When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

Thirty years before the beginning of the still ongoing cognitive revolution, Kenneth Burke articulated a universalist program of verbal resources that falls into close synch with many of the findings and principles of that revolution. In this paper, I connect Burke’s program to the insights of Jeanne Fahnestock in her work on figuration and argumentation and argue that cognitive rhetoric in this mode can undergird rhetoric of science.

This paper recommends three general lines of inquiry concerning rhetorical invention as alternative ways to advance work in rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine. One line of inquiry involves the study of the creative processes and imaginative practices involved in the invention of perspectives in discourses of and about science, technology, and medicine. This line of inquiry is elaborated with attention to the master tropes, dramatism, argument, and visual representations. The second general line of inquiry involves identification, analysis, and critique of the commonplaces that are deployed as authoritative in discourses about purportedly “expert” matters. The third line of inquiry concerns articulation of the distinctive place of a rhetorical perspective, informed by an emphasis on invention, in cross-disciplinary projects involving science, technology and medicine.

ἔστω δὴ ἡ ῥητορικὴ δύναμις περὶ ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν.(Estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.)Let us define rhetoric to be “A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject.” (Hobbes translation)Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. (Freese translation)Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. (Rhys Roberts translation)Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. (Kennedy translation) The question of rhetoric's potential continues to provoke. What appears in Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric—and to name it as a dunamis? What appearances do such a name endeavor to keep? Infused with a contingency that seems to double and perhaps even double again, the opening line of the Rhetoric's second chapter seems to defy understanding, let alone explanation. Form and substance blur. Is this a definition? A proposition? An article of faith? A prayer? Questions of translation circle and then spiral. Questions of context loom and fade away, and then loom again. As Aristotle pronounced it, rhetoric's (im)potentiality seems to promise and thwart (its own) recognizability. It remains otherwise—a suspicion of thought's necessary corruption, an opening to a discovery without grounds, an aporia with protreptic power. Whatever it might become, however becoming it might be, rhetoric's art is not (yet) altogether here. This may signal a deficit. It may sound a shared calling. In the name of letting rhetoric be, Aristotle bequeaths us a question that, perhaps tragically, we cannot let alone.The subtle and thoughtful essays that compose this forum require little introduction, not least as they thematize and reflect variously on the multifaceted question of beginning that inheres in Aristotle's famous pronouncement at 1355b. Concerned that dunamis is far from a “neutral human capacity,” Ekatrina Haskins considers the impracticality of Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric and how this founding gesture “erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy” that supports a teleology, a vision of progress in which rhetoric—as civic discourse—disciplines if not deters its performance. Starting with the insistent desire to understand the source of rhetoric, Megan Foley turns the table on Socrates—rhetoric emerges, for Aristotle, not from “some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible.” Existing potentially, existing as potentiality, rhetoric begins before its first (practical) move, a beginning that begins with the question of its contingent ground. In his meditation on the “rhetoricity” that may abide in Aristotle's concern to “let rhetoric be,” Christian Lundberg reflects carefully on this question of ground as a problem of context, that is, the ways in which rhetoric—as a discourse—operates “in advance of any context” and how the understandable need to define rhetoric does not relieve us of the need to think the movement between trope and persuasion, a movement in which rhetoric's potentiality begins—and perhaps ends—in a nomadic existence.These nuanced inquiries are timely. Individually and together, they show how the city—whether Aristotle's or our own—cannot contain rhetoric. Rhetoric's potential sets it in motion and moves it beyond the walls, beyond the law, beyond the law of (its) language. In this way, very quietly but very firmly, the essays here trouble and expand the tradition of rhetorical theory as such. They do so from a beginning, from Aristotle's naming of rhetoric as an (im)potentiality, that marks a tear between the apophantic and nonapophantic modes of expression. As it refuses to disavow its own antiphasis—and here, it is well worth recalling Aristotle's dedicated interest in the ways in which self-unraveling assertion participates in the work of coming to be and passing away—rhetoric's “defining” (im)potentiality testifies to an unsettling experience of (its) language, a moment of letting go, of letting a controlling interest in language give way to letting the word be. As Walter Benjamin saw it, this gesture is an ethical hinge. It is a moment to hear the lament of language in the wake of its overnaming, a human impulse that submits speech to the fate of tragedy at the cost of recognizing its power—for now. Such a gesture may also be urgent, at least in a moment when the need to advocate (for rhetoric) feels nothing less than pressing.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy had a deep and significant impact on the development of Richard Rorty's pragmatism. One of the central features of the “linguistic turn” was its attention to the role of language in mediating questions of philosophy, and, in Rorty's hands, the “linguistic turn” drew philosophy very close to rhetorical theory. However, I argue that Rorty failed to engage or embrace rhetorical theory in any substantive way. This meant that his pragmatism cleaved philosophy off from the social democratic project. Such a separation of philosophy from the problems of maintaining and cultivating democracy abandons an important strand of first generation pragmatism. This amounts to a missed opportunity. By complimenting the linguistic turn with a robust account of the role of rhetoric in socio-political affairs, Rorty could have tied philosophy to social democracy in just the manner that Dewey had hoped. But instead Rorty is constrained by the tradition of philosophy and unable to make the “linguistic turn” into any kind of rhetorical turn.

In the closing moments of Phaedrus, Socrates announces rhetoric’s last gasp: “And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough” (2006, 69). Of course, news of rhetoric’s death has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the death and subsequent rebirth of rhetoric have been declared countless times, and debates surrounding the nature and character of rhetoric— from antiquity through the renaissance and even into the modern day— seem to continue almost interminably. In the contemporary context, such debates often flow inexorably from a constitutive indecision that marks rhetorical studies’s complicated relationship to a foundational definition of rhetoric. More often than not, after a brief foray into debates surrounding rhetoric, many theorists retreat, opting, following Robert Scott (1973) to “not define” rhetoric at all, producing an implicit rather than an explicitly conceptually articulated definition of rhetorical theory and practice, albeit in a manner that often opens up as many problems as it solves. When rhetorical theorists do take up the task of defining rhetoric, definitions often vacillate between one of two basic gambits: one stratagem frames rhetoric as the codification of a relatively banal insight about human life together (people have interests, opinions, and investments, and one should take each of these things into account if they would like to persuade or to understand why others are persuaded); the other frames rhetoric as a globally constitutive social ontology in its own right. It may be that a portion of this ambivalence is a historical accident; nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that this ambivalence is part and parcel of the project of rhetoric. In defining rhetoric one potentially also swims in the discursive equivalent of Heraclitus’s river: every definition

ABSTRACTJoining the New Rhetoric project's conversation about argumentation as justice, this article aims to add an expanded version of the psychological to the just resources of argumentation. After examining how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric justifies attention to—yet ultimately swerves from—contingencies of psycho-physical sensation, I turn to Burke's highly elaborated concept of identification, which adds to the New Rhetoric project by articulating the relations of physiological sensation, attitude and emotion, and persuasion. Linking ethics and form, identification provides a means by which one may grow increasingly aware of the sensation-driven defensiveness that can undermine dialogic exchange. After making this case that Burke's rhetoric can help develop what is not in the New Rhetoric project but should be—the resource of constitutive, affective identification—I end with what should be in Burke but is not—a universality that a “we” of substantially different constitutions would agree on.

Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

In the same vein as my Burkean Parlor essay (2011), another ready classical discourse form useful for learning rhetoric and for non-academic speaking and writing opportunities is the encomium. This...

Reviews Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in theArts oftheMiddleAges. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Carruthers' edited collection shows how rhetorical theory informs and is informed by the visual, mechanical, and performative arts of the Mid­ dle Ages, with origins in the classical rhetorical tradition. This collection is groundbreaking in several ways: 1) by demonstrating the interconnected­ ness of medieval genres of rhetoric, 2) by expanding the canon of rhetorical texts, from classical origins to later adaptations, and 3) by suggesting av­ enues for further research across disciplinary lines. Thus, it transforms our understanding of rhetoric and expands it to new areas, especially oral and written performance in the Middle Ages. This collection will also appeal to those interested in medieval cultural studies through the study of verbal, visual, and performative arts as rhetoric. Paul Binski's essay, "'Working by words alone': the architect, scholas­ ticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France," opens the collection by relating thirteenth-century scholastic and rhetorical discourse and architec­ ture as influential on High Gothic architecture. Not only were architectural terms imported into rhetorical treatises, but also the architect as auctor, cre­ ator, master of a craft, was elevated to a new plane of authority. Central to this authority is that of planning, envisioning in the mind, foreknowing the work to be constructed, a skill required of both rhetor and architect. In "Grammar and rhetoric in late medieval polyphony: modern meta­ phor or old simile," Margaret Bent takes cross-disciplinary applications of rhetoric into the realm of performance by exploring intersections among terms employed in medieval music and grammar and rhetoric. Shared terminology, such as definitions, metaphors, and similes parallel musical structures. Other correspondences between rhetoric and music include the parts of an oration in arrangement and punctuation in notation, rhetoric in and as performance art. "Nature's forge and mechanical production: writing, reading and per­ forming song" continues this theme. Elizabeth Eva Leach develops the metaphor of the forge through collaborative invention in song, challenging Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 2, pp. 220-237, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.2.220. Reviews 221 a common assumption that pieces were written first by a solitary composer or lyricist and then rehearsed by singers. Instead, she argues for "viewing the musical trace as a series of more or less precise memorial notae from which singers invent a collaborative (simultaneous) performance" (72). Her findings corroborate research on early modern theatre, as she explains in the latter half of her essay, thus broadening and transcending genre lines through a concept of composing process with parallels in two performance arts. Lucy Freeman Sandler's essay, "Rhetorical strategies in the pictorial im­ agery of fourteenth-century manuscripts: the case of the Bohun psalters," in­ troduces rare evidence of a rhetorical appeal from artists to patrons, through illuminations of psalters commissioned by the Bohun earls of Essex in the fourteenth century. Two artists, both Augustinian friars, employ images that relate biblical scenes to social and political matters relevant to their pa­ trons, thereby providing moral and theological counsel in devotional prac­ tice. Thus, the rhetoric of the art mirrors that of the drama, in which reader becomes actor: "For the Bohuns, reading and recitation of the psalms or the Hours of the Virgin, a devotional exercise that was repeated over and over, was associated with study of the fundamental narratives of human and sacred history in the Old and New Testaments in pictorial form" (117). This parallel opens pathways for research on intersections among private devotion, art and drama. Similarly, in "Do actions speak louder than words? The scope and role of pronuntiatio in the Latin rhetorical tradition, with special reference to the Cistercians," Jan M. Ziolkowski takes up the theme of performance in the Latin rhetorical tradition through actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution...

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

Abstract This essay makes two key arguments. The first is that preemptive politics often rely on strategies of rhetorical irony to cultivate perceptions of reasonableness, humility, and dialectical transcendence. As such, I expand the rhetorical conception of Stephen Skowronek's “political time” thesis to reveal its dimensions as a Burkean “ironic development.” The second argument is that Barack Obama's rhetorical strategy more directly fits the typology of preemptive presidents than that of reconstructive presidents, making him far more comparable in “political time” with Richard Nixon than with Ronald Reagan. I proceed to analyze the two presidential candidates' rhetoric in their first winning campaigns for the presidency to discern the extent of these parallels and reveal the applicability of an ironist political style in preemptive electoral situations. The essay concludes by examining the trajectory of liberalism in political time and the implications of this analysis for preemptive “wild cards” in presidential rhetoric.

Abstract This study examines the case of the American philosopher John Dewey as rhetor and public intellectual in China in 1919–1921 to elucidate the lived rhetoric of pragmatism. In China, Dewey gave more than 200 lectures to large academic and general audiences on topics such as education, philosophy, and science. This lecturing activity represents a remarkable and complex rhetorical situation as it involves Dewey addressing an audience not familiar with his ideas and potentially open to persuasion. Using recently discovered lecture notes written by Dewey and translations from the Chinese interpretations of his lectures, I argue that his lectures evinced a pragmatist rhetorical style that attempted to reconstruct dominant habits of thought and communication among his Chinese audiences. In so doing, this study advances our understanding of Dewey as rhetor and the theoretical grounds of the pragmatist rhetoric of experience and synthetic conflict.

ABSTRACT In antiquity, rhetorical treatises generally identified clarity and obscurity as positive and negative qualities of style, respectively. But in the fifth century, Augustine developed a valuation such that both clarity and obscurity could potentially function as equally viable resources for persuasion. While previous rhetorical treatises acknowledged that standards of perspicuity varied with genre, Augustine's stipulations for variability are tied much more closely to the particulars of the rhetorical situation. In a bold vision of the potency of style, Augustine demonstrates how a principle like clarity can be adjusted according to the rhetorical situation.

ABSTRACT In his monumental speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen urges his fellow townsmen of Syracuse, NY, an “open city” to fugitives, to defy the new federal legislation by protecting the city's fugitives from federal marshals en route to apprehend them. My analysis of Loguen's speech examines his use of American and African American jeremiadic strategies to convince his audience of primarily white Christian abolitionists that their unified resistance against the new law was part of God's providential plan to redeem the nation of the sin of slavery. My study also reveals how Loguen's appeals to manhood, through associating divine punishment with the emasculation of American men, as well as his establishment of “identification” around shared religious and political values, proved effective in rallying Syracuse's citizens to defend their God-given freedom.

Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard's first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard's work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure's goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. Within its argument, I focus on its central chapter in order to signify the uniqueness of Discourse, Figure. Finally, I offer some thoughts on what this event may signify for us now.Discourse, Figure signifies an event in Lyotard's career. It is tempting to think of his oeuvre as discontinuous: the early phenomenological work breaks off in a flurry of political writings and activism; the psychoanalytic work coalesces into Libidinal Economy, a positively derivative book that makes a radical break with Marxism; language games yield incredulity toward metanarratives; and his later preoccupation with Kant becomes a critique of the third critique in both The Differend and his work on the sublime.Situated between his phenomenological work and Libidinal Economy, before the break with Marxism yet already politically ambivalent, Discourse, Figure signifies schism—from its title to its organization. Its first half deals with phenomenology and the second half with psychoanalysis. Between these is only the trompe-l'oeil of a veduta, the section on which I focus in a moment. The temptation to take a discontinuous view of Lyotard's career now runs up against the temptation to see a continuity in which Discourse, Figure looks back at his first book, Phenomenology, and forward toward his next, Libidinal Economy. To look for such a continuity might be to attempt a narrative of which Lyotard himself would be incredulous. Nevertheless, there can be continuity without mastery: “To link is necessary; how to link is contingent”(Lyotard 1988, 29).Lyotard only considered three of his books “real” books: Discourse, Figure, Libidinal Economy, and The Differend (Bennington 1988, 2). He regarded his other books as preparations for these major works. That it took forty years for the first of these “real” books to be translated is as remarkable as it is unfortunate. The translation had originally been undertaken by Mary Lydon, who published translations of two of its chapters in the early eighties. Her “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” a version of which was originally meant to serve as the introduction to her translation, opens by calling Discourse, Figure, “a notoriously difficult book” (2001, 10).1 Sadly, Lydon's untimely death later in 2001 ended her role in the work. The translation, already delayed in 2001, had to wait another ten years. Antony Hudek took on what I can only assume seemed an impossible task.The length of time Lydon spent translating Discourse, Figure, along with her awareness of its delay recalls a third event: the length of time Lyotard spent writing the book and his awareness of that time: “If I had to wait as long as I did to see my own resistance to writing it fall, it was (among other reasons) without a doubt out of fear of being seduced, distracted from this goal, mesmerized by language” (2011, 14). Seventeen years passed between Lyotard's first book, Phenomenology, and his first “real” book, Discourse, Figure. During those intervening years he drifted, the collected essays of that period appearing as Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. The drifting return to those two figures eventually became Discourse, Figure, his attempt to signify the other of signification without being mesmerized by signification.Lydon's statement that Lyotard's book is difficult serves as an understatement. Discourse, Figure could be read almost as a novel or epic poem, replete with philosophical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, religious, and political allusions. His discourse is figurative. His opening salvo, “This book protests: the given is not a text” (2011, 3), aims not just at its immediate interlocutor, Paul Claudel, and his statement that the sensible world is legible. It also takes aim at Jacques Derrida's text-centered claim that “there is no outside-text” (1976, 158). The book's lengthy engagements with Hegel, Mallarmé, Merleau-Ponty, Frege, Klee, Cezanné, and Freud, hide sidelong references to Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Kandinsky, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. All of this to say that for Lyotard, the stakes are high. He grapples with Jacques Lacan by returning ever more rigorously to Freud.2 He performs Derrida's (anti)method of deconstruction without being mesmerized by language. He follows Deleuze's anti-Hegelian critique of representational difference while subtly chiding Deleuze for his neglect of the visual and his rejection of the psychoanalytic. Lyotard is in a Burkean parlor in which he has spent seventeen years listening.The first chapter, “The Bias of the Figural,” serves as an introduction, and signifies at least two more events: the book's aim and the book's arc, each of which entails its own failure. Discourse, Figure's aim, as noted, is the signification of the other of signification. Throughout the first half, phenomenology and structuralist linguistics are relied on, or rather stretched to their limits, in an attempt to represent what Lyotard will ultimately call unrepresentable: “Phenomenology … remains a reflection on knowledge, and the purpose of such a reflection is to absorb the event, to recuperate the Other into the Same” (2011, 17, emphasis his). The failure of the aim leads us to its arc.Lyotard tells us that the arc of the book is an event in which the visual comes to play less and less of a role. While its opening pages concern themselves with the very pragmatic distinction between seeing and reading, by the end of this first chapter it is clear that there will be a shift throughout the course of the book. The shift is from phenomenology to psychoanalysis but also away from figure as visuality and toward figure as rhetoric and as unconscious. In a sense, Lyotard must become dissatisfied with the answers phenomenology offers and move on to psychoanalysis.Why include the first half then? Why not just move on? “I would answer,” Lyotard explains, “that this displacement is precisely what constitutes the event for me in this book. By virtue of what order, of what assumed function of the book, of what prestige of discourse, should one attempt to erase it?” (2011, 19). In this sense the book signifies the event of phenomenology's failure to signify the event and Lyotard's move away from it. That failure creates a clear structure, one that parallels its title. After the initial chapter, the book takes shape in two halves: “Signification and Designation,” concerned with phenomenology and linguistics, and “The Other Space,” devoted to a return to Freud. And in between, Lyotard offers a crucial chapter entitled “Veduta on a Fragment of the ‘History’ of Desire.”The text proceeds through a series of ninety-degree rotations, each of which can be traced and each of which offers a way into Lyotard's complex argument. In the first half of the book, Lyotard begins by distinguishing between the negation of the sensory and the negation of language. The negation of the sensory consists in the distance between the seer and the seen, a distance that becomes confused with the distinction between subject and object. Language's negation consists not only in the gaps between signifiers but also in the distance between signifier and signified, and, most importantly, in the “no” of psychoanalysis, the “no” that says “yes.” For Lyotard, negation provides an elementary link between the seen and the said.Lyotard's first rotation is thus a move from signification to designation. Saussurian signification consists in a chain of signifiers. Between these signifiers are invariable gaps. The distance between cat and car is no greater or smaller than between cat and epistemology, structurally speaking. Thus Lyotard sees a flatness in signification that does not parallel the variable gaps of designation, the distance between me and my hand and the moon and my office. In Saussure, there is a rotation such that designation becomes confused with signification. The moon becomes another word. Flatness asserts itself over thickness. Lyotard understands this turn as representation.The title Discourse, Figure refers us to the movement from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, another event of the book, one in which Lyotard slowly moves toward taking the side of the figural. But Discourse, Figure is a deliberate book, not a spontaneous event, and there is a bit of secondary revision occurring. Freud and Lacan lurk throughout the first half, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly. It is clear that Lyotard has this larger rotation from discourse to figure in mind throughout the early chapters, and this foreshadowing creates depth and tension.So it is unsurprising that after moving from Saussure to Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard finds Freudian negation underlying structuralist linguistics and phenomenology. Lyotard ends the first half by distinguishing between opposition and difference in a chapter that perhaps owes the most to Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze sat on the habilitation committee to which Lyotard submitted Discours, Figure, and Lyotard's concept of difference is decidedly Deleuzian). Opposition corresponds to the negative difference of representation that Deleuze critiques in Difference and Repetition. In an important section of book entitled “Nonhuman Sex,” Lyotard explains that the castration complex which inaugurates difference does not primarily hinge on the opposition between the two sexes (i.e., women are not castrated men, or rather, women are not not men) but on the difference between human and nonhuman sex. Lateral to distinctions between man/woman, pure/impure, black/white, or good/evil, we find the difference of difference: “Sex is foremost nonhuman, non-opposite, transgressive with regard to oppositions” (2011, 147). The entry into representation is built on the castration complex, which owes to the death drive. It is the “yes” of the death drive that appears alongside all of these “no”s with which we have been concerned.This lateral move allows Lyotard to move toward visual phenomena. He outlines theories of curvilinear perspective (to be opposed to linear perspective via the coming veduta) as well as of peripheral vision. Linear perspective depends on an immobile focus of the eye that duplicates the false mobility of the eye. By immobilizing the eye and paying attention to the periphery we begin to understand curvilinear perspective and the death drive lurking at the corners of our eyes. These two elements, representation and perspective, frame Lyotard's veduta.The section on the veduta constitutes an abrupt rupture that sutures the book together. He offers a short history of images in the West, focusing on medieval illuminated manuscripts and the paintings of the early Renaissance, specifically those of Masaccio. Lyotard wants to move us from the sacred to the secular, through two types of thickness and through two rotations. It is a complex move, or rather two moves, each of which is worth dwelling on.Lyotard attempts to demonstrate the imbrication of discourse and figure within medieval illuminated manuscripts. The images may be read and the letters seen just as often as the reverse. Their signification is working opposite to our own. While we might represent the designated (the “real” world), the signifier for the medieval mind always signifies divine discourse. Because there is only one signified, image and text alike are infused with figure. The thickness to which Lyotard has referred throughout occupies—during the medieval period—the space between God and man: true difference.At the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see a rotation. Masaccio's perspectival paintings reveal a new thickness, one between designation and signification. Difference is no longer vertical (God-human) but horizontal (human-vase-sheep-human); transcendence is replaced with immanence. It is this rotation that opens up the possibility of nonsacred art, that is, depictions of peasants and everyday objects. Masaccio's perspective is complex, not yet strictly linear. He employs aerial perspective as well (which offers the illusion of atmospheric depth), but the two types of perspective appear within the same painting without any kind of framing device separating them.Lyotard compares this to Leonardo's use of aerial perspective, where it is carefully restricted. Leonardo has already moved to a linear perspective that is based on a rotation from picture plane to viewer: “The distance from the ‘eye-point’ to the screen is transferred onto the latter so as to establish the oblique from which the objects' foreshortening will be determined” (2011, 197). This second rotation, geometrical foreshortening, may be directly opposed to Masaccio's perspective. In Masaccio, we see naught but plastic space, ready to be invested with figural, libidinal energy. In Leonardo, each aspect of the painting must be kept separate. In Masaccio, the viewer is immanent to the world of the painting. In Leonardo, she or he is transcendent: “This rotation of meaning is directly opposed to that which I described to convey the importance of the Masaccian revolution: rather than the exteriorization of what was scripted, it is the scripting of exteriority” (2011, 197). These two rotations—first from creator to creation, then from immanence to transcendence—occur in the first few years of the fifteenth century and separate the sacred, mythopoetic world from our current secular, scientific world.Lyotard uses the term “veduta” to refer to a particular kind of painting within a painting. A window is painted on the wall, like the one placed behind Mona Lisa. This window achieves a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect. We see “through” the painting at another level. In a sense, Lyotard's veduta offers us a chance to see “through” the history of representation. The first half of the book frames this history. The second half signifies what we might see on the other side of the veduta.In the face of the failure of signification outlined in the first half and the history of its subordination of desire outlined in the veduta, Lyotard attempts to signify the other of signification by more psychoanalytic means. Here, in the second half of the book, he performs this work through a rotation from discourse to figure, exploring the unrepresentable in the paintings of Paul Klee and in the dream work that does not think. The dream- work of course cannot think, cannot perform discourse, as it operates under the sign of desire, that is, through the unconscious. Language depends on negation, and the unconscious, Freud reminds us, knows no negation. Lyotard's argument reaches its crescendo in his tripartite model of figurality: figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix: The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote's regulating line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of original repression, instantly laced with discourse: “originary” phantasy. Nonetheless the figure-matrix is figure, not structure, because it is, from the outset, violation of the discursive order—violence against the transformations authorized by this order. (2011, 268, emphasis his) The unconscious is not a language at all. These three parts of figurality braid themselves throughout discourse via desire. Desire's complicity with the figural operates through three transgressions that parallel the three elements of figurality: transgression of the object, transgression of form, and transgression of space. Lyotard argues that these transgressions are manifestations of the death drive and drives his point home by returning to Freud in repeated interpretations of the case study “A Child Is Being Beaten.” These readings allow us to see that the death drive acts as a baffle that moves the spool from fort to da. It is only against this movement that repetition, repression, regression, occurs. Thanatos provides the “re-” that makes possible the return. Death drives deconstruction.While we may have expected figurality to be dangerous only to structuralists, we are surprised by the truth (and it is in its surprise that we recognize its truth): figurality is not eros but thanatos. The relationship of figure to discourse cannot be spoken or drawn, for discourse is within figure and vice versa. Rather than painting a mise-en-scène, Lyotard stages for us a mise en abyme. In the final paragraphs of the book, Lyotard signifies a final rotation: between mother and spouse. Mousetrap, the play within the play in Hamlet, provides Hamlet an opportunity to meditate on his mother as “mobbled” queen. Lyotard reads “mobbled” through an associational chain that leads to “mobilized.” The mobile mother rotates her relationship from variable gap between mother and son to the invariant gap between lovers: Hamlet's “Oedipal truth” (Lyotard 2011, 388). In this final scene we may see how Lyotard prefigures Anti-Oedipus.Discourse, Figure finds us in the shadow of a recent return to Lyotard in the work of philosophers like Alain Baidou, Ray Brassier, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler and that of rhetoricians like Diane Davis, and Lyotard was more than most to at this of rhetoric and to not only study the but to be A rotation of the book's title reminds us of the and often between discourse and as figure in discourse, so rhetoric not from without but from of visual rhetoric of Jacques psychoanalytic theories of the or on the between image and Lyotard offers a cannot only be must be space for us to on and on our Finally, images cannot be from text as as we might and image are as as discourse and have to Discourse, Figure's to and on Deleuze for have an in Deleuze's theories of While Deleuze has to say to our he that is psychoanalytic in Lyotard. we are returning to Lyotard can offer to the the of or of this us to a final event: my own failure at Discourse, Figure. It is a book that must be read and a book that up its only after That it took this long to to us is perhaps In an with Lyotard on its was with a of on my to that a book like Discourse, was at the time because it was explicitly against … I was against this way of and I that now have this book. I was (Lyotard We

The essay examines the ethical tensions surrounding the common cultural and disciplinary demand that writers write “clearly.”  The essay seeks to advance the discipline’s engagement with Linda Kintz’s and Sharon Crowley’s separate critiques of the “ideology of clarity,” arguing that clarity potentially manipulates audiences primarily through either strategic or unintentional omissions of critical information.  Deploying Kenneth Burke’s notion of ingenuous and cunning identification, it advances an argument that, through persistent acts of omission, clarity can become a cunning rhetorical form, a form often set into motion by unintentionally manifested cultural pressures.  The essay ends by proposing five definitions of clarity currently circulating within the discipline, before a final reflection upon the inherent tension (both stylistic and disciplinary) between clarity and obscuration.

Although student veterans comprise just four percent of the population of undergraduate students, this number is expected to grow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come to a close (“Out”). In recent years, higher education has become increasingly concerned with accommodating this emerging, diverse, and vulnerable population of students. This review essay discusses two Web-based initiatives that advocate for and about student veterans transitioning to higher education : In Their Own Words, Montgomery College Student Veterans and From Combat to Kentucky . Specifically, this review essay discusses how these two digital projects provide educators, administrators, and students (both civilian and veteran) the invaluable opportunity to hear the unique experiences and needs of student veterans in higher education. Hearing such stories can contribute to teachers and students’ learning practices by fostering identification with student veterans, despite our differences, while affording teachers and students a way of increasing our understanding of military culture and its large role in our nation’s present, past, and future cultural contexts.

AbstractDewey emphasizes the perception of “indirect consequences” of transactions as the basis of responsible public identity and organization. These consequences are external; they appear in the scientifically observable world and are susceptible to technical control. But transactions may have indirect affective consequences that are part of a culturally influenced inner reality, pose obstacles to speech and communication, and fund an irresponsible public identity-cum-organization. Rhetorical theory that builds on Dewey's “public” ignores these consequences at considerable cost. This claim is supported by a social psychoanalytic conception of affects and by an interpretive-analysis of public speech-acts that moved from opposition to the largely unauthorized immigration of Latin Americans to Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee, to reactionary endorsement and legislative passage of an “English-first” ordinance.

This essay introduces Lű's Annals (Lűshi chunqiu), a classical Chinese text with a wealth of material on rhetoric. Not only does the text evaluate numerous examples of persuasion and sophistry, it also lays out a system of rhetorical precepts grounded in a distinctive ontology, that of correlative cosmology. After outlining the cosmology, epistemology, and theory of language of Lű's Annals, I trace how these shape its rhetorical theory and practices. I then consider how the text itself works as a persuasive artifact in the light of its own strictures. The essay closes with some reflections on why this valuable resource for Classical Chinese rhetoric has been neglected.

Book Review| November 01 2012 Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Rhetorica (2012) 30 (4): 457–460. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Rhetorica 1 November 2012; 30 (4): 457–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACTThis article treats the idea of consilium as a concept in the rhetoric of the Western Middle Ages. The tradition of civic oratory in antiquity was associated with the deliberative genre, and civic speech was perpetuated in the Middle Ages but manifested itself as consilium. In the letters of Fulbert of Chartres, the rhetorical commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, and the rhetorical treatises of Albertanus of Brescia and Brunetto Latini, the concept of consilium (“counsel”) systematically describes persuasive human interaction to address deliberative uncertainty about future civic decisions. Medieval rhetoricians use the term consilium both synonymously with deliberation and to describe an activity of persuasion that is akin to deliberative oratory. In rhetorical texts describing the practice of counsel in the Middle Ages, we see a transition from counsel as a subject of rhetorical theory to counsel as a public practice.

Preface Personal Prologue Chapter 1: Introduction: Examining Crisis, Laurie MacGillivray and Devon Brenner Commentator Introductions, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) Part I: Reading and Writing in Times of Crisis Chapter 2: Making Contact in Times of Crisis: Literacy Practices in a Post-Katrina World, April Whatley Bedford and Devon Brenner Chapter 3: Hallelujah! Bible-based Literacy Practices of Children Living in a Homeless Shelter, Laurie MacGillivray Chapter 4: Reactions to Divorce: Communication and Child Writing Practices, Gisele Ragusa Chapter 5: When daddy goes to prison: Examining crisis through fanfiction and poetry, Mary K. Thompson Chapter 6: Reading and Writing Teenage Motherhood: Changing Literacy Practices and Developing Identities, Kara L. Lycke Chapter 7: Disability Identification: Shifts in Home Literacy Practices, Gisele Ragusa Part II: Crises Arising from Literate Practices Chapter 8: Finding Husbands, Finding Wives: How Being Literate Creates Crisis, Loukia K. Sarroub Chapter 9: A State Take-Over: The Language of a School District Crisis, Rebecca Rogers and Kathryn Pole Chapter 10: Brewing a Crisis: Language, Educational Reform, and the Defense of a Nation, Susan Florio-Ruane Part III: Reflecting on Crises and Literacy Chapter 11 Commentators' Insights, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) List of Contributors

This article examines 3 papers presented before the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine by 19th-century physician Julia W. Carpenter. The article identifies 3 strategies Carpenter used to negotiate the incompatible rhetorical expectations for women and for physicians. The published records of academy discussions provide evidence for Carpenter's colleagues' reactions to each strategy, revealing the complexity of her rhetorical situation and demonstrating the complex links among rhetorical practice, professional identity, and a communicator's social position.

The essay argues that no substantial connection exists between Stanley Fish's work and the tradition of sophistic rhetoric. The purpose of this argument is to show that Fish's work undermines and weakens the development of a rhetorical pedagogy that focuses on the role of language in the formation of beliefs. I contend that Fish's book, Doing What Comes Naturally, is actually hostile to most forms of a classical rhetorical education and can only issue from theoretical grounds that misunderstand the rhetorical tradition. Thus this essay seeks to critically examine one of the foremost defenders of rhetoric over the last twenty years by contextualizing his work in classical rhetorical theory. Fish produces a thin account of rhetoric that disassociates the language arts from citizenship in contemporary democracies. Such a move shapes his highly disciplinary and epistemological understanding of the function of higher education.

Reviews 457 Disagreements are often treated as differing appearances or perspectives on a singular reality (after Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteka, for example) or as prompts for the invention of an agreement or unity to come. However, building on Canpanton's example, Dolgopolski's work develops a sustained and insightful construction of what might be termed Talmudic rationalism where the ontological entailments of expressions are drawn from the careful and charitable articulation of disagreements. As such, What is Talmud? is an important new contribution to the study of rhetoric. In addition, What is Talmud? is a necessary reorientation and elaboration on current studies of Rabbinic discourse and textuality, which has been dominated by praise for Rabbinic tolerance and appreciation of polysemy. What is Talmud? puts on the table the possibility that in accepting the Talmud as the historical anchor (if not the core symbol) for an appreciation of polysemy and multiple truths, we have done so at the expense of Talmudic understandings of disagreement. David Metzger Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetor­ ical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Traditional accounts of rhetoric's emergence in fifth-century Greece have encountered many recent challenges and revisions. Among these challenges, Edward Schiappa's prolific scholarship on classical rhetoric has always been exceptional. In this vein, Schiappa has long argued for the importance of a later origin of rhetoric as a distinct discipline than has been presumed. It arose as a discipline, that is - something that could be studied - he says, in the fourth-century in the wake of Plato's invention of the term rhetorike. This latest volume, coauthored with David Timmerman, continues to provoke the reader to question accepted rhetorical histories and is located well within the scholarly trajectory of Schiappa's earlier work, in particular, the Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). However, by emphasizing the role of "terms of art," Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse adds a refined focus on discourse in the formation of rhetoric as a discipline. Timmerman and Schiappa explain "terms of art as bits and pieces of disciplinary jargon that have "specialized denotative functions" (p.l) for those within a distinct knowledge community. Their introductory chapter provides a nuanced theoretical and historical explanation of such terms in the context of the history of rhetoric. The authors contend that the emergence of this kind of technical vocabulary is evidence of the expansion of the available "semantic field" and of corresponding "conceptual possibilities" (p. 6) available to rhetorical practitioners. Terms of art, in this way, are a 458 RHETORICA fundamental marker of discrete knowledge communities (i.e. disciplines). Consequently, they shape "the pedagogical, political and intellectual goals of rhetorical theory" (p. 2). Rather than simply revealing the historical importance of terms of art, however, Timmerman and Schiappa endeavor also to make a "methodological intervention" in the field of history of rhetoric (p. 171). They contend that the use of terms of art as an analytic framework has the advantage of shifting "our focus to the relevant pedagogical and theoretical texts to examine how the relevant terms ... are employed in those texts" (p. 172). The origin of rhetorike as a term in the fourth century (rather than fifth) has even further implication, for the authors, when understood in this light. In this context, Rhetorike is not merely Platonic shorthand, but an essential component in the technical development of the entire rhetorical knowledge community. The book takes up a variety of case studies that are united by their focus on terms of art. The first of these studies concerns dialegesthai (dialogue or dialectic) and its assorted meanings. In considering these variations, Timmerman and Schiappa demonstrate the ways in which words can be contested in technical contexts as terms of art. By synthesizing and analyzing the philological evidence, the authors contend a sophistic conception of dialegesthai was an established term of art for the Athenian intelligentsia. Thus, Plato's refinement of the term into what we understand as dialectic challenges this earlier technical usage. Parsing the similarities and differences that emerge in...

This essay introduces Lű's Annals (Lűshi chunqiu), a classical Chinese text with a wealth of material on rhetoric. Not only does the text evaluate numerous examples of persuasion and sophistry, it also lays out a system of rhetorical precepts grounded in a distinctive ontology, that of correlative cosmology. After outlining the cosmology, epistemology, and theory of language of Lű's Annals, I trace how these shape its rhetorical theory and practices. I then consider how the text itself works as a persuasive artifact in the light of its own strictures. The essay closes with some reflections on why this valuable resource for Classical Chinese rhetoric has been neglected.

Reviews 445 Lancelot en pi ose, la polémique est muselée par les stratégies narratives et une volonté d'édification chrétienne : les opposants à la cour d'Arthur ne reçoivent pour seule réponse qu'une fin exemplaire. Pour le cheik Al-Ansari et son admirateur enthousiaste, la vérité révélée n'a rien d'une fiction. Tant que les points de vue avancés admettent la contradiction et que le débat est permis, même dans ses formes les plus agressives, l'analyse rhétorique reste un outil d'interprétation privilégié pour démystifier le discours polémique. Elle permet en outre à certains contributeurs, comme R. Micheli, Th. Her­ man, E. De Jonge, ainsi qu'aux directeurs de l'ouvrage, de proposer des hypothèses nouvelles et pertinentes qui pourront servir de jalons pour de futures recherches dans deux domaines, celui du rhétorique et du polémique, qui sont intimement liés autour du sens du combat. Benoît Sans Université Libre de Bruxelles Graves, Michael. Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (Studies in Rhetoric and Religion 9). Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009. 450 pp. ISBN: 9781602582408 Given the challenges of working with early Quaker sermons, it's not surprising that there is relatively little work on Quaker rhetoric. Unlike the Puritans, who seemed to suffer from graphomania, early Quakers believed in impromptu preaching which means that there is a paucity of source mate­ rial for historians of rhetoric. Perhaps more troubling, early Quaker sermons were often printed by non-Quaker publishers and questions about their authenticity often arise. In Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric Graves does an admirable job working with the corpus of seventy-nine surviving Quaker sermons, situating them within a reconstruction of early Quaker theology, rhetorical theory, and die emerging transatlantic printculture . Indeed, this work needs to be read as straddling Quaker studies and the history of rhetoric as Graves speaks to both groups of scholars through­ out. For that effort alone, this work deserves special attention. Despite this achievement or perhaps because of it, this reviewer has some concerns about Graves's otherwise excellent work. Graves has long been immersed in the literature of early Quakerism and, to his credit as a craftsman, this work establishes a mastery of archival material that is rare even in the best scholarship. This study of early Quaker rhetoric fills a number of important gaps in our historical knowledge. For example, in his discussion of Robert Barclay (1648-1690), one of the most important early Quaker intellectuals, Graves claims that Barclay s under­ standing of preaching is derived from a very different model of faculty psychology from both Bacon who preceded him and Campbell who came after, which he claims is closer to modern brain science than either (pp· 446 RHETORICA 115-116). Leaving aside the questionable relationship between early modern homiletic theory and postmodern science, Graves's argument suggests that faculty psychology is far more complex and varied than many traditional his­ tories allow. Furthermore, his reconstruction of Quaker impromptu speaking theory can and should provide a guide for other scholars interested in the impromptu sermon, a genre of considerable importance in America's Great Awakening and subsequent religious revivals. The craftsmanship of this book is impressive. According Graves's on­ line profile, this work is the product of nearly forty years of research and one can detect the expertise that has gone into every footnote. Alongside the twelve analytic chapters and epilogue are the complete texts of four surviv­ ing Quaker sermons, five appendixes which examine the remaining corpus of seventeenth-century Quaker sermons, a very thorough bibliography of Quaker studies and three indices. The book is divided into four sections, each focuses on different levels of analysis and context necessary for under­ standing Quaker rhetoric. It begins with an overview of seventeenth-century rhetoric, continues with an analysis of the evolution of Quaker impromptu preaching theory, and proceeds to an examination of all seventy-nine surviv­ ing Quaker sermons and then ends with an analysis of works by key Quaker figures including Fox, Crisp, Barclay and Penn. Historians of rhetoric will likely...

Reviews 439 century (p. 517). Can we also conclude that classical early modern philos­ ophy did contain a (hidden) philosophy or philosophies of rhetoric in the sense of attempts to justify rhetoric? This question is important, especially with respect to Descartes and Spinoza. The answer must be negative. The results clearly show that rhetoric does not contribute to the meaning of signs in the work of these authors. Only Bacon, who grew up under nearly ideal circumstances with respect to humanist education and rhetoric, arrives at something like a philosophical theory of rhetoric. To a much lesser extend, this can still be said with respect to Hobbes, who is much more than Bacon a critic of rhetoric, but still in search of an new rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza we still find rhetorical education and many reflections on rhetoric (it is one of the great merits of this book to have shown this). At the same time they were convinced that rhetoric constrains the expressive power of language. The conclusion must be that the way the early modern thinkers distinguish between res and verbiuu prevents them from providing a pow­ erful theory of meaning which is the cornerstone of a philosophy of rhetoric. Not a prejudice against rhetoric, but the idea that language only provides a deficient expression of thought proves to be inconsistent with the very idea of a philosophy of rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza these effects are enforced by the rationalist assumption that thought is a sphere of reality to which the mind has access independently of linguistic expressions. This book thus proves to be a strong contribution to the literature. Rothkamm enables us to see the real limitations of early modern rationalism with respect to rhetoric much clearer than before. Temilo van Zantwijk Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Lit­ erature, 2010. 695 pp. ISBN: 9780674053335 According to Christopher Johnson the hyperbole is the "most infamous of tropes, whose name most literary criticism does not praise, and whose existence the history of philosophy largely ignores" (1). As a result of this neglect "no full-scale defense has been made of the Baroque's most Baroque figure. This book aims to remedy that lack" (16). And what a remedy it is. To say that this is a study on a grand scale is certainly not hyperbolic. In nearly 700 pages Johnson "moves from the history of rhetoric to the extravagances of lyric and then through the impossibilities of drama and the aporias of philosophy" (521). The grand scope of Hyperboles is made necessary by the protean role of hyperbole in discourse: "as a discursive figure integral to the success of classical and Renaissance epic, Shakespearian tragedy, Pascalian apology, as 440 RHETORICA well as the viability of the Cartesian method, it can be narrative, dialogic, or structural" (8). Thus hyperbole is no mere figure of speech but rather, says Johnson, following the lead of Kenneth Burke, it is "a 'master trope,' one that vies with metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony for our attention (3). Indeed, Burke's approach to the four "master tropes" in A Grammar of Motives might serve as a preview of Johnson's method in Hyperboles. Say Burke: "my primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth.' It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between tne figurative and the literal usages shift, but also the four trope shift into one another" (Grammar ofMotives, 503). The hyperbole, now rechristened a "master trope" supersedes the merely figurative. It is more than a stylistic device, so much more that at times it is difficult to say what a hyperbole is—or what it is not. It is a figurative element, to be sure, but hyperbole is also an argumentative tech­ nique, an inventional device, a philosophical critique, and ultimately a world view. In establishing the hyperbole a "master trope" Johnson begins with an examination of the place of hyperbole in the rhetorical theory of Aristotle...

Abstract This essay recovers the emergence of teachers’ union rhetoric through an analysis of Margaret Haley’s address to the National Education Association convention of 1904. Entitled "Why Teachers Should Organize," Haley’s speech was the first call for a national effort to unionize U.S. classroom teachers. Promising not just material but also professional advancement, Haley broke new rhetorical ground in St. Louis by advocating unionism as a professional duty. Through a close reading of her argumentation, I contend that Haley positioned democracy at the center of teachers’ union rhetoric. To make unionism appealing for her audience of schoolteachers and administrators, Haley paired the democratic goals of progressivism with the democratic potential of labor. Appealing to the commitment to democracy shared by educators, progressives, and labor activists, Haley’s speech was the first to outline the union rhetoric that would transform public education over the course of the twentieth century.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.

This article builds on scholarship in technical communication, medical rhetoric, and visual communication and represents a portion of a grounded study of one medical workplace setting's visualization practices. Specifically, the author explores how medical images—as technologically and rhetorically rendered artifacts—make “present” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969 Perelman , C. , & Olbrechts-Tyteca , L. ( 1969 ). The new rhetoric . Notre Dame , IN : University of Notre Dame Press . [Google Scholar]) the material characteristics of disease and thereby perceptually and argumentatively afford the construction of knowledge about future cancer-care action.

312 RHETORICA relato del libanés. Lafabula docet podrá obtenerla mi lector sin necesidad de mucho batallar mental. José Calvo González Malaga Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 211 pp. The thesis of Lois Peters Agnew's Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philos­ ophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics is a bold one: "This book argues that the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). Since Stoicism hardly appears in scholarly works on eighteenth-century British rhetoric, we must conclude that these histories are wanting. The narrative that Agnew in part contests has two parts and is as follows: First, the empirical epistemologies of Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Reid offered a new account of cognition and emotional response that had implications for rhetorical theory. Campbell and Priestly, recognizing the importance of these ideas, incorporated them into their theories. In their new epistemologicalpsychological accounts, rhetoric moved away from in its civic function as the means for reaching decisions in social, political settings and toward an inter­ est in the way an individual formed ideas, became emotionally engaged, and then acted. Rhetorical theory became concerned with providing a description of the way an individual processes sense impressions at the expense of the Classical concern with public deliberation. Second, the rhetorics of Smith, Karnes and Blair replaced an emphasis on helping students create speeches with developing students' receptive capacities—with developing students' taste—and establishing standards of judgment for all the types of discourse that constitute belles lettres. Taking these changes together, some scholars have depicted eighteenth-century rhetoric as abandoning rhetoric's tradi­ tional political mission and transforming rhetoric into a technical, psycho­ logical, and instrumental science in the service of bourgeois individualism and self-improvement. Agnew does not contest specifically that the overtly political is no longer thematized in eighteenth century rhetoric; nor does she deny that eighteenth century rhetoric is different. She does deny, however, that a social mission vanishes in the theories she analyzes. She insists that eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists were themselves anxious about movements tow ard indi­ vidualism, secularism, and scientism and developed their theories of rhetoric not to accommodate these movements but to ameliorate their effects. Her ar­ gument is that the concepts central to eighteenth-centurv rhetoric-—common Reviews 313 sense, taste, and propriety—constitute a technical vocabulary that, if cor­ rectly read in the context of Stoic concepts familiar to the eighteenth-century theorists, are the basis for a social theory of rhetoric. Agnew's "Introduction" and first chapter, "Stoic Ethics and Rhetoric," offer a short summary of Stoicism that attempts to complicate some of the stereotypes that readers may hold of it. While Agnew acknowledges that Stoicism has a long, complex history, she is not much concerned with nu­ ance or the ensuing historical complications. Rather, she mines the tradition for Stoic themes that serve her purposes—a somewhat circular way of pro­ ceeding but forgivable since the eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists who are her concern would themselves be interested in Stoicism as appropriators . She is interested in dispelling or complicating stereotypes of the Stoic wise man who stands above the social norms, proudly beyond influence by others, and practices at best a disciplined sympathy, cultivating an austere self-command that hardly seems social. And of course the Stoics had notori­ ously little use for rhetoric. But as Agnew points out, the wise man has a civic obligation, and she highlights themes of civic duty and responsibility, in Roman Stoicism especially. With regard to rhetoric, Cicero, who faulted the Stoic attitude toward rhetoric while advocating Stoicism, judged the impoverished Stoic theory of language and rhetoric a remediable deficiency. In Chapter 2, Agnew traces the concept of commonsense in Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, and Reid to Stoic antecedents. The three eighteenth-century theorists had, among themselves, distinctly different understandings of the meaning of commonsense, which Agnew acknowledges while maintaining that their different articulations are similarly motivated to find in human innate cognitive and moral capacities an argument against skepticism and the basis for...

334 RHETORICA 254) he is not wrong strictly speaking, although the observation is too broad to be useful; "radicalized," decorum can look like almost anything including Sunday brunch or the DMV Driver's Handbook. Ultimately these issues are minor when we consider the substantial payoff. David Marshall has written a deeply responsible book that moves with grace, chronologically through Vico's entire oeuvre—including some notable rediscoveries in the archives and beyond—at the same time that it honors the weirdness that makes Vico indispensable. Daniel M. Gross University of California, Irvine Thomas Conley, Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult, Chicago: Chicago Univer­ sity Press, 2009. 132 pp. As he states in the preface to his Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, Thomas Conley's explicit aim is to "stimulate some constructive conversation" (p. viii). Insults have admittedly been a serious political issue in the 2000s. Conley mentions in passing both the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed (p. 8) and the speech by Pope Benedict XVI about Manuel II Palaeologus (pp. 121-122), and quotes one Iranian imam as saying: "I am for freedom of speech, but not the freedom to insult" (p. 1), which puts the problem of political correctness in a nutshell. The style employed in this book is both expansive and discursive. Conley's range of examples and sources is wide: from antiquity (Aristo­ phanes, Cicero, Martial) to the early-modern period (the sixteenth-century Lutheran Flugschriften, Julius Caesar Scaliger's attack on Erasmus, Shake­ speare's comedies); from the political cartoons and the anti-Semitism of the twentieth century (the leading nazi-ideologist Julius Streicher's Kampf dem Weltfeind and the anti-Semitic insults disseminated by The Dearborn In­ dependent, a Michigan newspaper published by Henry Ford) to TV series and movies created by the comedy group Monty Python. Presentations are generous, and the reader is invited to explore the many facets of the topic. Although Conley's expressed intent is not to theorize insult (p. vii), he nevertheless offers some useful semi-theoretical concepts, defining, for example, what he terms the "scenario" and the "intensity" of insults (p. 3-7). Referring to Saara Lilja's work on insults in Roman comedy (from 1965), Conley underlines the importance of studying "who says what about whom and why" (pp. 13-14). These are more or less rhetorical issues, dealing with and specifying the rhetorical situation. Conley emphasizes that the rhetoric of insults does not concern only elocutio (diction, style), but also pronuntiatio (delivery) like the tone of voice, body language, and timing (p. 7). One of the main arguments in Conley's book is that there are also 'positive' or 'nonserious' insults, which have cohesive effects such as fh/tin^ Reviews 335 (the Scottish tradition of of insult poetry), craik (the banter between friends in the Irish pubs), the dozens (a form of verbal duelling used in AfricanAmerican culture), and battle rap or beefing. Indeed, it is quite delightful to read, e.g., about Yiddish insults (p. 11-12), which seem to be both self-ironical and have a kind, sympathetic nature. According to Conley, some insults can even be analysed like jokes with a punch line, as he does when discussing Martial's epigrams (pp. 43-47). Conley calls into question strict manuals or rules of good conduct; he has some apprehensions about the situation when the maxim 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all' is in operation (p. 120). In his view, this kind of atmosphere and passing laws against insults censures not only freedom of expression but can also threaten the social relationships based on the many kinds of 'positive' insults (p. 116). However, Conley's own tentative definition does not fit well in the benign situations of 'positive' insults. He defines insult as a "severely nega­ tive opinion of a person or group to subvert their positive self-regard and esteem" (p. 2). Furthermore, Conley's examples of, e.g., the aesthetically valuable insults—such as found in the writings of the English critic William Connor (p. 118)—seems to be examples of irony, not of insults. The definition of insult is the subject of the first section of the book...

Reviews 325 much wider rhetorical practice or whether the Sophists offered any notable contribution to these fields. T.'s book is a worthy summary of Sophistic argumentation based on a painstaking analysis of a wide selection of available texts and lucid compar­ isons with modern parallels. Unfortunately, it does not consistently address the thorny (and possibly unresolvable) methodological question of what strategies and why we could call genuinely Sophistic, so he occasionaly seems to read Aristotelian or Platonic concepts back into sophistic texts. Sometimes the line of argument is not easy to follow due to the dense pre­ sentation of facts and the book also suffers from some irritating mistakes both in the English and the Greek spelling (e.g. pp. 35, 48 or 169). However, as a rich and perceptive reappraisal of primary evidence, the study will likely to provoke strong response and stimulate further studies on the Sophists not only in classical and modern rhetoric, but in philosophy as well. Gabor Tahin Burnham, England Pseudo-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, I discorsi figurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-RadJ. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento a cura di Stefano Dentice di Accadia, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore (AION. Quaderni 14, 2010), 184 pp., ISBN 978-88-6227-220-9 Accompagnata da un'ampia Introduzione (pp. 11-50) e dal Commento (pp. 129-178), Stefano Dentice di Accadia (D.A.) propone nella collana AION. Quaderni (n. 14) la prima traduzione intégrale in italiano dei Discorsifigurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-Rad. ) di ps.-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, basata sul testo edito, agli inizi del secolo scorso, da Usener e Radermacher (da cui D.A. si discosta in alcuni luoghi, come H vede dalla Tavola delle divergenze a p. 51), con un'ulteriore lettura del Parisinus Graecus 1741 e del suo apógrafo, il Guelferbytanus 14. L'idea di tradurre i due scritti nasce nell'àmbito degli studi di ricostruzione dell'esegesi omerica antica; l'impostazione del lavoro tende infatti a privilegiare l'aspetto della critica letteraria omerica rispetto a quello retorico. I due trattati, che analizzano una particolare técnica oratoria conosciu*a nell'antichità col nome di λόγοι ¿σχηματισμένοι, ossia un discorso in cui il pensiero non viene espresso in maniera diretta, ma in forma mascherata (come si legge nella definizione di Zoilo riportata da Febammone III, 44, 1-3 Spengel), rappresentano un unicum nella letteratura antica perché sono i soli scritti monografici nei quali la teoría è spiegata attraverso 1 analisi di esempi letterari tratti da autori greci (Omero, di cui si analizzano molti passi deïVIliade, Demostene, Euripide e Tucidide). I due trattati a e b costituiscono i capitoli VIII e IX di una Τέχνη ρητορική erróneamente attribuita a Dionigi di Alicarnasso, sulla cui paternité e datazione c'è ancora grande incertezza (si 326 RHETORICA tende a ritenere i due trattati composti tra la fine del I sec. e la prima meta del III sec. d.C., cf. Introd., p. 14 n. 19), un'opera che consiste in una raccolta di testi di retorica e di critica letteraria scollegati per lo piü tra loro, frutto di una collezione arbitraria di diversa provenienza. Potrebbe trattarsi, considerato 10 stile frettoloso e spesso inelegante delle due monografie, di testi scolastici, verosímilmente appunti dettati a vari allievi in momenti diversi (ipotesi contestata da M. Heath, Pseudo-Dionysios Art ofRhetoric 8-11: Figured Speech, Declamation and Criticism, «AJP» 124/1 [2003], pp. 81-105). D.A. non esclude che i due trattati possano essere opera del medesimo autore, né che si possano individuare mani diverse da un'opera all'altra o anche all'interno di uno stesso trattato (Introd., p. 15). L'lntroduzione si compone di un parágrafo (1) relativo alia storia della teoría antica del discorso e della causa figurati, di un parágrafo (2) dedicato all'importanza dei due trattati nel panorama del genere letterario in cui sono inquadrati, con l'illustrazione dei tre σχήματα (il parlare con tatto e decoro [μετ’ εύπρεπείας], il parlare 'per obliquo' [κατά πλάγιον], il parlare 'per contrario' [κατά τό εναντίον]) e un utile e dettagliato sunto (pp. 16-21), e di un parágrafo (3) che traccia uno status tpiaestionis degli studi sull'argomento. Nel penúltimo par...

Abstract This essay examines the speech delivered by Vice President John C. Breckinridge on the occasion of the removal of the United States Senate to its new chambers on January 4, 1859. Drawing upon Kenneth Burkes concept of contextual substance, I argue that Breckinridge constructs the Senate’s transition to its new quarters as a defense of constitutional unionism, a conservative political ideology holding that the survival and prosperity of the Union depended upon its continued adherence to the compromises enshrined in the Republics founding document. In an age dominated by increasingly strident rhetorical extremes, constitutional unionism represented a beleaguered vision of Union that was soon eclipsed by the Civil War and today is all but forgotten. Analysis of the Removal Address thus illumines the rhetoric of an important yet neglected political ideology while disclosing the rhetorical "alchemy" by which geometric, familial, and directional substance reconcile continuity and change in leave-taking discourse.

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

Abstract This essay argues that the theory of form Kenneth Burke introduced in Counter-Statement can be read as articulating a usable concept of a rhetorical aesthetic. Here rhetoric involves identity in assertions and responses that develop through immediate encounters that prompt, even if just vicariously, a sensory experience. In their conventional conceptions, rhetoric engages concepts while aesthetic engages sensation and emotion—an overgeneralization that may still be more or less accurate. But if we conclude with Burke that it is not always useful to treat the rhetorical and the aesthetic as separate we might come to better understand the human tendency to abandon abstraction and dive into immediacy in matters pertaining to the alienation of self from community. Ideas and arguments bind people together or push them apart, but aesthetic experience does that as well and perhaps to greater effect. The essay explores that claim in the context of a contemporary revival of traditional Hawaiian music that draws directly on sensory experiences of life in Hawaii to assert aesthetically a place for Hawaiian identity in an American national community.

Although regionalism has long been an important concept in architecture and political science, rhetorical studies has not specifically theorized regionalism as an analytical or productive concept. This introduction outlines four premises of a regional rhetoric that help to articulate a specifically rhetorical theory of regionalism.

Drawing on Douglas Powell's assertion that “region making [is] a practice of cultural politics” (8), this essay traces the nationalist force of mid-twentieth-century Ecuadorian appeals to America as a strategic ethno-historic region. It suggests that such arguments bound national, regional, and transnational concerns together, using indigenous roots and cultural landscape as their anchors. Ecuadorian intellectuals who made nationalist arguments by building a larger, American moral geography drew on a racialized sense of history and landscape to re-imagine their relationship with their Spanish ex-colonizer and to distinguish an autochthonous American Ecuador from its diluted American neighbors. These arguments from America gave their small country greater cultural weight through regional identification. Tracing those tactical claims to America as they played out within Ecuador and across its regional commitments contributes to a broader understanding of the rhetorical force of place. The Ecuadorian example of regional appeals that amplify national stature demonstrates how place-based claims to identity can simultaneously ground and circulate arguments; it shows as well how the cultural politics of a particular landscape invoke and move within larger complexes of meaning and force.

Abstract Humor that addresses race can easily backfire. This article engages in an analysis of The Boondocks, an adult cartoon, to investigate how humor about race and racism can function not only to generate laughter through satiric rejection of long-held racist stereotypes in the American context but also to encourage new perspectives. The analysis makes use of rhetorical concepts drawn from theorist Kenneth Burke to analyze the rhetorical and comedic functioning of the dialogue, the use of music, and the visual features of the show. Notes 1We thank two extremely helpful RR reviewers, Richard Marback and Adela Licona. The quotation in the title comes from Glenda R. Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 15. 2As an example, CitationVidmar and Rokeach (1974) examined audience interpretations of the humor in All in the Family. They found that while some viewers laughed at the overt racism in the comments of Archie Bunker, others laughed at his hippie son-in-law Michael, who portrayed a racially enlightened person. 3McGruder has also published his comic strips in a series of books including The Boondocks: Because I Know you Don't Read the Newspapers, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel (2000); A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, New York: Three Rivers P (2003); Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection, New York: Three Rivers P (2005); and All the Rage: The Boondocks Past and Present, New York: Three Rivers P (2007). 4Readers interested in the media portrayal of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers will find the following works helpful: Pearson, Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America; and Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. The Party is seen to have continued the militant and nationalistic efforts of Malcolm X. Huey Newton, who earned a PhD in Social History from the University of California at Santa Cruz, also continued the intellectual legacy of Malcolm X. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1967, but this was overturned two years later. He and the Black Panther Party later adopted a nonviolent creed and focused on providing food, housing, and basic social services to black Americans in need. He later faced another charge for murder, but this did not result in a conviction. In 1989, after a conviction and short jail sentence for the misuse of public funds, he was murdered in Oakland, apparently participating in a drug deal that went bad. 5All quotations from episodes of The Boondocks, season one and season two. 6Anime is a uniquely Japanese visual art form that began in the early twentieth century. In the United States, the form became popular in the 1960s when a Japanese comic book, Aru Machikado, was made into a television show, Astro Boy. Other anime television shows followed in the midsixties including Gigantor, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion. The art form often includes children as main characters and heroes. The form also presents human emotion in a very visual manner and highlights the role of emotion in human interaction: "In anime the feelings of the characters play an important role in shaping their actions, much more so than in most American products, live or animated" (Poitras 55).

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded the first global rhetorical curriculum. Jesuit educators founded schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America—all ordered on their 1599 Ratio Studiorum. Yet this organizational and educational achievement faced several challenges. The Ratio reveals an attempt to reconcile the medieval education that shaped the early Jesuits and the classical humanism that excited later generations. The Jesuits articulated a reconciliation of humanistic and Christian virtue for the vita activa. These accomplishments mark Jesuit rhetoric as a distinct tradition worthy of deeper study by contemporary rhetoricians.

The purpose of this project is to conceptualize, theorize and provide a representative anecdote of rhetorical ingenuity as it has surfaced in the contemporary history of the anti-sweatshop movement. Rhetorical ingenuity is a term derived from the work of Kenneth Burke (1969) based on the combination of imagination and inventiveness. The anti-sweatshop movement, part of the new global realities (Ingram, 2002), calls for more imaginative tactics and strategies. Special attention is paid to the proposition of and development of counter-organizations as forms of rhetorical ingenuity. Two parallel situations are compared where a traditional social movement tactic (i.e., the hunger strike) ushers in the example of rhetorical ingenuity through the development of new counter-organizations (i.e., the WRC and later the DSP), occurring in 2000 and the other in 2006. The purpose of rhetorical ingenuity to add to social moment theory is discussed in light of previous contributions. Finally, exploring the success of rhetorical ingenuity in social movements is considered for future research.

In 2003, writer and cultural critic Bill Wasik stunned the world with his newest experiment, the MOB Project, which flooded the streets of New York City with strange performances quickly labeled “flash mobs” by participants and local media. With the goal of understanding the communicative purpose and function of these new performance events, this project analyzes the eight original flash mobs of 2003 through the use of Kenneth Burke’s Pentad. Specifically, this essay explores the agent, agency, and scene of the flash mob, arguing that the scene was the dominant pentadic feature of Wasik’s act (the Flash Mob). Additionally, this paper examines the specific social, cultural and political influences of the flash mob and its participants with a particular emphasis on technology and the hipster subculture.