Ghost bikes function as MEmorials, or a public acknowledgement of the unspoken costs of petrocultural values. However, ghost bikes are temporary monuments: they are often stolen or taken down by public authorities within just a few days or weeks after their installation. We created the mobile augmented reality experience “Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike (Monu)mentality” to visualize MEmorials of ghost bikes digitally.

Grounded in the work of Ong’s (1982) theory of the ‘internalization of the technology of writing’ (p. 437), this study sought to understand the application of oral language skills to writing. Contextualized in a South Texas urban setting, five elementary students participated in an after-school book club over the course of six months. During this time, the participants engaged in discursive activities in the form of response sheets, discussions, communal meaning statements, and reflective journal entries. Using seminal research by Elbow (1985) that supports how writing is similar to speech, findings showed that seven of the nine characteristic features of speech were also evident in the writing acts engaged by the participants. Those characteristics were: spontaneity; responding, replying, and two-way communication; voice, participation in meaning making; and organization and structure. This context for writing removed many of the threats commonly associated with the traditional unidirectional approach to writing. Overall, the participants merged the speech acts into the writing acts, moving seamlessly through the processes of communication.

The recently diagnosed “broadening imperative” in revisionary historiography is of special concern to feminist historians, for whom critique of traditional methodological presuppositions has been central to the feminist revisionary project. By examining the performative and figurative elements of feminist historiographical discourse, feminist historians and historiographers can both identify sites of feminist rhetorical resistance to traditional presuppositions, and gain an understanding of how feminist revisionary methodologies have been re-assimilated into traditional methodological and rhetorical paradigms.

Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a defining role in religions. Though science and religion are often seen as mutually exclusively (sometimes in opposition), identifying the ineffable experience as a shared ground can provide opportunities for science and religion to dialogue in new ways.

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the speech act perspective can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts.

368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

Abstract This essay examines President Barack Obama’s March 28, 2011 address on the war in Libya to theorize a shift in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which violence is insulated from critique through the numbing of public sensation. In contrast to traditional persuasive appeals aimed at securing collective participation and approval for war, Obama’s oratory is characteristic of “light war,” a mode of conflict that flows more freely by placing few demands on thought, feeling, and attention. I argue that Obama’s rhetoric limits the potential for audiences to sense the material consequences of war through a set of kairotic justifications in which violence is considered “just” in the dual sense that it just ended, and that it is just war, or merely a banal and quotidian version of conflict. After unpacking the anesthetizing features of Obama’s discourse, I conclude by addressing the prospects of resistance given the compressed interval for public thought and feeling to interrupt violent practices.

This brief essay examines the undervalued technê of vultures as they take up putrid material for their own sustenance. These broad-winged masters of the updraft glide along a dialectic between graceful and gross. Even grounded in the pragmatics of materiality and its decay, they nonetheless soar in our collective unconscious as psychopomps, guides on the bridge between the living and the dead, creatures of the uncanny and deeply symbolic. The essay uses Morton’s “dark ecology” and the intersection of rhetoric and magic to make sense of the rhetorical contributions of vultures.

Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the ways that doing rhetoric in situ can reveal sets of decolonizing practices within interdisciplinary rhetorical studies. I discuss the idea of rhetoric in situ and its possibility for establishing sets of decolonizing practices in rhetorical studies drawing from fieldwork methods found in disciplines including anthropology. I advance a call for a more literal interpretation of in situ as one way of demonstrating the ways that historians and critics of rhetoric contribute to the conceptual world of publics to co-create imagined rhetorical possibilities with displaced persons. By way of demonstrating the methodological approach I’m advancing in this essay, I turn to a set of discourses born from my own fieldwork, completed on the northern border of Jordan in 2014, amidst the Syrian refugee crisis. In analyzing discourse from two refugee families living in the Mafraq Governorate of Jordan after escaping the violence of the Syrian conflict, I offer the concept of the “nomad citizen” as one way to expand understandings of citizenship in rhetorical studies to be more responsive to crises of transnational migration born out of colonialism.

This article traces the reception of a “science comic book” by various audiences including readers and reviewers after publication as well as grant application review committees vetting the proposed project in its conceptual stage. Specifically, the work is a biology textbook containing comics-style visual explanations couched in the form of an imaginative story interwoven with and supplementing traditional text-based explanations of the same ideas. The analysis uses Genette’s concept of “paratexts” (i.e., a class of speech genres comprising those supplementary texts that contextualize and inform readers’ interpretations of the primary text that they accompany) to examine the rhetoric of the visual in the discourse of science education. This analysis observes that the stigmatization of comics as a medium played some role in how readers, critics, and reviewers responded to the text. The implications of this stigma for cultural conceptions of science and their relationships to other knowledge domains, including the arts and humanities, raise a concern for the mediation of public impressions of science as an institution.

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream1 and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of the journey toward their dreams. Sharing their narratives and photographs in public forums, the students challenged the individualist American Dream discourse, underscoring a collective approach instead. The outcomes foreground previously-silenced voices and provide an example of culturally relevant pedagogy within a structured literacy curriculum.

Big data is one of the most hyped buzzwords in both academia and industry. This article makes an early contribution to research on big data by situating data theoretically as a historical object and arguing that much of the discourse about the supposed transparency and objectivity of big data ignores the crucial roles of interpretation and communication. To set forth that analysis, this article engages with recent discussion of big data and “smart” cities to show the communicative practices operating behind the scenes of large data projects and relate those practices to the profession of technical communication.

This study describes how members of a transnational social network of Mexican bilinguals living in Chicago manipulate their language on online social media to facilitate and maintain close connections across borders. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, I examine conversations posted on members’ Facebook walls and the contexts in which the discourses are formed. I argue that members of this transnational social network engage in the use of deterritorialized discourse to create chronotopes; that is, through discourse, members connect temporal and spatial relationships and form them into a single constructed context. These chronotopes help members recontextualize Facebook as a unique transnational social place that connects families and allows for the continuation of cultural practices that maintain their transnationalism. This study sheds light on the use of linguistic resources and modes of communication to examine how individuals construct imagined experiences within a real intimate community in the deterritorialized space of online social media.

Coming out is a powerful way for individuals to disclose, constitute, and perform membership in stigmatized identity categories. The practice has now spread far beyond its LGBTQ origins. In this essay, I examine how atheists and other secularists have taken up and adapted coming out discourse to meet their situational and rhetorical needs. Through an analysis of 50 narratives about coming out atheist, I show that atheist writers use coming out discourse to claim both high and low agency over their identities. They both follow and resist a low-agency approach that has sometimes characterized LGBTQ uses of coming out discourse. Furthermore, I argue that the attribution of high personal agency in coming out discourse and other discourses of identity can introduce themes of deliberation, choice, and uncertainty, leading to a richer public discussion of identity category membership.

While Burke examined the relationships among the terms of the pentad within a single pentadic set (i.e., a single "act"), a few rhetorical critics using pentadic criticism have noted grammatical relationships that cross between pentadic sets (multiple acts). Yet no one has theorized about those multipentadic relationships. This paper provides a basic explanation of how such multipentadic relationships work in strategic constructions, using many illustrations from public discourse.

While Burke examined the relationships among the terms of the pentad within a single pentadic set (i.e., a single "act"), a few rhetorical critics using pentadic criticism have noted grammatical relationships that cross between pentadic sets (multiple acts). Yet no one has theorized about those multipentadic relationships. This paper provides a basic explanation of how such multipentadic relationships work in strategic constructions, using many illustrations from public discourse.

This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform.* Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results that can be replicated and aggregated. This research demonstrates the impact of assignment design and platform affordances on student composition practices. Results show that incoming students do not fit the "digital native" myth, nor are they prepared to engage in digital scholarship at the college level without significant guidance and specific requirements that scaffold digital work.

Rhetorical studies has long worried about its identity as a critical discipline and a practical art. Since the Great Recession of 2008, a myriad of social and political forces has provoked a discourse about the vitality of the liberal arts, which brings this identity crisis to the fore. Defenders of the liberal arts have deployed a negative critical stance, positing the liberal arts as external to liberalism as a public culture. This stance limits criticism’s political potential because it ignores the productive role of liberal cultural constraints in forming social bonds and creating self-understandings. As the liberal arts grapple with an evolving liberty to learn, so too might the rhetorical arts commit to the productive possibilities of simulation and judgment. This path would respond to the needs of students, who find themselves between structural constraints and contingent possibilities for change.

The introduction and tracking of discourse referents is a central feature of discourse coherence, alongside considerations for temporal, spatial and causal features. However, while much attention is usually paid to the management of temporal, spatial and causal language in L2 writing course materials and curricula, it is apparent that the appropriate management of reference in L2 writing is often overlooked. Typically associated with the label of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), current research from pragmatics (notably Ariel, 1991, 2008, 2010) suggests that writers and readers are sensitive to the accessibility of referents in extended discourse, which is dependent on a variety of cues including salience, parallelism, number and type of competing referents, etc. The writer’s choice of referring expressions (i.e. full NP, pronoun, zero) at any given time thus reflects their belief regarding a referent’s accessibility to their intended reader. In L1 discourse, accessibility-mediated marking of reference is considered a pragmatic universal, despite different L1s marking accessibility in different ways. Recent research into L2 discourse, particularly Asian L2 discourse (e.g. Kang, 2009; AUTHOR, 2014a; Ryan, accepted, in press) has suggested that the appropriate introduction and maintenance of reference by L2 learners is problematic - despite the universal distribution of form/function found in L1 discourse – with learners often under or over-explicit in their reference management, or frequently miscommunicating entirely. This has serious implications for the overall coherence of the L2 discourse produced. The proposed paper explores the root causes of the failure of Asian EFL students to manage reference coherently in L2 writing, then focuses on how such management can be improved pedagogically. The paper proposes additions to L2 writing materials and in-class activities that would help improve L2 reference maintenance, including picture sequence descriptions, silent film retellings and collaborative writing projects designed to maximise the potential tracking of reference over extended discourse sequences.

232 RHETORICA l'attenzione a generi e tipologie testuali apparentemente minori, come la scoliastica , l'epistolografia, la favolistica e altri ancora, di cui si rivendica persua­ sivamente, alla luce di una analisi minuta e puntúale, Taita caratura letteraria e la ricercata raffinatezza fórmale. Infime, va sottolineato corne Tindagine linguistico-retorica non sia pressoché mai fine a se stessa, ma concorra a illuminare strategie comunicative, intenzioni letterarie, prese di posizione ideologiche , e questo non solo per gli autori classici, ma anche per i testi umanistici, troppo spesso appiattiti da un pregiudizio critico che li vede come mero prodotto di una pedissequa riproduzione dei modelli antichi. Per tutte queste ragioni, Topera curata da Raffaele Grisolia e Giuseppina Matino si legge con grande interesse, stimola nuovi percorsi di ricerca, invita ad approfondire Tindagine sui testi e sugli autori presi in considerazione nei diversi saggi: che è quanto ogni autentico studio scientifico dovrebbe fare. Mario Lentano, Universita di Siena Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 325 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-8032-4836-6. In his contribution to the edited volume The Ethos of Rhetoric, Robert Wade Kenny observed that even after centuries of inquiry into ethos, it still "calls to us as something to be understood," a point powerfully captured in Liesbeth Korthals Altes's Ethos and Narrative Interpretation. Korthals Altes identifies as a narratologist, and though her book is not directed specifically at historians of rhetoric it offers perspectives on ethos that will likely be new and useful. Korthals Altes's focus on ethos is part of a rhetorical tradition in literary studies intent on considering the author, or the "implied author" as Wayne Booth defined it in The Rhetoric ofFiction, as an integral site of inquiry into the meanings of texts. Like Booth, she is drawn to ethos and rhetoric through Aristotle's "pragmatic" vision (6) that "elucidates what makes per­ suasive discourse effective and stipulates what means of persuasion can best be used in specific situations in the public domain" (2-3), and while she does not break new ground in her conception of ancient rhetoric (nor does she claim to), her uses of ancient terms aim to extend its influence in a variety of disciplines, particularly narrative theory, hermeneutics, sociology, and cognitive psychology. Uninterested in building ethos "as a consistently rigor­ ous analytical concept," she instead sees it as a node connecting "heteroge­ neous aspects of narratives" and the ways they are interpreted (xiv). Korthals Altes uses Aristotle's Rhetoric to build a methodological founda­ tion that serves her well throughout the book. For her, "the treatise's interest resides in Aristotle's subtle analysis of the various - rational, emotional, and social - components of persuasion and of the implied interactive mechanisms" Reviews 233 (3). She is less concerned with interactions between the three domains of logos, pathos, and ethos and more interested in those she sees contained in ethos itself. One such "interactive mechanism" lies in the connection between ethos and phronesis, which "crucially connects rhetoric to ethics" (257n6), important for Korthals Altes as she develops the argument that narrative literature cons­ tructs ethical codes in storyworlds and in the minds of readers. An interactive mechanism equally central to the book is "ethos topoi," which she briefly defi­ nes as "culturally recognized grounds for rhetorical credit" (62) related specifi­ cally to the character of a speaker or author that "provide an interface between perceived textual clues and cultural norms and shared character repertoires" (211). She notes that Aristotle's ethos topoi, developed as they were for "public speech in the Athenian state," are practical wisdom, virtue, and good will, and she defines these for her modern purposes to include the broad categories of morality, truth, expertise and experience, and social and political power (63), which she breaks into more specific qualities as her interpretive needs dictate. Ethos topoi serve as an important heuristic for what Korthals Altes calls her "metahermeneutic" project: tracing the complex interpretive path­ ways of a reader "assessing] a discursive ethos" (ix). She develops, for example, specific topoi for assessing the ethos of the "engagé," or socially engaged, writer, someone who at...

Abstract The Suez Crisis address, given in response to the exigencies of the Cold War, marked a dramatic shift in presidential rhetoric regarding the Middle East. In this essay I build upon Richard Gregg’s analysis of this speech by demonstrating how President Dwight Eisenhower’s rhetoric broke from previously articulated rationales for American engagement with the region and subtly proposed a new understanding of U.S. responsibility for the region that has yet to be refuted. This speech should be understood as establishing premises in presidential discourse that have been used to mobilize support for American intervention in the Middle East from the Eisenhower Doctrine to the present.

Abstract This article examines the rhetoric of an important, yet understudied, figure in the history of public relations, Bruce Barton. I argue that Barton attempted to mobilize those in the business community to adopt public relations in the creation of a more socially responsible free enterprise through a discourse of evangelical capitalism. Barton’s rhetoric, I argue, positions the corporation as a benevolent shepherd and the public as a submissive and adrift flock in need of salvation. This submissive relationship between public and corporation dovetailed with the technocratic understanding of politics espoused by Walter Lippmann that portrayed the public as a bewildered herd to be guided and mobilized as political leverage by managerial elites, ultimately providing ideological scaffolding for the maintenance and legitimization of corporate power through the appropriation of progressive rhetorics.

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke's blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke's works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke's rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.Clark models his book on a jazz performance. The book offers neither a linear argument nor a dialectical movement from antitheses to synthesis. Rather, Clark weaves an account where theory, the rhetoric of jazz advocacy, and jazz performances themselves resonate harmoniously. Jazz becomes a representative anecdote for unpacking the details of Burke's political aesthetics, even while this developing theory provides a means to understand jazz's aesthetic workings and civic significance.In “Setting Up,” his first and introductory chapter, Clark advances the thesis/theme that jazz calls forth an identity and a form of living that manifest e pluribus unum. He introduces Burke's work, its cultural critique of America, and its call for a redemptive art of living. Aligning Burke with critics ranging from Walt Whitman to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Clark explains how Burke looked at America and how when he saw division, turned to rhetoric and its capacity to overcome it by fostering identification through form. Clark then takes up the difficult task of extending rhetorical theory and criticism to jazz as a historically situated and significant art form and looks to jazz writers and musicians who describe such rhetorical processes in their music. Clark establishes his bona fides by citing broadly: he revisits Aristotle's and Suzanne Langer's reflections on music, gestures toward Ingrid Monson's recent jazz musicology, and takes up the African American reflections on jazz of Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis. These provide the means for him to develop the idea that jazz is constitutional and that its workings can be explained in terms of the rhetoric of form.Each chapter returns to, explores, and augments this initial theme, much as each chorus of a well-crafted jazz solo extends and develops those musical ideas that have preceded it and just as Burke notoriously returned, revised, and augmented own his prior efforts. In his second chapter, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark doubles down on Burke. While Burke never wrote on jazz, Clark finds in his work the means to capture jazz's civic function. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives describes the aesthetic experience of identification as “swinging along with the form” (58). In Clark's account, this link to jazz is more than fortuitous. Jazz was known as “swing” during its commercial heyday as America's main popular dance music, a reference to its pulsing, danceable rhythm and its contagious attitude, intensity, and energy. Furthermore, Burke was a young man during the “jazz age,” and was aware of African American musical styles, having favorably reviewed both a 1928 concert by the African American Jubilee Hall Singers and the 1933 African American Broadway musical Run, Little Chillun! Burke also corresponded regularly with African American intellectuals, notably Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and Albert Murray, Ellison's friend and author of both Stompin' the Blues and The Omni-Americans, canonical texts on jazz and race in America.Clark considers “swinging along” to be an apt term to describe the activity of both musicians and audiences, who are guided by a faith that the musical work in progress will continue to cohere as it unfolds. Burke presented swinging along as a needed corrective to the American civic sphere, where cooperation is difficult. For Clark, jazz offers a model for such cooperation. This is because “jazz is an act of hopeful defiance of the alienation and fear that makes us hold ourselves back to avoid judgment or rejection” (26). Throughout the book, Clark describes singularly eloquent jazz performances, including an impromptu restaurant performance of “Route 66” by his thirteen-year-old daughter with noted jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, to illustrate the process and form of life that jazz offers. He selects Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley's rendition of “Autumn Leaves” to illustrate swinging cooperation and hopeful defiance. The reader can easily find the track online and follow Clark's commentary, which offers a sensitive analysis of how Miles and Cannonball swing along: in their improvisation, they depart from this standard's original form to explore, extend, and deepen its melancholy, using it as a resource for moving beyond, for crafting an aesthetic pathē of upward transcendence.Paradoxically Clark's third chapter, “What Jazz Is,” does not begin with a discussion of jazz, but with Burke's preoccupation with identity and his turn from literary self-expression to rhetoric. Clark retells the story of Burke's response to the turmoil and conflicts of the twentieth century. Originally a writer of poetry and fiction, Burke became a theorist and critic who, seeing America as in need of some type of transcendence, spent a career exploring how understanding, common feeling, identification, and consummation might be fostered through form. The problem in America, and indeed in any democracy, is that individual will and aspiration are in many ways antagonistic to identification and the consummatory experience of community. America's founding sides with the existential truth that our pains, our goals, and our lives are ultimately our own. In all cultures, ritual and civic arts mediate the tension between individual and community. In America, such arts are faced with a particular challenge. They cannot demand the full subordination of individual voices to an idealized unity, as does a church choir. Clark counterpoises a performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO) to the unity of his church choir to illustrate how jazz negotiates this tension successfully. His choir follows a fixed arrangement and is guided by a choir master. In contrast, JALCO coordinates a complex of individual voices. JALCO is like a complex organism, where the written musical arrangements provide a basis for skilled jazz artists to make their own music, even as each artist and part coordinate with the whole.JALCO is for Clark exemplary of the art that Burke sought. Clark explains the jazz aesthetic by turning to jazz pedagogy, which encourages students to develop their own musical style, approaches, and voice, even though jazz is based in collective improvised performances. For Clark, jazz is singularly American in the way that it integrates the one in the many and also is forward looking, directed toward redemption. Clark turns to the blues to illustrate this American trait. Blues lyrics paint a bleak picture of pain and loss, even while the music's form and propulsive energy offer emotional coherence and hope. Robert Johnson may be standing at the crossroads and sinking down, but the music carries him and those who listen forward. As Albert Murray observed, borrowing from Burke, the blues are equipment for living, transforming desperation into defiance and joy.America's singular character is the theme of Clark's fourth chapter, “Where Jazz Comes From.” Clark focuses neither on New Orleans nor New York, neither on Chicago nor Kansas City, but on the conflict that Tocqueville saw at the center of the American spirit, where radical individualism leaves each person uprooted and solitary. This insight, first stated in his introduction, is Clark's original contribution to jazz studies. Jazz's origin is far more psychic than geographical or musicological. Jazz does not emerge from the mere musical encounter of African and European forms as much as from a reaction to American alienation, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Louis L'Amour's cowboy pulp function, and Burke's search for a redemptive civic art. Curiously, race is not central to Clark's account. He acknowledges the racial fact of jazz but does not reflect pointedly on slavery's legacy or on the link between American alienation and its original sin. His account, consistent with Wynton Marsalis's narrative, presents jazz as pointing to a world without racial division. Clark insists that jazz is concerned with transcendence and gives new meaning to jazz pianist Bill Evans's observation that “‘jazz is not a what, it is a how’” (14). Clark presents jazz as a form of collective problem solving. Jazz transcends difference by casting new modes of experience and forms of being, by relying on improvised augmentation and complexification rather than the imposition of static melodies and harmonies. Paraphrasing Whitman, we could say that Clark tells us that jazz is large and contains multitudes.While Clark offers a redemptive vision of jazz, he also reminds us that none of this is painless. He recounts the troubled 1963 recording session of Money Jungle by jazz greats Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Musical styles, professional egos, and creative visions clashed. Neither the session nor resultant tracks were marked by harmonious identifications. Nevertheless, the conflict was productive. Clark refers to the music as “eloquent” as it strains to keep it together. Just as the purpose of the session was to produce an album, so the art of democracy is directed toward enabling a life in common, not a common life. Putting a happy face on an at times agonistic and tortured process, Clark describes jazz as another occasion for ad bellum purificandum, “a war waged with an attitude of goodwill … in the bright hope that something better for everyone will follow” (75).A great deal of jazz writing is descriptive and anecdotal, with stories of great bands and singular recordings sessions, battles with drug addiction, brilliant creators, and visionary promoters. Critical and theoretical work in jazz is relatively recent, having emerged in the last two or three decades, but as in rhetorical studies, description and historical anecdote play a crucial role and remain necessary. One of the pleasures of this book is Clark's strategic use of anecdotes as he returns to and elaborates on its main theme. One might find Clark redundant, but only if one fails to grasp his strategy of augmentation and his rhetorical celebration of jazz. Each chapter continues the process of explaining the formal theory of rhetorical aesthetics that underpins Burke's oeuvre even as they clarify the demands and workings of jazz as a civic art. Thus, in his fifth chapter “What Jazz Does,” Clark returns to Tocqueville's pessimism regarding America, to which he counterpoises jazz's possibilities and potential: jazz offers an image of what America would look like if America's three “taboo” divisive issues—race, freedom, and religion—were faced openly and worked through collectively (90). Clark turns to Billy Holiday's signature performance of “Strange Fruit,” Louis Armstrong's rendition of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” and Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige suite as eloquent expressions of the African American experience. Clark devotes particular attention to Ellington's explicit attempt to reflect on “his people” as within the American people.Clark's account is compelling, although he does not fully resolve the underlying tension within rhetoric between identification and division. At one moment he praises jazz for offering a common aesthetic experience that offers, if only briefly, the upward transcendence that America requires to fulfill its democratic promise. Subsequently, however, he emphasizes the role of jazz in racial politics, in its lyrics of protest and in the musical expression of the pain of racism in the dissonance and wailing of free jazz. Clark attempts to resolve this tension by equating jazz with freedom, since each jazz performance raises the question of where to go next. Each soloist in part answers this question in tandem with the ensemble, and for Clark the American answer – and the jazz musician answer – is “to freedom, of course” (97). To many, jazz sounds free, which accounts for its appeal to dissidents in the USSR and Nazi Germany and for the American government's use of jazz in the Cold War. Clark notes the irony that black musicians were displayed as representatives of American freedom even while they suffered Jim Crow at home and offers free jazz and its challenge to conventional forms of expression as their rhetorical response.Of singular importance in Clark's fifth chapter is the idea that jazz is political and ethical not only because of its democratic performative pragmatics but because of its content, in both its musical forms and particular compositions. Jazz can be spiritual, in religious or secular terms, even as it is rhetorical, as in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Clark highlights the significance of the avant-garde and its embrace of self-expression as the best way to communicate. While spiritual experience is personal, familiarity with jazz, its traditions, and its musical figures makes shared experience possible. This is for Clark what John Dewey sought when he called on Americans collectively to search for the truth. Jazz can prompt reverence, civic humility, and awe. Jazz requires intense individualism and intense cooperation. Optimistically, Clark does not address the deeply competitive spirit at the heart of jazz and its “cutting contests,” jam sessions where each soloist seeks to best and at times show up the other. For Clark, the jazz situation is much like the rhetorical situation, but less agonistic, because each performance is a collective endeavor that ultimately requires cooperation. For Clark, jazz favors congregation over segregation. In America, the latter dominates and requires the corrective jazz offers.This book is about jazz, of course, but it is also concerned with extending Burke's rhetorical sensibility beyond the verbal arts. In his penultimate chapter, “How Jazz Works,” Clark turns to Burke's 1930s novel Towards a Better Life in order to work out the trajectory of his thought. In that early effort, a walk in the New England countryside summoned Burke's alienated protagonist to find happiness through living beyond himself. Burke revisited this path to happiness in his later critical and theoretical writings, working out the nature of being summoned or called. The summons has two related moments: One is summoned to summon others. For Clark, this is how music works. Clark follows Burke's constitutive turn in the Grammar of Motives. Clark incorporates Stanley Crouch's analogy of jazz to the Constitution as an “exercise of the ‘freedom to constantly reinterpret the meanings’” (20) that it provides, offering a way to perfect the American form of life. Resolutely American in his analysis, Clark cites Dewey, who argued that art provides immediate feeling through its structure and coherence. Clark suggests that for Burke, art's aim is not experience in itself but the organization of experience through form to create common sentiments and sensibilities. Art provides resources for better encountering and living with others. In other words, art offers the possibility of civic transcendence.Jazz is constitutive of democracy, as each in turn improvises over a given form, all the while responding to others and expanding the range of what is possible. Jazz musicians share a stock of knowledge and set of skills that enable them, without sheet music or a prior plan, to meet as strangers and play something new. The pragmatics or aesthetic constitution of jazz lets musicians call the tune in a way unheard of in the classical repertoire, just as the Constitution lets citizens call the tune.This insight is not new to Clark. Wynton Marsalis has said much the same thing, What Clark brings to the mix is a more sophisticated account of how jazz both is structured democratically and manifests a democratic aesthetic sensibility. To this end, Clark offers an innovative and well-developed account of Burke's project that links aesthetic form to attitude and identity. Indeed, Clark cites Burke's observation that music far more than speech adheres to the psychology of form. The power of music and other nonrepresentational arts arises not from cognitions but from the experience of form in the moment. Furthermore, jazz as an improvised music is always performed against the possibility of failure: its movement does not always produce the consummation that it seeks. Music opens onto changing the ways that people think. To illustrate, Clark turns to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane's rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” which offers a remarkable, and yet for jazz, everyday call to transcendence.Even though jazz is no longer a popular musical form, Clark insists that it offers precisely the form of interaction that Burke called for. He works this out again in his concluding chapter, entitled “So What,” after one of the most memorable tracks on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. With no rehearsals and no sheet music, that session produced brilliant and innovative music because each in his ensemble was supremely conscious of the others. In this, Clark's insight and optimism shine through. Clark is driven by an appreciation of possibility. At the same time, however, he does not consider the difficulty of the art. Jazz is less democratic than it is aristocratic and republican. As with all arts, it is practiced by the bold, whose eloquence make their work look easy. Its “citizenry” is not enfranchised by birth but earns a place on the stand through displays of which requires of and Jazz is American and and indeed can offer transcendence and new but like rhetoric requires a life to the art.

ABSTRACTThe Aristotelian concept of magnitude (megethos) can expand our understanding of how abundant information accumulates in ways that expand beyond epistemic registers, creating a sense of coherence. This sense of coherence, in turn, is more of an aesthetic effect than the result of epistemic validity drawn from that evidentiary abundance. In this article, I explore two different examples of archival magnitude: one is the fine-grained enormity of conspiracy discourse and the second is the large-scale quantities that power big data. These examples of archival magnitude are simply two narratives through which to explore the aesthetic and rhetorical operation of megethos. By redefining discourses that call on magnitude—the power of more—as aesthetic discourse, we may also find that the most fitting response is likewise an aesthetic one.

Rhetoric, as a discipline, can and should play a part in helping (re)formulate and (re)frame approaches to human trafficking because of the potential for such change to ripple through cultural discourse, leading to shifts across public understanding, law, and policy. Specifically, I argue that a Cultural Rhetorics approach is both necessary for and best suited to initiate the building of new communication spaces to address the issue of human trafficking. Indeed, the lens of Cultural Rhetorics reveals new priorities for scholarly intervention. This work must be rooted in and driven by attentiveness to and careful handling of stories. Such an alternate approach might more closely consider and account for the stories that individuals tell about themselves, the stories that survivors tell about their lived experiences, and the stories that institutions put forward about human trafficking. In so doing, we might then be better able to evaluate how these stories interconnect and constellate not just with each other, but also with a range of cultural influences.

Truth-construction and -mediation are theorized both by Thucydides xyngrapheus and by the internal rhetores in his History, with tensions between these perspectives highlighting rhetorically significant moments of political communication. The historian posits the (negative) configuration “contest – pleasure – hearing – untruth – useless” as contrastive foil to his own model of “rigorous enquiry – pleasure disavowed – seeing – truth – useful.” Cleon the demagogue, in a process of rhetorical “contaminatio” or creative fusion, artfully (mis)appropriates and instrumentalizes this model in his critique of Athenian assembly culture, embedding the signature Thucydidean categories in a spirited anti-Thucydidean argument. His distinctive approach, conflating Thucydidean categories and noteworthy Periclean echoes, marks him as both anti-Pericles and anti-Thucydides, and signals a counter-model to the historian's own schema of truth-construction. As such, Cleon's tirade fits into the History's wider concern with the corruption of political discourse over the course of the war.

Since the early 1990s, language and literacy scholars have explored the pedagogical potential of hip-hop culture in the English language arts classroom. Despite more than 25 years’ worth of peer-reviewed research documenting its effectiveness, hip-hop pedagogies continue to be relegated to the margins of English education policy and practice. In this essay, I argue that the future of “hip-hop based education” (HHBE) research in English education demands moving beyond making a case for hip-hop’s pedagogical merits and toward helping teachers and teacher educators put theories of HHBE into practice, given their various identities and institutional contexts. Thus, I begin by addressing practical and philosophical dilemmas regarding the role, purpose, and function of hip-hop-based curricular interventions in this current era of the Common Core State Standards. As the title of this Forum piece suggests, hip-hop culture and pedagogy are more than just rap music and textual analysis. Therefore, I seek to shift the conversation from pedagogies with hip-hop texts to a more complex unit of analysis known as “pedagogies with hip-hop aesthetics.” With a broader and deeper understanding of hip-hop cultural knowledge, as well as the tensions and contradictions contributing to the shortcomings of HHBE research, I conclude with a call for additional studies that “show and prove” the possibilities (and pitfalls) of hip-hop pedagogies in English language arts and English education classrooms.

This project explores the dynamic impact of student employment on classroom discourse and on students “long-term academic and professional success. Using student surveys, institutional data, and scholarly research, I demonstrate that students” everyday workplace experiences play an integral (and potentially integrated) role in their liberal arts education and in their ability to negotiate future workplace literacies.

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

Building on current theories of rhetorical agency, this essay analyzes two metaphors for aging found in public health information materials targeted to the elderly—aging is ageless and aging is pathology—concerning how these metaphors frame agency for older adults. The metaphors attribute limited agency to older adults by emphasizing short-term, biomedical solutions and expert knowledge and by not representing agency as situational, dynamic, and co-constructed. Exploring the limits of these metaphors both further exposes how public health discourse shapes the cultural perception of aging and offers an expanded understanding of older adults as dynamic rhetorical agents.

This study explores student written responses to teacher feedback and analyzes these responses through the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Drawing on CDA, we examined the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of 21 students’ paragraph-length comments on formative teacher feedback on their first assignment draft in a first-year composition class and investigated relations between the text, interaction, and context. The structural analysis indicates that the students’ comments demonstrate their emerging academic literacy skills. Our interactional analysis shows that most students took on an active role as a good student and a hardworking writer, but some students exerted their agency by taking the opportunity to resist the authority of the teacher, while others rejected it altogether. Our interdiscursive analysis illustrates that students used not only language from the teacher’s comments, but also metalanguage of the composition classroom to formulate their responses. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for teaching practices and future avenues for research on students’ responses to teacher feedback.

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering).\n• Literature Review: Hardy and Römer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline.\n• Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows:\n1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing?\n• Research Methodology: To address the research questions, student-produced science and engineering texts from MICUSP were analyzed with regard to lexical sophistication and textual features of cohesion. Specifically, 22 indices of lexical sophistication calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015) and 38 cohesion indices calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016) were used. These features were then compared both across science and engineering texts (addressing Research Question 1) and across micro-disciplines within science and engineering (biology and physics, industrial and mechanical engineering) using discriminate function analyses (DFA).\n• Results: The DFAs revealed significant linguistic differences, not only between student writing in the two macro-disciplines but also between the micro-disciplines. Differences in classification accuracy based on students’ years of study hovered at about 10%. An analysis of accuracies of classification by paper type found they were similar for larger and smaller sample sizes, providing some indication that paper type was not a confounding variable in classification accuracy.\n• Discussion: The findings provide strong support that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences exist in student writing in these MICUSP samples and that these differences are likely not related to student level or paper type. These findings have important implications for understanding disciplinary differences. First, they confirm previous research that found the vocabulary used by different macro-disciplines to be “strikingly diverse” (Durrant, 2015), but they also show a remarkable diversity of cohesion features. The findings suggest that the common understanding of the STEM disciplines as “close” bears reconsideration in linguistic terms. Second, the lexical and cohesion differences between micro-disciplines are large enough and consistent enough to suggest that each micro-discipline can be thought of as containing a unique linguistic profile of features. Third, the differences discerned in the NLP analysis are evident at least as early as the final year of undergraduate study, suggesting that students at this level already have a solid understanding of the conventions of the disciplines of which they are aspiring to be members. Moreover, the differences are relatively homogeneous across levels, which confirms findings by Durrant (2015) but, importantly, extends these findings to include cohesion markers.\n• Conclusions: The findings from this study provide evidence that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences at the linguistic level exist in student writing, not only in lexical use but also in text cohesion. A number of pedagogical applications of writing analytics are proposed based on the reported findings from TAALES and TAACO. Further studies using different corpora (e.g., BAWE) or purpose assembled corpora are suggested to address limitations in the size and range of text types found within MICUSP. This study also points the way toward studies of disciplinary differences using NLP approaches that capture data which goes beyond the lexical and cohesive features of text, including the use of part-of-speech tags, syntactic parsing, indices related to syntactic complexity and similarity, rhetorical features, or more advanced cohesion metrics (latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, Word2Vec approaches).

Aim: This research note focuses on some of the consequences of big data as an emerging methodology. Its purpose is to provide a brief literature review of the method’s development and some of the critical questions researchers should consider as they move forward. Salvo (2012) contends that big data as a form of design of communication itself “is necessarily a rhetorically-based field” (p. 38). With big data as an up and coming methodology (McNely, 2012; Salvo, 2012), using caution in its application is a necessity for scholars. Not only should researchers seek out the unseen and untapped applications of big data, but they should learn its limitations as well (Spinuzzi, 2009). You adopt a methodology, you adopt its flaws. Problem Formation: This section identifies a gap in the field as it relates to some of the consequences of applying big data as a methodology and seeing it as a rhetorical tool. As big data gains steam in the field of humanities, some are sure to question what they see as a flaw: the act of quantifying language. This argument is not new nor is its rebuttal. Harris (1954) discusses the distributional structure of language with each part of a sentence acting as co-occurents, each in a particular position, and each with a relationship to the other co-occurents (p. 146). Salvo (2012) argues that the combination of these new methodologies and technologies “knits together invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in ways that challenge conceptions of print based literacy and textuality” (p. 39). While big data itself has several rhetorical methodologies embedded within, deciding which one to use depends on the amount of data and how it’s aggregated. • Information Collection: As described above, this research note functions primarily as a brief review of literature. This section focuses on how writing analytics developed from content analysis in mass communications and shifted into latent semantic analysis assisted by computer technology. Riffe, Lacy, & Fico (1995) offer a clear explanation of content analysis, which was developed with comparably small data sets in mind: “Usually, but not always, content analysis involves drawing representative samples of content, training coders to use the category rules developed to measure or reflect differences in content, and measuring reliability (agreement or stability over time) of coders applying the rules” (p. 2). Finding a representative sample of content was once a more feasible methodology, but in the digital age that amount of content exponentially increases every day. Conclusions: As latent semantic analysis is an extension of quantitative content analysis (and vice versa)—and knowing that an adopted methodology carries adopted flaws—it makes sense to turn to some of the concerns voiced by mass communication scholars in order to understand limitations. While quantitative content analysis grew in popularity in mass communication, so did the refining of its methods. Reporting the reliability of a study adds credibility to the study itself, and when a human coder is involved, the reporting of this intercoder reliability becomes imperative (Hayes & Krippendorf, 2007; Krippendorf, 2008, 2011). While intercoder reliability measures the degree to which coders agree, researchers should also be keenly aware of the theory and valence informing their study, which impacts their coders, which ultimately impacts the results of the study itself. Directions for Further Research: As the field of writing studies begins to adopt big data methodologies, researchers must continue to challenge and question their applications, implementations, and implications, turning to familiar questions from our own fields. Big data is exciting and new, but it’s not the methodology to explain it all. It’s just as rhetorical as every other methodology—it’s just better at hiding it.

Background: Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also highlights the prevalence of the most common genre in students’ transition into advanced college writing, the argumentative essay. Consistent with most research in composition, and therefore most studies of general, first-year college writing, such research has primarily emphasized genre context. Other research, in international applied linguistics research and particularly English for Academic Purposes (EAP), has focused less on first-year writers but has likewise shown the frequent use of argumentative essays in undergraduate writing. Together, these studies suggest that the argumentative essay is represented more than other genres in early college writing development, and that any given genre favors particular discourse features in contrast with other genres students might write. A productive next step, but one not yet realized, is to bring these discussions together, in research that uses context-informed corpus analysis that investigates students’ assignment contexts and analyzes the discourse that characterizes the tasks and genres students write. This study offers an exploratory, context-informed analysis of argumentative and explanatory writing by first-year college writers. Based on the corpus findings, the article underscores discourse as an integral part of the sociocognitive practices embedded in genres, and accordingly considers new ways to conceptualize student writing genres and to inform instruction and assignment design. Research questions: Four questions guided the inquiry: What are the key discursive practices associated with annotated bibliographies and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with visual analyses and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with the two argumentative tasks in comparison with the two explanatory tasks? Finally, how might corpus-based findings inform the design of particular assignment tasks and genres in light of a range of writing goals? Methodology: The article outlines a context-informed corpus analysis of lexical and grammatical keywords in part-of-speech tagged writing by first-year college students across courses at a U.S. institution. Using information from assignment descriptions and rubrics, the study considers four projects that also represent two macro-genres: an annotated bibliography and a visual analysis, both part of the explanatory macro-genre, and two argumentative essays, both part of the argumentative macro-genre. Results: The corpus analysis identifies lexical and grammatical keywords in each of the four tasks as well as in the macro-genres of argumentative versus explanatory writing. These include generalized, interpersonal, and persuasive discourse in argumentative essays versus more specified, informational, and elaborated discourse in explanatory writing, regardless of course or task. Based on these findings, the article discusses the discursive practices prioritized in each task and each macro-genre. Conclusions: The findings, based on key discourse patterns in tasks within the same course and in macro-genres across courses, pose important questions regarding writing task design and students’ adaptation to different genres. The macro-genre keywords specifically inform exploratory sociocognitive “profiles” of argumentative and explanatory tasks, offered in the final section. These argument and explanation profiles strive to account for discourse patterns, genre networks, and purposes and processes—in other words, multiple aspects of habituated thinking and writing practices entailed in each one relative to the other. As discussed in the conclusion, the profiles aim to (1) underscore discourse patterns as integral to the work of genres, (2) highlight adaptive discourse strategies as part of students’ meta-language for writing, and (3) identify multiple, macro-level (e.g., audience), meso-level (paragraph- and section-level), and micro-level (e.g., discourse patterns) aspects of genres to help instructors identify and specify multiple goals for writing assignments.

n composition studies, "the streets" is a term frequently employed to delineate a tangible public space and/or the discourse emerging from it, particularly outside the bounds of government or other institutions (such as universities), where people interact and live. The streets also represent a site of protest for political or social change, as when people repeat the mantra take it to the streets! In his 1963 March on Washington speech, Civil Rights leader John Lewis stated, "I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village, and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. " Many people believe that embodying this ubiquitous public space guarantees them a venue and an audience for their discourse, particularly when it takes the form of dissent.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

This article reexamines Henry’s 2006 proposal for training technical communicators as “discourse workers,” as a solution within a certain postmodern problematic, in which changing economic conditions in the late 1990s and early 2000s made workers vulnerable to exploitation, outsourcing, and layoffs. Henry used postmodern and critical theory to describe discourse as a medium of leverage for enabling workers to define new workplace agencies. Even though Henry’s discourse worker is an appealing concept buttressed by solid theory, it did not become a widely implemented model for pedagogy or workplace practice. To reexamine Henry’s concept, the authors exchange late 20th-century postmodern theory for the more recent articulation of “post-postmodern” theory proposed by Nealon and explore the implications of swapping out the postmodern puzzle piece for a post-postmodern puzzle piece in Henry’s formulation of the discourse worker.

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

Abstract In an attempt to create more meaningful and effective assessment, the Howe Writing Center at Miami University implemented a new post-consultation/exit survey. During the course of the Fall 2012 semester, over 800 students responded to the post-consultation survey. Writing center theory has documented the limitations of the post-consultation survey; however, this type of feedback still represents the best and most accessible way to assess and expand the knowledge of writing centers. This assessment project provided important feedback concerning the writing center at Miami University about student demographics that use the writing center, including academic year and classes students wanted to work on. The assessment project also contributes to writing center theory and discourse by providing a different narrative for non-native English speaking students and native English speaking students that use the writing center. The assessment challenges the view that writing from non-native English speaking students is only concerned with so-called "lower order" writing issues and writing from native English speaking students is primarily concerned with so-called "higher order" writing issues. Instead, it was found that non-native English speaking students are interested in working on many "higher order" concerns and were very similar, after sentence-level concerns, in their writing needs to native English speaking students.

Although research on tutoring nonnative speaker (NNS) students has grown in the past two decades, many of these studies have either predominantly focused on native speaker (NS) tutors or have been written with the assumption that all tutors are NSs.Thus, NNS tutors have been largely neglected.The purpose of this study is to examine how one NNS student interacts with one NNS tutor and one NS tutor in a writing center at the college level.These two sessions were video-taped, transcribed, and then analyzed in detail using the methodology of conversation analysis.After each session was analyzed, a retrospective interview with the NNS student was conducted to explore her opinions of these tutorials.Interview data shows that the NNS student preferred the NS tutor over the NNS tutor by virtue of their NNS/NS status.The conversation analysis of the actual tutorials, however, reveals that the NNS student preference is likely due to the fact that the NS tutor's

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.