All Journals
880 articlesSeptember 2003
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Abstract Although scholars have acknowledged a Stoic influence on Quintilian, they have been reluctant to see Stoicism as providing the philosophical underpinnings of the Institutes. Against this scholarly hesitance, this essay argues that Stoic ideas are at the heart of Quintilian's educational program. Quintilian's ideal orator is the Stoic Wise Man with this difference: he is trained in Ciceronian eloquence. Furthermore, Quintilian's definition of oratory is based on the Stoic view of rhetoric as an essential science that enables the orator to meet the social responsibilities inherent in the Stoic ideal of the virtuous life.
July 2003
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Pretty and Therefore "Pink":Helen Gahagan Douglas and the Rhetorical Constraints of US Political Discourse ↗
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This article combines feminist and historical rhetorical theories to analyze the rhetoric of US Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, who served in the House from 1944-1950 and was defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1950 race for US Senate. The article examines Gahagan Douglas's 1946 speech "My Democratic Credo" within the social and linguistic context of US political discourse of the late 1940s. Gahagan Douglas engaged in rhetorical "cross-dressing" to create a rhetorical space for herself in the male House by adopting a masculinist Enlightenment discourse to create her ethos as a rational, didactic representative.
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This essay examines rhetorical instruction and student writing at Texas Woman's University, a public women's college. Unlike their peers at elite, private women's colleges in the East, students at TWU were consistently encouraged to write and speak in public forums, to take part in political discourse, and to think of themselves as rhetors. The vocational focus of the school meant that the campus could never serve as a cloister, and the ever-present support of activist clubwomen gave students powerful role models for participating in the public sphere.
June 2003
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Reviews 199 nitá della sua opera per attribuirla ad Aristotele, affidandogliela come ad un padre adottivo. Ed in realtá, come ben osserva il Velardi, la Rhetorica ad Alexandrum deve non soltanto la sua fama, ma molto probabilmente la sua stessa sopravvivenza fino ai nostri giorni, al fatto di essere stata ritenuta opera aristotélica. Il volume é corredato da una serie di indici: Indice dei luoghi citati, Indice delle cose e della parole notevoli, Indice dei nomi. Ferruccio Conti Bizzarro Universita Federico ÍI, Napoli Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 220. Nan Johnson's first book, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), has been called "the most comprehensive assessment yet published of the rhetorics that shaped the teaching of English composition and pub lic speaking in the nineteenth century" (Miller 1993). It is an admirably well-researched account of how American college and university students were taught the rhetorical skills necessary for careers in the courtroom, leg islature, and religious professions, and has proved an invaluable resource for both historians and teachers of rhetoric and composition. However, in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Johnson is silent about women's relationship to this dominant male tradition of rhetorical instruction. It is this relationship which her second book, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, takes as its focus. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 is one of three inaugural titles in a new series, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan for Southern Illinois University Press. In part, the book is a project of historical recovery, reconstituting a separate tradition of rhetorical training for women in postbellum American society. In this respect, it fits into a body of feminist scholarship on the history of rhetoric that begins with Doris Yoakum's 1943 article "Women's Introduction to the American Platform" and includes Lillian O'Connor's Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement (1954), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1993, 1994), Andrea Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), Shirley Wilson Logan's "We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women" (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000). However, while Johnson praises these texts for carrying out the vital and ongoing work of situating prominent and forgotten women speakers in rhetorical history, 200 RHETORICA she differentiates her own historiographical method from such remapping projects (7). Johnson's purpose is not to redraw the rhetorical map by restoring forgotten contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but to ask why it is that women's contribution had been—until the advent of these projects—so com pletely excluded from the twentieth-century canon (10). To answer this ques tion, Johnson examines a wide range of nonacademic rhetorical materials, including elocution manuals, conduct books, and letter writing guides, that comprised a late nineteenth-century pedagogy of "parlor rhetoric" (2). Draw ing upon terms and concepts established by feminist historians to describe the gendered ideology of nineteenth-century American culture—the "cult of domesticity," the "cult of true womanhood," "Republican motherhood"— Johnson argues that the parlor rhetoric movement, while purporting to offer rhetorical training for both sexes, prescribed separate and unequal roles for both men and women (4). Men were to exercise oratorical power in the political domain, while women were to use their rhetorical skills to exert influence in the domestic sphere. This popular pedagogy defined a very tra ditional role for women and effectively guarded "access to public rhetorical space in American life" (16). The history of the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, Johnson suggests, began in the nineteenth century, since the parlor rhetoric movement's relegation of women to a subordinate rhetorical role legitimized their erasure from twentieth-century histories of rhetoric (10). Johnson's argument seeks to answer why it was that, in spite of their struggle for a greater public role, white middle-class women at the end of the nineteenth century were...
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202 RHETORICA insight into how access to public rhetorical space continues to be controlled today. As Johnson asserts, "Only by stepping into the contradictions between 'discipline' and 'possibility' inherent in how rhetorical traditions play out their power can we become more clear in our own minds why even in the new millennium our day-to-day lives remain corrupted by rhetorical theologies that value some voices more than others" (18). Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams University of Warwick Katerina Kostiou, Hè poictikè tes anatropès: Satira Eirôneia Parôidia Humour, Athènes: Néphélè, 2002, pp. 277. Le livre de K. Kostiou, La poétique de la subversion: Satire, Ironie, Parodie, Humour, est une étude originale dans le domaine de la littérature grecque, car il manquait une telle monographie théorique sur des thèmes qui touchent la Grèce moderne. La division de la matière est simple: quatre chapitres, un pour chacun des thèmes indiqués dans le titre. L'auteur présente son sujet de façon systématique et conceptuelle, dialogue avec la bibliographie internationale jusqu'à nos jours, et apporte des exemples tirés de la littérature grecque des deux derniers siècles. Dans une courte Introduction (pp. 21-30), où sont posées les ques tions de base et présentées les principales sources bibliographiques (Frye, Muecke, Booth, Rose, Pirandello), Kostiou trace une distinction entre les termes étudiés et le terme général de «comique» et fait référence aux tra ditions anglo-saxonne et française sur le sujet. Le premier chapitre est consacré à l'étude de la satire (pp. 31-108). Etant donné la difficulté qu'il y a à définir ce genre, l'auteur commence par un panorama remontant jusqu'à l'antiquité (Satire Ménippée des Grecs, Satura des Romains), puis analyse sa fonction, ses mécanismes, ses techniques. Ce qui sépare la satire de la comédie est le résultat obtenu. La critique du XXe siècle a prêté une grande importance à la dépendance étroite de la satire à l'égard de la rhétorique. Kostiou adopte le vocabulaire de Frye et envisage les six phases de la satire. La satire, dit l'auteur, n'est pas une forme d'écriture; elle est plutôt un ton d'écriture. La satire implique une stratégie, un contrôle et une distance par rapport à ce qu'elle satirise. Le grotesque, le pseudo-réalisme et l'imitation en font également partie. Les techniques de la satire, qui occupent la plus grande partie du chapitre, sont présentées en détail grâce à de nombreux exemples, tirés de la littérature grecque du XIXe siècle: elles comprennent notamment l'hyperbole, la caricature, l'antithèse, le cynisme, le paradoxe, la surprise, l'hypocrisie, le recours à une persona, l'allégorie, etc.—tous éléments regroupés à la fin dans un tableau (p. 102). Reviews 203 Le deuxième chapitre, qui porte sur l'ironie (pp. 109-192), est le plus long et le plus difficile à lire, à cause de son caractère purement théorique. Commençant par la définition de l'ironie et par la relation de celle-ci avec la satire, la comédie et la métaphore, l'auteur décrit l'extension du terme chez les auteurs anglais et allemands qui, au XIXe siècle, ont estimé que la littérature moderne devait être ironique, voire que toute bonne littérature est par définition ironique: «L'ironie moderne est moins satirique et plus subjective, moins rhétorique et plus 'd'atmosphère', moins agressive et plus défensive»(II.A.3). Après quoi Kostiou analyse les différents degrés de l'ironie (ironie verbale ou ironie des situations), puis la dimension philoso phique que lui ont donnée les philosophes français (Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida). Les différentes techniques de l'ironie sont présentées, en core une fois, sur la base d'exemples tirés de la littérature grecque moderne (voir aussi le tableau p. 179). Le chapitre se termine par l'étude de la dimen sion...
April 2003
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Abstract
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh received from Queen Elizabeth a patent to colonize any region of North America not possessed by a Christian prince. In 1585 he sent a fleet of seven ships to plant a colony under the governorship of Ralph Lane on Roanoke Island near what is now the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The colony lasted less than a year and then returned to England, where Lane produced a commercial report explaining the failure. Using research from speech communication on the rhetoric of apologia, this essay analyzes Lane's attempts to answer four criticisms of his governorship: that he mistreated the Indians, that he failed to explore the region to find commodities valuable to Raleigh and his investors, that he was an incompetent military commander, and that he deserted the colony. The essay also evaluates Lane's recommendations that future colonies be established further north on the Chesapeake Bay.
March 2003
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What happened at the first American writers’ congress? Kenneth Burke's “revolutionary symbolism in America” ↗
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Abstract Burke's famous performance at the First American Writers’ Congress in 1935 should be understood in relation to its occasion. The Congress was held to enlist the services of writers in creating a broad Popular Front, or People's Front, to encourage social change, so Burke's recommendation that “the people”; ought to be substituted for “the worker”; in Communist Party symbolism—that “propaganda by inclusion”; ought to succeed “propaganda by exclusion “—was actually in moderate keeping with the Congress’ broad aim. Though his recommendation was resisted by some, Burke was actually not so much marginalized by the Congress as identified with its controversies.
January 2003
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Les Abbesses et la Parole au dix-septième siècle: Les discours monastiques à la lumière des interdictions pauliniennes ↗
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One tends to take for granted that in women’s monasteries the only voices raised were those of its masculine directors and preachers. However, while sermons by priests were generally reserved for Sundays and feast days, the abbesses addressed their communities several times a week or even daily. Although the Pauline prohibitions restricted women from speaking on religious topics in public or to mixed groups, within the walls of the convent that was assimilated to the private domain of a household, abbesses exhorted, instructed and rebuked their nuns at chapter meetings or during recreation sessions. Many such talks might have been considered a form of preaching if they had been delivered by abbots in a monastery of men. However, because abbesses of the era generally lacked rhetorical and theological training, they had to content themselves with the informal registers of sacred oratory.
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Who Measures “Due Measure”? or, Karos Meets Couuter- Kairos : Implications of Isegotia fOr Classical Notions of Kakos ↗
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Abstract This essay grows out of a larger project, one in which I look to account theoretically for ways in which underpowered groups creatively manage limited physical resourcesfor maximum rhetoricaleffect. My assumption in that larger project is that underpowered groups - groups whose publicness must be either granted or commandeered from same more greatly pouered group (e.g., government) - suchgroups encounter and engage constraints ofpublic rhetoric in way not necessarily of concern to the overpowered. For example, the mayor of any city can, at his or her choosing, call together a press conference inside City Hall to address tbe issue of homelessness: the homeless do not possess tbat same rhetorical option. Of the three terms central to that larger project - place, kairos, and delivery - it is upon kairos that I will focus this essay. My argument here is that. while I am respectful of the literature accounting for kairos as a rhetorical concern in ancient Athens, most of that literature focuses on the etymology, philosophy, or theology of the term, Fully acknowledging that literature, I wish to add politial dimension, and propose that kairos becomes even more complex when coupled with perhaps the most Significant political development in the democratization of classical Athens: isegoria, or the right of any citizen to address the Assembly.
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Writing in Noninterpersonal Settings: Rhetorical Choices by Nonprofessional Writers in Letters to a Senator ↗
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Writers often address letters to people with whom they have few if any personal connections. To increase understanding of rhetorical decision making in such noninterpersonal settings, this article analyzes letters to a United States senator. The analysis draws from three bodies of research on persuasion: situational context, persuade package, and personal constructs. On the basis of that theoretical grounding—and using deliberative democracy theory and the strategic-choice model—the authors develop hypotheses linking situation attributes and writer attributes to letter attributes. The results show that topic, position, sex, and technology are significantly related to the writer’s choice of appeals, argumentative complexity, and structural directness. They also demonstrate a strong link between technology and message length. These results raise several possibilities for further study, such as whether advocates sometimes address messages to an accessible person while aiming their argumentation at an archetypal authority figure.
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Abstract The study of emotion has regained prominence in the fields of psychology and rhetoric. Despite this interest, little has been written about the art of making an emotional appeal. This essay focuses on the writing of Quintilian, in particular Book VI of his Institutes of Oratory, in an effort to describe his theory of emotional appeal, and to see whether it has relevance today. The essay presents Quintilian's theory in the form of "rules."
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Practices, theories, and traditions: Further thoughts on the disciplinary identities of English and communication Studies ↗
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I often run along a path near my home. Recently I noticed something about my behavior: On especially crowded days I seldom greet either walkers or bikers, who are often talking in couples or riding by at high speeds. But when I meet other runners, I almost always say or signal hello. I interpret my greeting practice as a mode of identification: identifying with others sharing a running practice. For certain purposes, runners might identify with walkers and bikers, for example, in a civic action to save the path from the encroachment of housing developers. But within the group of pathway users, I identify primarily with other runners and, in a certain sense, we form a loose community of running practitioners. This is a very, very rough analogy for what happens at local university functions, at national scholarly conferences, and at non-academic events of all kinds, rhetorical contexts where disciplinary identities are established and reinforced for professional and lay audiences. To analyze performances of disciplinary identities in more depth, I'd like to begin heuristically with a three-dimensional model for locating academic fields in relation to each other. Axis A (Disciplinary Matrices) consists of practices, theories, and traditions; Axis B (Field Boundaries) includes disciplines, interdisciplines, transdisciplines, and non-disciplines; and Axis C (Cultural Sites) comprises ideational domains, material institutions, and public spheres.' Academic disciplines and their subfields can be identified and compared across the different axes of this model. For example, the disciplinary matrix of English Studies includes interpretive practices for critically reading, researching, and teaching texts; aesthetic and other theories for defining textual objects of study; and evolving traditions of texts to be described, compared, and evaluated (canons of literary, critical, and theoretical works). In the twentieth century, English as this matrix of practices, theories, and traditions (Axis A) was identified as a separate discipline (Axis B) with its own ideational domain in relation to other disciplines and its own subfields, institutionalized as an academic department within the
September 2002
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Lucifer Rising (Yet Again) American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty by Michael W. Cuneo. New York: Doubleday, 2001. 301 + xvpp. Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth J. Medway. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 465 + ix pp. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media by Bill Ellis. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 332 + xix pp. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition by Jacqueline. Bacon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 291 + xiv pp. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric by Thomas O. Sloane, Editor in Chief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. xii 837 pp. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres by Rosa A. Eberly. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 + xvii pp.
July 2002
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Public Rhetoric and Public Safety at the Chicago Transit Authority: Three Approaches to Accident Analysis ↗
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This article compares three rhetorical approaches to accident analysis: materialist, classical, and constructivist. The focal points for comparison are the two accident reports issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—reports that attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to change a problematic policy about rail communication alongside its technology for rail communication. The central question the article asks is, How can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA”s inaction, which ultimately led to property damage, injury, and death? Classical and constructivist approaches, emphasizing rational deliberation between equals, on one hand, and the social construction of technical knowledge between professionals, on the other, offer plausible explanations for what went wrong. But only the materialist approach appears capable of discerning the ideological nature of the CTA”s resistance to the NTSB”s recommendations.
June 2002
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Un rhéteur méconnu: Démétrios (Ps.-Démétrios de Phalère). Essai sur les mutations de la théorie du style à l’époque hellénistique par Pierre Chiron ↗
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304 RHETORICA by being overly literal. He also inserts sub-titles to what the Rhet. Al. deals with next, which aid the reader immensely There are 761 notes at the bottom of each page of translation and in almost one hundred pages (pp. 117-201) of "Notes Complémentaires". These contain an abundance of cross-references to other ancient sources (especially identifying relevant passages in other rhetorical works which are very helpful), while references to modern liter ature (mostly French at that) are kept to a minimum. This is hardly the place for a detailed critique, so let me give just one example of a topic in which I have my own scholarly interest: Rhet. Al. 29 on the exordium. Chiron gives us almost fifty detailed notes, though curiously little mention is made of the Demosthenic exordia or the Budé text of the exordia edited by R. Clavaud (1974). The edition also has an index of proper names (pp. 203-205), a lengthy index of Greek terms (pp. 207-258), and a concordance of previous major texts with differing divisions: Erasmus (1539 and 1550), Bekker in the Berlin Aristotle (1881), Hammer's revision of Spengel in the Teubner (1894), and Fuhrmann's recent Teubner (pp. 259-268). Chiron cites the works of other scholars on the Rhet. Al., works that are mostly articles, of which some are lengthy and others only notes. None can compare to what Chiron gives us in his Budé edition, an edition that is also testimony to the general quality and trustworthiness of the Budé series. Chiron's detailed assessment and critique of the Rhet. Al. will make his edition useful for anyone working on Greek rhetoric, oratory, or indeed interested in Greek literature. It is an important addition to scholarship, and for that he should be commended. Ian Worthington University ofMissouri-Columbia Pierre Chiron, Un rhéteur méconnu: Démétrios (Ps.-Démétrios de Phalère). Essai sur les mutations de la théorie du style à l'époque hellénistique (Paris: Vrin, 2001) 448pp. Dopo vari anni dalla sua pubblicazione del PH di Demetrio per la collana "Les Belles Lettres" (Démétrios, Du Style, Parigi 1993) Pierre Chiron ci offre adesso un'analisi molto approfondita di questo trattato nel tentativo, argomentato sempre con grande cura, di contribuire a risolvere alcune delle difficoltà che hanno tormentato da secoli gli studiosi di questo testo. Oltre alla prefazione di M. Patillon una introduzione ed una conclusione fanno da cornice a ben nove lunghi capitoli nei quali l'autore non solo fa il punto sullo status quaestionis ed affronta problemi di datazione e di attribuzione, ma anche esamina in modo capillare la dottrina esposta da Demetrio. Non soddisfatto dei criteri adottati dai suoi predecessori, Chiron pensa infatti che sia opportuno cambiare metodo e "passer à une étude axée sur le texte Reviews 305 lui-même, ses tensions internes, ses présupposés et les diverses sources dont il laisse entrevoir l'utilisation" (p. 32). Questo spiega dunque perché il discorso sull attribuzione del trattato e sulla sua datazione, iniziato nel primo capitolo con la presentazione delle varie, a suo parère insoddisfacenti, soluzioni, riprenda solo alla fine, nel nono. Qui Chiron si sofferma su quattro question! principali (1. Le PH peut-il avoir été écrit par Démétrios de Phalère? 2. Quels sont les arguments en faveur d'une datation "haute"? 3. Une datation "basse" est-elle soutenable? 4. Dans quelle mesure peut-on préciser une datation intermédiaire?) aile quali, dopo una minuziosa analisi dei dati a disposizione e delle ipotesi già fatte da altri studiosi, dà risposte che, per quanto mai categoriche, lasciano comunque chiaramente intravedere la sua posizione: il PH sarebbe opéra di un retore di nome Demetrio attivo alla fine del II o all'inizio del I sec. a.C. La sua formazione peripatetica sarebbe dovuta all'utilizzo diretto delle opéré di Aristotele e di Teofrasto che Apellicone di Teo aveva reso nuovamente accessibili ad Atene dopo il loro sotterramento da parte di Neleo di Scepsi e dei suoi eredi. Giunto a Roma forse nell'86, dopo la vittoria di Silla, insieme alla biblioteca di...
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I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.
April 2002
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In what can be called a "culture of disconnect," students and teachers alike often want to engage in public discourse but do not know where to begin. The newsletters and newspapers produced to support the work of small, alternative hospitality houses and prison ministries reveal the role communication plays in the lives of active participants in democracy and show how communities of people who choose to write and publish learn from each other s examples. These extraordinary words of ordinary men and women, writing for local, often little known causes, offer ways of understanding what may motivate writers to begin to assume a meaningful public voice.
January 2002
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Critical discourse analysis of a 75,000-word corpus of newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor reveals the presence of a cosmopolitan worldview-frame and its effects on representations of gun owners in the United States. This cosmopolitan worldview, which includes cultural frames of reliance on others, specialization, risk avoidance, and government responsibility for risk reduction, results in the marginalization of gun owners and the silencing of frames and information that would counter it. This study demonstrates that the frames news media adopt in covering contentious social issues can not only silence participants in public debate but hamper efforts to find common ground on those issues. Socially responsible news media should instead explore and report on the variety of frames in play regarding a range of social issues in an effort to educate their audiences and, in so doing, promote public debate.
December 2001
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Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.
September 2001
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Abstract At Rhetoric 3.12 Aristotle describes differences between a “written”; style, which he associates with the epideictic genre, and a “debating”; style suited to deliberative and forensic oratory. This paper argues that this seemingly unproblematic distinction constitutes a crucial indicator of the orientation of Aristotle's style theory as a whole. Passages throughout Rhetoric 3.1–12 offer precepts oriented toward the medium of writing and the reading of texts‐that is, they describe a specifically “written “ style of prose. In contrast, Aristotle largely neglects the agonistic style of practical oratory, a fact that can be taken as another indication of the literary, and literate, bias pervading Aristotle's account of prose lexis. In addition to disclosing nuances in the text of Rhetoric 3, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which early rhetorical theory responds to and is constrained by the circumstances of written composition and oratorical performance.
July 2001
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Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of "English Only" in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists' approaches to matters of "error." Proposes an approach to language and "error" considering the relations of language to power.
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Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of “English Only” in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists’ approaches to matters of “error.” Proposes an approach to language and “error” considering the relations of language to power.
June 2001
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Rhetorica Movet. Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett ed. by Peter L. Oesterreich, Thomas O. Sloane ↗
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344 RHETORICA in which he worked out his dramatistic poetics" (p. 105). As a set, the four chapters of Part One are the strongest of the collection in their consistent presentation and elaboration of Burke's later concept of aesthetics. Part Two collects three essays that consider Burke's work in the context of reader-response criticism, critical theory, and philosophy. Greig Hender son's "A Rhetoric of Form: The Early Burke and Reader-Response Criticism" considers Burke's concept of the formal relation between texts and audi ence expectations in the light of Wolfgang Iser's and Stanley Fish's readerresponse theories. Thomas Carmichael's "Screening Symbolicity: Kenneth Burke and Contemporary Theory" similarly examines Burke's theories in comparison with contemporary critical theory, suggesting ways in which Burke prefigured theorists like deMan and Lyotard vis a vis dramatism's antifoundationalist principles. Finally, Robert Wess's essay "Pentadic Terms and Master Tropes" examines A Grammar ofMotives's concluding chapter, "Four Master Tropes", in terms of its philosophical implications for dramatism. Part Three returns to more biographical material, but with the added emphasis of Burke's relation to religion. Wayne C. Booth's retrospective ac count of his correspondence with Burke emphasizes prominent religious undertones in the numerous "voices" Burke's letters often assumed. Burke's essay "Sensation, Memory, Imitation/and Story" represents Burke's strug gles towards the completion of the dramatistic model and, furthermore, is indicative of the religious undertones in Burke's theories. The final essay is Michael Feehan's discussion of Mary Baker Eddy, a prominent Christian Scientist, and her influence on Burke's Permanence and Change. Like Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, the editors of Unending Con versations see their collection as invoking and pluralizing "Burke's topos of the conversation" in contexts previously unvisited by Burke scholarship. As early attempts at expanding the range of application of dramatism, both texts offer useful and engaging starting points for further research. Paulo Campos The Ohio State University Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane eds, Rhetorica Movet. Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 545. After yielding so many scholars the chance to discuss rhetoric, Prof. Plett s dedication to the subject is gracefully acknowledged in this collection of essays, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In institutional terms his work has benefited all readers of Rhetorica: he was one of the founders of the ISHR in 1977 and served as its first Secretary General; he established the Centre for Rhetoric and Renaissance Studies at the Universitv Reviews 345 of Essen in 1989, and is an associate editor of this journal. In his own writing, such as the much-cited Rhetorik der Affekte, in the words of Thomas O. Sloane he "has welded a strong link between literary criticism and insights from the history of rhetoric". Written in English and German, Rhetorica Movet engages with the sub jects of three international conferences Prof. Plett organized at Essen: twothirds of it studies early modern rhetoric and poetics, with a subsidiary section on modern oratory. Some of the former contributions guide a rhetor ical technique smartly through an exercise programme, readying it at its classical antecedents then watching it bend and twist in a period's usage. Bernhard F. Scholz distinguishes Quintilian's view of ekphrasis as a report on the effect that a scene (not a work of art) has on the speaker's inner eye, such that the listener seems to see it too. Andrea and Peter Oesterreich examine Luther's comments on the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. For Luther, dialectic produced faith while hope was aroused by rhetoric. Two authors take up Shakespeare's rhetoric: Wolfgang G. Muller, on the comic and persuasive uses of the enthymeme, and Peter Mack, on variants of antithesis which connect opposites structuring the last scene of The Winter's Tale. Two stylistic essays use frequency analysis on Dryden's versification (Hermann Bluhme) and mirroring structures in Spanish golden age verse (Jose Antonio Mayoral). Heiner Peters describes Sterne's explo ration of analogies between rhetoric and the art of fortification in Tristram Shandy. Other essays defend rhetoric. Judith Rice...
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Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000–c. 1650 ed. by Georgia Clarke, Paul Crossley ↗
Abstract
346 RHETORICA Roman notions of politics and ethics. Marijke Spies studies the claims made by an Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, the Eglantine, that its writings on the art of rhetoric - which focused on natural human reason, took its examples from the vernacular and familiar, and gave instances of negotiation - were part of a process of reconciliation after the city left the Spanish crown to join the Dutch Republic in 1578. Several articles use ideas from classical rhetoric to interrogate modern German literature. Helmut Schanze discusses the relationship between the atrical speech and political oratory by examining the use of the metaphors of theatre and forum in Goethe, Jean Paul and recent studies of television and digital media. Gert Otto examines modern funeral orations by Max Frisch, Heinrich Boll and Christa Wolf in the light of the classical (Thucydides) and romantic (Grillparzer, Borne) traditions of consolatory oratory. Theodor Verweyen discusses the use of metonymy in Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in the light of modern analyses of classical theories this trope. Several of the modern pieces focus on the speech act and its context Rainer Schulze describes how studies of rhetoric have interacted with cognitive linguistics in the analysis of metaphors as constituents of understanding. Thomas O. Sloane mischievously argues that playing with words engenders a famil iarity and therefore a competence in playing with ideas—within defined playgrounds. As this brief notice has shown, the volume should be read as an un usually generous number of Rhetorica rather than a exploration of different aspects of a single topic (the editors wisely steer clear of an introduction). The wide range of the essays, literary critical, historical and theoretical, is a just tribute to the dedicatee's scholarship. Ceri Sullivan University of Wales, Bangor Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley eds, Architecture and Language: Con structing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000—c. 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This volume of collected papers is noteworthy as containing the first extensive studies by art historians to acknowledge and explore the influence of teaching and theory of rhetoric on writings about architecture and on architectural practice in the Renaissance and early modern period. We have had a number of good books and articles on the influence of rhetoric on painting and on music in the Renaissance, and many works on architecture discuss political and social meanings of buildings without actually using the word rhetoric or employing rhetorical terminology, but until now we have lacked good assessments of the indebtedness of architectural treatises to Reviews 347 rhetorical invention, arrangement, and style, including viewing the classical orders of architecture in terms of rhetorical commonplaces, all of which is done in chapters of this book. The first four chapters discuss the language used by medieval writers to describe features of architectures in England, France, Italy, and Germany. It was only with Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, that the concepts and vocabulary of classical rhetoric entered architectural treatises. In "Architecture, Language, and Rhetoric in Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria ", Caroline van Eck shows that Alberti's source for theory and termi nology was not so much Vitruvius's De Architecture, as usually believed, but classical works on rhetoric by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others. (There is an English translation of Alberti's treatise by J. Rykwert et al., published by the Harvard University Press, 1988.) Cammy Brothers then continues the subject with a chapter entitled 'Architectural Texts and Imitation in Late-Fifteenth- and Early-SixteenthCentury Rome". Debates ox er imitetio and eemuletio among Renaissance rhetoricians are echoed in architectural writing, and Brothers concludes that "the desire for authoritative models emerges from architectural treatises with increasing clarity over the course of the sixteenth century and parallels the development of an increasingly strict Ciceronianism" (p. 100). Subsequent chapters that will especially interest students of the history of rhetoric include "Sanmichelli's Architecture anti Literary Theory", by Paul Davies and David Hemsoll; "Architects and Academies: Architectural Theories of Imitetio and Literary Debates on Language and Style", by Alina A. Payne; and "The Rhetorical Model in the Formation of French Architectural Language in the Sixteenth Century: The Triumphal Arch as a Commonplace", by Yves Pauwels. Important rhetorical terms...
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Dissent and emotional management in a liberal‐democratic society: The Kent state iconic photograph ↗
Abstract
Abstract Public discourse in contemporary Western democracies is constructed, studied, and policed according to a general suppression or suspicion of emotional display, which then can become a mode of dissent. These tendencies are evident in the use of visual images in the public media. An icon of emotional public protest—the young woman screaming over the murdered Kent State student on the ground before her—reveals how visual practices and emotional display are important for democratic life. The iconic photograph constitutes citizenship as an emotional construct while it shapes emotions according to norms of public order. This representation of dissent provides resources for advocacy and change, but it also is vulnerable to narratives of fragmentation and control.
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Abstract
Abstract All but ignored by historians of rhetoric, Quintilian ‘s meditations on improvisation not only allow us to situate the Institutio Oratoria more firmly in its historical context but also require us to confront issues of performance, issues which (again) have been largely overlooked in historical studies of rhetoric. Quintilian's many references to extemporaneous speech participate in a broader argument the author advances against what he sees as the unscrupulous activities of the delatores (informers working in the service of the Emperors) and the theory of oratory implicit in their oratorical practices. In particular, Quintilian uses the topic of improvisation as an argumentative vehicle to reject the dependence of the delatores on natural ability, to parody their artless attempts at extemporization, and to promote his own educational program based on study, training, and art. Quintilian's discussion of improvisation also invites consideration of oratorical performance: the occasions upon which an orator should switch from a scripted to an improvised mode of performance, the psychological and affective experience of the orator who speaks extemporaneously, and the response of listeners who (according to Quintilian) regard the extemporized oration as more credible, more engaging, and more authentic than the one prepared in advance. For Quintilian, improvisation is the mode of performance to which all oratory should aspire.
May 2001
March 2001
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Abstract
Addresses the hundreds of web sites devoted to the memory of Diana. Provides a thick description of the way in which people are writing and using the Internet in everyday life, with a special emphasis on the way in which this writing brings them into a public sphere. Concludes that hypermedia offers the immediate sense of audience and community.
February 2001
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Abstract
The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.
January 2001
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Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English “Artes Dictandi” and their Tradition ed. by Martin Camargo ↗
Abstract
128 RHETORICA not place Isocrates neatly in his category of epideictic. Again, Walker's sub tle argument that the Ciceronian ideal eloquence draws on the "epideictic registers" (p. 83) ignores many of Cicero's own quite dismissive remarks concerning epideictic or demonstrative oratory Others may have reservations similar to these concerning Walker's reconstruction of the enthymeme, but will find it difficult not to admire his patience in testing the concept in his readings of the archaic poets. And these observations do not diminish the value of this very ambitious and challenging book. Walker's revitalization of "epideictic" should provoke greater scrutiny of the ancient understandings of that category. His blurring the traditional boundaries separating rhetoric from poetics is both innovative and cogent. The "rhetorical poetics" he proposes will no doubt be profitably applied in the study of lyric forms from many cultures subsequent to that of archaic Greece. Richard Graff University ofMinnesota Martin Camargo ed., Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English "Artes Dictandi" and their Tradition, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 115, (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), xiv + 257 pp. In studying the history of letter-writing in the medieval culture of Eng land, Martin Camargo has made a pioneering achievement, the first critical editions of five treatises on epistolary composition by writers in England. Al though four of these works can be identified as belonging to the Late Middle Ages, they nevertheless represent a significant part of England's contribution to epistolography. Camargo's introduction, a meticulously written summary of the history of letter-writing in England from the late twelfth century to the mid-fifteenth, is a model of craftsmanship and painstaking research. Descriptions of the manuscript copies, the text, the author, and the struc ture and contents of the work in outline form, where appropriate, precede each text. Massive compilations of variant readings comprising the apparatus criticus and large collections of references to sources and analogues along with comments related to meaning, syntax, and vocabulary follow each text. Rearranged as footnotes throughout each edited text, the variant readings and notes would have precluded an arduous task for the reader who must constantly be turning pages. The carefully edited texts presented in chronological sequence begin with Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice by Peter of Blois, the earliest treatise on letter-writing produced in England and found only in Cambridge University Library MS. Dd 9 38. This study should contain the last reference to the Reviews 129 uncertainty of Peter's authorship, as it has recently been shown that Peter of Blois was the author of this work. An edition of the prologue in Migne, PL. 207, cols. 1127-1128 is not mentioned. The second text is Compilacio de arte dictandi by John of Briggis, probably written in the late fourteenth century at Oxford, which survives in one copy in Bodleian Library MS. Douce 52. The next text is Formula moderni et usitati dictaminis, written c. 1390 by Thomas Marke, of which the most preferred copy is in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 237. Although a copy found in Newberry Library MS. 55 is described, Paul Saenger's A Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Western Manuscript Books ...(Chicago and London, 1989) pp. 96-97 is not cited. The fourth text is Modus dictandiby Thomas Sampson, who taught at Oxford in the second half of the fourteenth century. One complete copy is found in British Library MS. Royal 17 B XLVII. An omitted study is J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans, The History ofthe University of Oxford, II, pp. 524-526. The final text is the anonymous Regina sedens Rhetorica, found in three manuscripts, the fullest text of which is in British Library MS. Royal 10 B IX. By way of suggestion and not criticism, a more complete survey of the history of letter-writing in England should include Gervase, Abbot of Premontre, Robert Elenryson, Thomas Hoccleve, Richard Emsay, Ralph of Fresburn, John Wethamstede, John of Latro, Richard Kendale, Joseph Meddus, John Mason, and references to anonymous treatises as found, for example, in Manchester, Chetham's Library MS. Mun. A 3 130 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. lat. misc. f 49. This study...
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Abstract
Reviews Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii + 396 pp. In this lengthy, densely argued volume, Jeffrey Walker engages two particularly contentious issues in the history of rhetoric, offering a novel reconstruction of rhetoric's origins and a revised account of the relation ship between rhetoric and poetics in Classical Greece and Rome. This dual focus is reflected in the organization of the study. Parts I and II (ch. 1-4) concentrate primarily on a reading of the rhetorical tradition originating in pre-Aristotelian sources and extending to the "second sophistic" of im perial Rome. In Parts III and IV (ch. 5-11), Walker uncovers the rhetorical dimensions of archaic Greek poetry and then traces the tension between grammatical and rhetorical elements in the major (and several minor) Greek and Latin poetic theories. In the first two chapters, Walker advances three claims that are defended at length in the remainder of the book: (1) that the distinction between rhetoric and poetics featured in the standard histories is illusory and has resulted in distorted characterizations of both arts; (2) that the fundamental or "primary" manifestation of rhetorical art is not deliberative or forensic oratory, but rather the various verse and prose forms of epideictic discourse; (3) that accounts of rhetoric's periodic decline in the face of restricted op portunities for "practical", political oratory neglect the vital socio-political significance assumed by epideictic eloquence in nearly all periods. Cen tral to Walker's argument, then, is an expanded conception of "epideictic". Developing an insight of Chaim Perelman, Walker rejects the traditional characterization of epideictic as a decorative genre, simple entertainment or "mere display", and attributes to it broad suasive and ideological functions: epideictic, for Walker, is "that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives" (p. 9). Thus conceived, the epideictic category cuts across the prose-poetry divide, as Walker would include much poetry—including archaic lyric poetry—within it. This enlarged conception of epideictic enables Walker to locate the ori gins of rhetoric in discourse practices that predate by centuries the theoretical conceptualization of the art of persuasive oratorical speech (this is the thrust of ch. 2). In this respect, Walker's study represents a healthy alternative to the recent work of scholars such as Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa which identifies the "birth" of rhetoric with the fourth-century advent of a prop erly technical and theoretical vocabulary or "metalanguage". If Walker's 125 126 RHETORICA redescription of epideictic gives grounds for rejecting the narrow concep tion of rhetoric offered by Cole and Schiappa, it also confounds the wellknown distinction between "primary" and "secondary" rhetoric. In George Kennedy's formulation, primary rhetoric is associated with practical oratory, with speeches delivered orally in deliberative and forensic settings. This for mulation encourages epideictic's treatment as secondary, textual, literary and aesthetic. Walker reverses this narrative and the impoverished notion of epideictic it inscribes: "the epideiktikon is the rhetoric of belief and desire; the pragmatikon [dikanic and demegoric genres] the rhetoric of practical civic business...that necessarily depends on and appeals to the beliefs/desires that epideictic cultivates" (p. 10). Viewed in this frame, epideictic becomes "the 'primary' or central form of rhetoric" while deliberative and forensic speeches are derivative, applied forms of a more general logon techne (p. 41). In Part II (ch. 3-4), Walker considers the fortunes of rhetoric in the Hel lenistic and Roman imperial periods. Opposing the traditional characteriza tion of these periods as marking rhetoric's decadence and decline, Walker offers a more complicated narrative of a competition between two relatively distinct rhetorical traditions. The first version is that founded by the early sophists and given fullest expression in Isocrates' logdn paidea; it stresses the broad, culture-shaping function of poetic-epideictic eloquence. This tradi tion, Walker contends, is preserved in the fragments of Theophrastus and in later authors as diverse as Demetrius, Hermagoras, Dionysius, and Cicero (in De oratore). The second version of rhetoric is more narrow and technical, and by the late Hellenistic period focused almost exclusively on the practice of judicial oratory. This is...
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Abstract
Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. viii+322. Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation, edited by J. Michael Hogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xxxviii + 315 pp. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law by Rosemary J. Coombe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xi + 462 pp. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators by Rebecca Moore Howard. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. xi + 195 pp. Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words by Brad Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xii + 202 pp. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America by James Perrin Warren. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. x + 202 pp.
October 2000
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Abstract
Arguing that the immediate historical context of desegregation is vital to an understanding of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, this article reports on materials from the archives of Heath's research housed at the Dacus Library of Winthrop University. What emerges from reading Heath's letters and other materials at the time she was researching Ways with Words is a portrait of an ethnographer trying to negotiate existing stereotypes and raw tensions in the scholarly and public discourse on race while attempting to adhere to the tenets of the ethnographic approach of the 1970s. Taking a critical race theory approach, the article suggests that these materials indicate that Ways with Words could most fruitfully be read at this point as a story of the persistence of prejudice—a story that suggests the failure of the arguments in favor of desegregation to broker lasting reforms toward equity, and one that reveals the different and racialized meanings literacy acquires in response to historical shifts.
September 2000
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Abstract
The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218 + xv pp. Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 209 + xiii. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 130 pp. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 256 pages. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres by Gerard A. Hausen Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 335p. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois State University), 1998. 118 pp.
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Abstract
Abstract Mailloux and Leff urge us to seek a transdisciplinary ground for the study of rhetoric; this essay agrees but argues that neither Leff nor Mailloux has taken sufficient notice of the institutional and historical differences between Speech Communication and English, thus rendering the putative ground unstable. By offering an tentative account of the distinctive general orientation of Speech Communication rhetoricians, I hope to engage a substantive dialogue on the practical conditions of an interdisciplinary study of rhetoric.
June 2000
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Abstract
This article examines the ideological functions of seventeenth-century ceremonial oratory by distinguishing between two related rhetorical strategies: textual image and propaganda, defined as the promotion of a policy. This distinction helps characterize the particular nature of Louis XIV's régime, instead of anachronistically equating it with modern totalitarianism. If pursued in other contexts it can serve to illuminate the mechanisms of personality cult in general. Fashioning an image of the ruler with the help of an institutional apparatus which varies with the régime is a way to create public confidence in his/her ability. A well-established absolutist monarchy should not require propagandistic discourse; yet it was ubiquitous in Louis XIV's global design for government. This suggests a dialectical interpretation. When belief in the monarch's greatness fails to produce blind faith in his/her infallibility, propaganda may take over to bolster persuasion. When counter-propaganda, or facts, become insistently present, image may again appear as an expedient alternative.
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Abstract
The development of an oratorical literary genre is connected with the work of Antiphon, the first in the canon of ten Attic orators. This paper argues against the modern view that the beginnings of literary oratory date to the 420s B.C. when Antiphon began publishing his speeches. It argues that this view depends on a mistaken conception of literacy in the ancient world and that Antiphon’s speech-writing activities began much earlier. The argument is based on references to Antiphon in contemporary and later sources, the dating of his speeches, the authenticity and dating of the Tetralogies, and Antiphon’s reputation in antiquity as the first logographer.
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Abstract
Short Reviews Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp. In The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, Edward Schiappa continues his questioning of the disciplinary status of rhetoric in the Classical period. The book is divided into three sections: Reconstructing the Origins of Rhetorical Theory, Gorgias and the Disciplining of Discourse, and Fourth-Century Disciplinary Efforts. In Part I, Schiappa challenges what he characterizes as a 17point , "standard account" of the history of rhetoric—with points ranging from the status of the Corax and Tisias story to the origins and uses of ρητορική. For the most part, George Kennedy is the author of the account Schiappa challenges, and these first chapters interrogate Kennedy's timeline as well as his categories of "traditional," "technical," and "philosophical" rhetorics. This section recapitulates Schiappa's well-known argument that Plato was responsible for coining the term ρητορική —most likely in the early fourth century BCE. By Schiappa's account, this "coining" was "a watershed event in the history of conceptualized Rhetoric in ancient Greece" (p. 23). Specifically, Schiappa maintains that before ρητορική was coined the "verbal arts" were "understood as less differentiated and more holistic in scope", and they did "not draw a sharp line between the goals of seeking success and seeking truth" (p. 23). Part I includes Schiappa's direct response to critics of his ρητορική argument. In Chapter Two, he draws on theorists from Kenneth Burke and Ferdinand de Saussure to Benjamin Lee Whorf and Michel Foucault to defend the significance of the act of naming that Schiappa maintains is embodied in the coining of ρητορική (pp. 23-28). Chapter Four includes a sharp critique of the ideological uses of the term "Sophistic rhetoric", in which Schiappa challenges the "wishful thinking" of those who "over-romanticize the relationship between 'the Sophists' and Athenian democracy" .343 344 RHETORICA (p. 55). He is particularly hard on those whom he accuses of sacrificing historiographical method to ideological theory construction—a practice that he argues leads to the problem of anachronism (p. 61). Part II consists of "three studies". The first study, large portions of which were previously published in Pre/Text, examines Gorgias's style. The second study, "Rereading Gorgias's Helen", picks up more explicitly the disciplinary concerns of Part I, as Schiappa argues that "certain persistent questions about Gorgias's Helen obtain different answers once the speech is repositioned as a predisciplinary text" (p. 115). More specifically, Schiappa maintains that "Gorgias significantly influenced the early theoretical articulation of the discipline of Rhetoric by theorizing about the workings of persuasive discourse" (p. 131). In the last study, Schiappa focuses on Gorgias's "On Not Being", examining the ways in which disciplinary senses of philosophy and rhetoric have influenced interpretations and evaluations of this muchdebated text. Like Part II, Part III consists of "three studies". The first chapter of this section examines early uses of the terms ρητορεία ("oratory") and ρητορεύειν ("to orate"). Schiappa's general argument is that the terms "were not used often or consistently enough" to justify the sense of disciplinarity stability conveyed when they are translated as "rhetoric" (p. 160). The next chapter, "Isocrates's Philosophia", attempts to define Isocrates's sense of the art of discourse, particularly as it contrasts with Plato's concept of "philosophy". This chapter has—somewhat surprisingly—a second function: "to provide a reading of Isocrates that attempts to locate him as one of the first philosophers in Western history to address the concerns that we now identify with Pragmatism" (p. 162). Part III concludes with a chapter co-authored with David Timmerman that addresses the motivations for and implications of the diverse forms of discourse Aristotle classified as "epideictic". Schiappa's arguments have yielded invaluable insights into some of the most recalcitrant debates in the history of rhetoric—in particular, the ancient contest between rhetoric and philosophy. I found that the structure of The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece sometimes obscured rather than foregrounded the significance of these insights. As Schiappa acknowledges in the Reviews 345 Preface, portions of the book have appeared in books and journal articles. The result is sometimes redundant as opposed to...
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Abstract
Abstract Though early American revolutionary and scientist Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) never wrote a formal treatise on rhetoric, his medical lectures and reform essays constitute an important site for the reception of rhetorics in revolutionary America. Focusing on Rush as a cultural register rather than a biographical subject enables historians to observe more immediately the cultural uses of rhetoric, the ways that individuals encountered, synthesized, and utilized assumptions about language to fashion identities at specific historical moments. Rush's early encounter with Great Awakening oratory, his scientific training in Edinburgh, and his participation in republican politics all record new attitudes toward language in eighteenth‐century America.
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Abstract
We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.
May 2000
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Abstract
Proposes assigning polemics, suasive essays, and paradoxical encomia as a means to help students write in classical civic discourse forms, which enfranchise the personal in the service of the community. Presents guidelines for each assignment.
March 2000
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Abstract
Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.
January 2000
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“We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by Shirley Wilson Logan ↗
Abstract
Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...
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(RE)Constructing Arguments: Classical Rhetoric and Roman Engineering Reflected in Vitruvius' De Architectura ↗
Abstract
Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.
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Abstract
This article examines a 1994 General Accounting Office (GAO) report on sexual harassment at U.S. service academies to determine how power structures affected the report writers' rhetorical choices. Employing postmodern mapping theories, the article identifies what is valued and devalued in the report's contents. Then it describes Congress's reaction to the report and speculates on the report's impact on public discourse and subsequent social action. It offers postmapping theory as a way of understanding the relationship between discourse and power in policy reports.
September 1999
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Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400 ed. by Stanley E. Porter ↗
Abstract
Reviews Stanley E. Porter ed., Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D. 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1997) xv + 901 pp. Ce fort volume, d'une présentation typographique impeccable, se veut un ouvrage de référence sur la rhétorique antique, destiné principalement aux lecteurs anglophones. Il réunit 29 contributions, réparties en trois groupes, et toutes munies de bibliographies détaillées. La première partie (Rhetoric Defined) commence par un survol de l'histoire de la rhétorique antique confié à G. A. Kennedy: à tout seigneur tout honneur. Puis sont étudiés les grands secteurs de la doctrine: "The Genres of Rhetoric" (G. A. Kennedy), "Arrangement" (W. Wuellner), "Invention" (M. Heath), "Style" (G. O. Rowe), "Delivery and Memory" (T. O. Olbricht). Sur chacun de ces sujets, les auteurs s'efforcent de résumer les principales indications données par les théoriciens grecs et latins. On trouvera donc ici de solides aide-mémoires consacrées aux grandes divisions et classifications de la rhétorique antique. Le chapitre sur l'invention m'a paru spécialement original et éclairant, dans la mesure où il décrit le processus de Vinventio à partir d'un exemple précis et avec un grand recul méthodologique. La deuxième partie (Rhetoric in Practice) est plus curieuse. On était en droit d'attendre une étude de la pratique oratoire, parallèle à l'étude de la théorie qui fait l'objet de la première partie. Mais en réalité on a affaire à une succession de chapitres centrés sur les principaux genres littéraires et consacrés aux rapports de ces genres avec la rhétorique: "The Epistle" (J. T. Reed), "Philosophical Prose" (D. M. Schenkeveld), "Historical Prose" (S. Rebenich), "Poetry and Rhetoric" (R. Webb), "Biography" (R. A. Burridge), "Oratory and Declamation" (D. H. Berry - M. Heath), "Homily and Panegyrical Sermon" (F. Siegert), "The Rhetoric of Romance" (R. F. Hock), "Apocalyptic and 433 434 RHETORICA Prophétie Literature" (J. M. Knight), "Drama and Rhetoric" (R. Scodel). Ceci pose un problème de fond, qui mérite qu'on s'y arrête. Il suffit de lire cette liste de chapitres pour être frappé par une anomalie: "Oratory and Déclamation" est présenté comme un secteur parmi d'autres, enfoui au milieu du livre, dont les rapports avec la rhétorique ne seraient pas plus étroits que ceux de la philosophie ou du roman. En d'autres termes, le mot "rhétorique" est pris dans ce volume au sens de: théorie rhétorique, corps de doctrine, ensemble de cadres d'invention et de procédés d'écriture dont l'influence peut s'exercer sur n'importe quel texte, et par conséquent la pratique oratoire ne se voit reconnaître aucun statut particulier. L'inconvénient de cette conception est de rompre le lien très fort qui unit, dans l'Antiquité, la théorie et la pratique du discours. Pour les Grecs et les Romains, la pratique oratoire (sous ses multiples formes d'exercice scolaire et de discours public) faisait elle-même partie de la rhétorique. Il n'est donc pas surprenant que les auteurs du chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" s'avouent embarrassés. Ils reconnaissent que "rhetoric" and "oratory" ont entretenu une relation essentielle, "symbiotic", tout au long de l'Antiquité (p. 393), mais se voient forcés, faute de place, de renoncer à ce qui serait le véritable sujet (une étude de l'éloquence antique), pour se contenter de brèves illustrations. Et voilà pourquoi les historiens sont plus longuement traités que les orateurs, ou la collection des Panegyrici Latini passée sous silence alors qu'on lit des pages entières sur Bion de Borysthène et Chariton, auteurs intéressants en eux-mêmes, certes, mais dont l'importance est bien moindre pour l'histoire de la rhétorique. On remarque également que la déclamation fait l'objet d'un traitement contradictoire à deux moments du livre: dans le chapitre sur "Oratory and Déclamation" (pp. 406 sqq.), il est question des rapports de la déclamation avec la rhétorique, tandis que...
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Increase and diffusion of knowledge: Ethos of science and education in the Smithsonian's inception ↗
Abstract
In 1835 the United States inherited the large estate of James Smithson, the natural son of a British nobleman. Smithson had written in his will, I bequeath the whole of my property . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men (Rhees i). The single, enigmatic statement in Smithson's will was the only instruction that Congress had; as a result, competing Congressmen were able to interpret Smithson's words according to their own political and civil agendas. The eight-year debate that ensued over the use of the money was a groundbreaking ideological struggle in the nation's pursuit of knowledge. During these early years of the nineteenth century, universities were only beginning to develop in the United States, and the German thrust for research had not yet made its mark on these new institutions. The rhetoric in the Smithsonian debate represents a uniquely American version of the longstanding struggle between ethos as a value system passed on through education and ethos as a value system embodied in the new science of discovery.1 The debate forced Congressmen and citizens to address directly the question of where intellectual authority should reside in the developing nation. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran argue that early nineteenth-century America was an oratorical culture: one in which a tradition of citizenship and public argument relied on tacit agreement about the commonality of knowledge. This oratorical culture, according to Clark and Halloran, underwent an individualistic transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Andrew Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1828. While the debate over the formation of the Smithsonian does not entirely support the theory of a rhetorical paradigm shift or transformation, it does dramatize a creative struggle between multiple ideological approaches. While the ethos of public education competed with the ethos of scientific discovery, a larger cultural context of traditional consensus vied with the new ideology of liberal individualism. Individual speakers often
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Supporting deliberative democracy: Pedagogical arts of the contact zone of the electronic public sphere ↗
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I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing
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