Abstract

    Whoever raises questions about the legibility of the city must notice that the metaphor of legibility involves the ideas of interpreting signs and symbols under different motivational accesses, which leads to the creation of different scopes of reading, understanding and acting. Thus, the legibility of the city involves the idea of a rhetoric of the city. Kevin lynch is one of the most important theorists of the legibility of the city and his ground-breaking work The Image of the City is first of all on questions concerning the influence of architectural clues and city form on the degree a city becomes legible. Therefore, he emphasizes the important role of three major terms: identity, structure and meaning. But, while his inquiry stresses identity and structure, he says almost nothing about meaning. Since Lynch has no background in theories of meaning, his work leaves a desideratum. It seems to be obvious that leaving out questions of meaning won’t lead to any kind of legibility of the city, as long as the metaphor of legibility is taken seriously. To fill this gap Lynch’s work has to be grounded on a theory of meaning which is able to explain how form influences attributions of meaning, creates scopes of understanding and, finally, affects questions of appropriate behavior. This theoretical background is given by Kenneth Burke. The thesis of this paper is that Burke describes the relation of form, situation and action by the help of what I will call the motive-circle and that this motive-circle is able to explain the above mentioned advisements. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show the rhetorical dimension of the creation of an image of the city. Since—for Lynch—our processes of orientation are based on our image of the city, the main thesis of this paper is that processes of spatial orientation have a rhetorical dimension.

  2. Expanding the Terministic Screen: A Burkean Critique of Information Visualization in the Context of Design Education
    Abstract

    In the face of what information design theorist Richard Wurman has dubbed "information anxiety," it is well documented that information visualization has become a widely accepted tool to assist with the navigation of the symbolic world. Information visualisations, or infographics, are essentially external cognitive aids such as graphs, diagrams, maps and other interactive and innovative graphic applications. It is often argued by design theorists that information visualisations are rhetorical texts in that they have the ability to persuade. Thus, it is not a leap to assert that information visualization may be understood as one expression of Kenneth Burke’s notion of the ‘terministic screen.’

  3. “You’re Not Going to Try and Change My Mind?” The Dynamics of Identification in Aronofsky’s Black Swan

May 2014

  1. Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age
    Abstract

    Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.2.0219
  2. Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article uses Heidegger's critique of the aesthetic tradition to reconsider the limits and potential of aesthetic rhetoric. Contextualizing rhetoric's so-called aesthetic turn within the German aesthetic tradition, we argue that aesthetic rhetoric remains constrained by aesthetics' traditional opposition to the rational and the true. This theoretical heritage has often prevented contemporary aesthetic rhetorical theory from considering the value of art beyond sense experience and ritualized cultural reproduction. We claim, however, that rhetoric can be artistic and at the same time project a community's evolving sense of political and social truth. Through an analysis of Simón Bolívar's Angostura Address, which in 1819 inaugurated a political rebirth of the Venezuelan republic, we demonstrate how the art of rhetoric can exhibit Heidegger's three senses of “aletheiaic” truth: the bestowing, grounding, and beginning of a political community.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.2.0137
  3. Review: Theory, Practice, and the Disciplinary Cross-Narrative
    Abstract

    Holdstein examines the threads that connect three seemingly disparate books in composition studies: Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act by Rebecca S. Nowacek, The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University by David Bleich, and The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, edited by John T. Gage.

    doi:10.58680/ce201424745

April 2014

  1. Compensatory Division in the Occupy Movement
    Abstract

    Rhetorical approaches to identification have tended to favor it over its counterpart, division. However, compensatory divisions can be rhetorically productive for protest movements that challenge the state. An analysis of the use of these divisions in the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the use of the human microphone and computer networking—shows that these technologies aid in enacting divisions between protestors and the dominant social structures that they challenge, thus creating the potential for rhetorically productive sociality.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.884416
  2. How Belletristic Rhetorical Theory in the Liberal Arts Tradition Led to Civic Engagement: Turn-of-the-Century Rhetoric Instruction at Bryn Mawr College
    Abstract

    A reconstruction of the required two-year course in composition and rhetoric for all incoming students at Bryn Mawr College at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on archival sources such as college catalogs and related documents, administrative correspondence, and student papers—specifically those by Margery Scattergood, who entered Bryn Mawr in 1913—shows an adherence to the belletristic tradition. The course provided practice in criticism in the Arnoldian sense of the word. The focus on the role of the writer as critic provided Bryn Mawr students with opportunities to engage with issues of public interest.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.884412
  3. Geopolitics of Grant Writing: Discursive and Stylistic Features of Nonprofit Grant Proposals in Nepal and the United States
    Abstract

    This study examines the global-local interplay of genre features in a select sample of nonprofit grant proposals from two particular sites—Nepal and the United States. Critically analyzing the carefully selected samples from both the sites on their own terms first and then in clusters (of Nepalese and American proposals) by exploiting the genre and discourse analysis theories and techniques published in genre, genre analysis, and grant proposal scholarship, this study attempts to examine the genre of nonprofit grant proposal in both comparative and non-comparative terms. While the study acknowledges that each instance of nonprofit grant proposal is unique, complex, and therefore non-generalizable, it does draw some broad generalizations about the similarities and differences in the rhetorical “moves,” organization, and/or composition strategies of grant writers from these two different geopolitical locations. The study finds that variations observed across samples and grant writers reflect the unique rhetorical situations of these writers, whereas uniformities have to do with the global circulation of Western genre forms in the rest of the world via global organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund—which are also the major donors in developing countries like Nepal. And finally, the study reaffirms the fact that constraints like funding agencies' guidelines and reviewers' preferences have a considerable influence on genre features and forms. That has been the case with both the Nepalese and American proposals sampled in this study.

    doi:10.2190/tw.44.2.c

March 2014

  1. Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric’s Romantic Turn by Lois Peters Agnew
    Abstract

    Reviews 207 some women to break the written silence of earlier times"(Travitsky, xviii). How much more accurate would Pender's introduction have been, had she used the modesty trope of conversation instead of the combative figure of the crow. Jane Donawerth University ofMaryland Lois Peters Agnew, Thomas De Quincey: British Rhetoric's Romantic Turn, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 165 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8043-3148-2 Although rhetoricians often stress the lack of innovation in early nine­ teenth-century rhetorical theory and practice, Lois Agnew shows through the case of Romantic author Thomas De Quincey that rhetoric was still a ver­ satile resource for literary authors in the period. De Quincey, best known for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), redefines rhetoric as "a detached investigation of multiple perspectives" (p. 10), and Agnew examines his mul­ tifaceted theory and practice in her monograph. Extending her conclusion from Outward, Visible Propriety (2008), Agnew approaches De Quincey as an example of "rhetoric's transition to the modern era" from a unifying civic discourse to varied arts of style (p. 1). In this monograph, she builds on Jason Camlot's argument that "a previously coherent tradition of prag­ matic rhetoric is ... redistributed into the diverse localized sites of individual [nineteenth-century] periodicals" and traces how De Quincey revises the the­ ory and practice of rhetoric in his career as a magazine contributor? Because De Quincey demonstrates that rhetoric "need not be connected to practical decision making," Agnew argues that he reinvents rhetoric for the modern world as a form of intellectual inquiry and multiperspectival display (p. 15). For Agnew, De Quincey is a rhetorician because he treats writing as social interaction even though he divorces rhetoric from political ends: His "perspective on language and public life is grounded in classical rhetorical traditions, yet radically distinct from those traditions in ways that reflect his attention to the cultural circumstances in which he finds himself" (p. 2). De Quincey, according to Agnew, synthesizes classical rhetoric, eighteenthcentury Scottish rhetorics, and Romantic poetics. Because he combines tradi­ tions to create an art of rhetoric that orchestrates multiple perspectives, Ag­ new compares De Quincey's "dialogic" rhetoric to the theories of twentiethcentury literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Like Bakhtin's ideal novelist, De Quincey "produces a vision of rhetoric ... in which the speaker/writer interacts constantly with listeners who hold differing points of view and 1 J- Camlot, Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 14. 208 RHETORICA imaginatively integrates those perspectives" (p. 13). De Quincey anticipates the multivocal techniques of Victorian fiction when he extends rhetoric to the interplay of multiple perspectives in early nineteenth-century Britain. In the first chapter, Agnew introduces De Quincey and the Romantic era to rhetoricians. She makes a convincing case for the ubiquity and utility of rhetoric in this period: Not only was rhetoric an available resource for classically-educated authors, but they also needed rhetoric to respond to new audiences, publishing practices, and political situations. Agnew recounts elements of De Quincey's life that are familiar to Romanticists, like his piecemeal education, opium addiction, and tense relationship with William Wordsworth, and explains that De Quincey responds to a society "embroiled in the conflicting impulses of market-driven production and intellectual play" (p. 41). The instabilities of early nineteenth-century British society demanded a rhetorical approach to authorship and a reconsideration of rhetoric's functions, and De Quincey's life and writing exemplify these changes. In the next three chapters, Agnew examines De Quincey's "dialogic" rhetoric. She "track[s] key themes that emerge through the course of De Quincey's writings," including an embrace of open, philosophical questions over limited, political cases; an emphasis on the "eddying of thoughts" over the communication of facts; and a conversational dynamic that makes readers fellow participants in the discourse (p. 103). Agnew recovers his rhetorical theory from scattered, occasional essays like a review of Whatley's Elements ofRhetoric (1828), "Style" (1840), and "On Language" (1847). While De Quincey performs what he theorizes in these pieces, Agnew applies his theories to famous works such as;Confessions. For example, he "creates a narrative in which the...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0016
  2. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900 by Jane Donawerth
    Abstract

    200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0013
  3. The Pirate and the Sovereign: Negative Identification and the Constitutive Rhetoric of the Nation-State
    Abstract

    Abstract Pirates are commonly referred to as hostis humani generis, the enemy of all. This essay explores the contours of this figuration through an analysis of early nineteenth century American legal and political texts concerning piracy. I argue that pirate rhetorics in this period are part of a constitutive rhetoric of sovereignty, principally identified with Emerich de Vattel’s famous definition of sovereignty in The Law of Nations. Through an analysis of the textual milieu surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1820 decision in United States v. Smith, I show that the pirate is figured as an anti-sovereign, which allows for the consolidation of an otherwise differential system of international relations characterized by liberal, self-interested, sovereign nations. In becoming hostis humani generis, the pirate enters into an antagonistic relationship with the sovereign that provides the ontological ground for the theory of sovereignty characteristic of modern thought in international law. Supplementing Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric with Laclau and Mouffe’s work on antagonisms in social relations, I argue that focusing on negative identification, which is an essential component of any constitutive rhetoric, opens up unique avenues for analysis that may otherwise be obscured by attending solely to the positive dimensions of a rhetoric.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0105
  4. Toward a Queerly Classed Analysis of Shame: Attunement to Bodies in English Studies
    Abstract

    This article explores how scholarship informed by queer theory can be brought to bear on social class within the academy in order to open spaces for thinking about our professional ethos in English studies. I offer the term queerly classed faculty to accentuate the usefulness of bringing queer theory into conversation with questions of class, as well as to point to the strange or perverse sense of displacement that many faculty experience in relation to professional normalization. Through a brief analysis of queerly classed ruptures in normativity that tend to coalesce around questions of propriety and civility, I illustrate how we might use shame to expand and open the normative horizon of our collective professional subjectivity and ethos in English studies. Ultimately, I argue that the relational awareness and tension of ambivalence that shame produces for many queerly classed faculty offers an ethical calling, not to dispel the shame that is born of an interest in identification, but instead to use the embodied experience of shame to create a heightened sensitivity to our relation to self and others within our professional lives, such that we might find common ground among our differences.

    doi:10.58680/ce201424598

February 2014

  1. Retórica del decoro y censura de las imágenes en el Barroco temprano español
    Abstract

    In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, themost imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork's impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore howthe laws of decorumequipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

    doi:10.1525/rh.2014.32.1.47
  2. Adam Smith on Rhetoric and Phronesis, Law and Economics
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT Following recent scholarship, this article investigates the relationship among Adam Smith's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his lectures on jurisprudence. According to Smith, the rhetorical theory regarding genre and style improves practical judgment that is central to both economic and legal affairs. Though Smith's lectures on rhetoric feature no overt mention of these legal or commercial applications, when we read these lectures alongside his lectures and writings on jurisprudence and economics, we see that Smith had developed numerous applications for the practical judgment that he taught his students when, under his guidance, they analyzed literary texts. Noting the interrelation among Smith's work on rhetoric, law, and economics allows us to see that others in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Hugh Blair and Henry Home Lord Kames, similarly found connections among jurisprudence, political economy, and rhetorical theory.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.1.0025

January 2014

  1. Building the Case for an “Architectonic” Function of Rhetoric in Health Services Research
    Abstract

    In 2003,<strong> </strong>National Institutes of Health director Elias A. Zerhouni called for the development of innovative research methods that more effectively connect medical research findings to clinical care. His call and the transformative institutional and funding changes it has wrought have opened up an exciting opportunity for rhetorical scholars to join the interdisciplinary project of improving medical research and delivery. Responding to this opportunity, this paper articulates one vision for the rhetorician turned <em>health services researcher</em>. This vision is rooted in Richard McKeon’s insight that in addition to the analysis of discourse and the promotion of good communication practices, the art of rhetoric may also play a role in <em>arranging</em> human knowledge to catalyze the transformation of larger social, political, and scientific enterprises. His work suggests that this “architectonic” function of rhetoric is suited to the highly complex and technological modes of knowledge creation now prevalent in medicine and other artistic and scientific domains. Following his lead, this paper builds the case for an “architectonic” view of the role of rhetoric in interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the “rhetorical situation” emerging from the problems and possibilities of 21<sup>st</sup> century healthcare.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1180
  2. Rhetoric and Its Masses: An Introduction
    Abstract

    In virtually every epoch of its history, the theory of rhetoric has been associated with large, anonymous groups of people. They appear sometimes as crowds and at other times as mobs. At still other times, these large, anonymous groups of people are figured as herds, (counter)publics, imagined communities, “the people,” the audience, or social imaginaries. In whatever guise they appear, these anonymous groups of people have played a major role in the development of the idea of rhetoric. A few examples will make my point. Plato (2001) defined rhetoric as discourse that would persuade an ignorant crowd (94). Augustine (2001) tailored rhetoric to the “multitude of the wise” (459). In the sixteenth century, Castiglione (2001) calibrated rhetoric to the tastes of “ladies or gentlemen” (663). In the eighteenth century, David Hume (2001) suggested that discourse must account for “man in general” (836). Thomas Sheridan (2001) developed his “Lectures on Elocution” from a consideration of “man in his animal state” (884). By 1828, Richard Whately (2001) could characterize the entire history of rhetoric as so many theories on how to persuade the “promiscuous multitude” (1007). In 1958, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca made a large, anonymous group of people—the “universal audience”—famous as the enabling presupposition of all rational argument (Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca 1991, 31–35). Finally, consider the vibrant subfield of public sphere theory. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, public sphere theory may be the most institutionally secured of rhetoric’s modalities. In this popular mode, rhetoric is understood as the democratic practice of engaging groups of people qua citizens. Administrators seem to love this vision of rhetoric. Basic courses in both writing and speech are often designed explicitly as training in civic engagement, and institutionalized centers for civic engagement are now a common feature of research universities. Rhetoric, we might say, has generated institutional security by tying its fate to (and betting its value on) a particularly resonant large group of anonymous people: the

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2014.886924
  3. Fearing the Masses: Gustave Le Bon and Some Undemocratic Roots of Modern Rhetorical Studies
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT As the popular narrative has it, the modern speech discipline in the United States was born out of a concern for democracy and reason. However, this story occludes other, decidedly undemocratic, foundational ideas that were at the heart of rhetoric and oratory during the first half of the twentieth century. Given contemporary concerns with both deliberative democracy and affect theory, rhetoricians and speech teachers would benefit today from a fuller understanding of some of the undemocratic ideas that influenced the modern rhetorical renaissance. This article helps accomplish this by focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, whose concern with persuasion and the masses was influential on early scholars of rhetorical oratory, including James Winans, William Brigance, and James O’Neill. Indeed, it was Gustave Le Bon who popularized the notion that the masses were like a psychological crowd devoid of reason and the ability to deliberate.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2014.886932
  4. The Two Faces of Cincinnatus: A Rhetorical Theory of the State of Exception
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article offers a rhetorical theory of what Giorgio Agamben has called the “state of exception” through a genealogy of the figure of Cincinnatus. In classical Rome, Cincinnatus was named dictator not once, but twice; first to save the city from invaders, and second to put down a popular, democratic uprising. Here we see the two sides of exception, or what I call the two faces of Cincinnatus: enemyship, and sovereign violence. These two faces are linked by an anti-democratic logic that is premised on the will of “the people,” as becomes clear in the counter-revolutionary writings of the founders of the United States.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2014.886930
  5. Rhetoric and Dialogue in Hopkins's “Spring and Fall: <i>To a Young Child</i> ”: An Approach through Burke and Levinas
    Abstract

    The epideictic genre of rhetoric has traditionally included public, ceremonial types of rhetoric, such as eulogies and public speeches, that affirm communities. Public memorials and even lyric poetry, however, also epideictically constitute personal and communal identities. When read through the theoretical lenses of Kenneth Burke and Emmanuel Levinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” seems to evoke a public, communal attitude in readers. This epideictic effect challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private audiences, inviting us to think more broadly about epideictic rhetoric and its audiences.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.856728
  6. On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing
    Abstract

    Abstract Disability disclosures in academic scholarship raise questions about possibilities of rhetorical agency. This article engages performances of disability disclosure and recent theories of rhetorical agency to show such disclosures as the culmination of recurring processes in which past experiences are brought to bear on a present moment as people recognize opportune moments for action. Notes 1 Thanks to Scot Barnett, Brenda Brueggemann, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Margaret Price, and Amy Vidali for helping me develop this project. Especial thanks to Theresa Enos for her editorial guidance and to RR reviewers Jay Dolmage and Debra Hawhee for their thoughtful and valuable reviewers' reports. 2 I mean this in two ways: both literally in a different place—at different institutions and locations in different parts of the country—but also in terms of my place in scholarly experience, ranging from graduate school to being in my fifth year as an assistant professor. 3 Importantly, Price has recently revised her discussion of "kairotic space" to include what she calls "tele/presence" in order to acknowledge exchanges that occur even when participants are not physically present with one another (Yergeau et al., "Multimodality"). 4 This essay also appears in a slightly revised form as chapter 5 in Mad at School.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.856730
  7. Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoyic by Paddy Bullard
    Abstract

    Reviews 85 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke nud the Art of Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00657-7 In Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric Paddy Bullard "proposes a theory of Burke's rhetoric" (p. 3). Bullard approaches the question "of the artfulness with which Burke wrote and spoke" (p. 21) not by superimposing the \ ocabularv of classical rhetorical handbooks on Burke's performances; not by using Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as a source of technical, critical vocabulary; but bv looking to Burke's oeuvre to identify the rhetorical questions that preoccupied Burke and how he addressed the questions throughout his career. Readers will witness enactment of Burkean rhetorical virtues as Bullard examines Burke from perspectives as broad as classical and early modern thinking about rhetoric, to the practical occasions and stakes of Burke's political writing and speaking, to the textual dynamics of his rhetoric. The result is a compelling analysis of Burke's rhetoric that deserves to be read by scholars of eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and practices, and by any scholar interested in generating theory based on practice—indeed anv scholar who wants to read exemplary rhetorical criticism. Broadly speaking, the central question or issue that preoccupies Burke is the nature of the speaker-audience relationship. Bullard describes Burke's rhetoric as a "rhetoric of character," concerned with "who is addressing whom, on behalf of whom" (p. 5; see also pp. 7, 11). Bullard captures the dynamic nature of the relationship when he describes Burke's art of rhetoric as "an art of moral equipoise" (p. 10; see also p. 22). Put differently, "A well-established ethos giv es a speaker licence to be urgent, to abjure false delicacy, and to resist neutrality, and it allows him to do all this without renouncing the claims of equity" (p. 9). The speaker earns the audience's trust by displaying knowledge of characters and his own political judgment, and the audience grants the speaker a license to advocate with zeal. Bullard develops his analysis and argument in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction Bullard defends his objects of study and critical vocabulary. He chooses to focus on "the relatively small number of treatises and speeches that Burke authorized as his own (either through publication or private endorsement), while the texts of his publicly reported speeches are treated with caution" (p. 21). Readers will almost certainly find the arguments for the selection to be sound, the central one being that Burke calls for attention to, and Bullard attends to, stylistic detail because this is where the action is—where audiences experience rhetorical effects. In chapters 1 and 2, Bullard covers standard topics in writing the history of rhetoric, namely Burke's intellectual context for thinking about rhetoric and the place of rhetoric in Irish education. This is not a routine history of rhetoric that broadly covers the usual suspects but instead focuses on clas­ sical, seventeenth-century and contemporary writers who explored the idea that is at the heart of Burke's rhetoric of character: that orators are best able to 86 RHETORICA secure a good moral character in the minds of their audience by demonstrat­ ing their understanding of what moral character is" (p. 28). Bullard covers Aristotle's treatment of rhetorical ethos and its guises in Roman thinkers in­ cluding Cicero and Quintilian. He uses Locke as a critical prompt to discuss writings by Hobbes, Edward Reynolds, and La Bruyère and to trace "how the rhetorical category of ethos returned to relevance during the seventeenth century as part of a popularized prudential moralism" (p. 42) in history, psy­ chology, and character-writing. He traces the Aristotelian model's adaptions in writings about pulpit eloquence and their secular processes in Shaftesbury and Smith. Similarly, the history of eighteenth-century rhetoric education among English speakers is not commonplace but instead advances the claim that "there are several important respects in which the Irish, rather than the Scots, should be seen as the real pioneers of this new development ["the study of literature in modern vernacular languages"] in the art of rhetoric" (p...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0024
  8. Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost by William Pallister, and: Milton and the Art of Rhetoric by Daniel Shore
    Abstract

    88 RHETORICA who seek a history of rhetorical theory that teaches, delights, and moves will find it here. Beth Innocenti University ofKansas William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-80209835 -1; Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art ofRhetoric (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2012). isbn: 978-1-107-02150-1 Two books published in the last few years each have much to offer on the subject of how the English poet and statesman John Milton (1608-74) employed rhetoric in his various works and particularly in his epic poem Paradise Lost. William Pallister reminds or perhaps informs Miltonists of the centrality of rhetoric in the Renaissance and its utility both for persuasion and morality. He argues that contemporary criticism has overlooked the formal poetic and rhetorical presentation of Milton's ideas (7-8). Pallister's particu­ lar focus is Paradise Lost and the rhetorical issue of future contingency, which he traces through Milton's epic poem in terms of three distinct rhetorics, of hell, of heaven, and of paradise, the paradisal one being the most rhetorical because the most contingent. Pallister divides his book into two equal halves. His first five chapters are heavily documented demonstrations of Renaissance rhetoric, its clas­ sical roots, and Milton's engagement with it. In chapter one, Pallister first identifies contingency and probability as key issues in deliberative rhetoric and locates their discussion in such authors as Augustine, Boethius, Ock­ ham, Aquinas, Valla, Pomponazzi, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. He then demonstrates how Milton's theological concerns for free will in Paradise Lost are reflected in his preservation therein of future contingency. Chap­ ter two surveys the classical rhetoricians who had written on contingency, such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, since Milton cites these authorities in his short pedagogical tract, Of Education (1644) rather than any of the educational theorists of his own period. Chapter three surveys Renaissance rhetoric in terms of its focus on eloquent style and its prescribed utility in politics, ethics, poetry, and theology, and in chapter four demonstrates how Milton's own prose identifies eloquence as "none . . . but the serious and hearty love of truth" (80; An Apology against a Pamphlet, Yale Prose 1: 948-49), a love that Pallister associates with Milton's "humanistic faith in the power of eloquence to captivate its audience and compel them to accept Christian values" (10). Chapter five considers rhetoric's relation to Christian theology and particularly the Bible as a rhetorical text, preaching as a rhetorical art, and God as a rhetorical and especially a poetic speaker. Reviews 89 With this foundation laid, Pallister proceeds in the second half of his book to investigate the rhetorical nature of Paradise Lost. In chapter six, he takes us to the poitions of Milton s epic that take place in heaven. Since there is little contingency possible in God's omniscience, the master tropes of hea\ en aie polugtoton and especiallv conduplica110, and the favored genus dieendi is epideixis, especially praise. Chapter seven surveys Satan's presentation as an orator in various authors before and including Milton, whose Satan is an accomplished orator, and chapter eight identifies the master trope of hell as demotes, or rhetorical cleverness, by which Satan not only deceives others but “tricks himself into seeing a contingent future that no longer exists for the defeated angels" (176). Chapters nine and ten treat rhetoric in the Carden of Eden, “the hub of Milton's rhetorical universe, [where] the theological, dramatic, and discursive conditions exist for rhetoric to thrive on all levels" (197) and where it comes most into its own as a agent of moral persuasion in the psychomachia of man's inner being (198). Pallister's text is a manifestly learned, monograph-length discussion of how Renaissance rhetoric, and particularly deliberative rhetoric, informs the greatest epic in the English language. Elis volume is well worthy to have won the Modern Language Association of America's Prize for Independent Scholars in 2009. Like all sublunary publications, however, it is not always perfect. Its extensive surveys in the first half are sometimes more trees than forest and might have benefitted from more signposting...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0025
  9. Retórica del decoro y censura de las imágenes en el Barroco temprano español
    Abstract

    In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, the most imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork’s impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore how the laws of decorum equipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0019
  10. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills
    Abstract

    Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig­ uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con­ siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut­ son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake­ spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0026
  11. The Connected Curriculum: Designing a Vertical Transfer Writing Curriculum
    Abstract

    Rebecca Nowacek (2011) observes that “scholarship on transfer in the field of rheto-ric and composition has understandably focused on first year composition: what knowledge and abilities transfer out of, and less commonly, into FYC ” (p. 99). There is consensus in this research that all too often students fail to transfer skills learned in their first-year composition courses to other writing contexts across the curric-ulum. There is also consensus that composition instructors wishing to encourage transfer should focus on metacognitive awareness of writing processes; understand-ing of key writing studies concepts like rhetorical situation, genre, and discourse community; and making explicit connections to students ’ future college and pro-fessional reading and writing tasks (Beaufort, 2007; Bergmann &amp;amp; Zepernick, 2007; Clark &amp;amp; Hernandez, 2011; Fishman &amp;amp; Reiff, 2008; Wardle, 2007). What scholars have focused less attention on is how these lessons learned from the research on transfer and first-year composition might inform the design not just of first-year composi-tion courses, but of university writing across the curriculum (WAC) efforts, from a student’s first year to his or her final semester. With the exception of Anne Beaufort (2007) and David Smit (2004), even researchers who have studied courses across disciplines have focused their advice not on the structural design of campus WAC programs, but on what individual instructors can do to encourage transfer (Caroll,

    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2014.25.1.04

November 2013

  1. Questions in Greek Rhetorical Theory and Demosthenes' Philippics
    Abstract

    Nessuna classificazione, sia antica sia moderna, porta alla luce in modo adeguato la varietà di domande che Demostene utilizza nelle sue Filippiche. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di esaminare l'analisi dell'utilizzazione delle domande nell'eloquenza greca e di elaborare una nuova classificazione che si basa sul lavoro dei retori antichi e studiosi moderni, ma mette in evidenza la diversità della prassi di Demostene e chiara come i diversi tipi di domande che egli usa nei suoi discorsi spesso riflettono l'approccio di tutto il discorso.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2013.31.4.349
  2. The Rhetorical Unconscious of Argumentation Theory:
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT The contemporary study of argumentation has produced sophisticated new theories that attempt to capture norms for evaluating arguments that are much more complex and more suited to actual argumentation than the traditional logical standards. The most prominent theories also make explicit attempts to distinguish themselves from rhetorical approaches. Yet, in the case of at least three major systematic theories of argumentation, a reliance on rhetorical theory persists. Despite denials, each account ultimately grounds its norms in considerations of reception and audience. There are good reasons why these theories are attracted to rhetoric, and there are understandable factors that produce their concern about it. Ultimately, though, the rhetorical dimension of these theories is one of their major theoretical virtues and a clear sign of their staying close to the realities of argumentation.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.46.4.0392

October 2013

  1. Louis C.K.’s ‘Weird Ethic’: Kairos and Rhetoric in the Network
    Abstract

    &#8220;C.K.’s approach to kairos, to the complex forces that shape rhetorical situations, offers an alternative to the dominant mode of contemporary networked rhetoric: snark.&#8221;

  2. From “Representative” To Relatable
    Abstract

    In the wake of postcolonial studies, the culture wars, and the ongoing canon debate, the task of constructing one’s own pedagogical canon as a responsible educator continues to be an arduous one. Drawing in part on the work of Robert Coles on using literature for therapeutic purposes, as well as John Guillory’s notion that representation, in the political sense, is misapplied when it comes to canon formation, this article suggests that professors rethink how they put together their own syllabi. It asks that they consider shifting their primary criteria for inclusion from the much-disputed ideal of representativeness to one of relatability, defined in this instance as a student’s potential ethical engagement with a work. The central idea is that the student’s intuitive identification with some characters and texts should actually be encouraged, not dismissed, as a means of promoting greater engagement, more active learning, and a critical analysis of the text’s and their own personal values.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2266459
  3. Attributing Rhetorical Agency in a Crisis of Trust:<i>Danske Bank</i>'s Act of Public Listening after the Credit Collapse
    Abstract

    Digital media offer innovative ways of resolving crises of trust. This essay discusses a campaign that aimed to rebuild public trust in banks during the financial crisis. The campaign reflected a strategy (well-known in conflict resolution) that is best described as an online exercise in active listening. The essay discusses the potential of such a campaign and argues that in a crisis where rhetorical agency is impaired due to declining trust, corporations that engage in public listening may communicate acknowledgment and openness to change. However, in order to realize this potential, the public must be entrusted with a meaningful role as contributor to the campaign in the discursive and technical design of the medium of interaction. In the case studied, the campaign texts explicitly invited participation, but implicitly restrained the rhetorical agency of the public. This undermined the initiative's ability to renew the cognitive and emotional grounds for trust.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2013.839820

September 2013

  1. Questions in Greek Rhetorical Theory and Demosthenes’ Philippics
    Abstract

    Nessuna classificazione, sia antica sia moderna, porta alla luce in modo adeguato la varietà di domande che Demostene utilizza nelle sue Filippiche. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di esaminare l’analisi dell’utilizzazione delle domande nell’eloquenza greca e di elaborare una nuova classificazione che si basa sul lavoro dei retori antichi e studiosi moderni, ma mette in evidenza la diversità della p rassi di Demostene e chiara come i diversi tipi di domande che egli usa nei suoi discorsi spesso riflettono l’approccio di tutto il discorso.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0000
  2. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art by Michael S. Kochin
    Abstract

    Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0004
  3. Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming by Nathan Crick
    Abstract

    450 RHETORICA The Pennsylvania State University Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-876-1 Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming foreshadows its full trajectory in the quote from Dewey that opens the book: "The end of democracy is a radical end.... It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural" (p. 1). Dewey's identification of genuine democracy as a radical ideal has a contemporary resonance in the light of resurgent progressive protest here and around the world. His call is directed at "the inequities and tragedies of life that mark the present system," just as grass-roots movements have advanced systemic critiques of systemic injustice (p. 1). But it becomes immediately clear that Dewey's invocation of radicality is in part a provocative rhetorical gesture, because he immediately qualifies it. Those who espouse radical ends must not indulge the desire "for the overthrow of the existing system by any means whatever," but work within the democratic process (p. 1). The concept of the radical is disciplined by the stipulation that there is "nothing more radical than insistence upon democratic methods" (p. 1). Dewey's quote ends by asserting that victory against systemic inequity can only come "from a living faith in our common human nature and in the power of voluntary action based on collective intelligence" (p. 1). The radical is thus put in tension with itself by Dewey's effort to find congruence between means and ends. An analogous split within the concept of the radical underlies Nathan Crick's effort to bring Dewey to the discipline of rhetoric. As the book title suggests, Dewey can help in the contemporary revision of rhetoric as an ontological project. That is surely a radical appeal given the reductive instrumentalism that has so often diminished rhetoric as a techne even within the discipline. But Crick accepts Dewey's constraint on the radical by giving presumption to faith in a common human nature, voluntary action, and collective intelligence. Within the critical rhetoric community in the United States these three presuppositions have been in play for some time, given the suspicion introduced to notions of transparent agency, the autonomy of the will, and faith in the Enlightenment project. The distinction between the two forms of radicality - one that attempts to undermine, and one that attempts to reaffirm the hopeful possibility of a unitary deliberative community through persuasion - is crucial for a grasp of the orientation of Crick's effort, since academic rhetoric in the United States is pulled between the two tendencies. The opposite case was made by Ronald Greene, who attributes to Dewey "the tendencv to translate communication into an aesthetic-moral theory of eloquent citizenship [that] Reviews 451 puts argumentation studies to work for, rather than against, new forms of bio-political control."1 The greatest service of Crick's book may be that it brings this debate to prominence. It should be said that Crick does make efforts to incorporate radical structural thinking in his rapprochement. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stewart Hall, Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty and others weave in and out of Crick's widely cast net. But does Crick adequately wrestle with Dewey's faith in the public sphere, and does he address the challenge posed by a system of discursive display that, at least at the national level, seems to have subsumed public communication into a facade of consensus? That seems to me to be the real test of his assertion of radicality. Crick does address Greene's argument early on (Greene is er­ roneously excluded from the bibliography), arguing that Dewey's radicality had a material dimension, quoting Dewey to this effect: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political" (p. 6). Crick asserts that Dewey provides a "third alternative" to, on the one hand, a naive faith in the reformist power of the public sphere, and on the other hand, an impotent posture of critique against the insurmountable Leviathon (p...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0006
  4. Redemptive Resistance through Hybrid Victimage
    Abstract

    In 1968 the Milwaukee Fourteen, members of the Catholic Anti-Vietnam War Movement, removed approximately ten-thousand draft files from a Selective Service Office and burned them with home-made napalm in a nearby park before awaiting arrest. Employing the Burkean concepts of categorical guilt, mortification and transvaluation as a framework from which to analyze the Milwaukee Fourteen’s “statement” and the resistive act itself, this essay troubles the general understanding of mortification as simply extirpating one’s guilt by self-victimage. Rather the Milwaukee Fourteen mortify themselves for the disordered transgressions of a culture. Their sacrificial purification results in a form of hybrid victimage with the ultimate goal of transvaluing the moral order of the Vietnam War era.

  5. Review: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke by Bryan Crable
  6. Redemptive Resistance through Hybrid Victimage
    Abstract

    In 1968 the Milwaukee Fourteen, members of the Catholic Anti-Vietnam War Movement, removed approximately ten-thousand draft files from a Selective Service Office and burned them with home-made napalm in a nearby park before awaiting arrest. Employing the Burkean concepts of categorical guilt, mortification and transvaluation as a framework from which to analyze the Milwaukee Fourteen’s “statement” and the resistive act itself, this essay troubles the general understanding of mortification as simply extirpating one’s guilt by self-victimage. Rather the Milwaukee Fourteen mortify themselves for the disordered transgressions of a culture. Their sacrificial purification results in a form of hybrid victimage with the ultimate goal of transvaluing the moral order of the Vietnam War era.

  7. Review: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke by Bryan Crable

August 2013

  1. The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control Confronts Movement Theory and Practice
    Abstract

    Unlike the others in this collection of articles, I was Don Ochs' classmate for three years. When taking classes in classical rhetorical theory or practice, he tended to share instructional tasks with the professor-ofrecord. His classical education was exemplary. He had drunk deeply of the Greco-Roman brew. He was a man whom you could ask, "So what are you doing at 2:34 p.m. tomorrow?" and get a precise reply-the most totally organized doctoral student I've ever met (so unlike the rest of us).

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1172

July 2013

  1. The Influence of Theology on the Rhetorical Theory of Austin Phelps
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT Studies in the history of rhetoric can be enriched by paying more attention to the relationship between theological belief and rhetorical theory. This article describes ways in which theology shaped the rhetorical theory of Austin Phelps (1820–1890), the fifth Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, America's first graduate school of theology and a premiere institution for rhetorical education during the nineteenth century.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2013.827597
  2. Between Motion and Action: The Dialectical Role of Affective Identification in Kenneth Burke
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT Taking seriously Kenneth Burke's claim that identification follows property's logic discloses identification's rootedness not only in nonsymbolic motion but also in attitudinal sensation, that midway realm between sheer motion and symbolic action. Burke's key distinction is among three terms, not two—implying consubstantial (not antithetical) relations between pure persuasion and identification. Thus understood, these relations have implications for the New Rhetoric, in particular for how it frames the question of justice.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2013.827596
  3. Obscene Demands
    Abstract

    The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.46.3.0351
  4. The State of Speech
    Abstract

    The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.46.3.0367
  5. Suspended Identification:
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTAs commemorative artifacts have come to saturate our public culture, many scholars have revisited the question of genre and the commemorative experience. Responding to this work, I argue that by subverting the commonplaces of our commemorative culture, certain works of public memory have the capacity to suspend audiences in a deferred event of identification. I describe the creative potential of this process by arguing that when compelled to forge common ground with an atopon (out-of-place) work of public memory, one can be unsettled in one's ordinary habits and resituated toward the world and toward others. By redescribing the problem of identification as it relates to the disruption of our everyday rhetorical encounters, this article's significance extends beyond public memory and suggests the transformative potential of suspense and the out-of-place in our broader rhetorical culture.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.46.3.0306
  6. Toward the Satyric
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article recovers the figure of the ancient satyr as a mythic modality of satire by reimagining Kenneth Burke's own satires as exemplary of satyric rhetoric. First, it dispels the notion that, on one hand, satire and the satyr are unrelated because of uncertain etymologies and, on the other, that satire is an inherently destructive critical enterprise. Myth is deployed as a constructive means of juxtaposing Burke's conceptualization of satyrs with that of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Helhaven satire and “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven” are then presented as illustrations of the satyric lurking throughout Burke's philosophy. Ultimately, a case is made for the figure of the satyr as a mythic goad by which to revise our understanding of contemporary satire as a comic enterprise. The article also serves as a resource for conceiving satyric correctives as the comic corrective pushed to the end of its line.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.46.3.0280
  7. The Rhetorical Construction of Social Classes in the Reports of Stalin's Secret Police
    Abstract

    Stalin's government received information about the political and economic situation in the countryside through the reports prepared by the security service VChK-OGPU-NKVD. This article reveals that these reports ( svodkas in Russian) strain to rhetorically construct a social classification of the peasantry by dividing it into the kulaks (wealthy peasants hostile to Soviet power), the bednyaks (poor peasants supporting Soviet power), and the serednyaks (peasants of average means with uncertain attitudes to the regime). The svodkas persuaded their audience—the secret police and the governments—of the reality of this tripartite classification. This persuasion derived from their massiveness, secretiveness, and mixture of ideological and technical language. Since these conditions inhere in modern governmental, technical, and scientific discourse, the writers for these fields should be aware that when they engage in constructing order through classification, they face temptations of what Kenneth Burke calls rhetoric of hierarchy with its scapegoat principle.

    doi:10.2190/tw.43.3.c
  8. The Dogma of Inquiry: Composition and the Primacy of Faith
    Abstract

    Composition studies has accepted a reductive view of dogma as an acritical commitment to received knowledge that precludes inquiry. As a result, composition gives short shrift to the role that basic beliefs play in any act of inquiry. But certain forms of humble dogma can and do serve as essential starting places for asking questions—even for skepticism and doubt. The writings of St. Augustine and Lesslie Newbigin exemplify such approaches to dogma and offer rhetorical educators a new terministic screen through which to value the role that beliefs play in inquiry.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2013.797880
  9. Ideas and Consequences: Richard Weaver, Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Politics
    Abstract

    Although it has been ten years since Sharon Crowley called for Richard M. Weaver's exclusion from the canon of rhetorical history, Weaver's rhetorical positions have never been stronger, utilized in movements such as the Tea Party and current conservative rhetoric. While Crowley (2001) Crowley, Sharon. 2001. When Ideology Motivates Theory: The Case of the Man From Weaverville. Rhetoric Review, 20: 66–93. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] argued that Weaver's Platonism came from his reaction to Roosevelt's politics, this archival study suggests that Weaver was much more pragmatic than his political pronouncements have led scholars, such as Crowley, to believe. Before Weaver wrote polemical works such as “To Write the Truth,” he operated within the constraints of the philosophically rigid institutional culture of neo-Aristotelianism, and the archival record demonstrates his attenuation to this rhetorical situation. The implications for these findings diminish the effectiveness of his appropriation by political movements that are based in foundationalistic rhetoric. These implications also demonstrate how rhetorical scholarship has utilized the polemical nature of Weaver's writings in the advancement of the professionalization of the discipline.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2013.797876

June 2013

  1. Identifying User Experience Dimensions for Mobile Incident Reporting in Urban Contexts
    Abstract

    Research problem: Despite the increasing interests raised by incident reporting systems, it is still unclear what dimensions of user experience (UX) and other contextual factors should be taken into account for the various stages of declaring an incident using mobile-phone applications. Research questions: How do citizens perceive and describe urban incidents? What UX dimensions are important for reporting an incident with a mobile-phone application? What other (contextual) factors are important from the users' point of view when declaring incidents? Which of the UX dimensions and contextual factors are important when in the various phases during an incident declaration? Literature review: Overall, there is a lack of empirical research in the domain of incident reporting. In general, the UX dimensions-visual and aesthetic experience, emotion, stimulation, identification, meaning and value, and social relatedness/coexperience-are important when designing interactive systems. It also shows that incidents are related to the citizen's perception of the environment. Methodology: A triangulated method approach combining interviews, a survey of existing systems, and a model-based task analysis were applied. This allows us to present a generic task model for incident reporting with a detailed description of UX dimensions affected in the various subtasks. Results and conclusions: Our findings point out the effect of UX dimensions in the task engaged by users when reporting urban citizens. The overall UX is directly influenced by the perceived level of severity, inconvenience and involvement, the personal context, and the technological mobile context. We have found that while several UX dimensions are highly relevant, they are not equally distributed along the several subtasks that citizens engage when reporting incidents. This study shows that semistructured requirement interviews can provide information about UX dimensions and it highlights the importance of the identification of UX dimensions in early phases of the development process.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2013.2257212

May 2013

  1. Love and Strife
    Abstract

    In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke revises the traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion.He introduces the concept of identification to define persuasion dialectically by locating it in a formal opposition to identification. The ultimate motives that drive this dialectical tension are love and strife. As dialectical creatures, human are drawn toward each other and seek to distinguish themselves from one another. For a world threatened by its own misunderstanding of ambition and its unreflective acceptance of historical identities, Burke's philosophy of rhetoric offers a way to understand what itmeans to be a dialectical being at a particular point of history, and it does so because it has the practical objective of making the world more just.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.172