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September 1999

  1. The tangled roots of literature, speech communication, linguistics, rhetoric/composition, and creative writing: A selected bibliography on the history of English studies
    doi:10.1080/02773949909391162

August 1999

  1. Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith
    Abstract

    Research Article| August 01 1999 Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith Harvey Yunis,Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp.Janet M. Atwill,Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp.Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy eds. Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1997) xxvii + 249 pp.Vivian Salmon,Language and Society in Early Modern England (The Netherlands: John Benjamfris, 1996) 276 pp.Quentin Skinner,Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp.Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Michael Svoboda, Michael Svoboda C/O The Joanne Rockwell Memorial House, 1910 E. Jefferson Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Fredal, James Fredal Department of English, 164 W. 17th Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar John T. Kirby, John T. Kirby Program in Comparative Literature, Purdue University, SC 1354, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Linda C. Mitchell, Linda C. Mitchell Department of English, One Washington Square, San Jose State University, San Jose, California 95192-0090, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wade Williams, Wade Williams Department of English, The University of Puget Sound, 1500 North Warner, Tacoma, Washington 98416, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judy Z Segal Judy Z Segal Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T1Z1, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1999) 17 (3): 331–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Svoboda, James Fredal, John T. Kirby, Linda C. Mitchell, Wade Williams, Judy Z Segal; Short Reviews: Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens, by Harvey Yunis, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition, by Janet M. Atwill, Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire: Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric Attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and to Apsines of Gadara, by Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy, Language and Society in Early Modern England, by Vivian Salmon, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, by Quentin Skinner and Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, by Alan G Gross and William M. Keith. Rhetorica 1 August 1999; 17 (3): 331–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331 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 Copyright 1999, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.1999.17.3.331

June 1999

  1. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens by Harvey Yunis
    Abstract

    Short Reviews Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp. In methodological reflections written near the end of his career (and published in English translation as On Interpretation), the German classicist August Boeckh articulated a number of hermeneutic principles, including two very simple dicta. First, a good interpretation will explain as much of the text as possible. And, second, a good interpretation will make the text compelling on the terms of its own time. Judged on these two criteria, Taming Democracy by Harvey Yunis offers a very good interpretation of Plato on political rhetoric. Though Plato is not the only subject of Taming Democracy, he is at the center of this study of models of political rhetoric in democratic Athens: a study that runs from the theatrical responses to the Peloponnesian War of Aristophanes and Euripides, to Thucydides' self-conscious history, to Plato's evolving views, to Demosthenes' oratorical resistance to Philip of Macedon's imperial encroachments. As an interpreter of Plato on rhetoric, Yunis immediately stands out for his willingness to move beyond the two-piece puzzle posed by the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. To his interpretations of these essential dialogues Yunis adds some reflections on the Apology and the Republic and, in a nearly unprecedented move, a detailed assessment of the rhetorical theory implied by the "persuasive preambles" Plato introduces in his Laws. Looking at this larger set enables Yunis to conclude, "The philosophical distance that Plato has traveled from the bitter rejection of rhetoric in the Gorgias to the creation of a new rhetorical genre of legal-political discourse in the Laws is immense" (p. 235). Yunis then makes this philosophical journey historically compelling by setting it against the rise and fall and rise of the 331 332 RHETORICA Athenian empire. Yunis suggests that Athens' democracy depended in subtle ways on its imperial ambitions. The navy that gave the masses, the poorer classes, an important civic role to play also built for Athens an empire. And that empire brought revenues to Athens, revenues that provided the livelihoods for many of these poorer citizens. Thus, domestic harmony in Athens depended on foreign hegemony, even tyranny. Taming Democracy is an analysis of late fifth and early-mid fourth century thinkers who, like Plato, felt compelled to address the political questions raised by Athens' imperial history. "Athens' miserable defeat in the Peloponnesian War invited a réévaluation of its democracy in general and democratic rhetoric in particular" (p. 32). Their answers, according to Yunis, hinged on whether they believed that rhetoric could be instructive, whether they thought the rhetores—the most accomplished speakers in the assembly—could tame the demos, the public, by teaching it to deliberate wisely through mass political discourse. In Thucydides' work Pericles is presented as the exemplary rhetor because he had the ability and the moral will to teach the Athenians as he led them. The rhetores who arose after Pericles lacked his abilities and his character. They pandered to the Athenians' worst impulses and thus, Thucydides implies, led Athens to its ruin. The Gorgias, Yunis argues, is Plato's response to Thucydides' portrayal of Pericles. Unlike Thucydides who gloried in Athens' power, Plato regarded Athens' imperial ambitions as inherently corrupting. The Gorgias is set in Athens at its zenith; but the characters and historical references of this dialogue about rhetoric and power serve to remind the alert reader that the city will soon be led, by a speech, into the disastrous folly of the Sicilian expedition and, thereby, to the collapse of its empire. This is an extraordinarily provocative book. It is not without its weaknesses, however. First, though other scholars have acknowledged the echoes and parallels between the two authors, they have stopped short of the suggestion that Plato "read" Thucydides. Yunis needs to provide additional warrants for his more assertive position. Second, Yunis actually overlooks one supporting line of evidence in this regard: the paradoxical place of shame in Thucydides and its prominence in the Gorgias. Third, Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0008
  2. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Janet M. Atwill
    Abstract

    Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the lovers both argue, in my view, against an endorsement of political discourse. Yunis' suggestion that the demos can be treated as having a single soul and, thus, as subject to the dialogue's rhetorical psychology strikes me as akin to pious efforts to allegorize The Song of Solomon. Nevertheless, by interpreting Plato in the dramatic political context of his time, Yunis succeeds in making Plato's dialogues on rhetoric more compelling objects of study for our time. I recommend the book highly. MICHAEL SVOBODA The Pennsylvania State University Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 265pp. Following Achilles' death near the end of the Trojan War, the chieftains held a debate to determine whether Odysseus or Ajax should win his armor. Ajax claimed the armor based not only on his legendary strength, but on his strength of character, his steadfast loyalty, bravery and self-control in battle. He was governed by a proper sense of shame and honor, corresponding to a code of behavior that guaranteed the propriety of his actions. Odysseus, by contrast, used shameless tricks and deceptions to defeat his enemies, even allowing his slaves to beat him so that, dressed in rags, he could sneak behind the walls of Troy, accomplishing in one night what the entire Achaean army couldn't accomplish in ten years. He makes the weaker appear to be the stronger. Odysseus wins the armor, for good or ill, but the contest represented by constant Ajax and wily Odysseus would continue to saturate ancient Greek public discourse. Are skills at trickery, deception and craft to be valued for their effectiveness, or despised for their dangers? Ought rhetoric to reproduce stable, normative subjects governed by traditional conventions of 334 RHETORICA conduct (like Ajax)? Or does it rather teach crafty arts of social intervention through cunning self-reformation answerable only to the specific exigencies of context and advantage (like Odysseus)? In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Margaret Atwill challenges us to rethink the question of techne, not only in terms of Greek rhetoric, but in terms of contemporary liberal arts education. For Atwill, the liberal arts tradition has long been committed to reproducing normative subjects defined in terms of a universal human "nature", in terms of a foundationalist faith in objective knowledge, and of a reductive scale of value whose end is the acquisition of knowledge. These models of subjectivity, knowledge and value, argues Atwill, coalesce to form what is now termed "the humanities", whose business "is not so much the dissemination of knowledge or competencies as it is the production of a particular 'kind' of subject" (p. 18). This educational paradigm naturalizes the contingent, universalizes the particular, and privatizes the public: claims by now familiar to students of various current postmoderisms. But despite its deformation into a theoretical discipline by scholars like Plato and, later, Grimaldi and Cope, rhetoric was always more than just a tool for normative subject formation. It was in the hands of Protagoras, Isocrates and Aristotle a productive art (a techne) of "seizing the advantage", of social and political intervention, of creating possibilities and transforming existing social structures (a la Odysseus). Atwill's goal is to rethink current classroom goals and methods within the humanities by "reclaiming" rhetoric; to ask "What forums are available and what must be invented to enable the kind of political agency that was once the primary aim of rhetorical instruction?" (p. 210). In her approach to this question, Atwill discusses a wide variety of texts, from Hesiod to Aristotle, unpacking the meaning of techne and rhetoric's place as productive art within that tradition. Atwill develops terms like techne in important ways, but avoids connecting the discussion to related terms (like metis—cunning intelligence, hexis, or habitus all terms used by Bourdieu, upon whom she relies). She does not pursue the important subjectivity/knowledge/value equation with which she Reviews 335 begins. And she never fully answers the question posed by the structure of the book. How does a revised understanding of rhetoric as an...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0009

May 1999

  1. Building Learning Communities on Nonresidential Campuses
    Abstract

    Describes how three faculty members created a learning community at a nonresidential campus by creating and teaching a linked block of three core-curriculum courses (Composition 1, Speech Communication, and Cultural Anthropology) for incoming freshman students. Relates first-day class activities, describes the linking of assignments and communal learning, and discusses assessment. Notes excellent student retention, and student and teacher enthusiasm.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc19991843
  2. A Rhetorical Stance on the Archives of Civic Action
    Abstract

    Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

    doi:10.58680/ce19991139

March 1999

  1. “Like a bewildered star”;: Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann, andaddress, delivered with applause
    Abstract

    A survey of early American narratives of female experience reveals a consis tent pattern of ideological appropriation of women's stories by mediums of cultural authority. Women's lack of political agency and their circumscribed public voice facilitated their complicity in these projects. Colonial clergymen shaped female captivity narratives to support their political agendas, and women's criminal confessions were tailored to reinforce social norms endorsed both by ministers and magistrates.! This essay examines the implications of Herman Mann's appropriation of the experience of Deborah Sampson [Gannett], who served for eighteen months in the continental army during the American Revolution disguised as a male, and who described her exploits in a speech published by Mann under the title Addres [sic], Delivered with Applause.... Between March and October, 1802, in a venture undertaken to earn money for her family, Sampson delivered to audiences in New England and eastern New York at least a part of this text, narrating her military experiences and penitently confessing her transgression of woman's sphere, in what is believed to be the first public speaking tour by a woman in America (Anderson XII). Although previous commentary on Sampson's Address has noted that Mann played a part in shaping the text, a survey of his other publications strongly suggests that he was the sole author of this speech. Mann, a Dedham, Massachusetts printer, occasional poet and newspaper editor, wrote and published, among other texts, patriotic addresses and also criminal confessions in which he assumed the first person voice of his subjects, just as he does in the Sampson address. Five years before he drafted her speech, Mann had compiled, in his own voice, Sampson's memoirs in a book entitled The Female Review, an account which he rewrote after she died, this time employing the first person voice of his subject throughout the text. Although in the 1797 biography he faithfully recorded some facts of her childhood and included verifiable details regarding her military experience, extensive portions of the text were fashioned from other sources, including fabricated or imaginatively augmented episodes.2 The 1802 speech, in which Mann recasts his earlier treatment of Sampson's heroism in significant ways, is important, not because it dramatizes Sampson's own conflicted psyche, as has been argued recently (Campbell), but because it exemplifies cultural strategies for containing dangerous models of female conduct; strategies employed in this case by a representative of liberal republican print culture who consistently advocated improved educational opportunities for women.3 Examining the cultural influences that shaped Mann's appropriation of Sampson's story documents emphatically the shifting gender politics

    doi:10.1080/02773949909391141

February 1999

  1. Public Displays of Affection: Political Community through Critical Empathy
    Abstract

    Reflects on the notion of community in public life. Considers the importance of developing and sustaining affective relationships in the larger public sphere, engaging in civic literacy (publicly consequential acts of citizenship) complemented and sustained by civil literacy (characterized by a willingness to listen), supported by critical empathy (establishing affective connections with other human beings).

    doi:10.58680/rte19991669

January 1999

  1. The Scottish Invention of English Literature ed. by Robert Crawford
    Abstract

    Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to 98 RHETORICA explore the implications of this thesis in the context of issues such as national identity, cultural politics, and gender in Scotland, England, America, and Australasia. Robert Crawford introduces the volume by situating it within the context of recent accounts of the development of university English. He then addresses the establishment of courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at St. Andrews, focusing in particular on the career of Robert Watson, who was appointed Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in 1756. In the second article, Neil Rhodes continues Crawford's discussion of the curriculum at St. Andrew's by detailing the influence of Ramus on the teaching of Belles Lettres. Rhodes argues that it was the dissemination of Ramist pedagogy through the work of Roland Macllmaine at St. Andrews which led in the eighteenth century to the "redescription of Rhetoric as Criticism", first in the lectures of Watson and later in the work of Lord Karnes (p. 31). Joan Pittock focuses on the Scottish development of English Studies by examining the curriculum at Aberdeen. In her article, she illustrates the philosophical approach to Belles Lettres in the works of Aberdonian scholars such as David Fordyce, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, as well as the critical connections these scholars make between the concept of taste and the social and ethical development of students. The important social function of English Studies is also taken up by Paul Bator in his discussion of the novel in the Scottish university curriculum. Bator demonstrates the rise of the novel as a serious genre of study through careful analysis of lecture notes from Professors of Rhetoric at St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities, acquisition and library borrowing records, and activities of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society. He argues that for Scottish professors of rhetoric in the eighteenth century "the novel provided a unique and unstoppable vehicle by which their students could observe and learn vicariously the manners of their English brethren" (p. 90). The new genre, then, functioned as a form of conduct literature through which the values of mainstream British culture were perpetuated in Scotland. Bator's analysis of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society, however, indicates that the study of the novel in the Scottish universities...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0029
  2. Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America by Don Paul Abbot
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 96 Don Paul Abbot, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997) xiii + 135pp. The study and practice of rhetoric were at the center of all representations, interpretations and debates in colonial Spanish America. Readings and criticisms of the cultural production of the colonial period, since just before the Quintencenary celebration in 1992 and after, have shed light on diverse aspects of history, culture and society. However, these critical assessments have only superficially confronted the use and transformation of the precepts of the European rhetorical tradition across the Atlantic. In colonial Spanish America, rhetoric offered the theories behind the evangelization project and the rules to follow in the most important political debates of the period. Don Paul Abbot's contribution to colonial studies and the history of rhetoric in America, Rhetoric in the New World, looks at how Spanish, Amerindian and Mestizo rhetoricians challenged the classical tradition and offer a new perspective on secular and religious historical writing, the theory behind it, and culture. Spanish and Mestizo scholars gave continuity and provided a new perspective in theory and practice to Renaissance humanism and the rhetorical tradition. Abbot addresses this important problem, successfully demonstrating the important role of and adjustments made to ancient concepts in the practice of writing theory, considering the different addressees, and more important, the project of representation, translation and interpretation of the Amerindian culture. The texts under review in Abbot's book provide a crosssection of some important writers and intellectuals during the early colonial period. He discusses the works of Fray Luis de Granada, Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Valadés, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, José de Acosta, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and José de Arriaga. The context to the transmission of the precepts of rhetoric from Spain to the New World is provided in an insightful manner with a study of the lesser known Breve tratado, by Fray Luis de Granada, one of the most important ascetic writers, Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to ...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0028
  3. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader ed. by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde
    Abstract

    104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0031
  4. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women ed. by Molly Meijer Wertheimer
    Abstract

    Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter­ writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1999.0027

November 1998

  1. Public Debate – An Act of Hostility?
    doi:10.1023/a:1007735127171
  2. Short Reviews
    Abstract

    Research Article| November 01 1998 Short Reviews George Kennedy,Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Andrea A. Lunsford ed.. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).Takis Poulakos,Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp.David Roochnik,Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp.Peter Auksi,Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Monfreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995).Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp.Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle,Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self(Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997) xv+274pp.L. L. Gaillet ed., Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences (Mahwah, N.J.: Hermagoras Press, 1998) xviii + 238pp.Thomas W. Benson,Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. Mary Garrett, Mary Garrett School of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Shirley Sharon-Zisser Dept of English, Tel Aviv Univeristy, Ramat Aviv 69 978, Israel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen, C. Jan Swearingen Dept of English, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Edward Schiappa, Edward Schiappa Dept of Communication, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jameela Lares, Jameela Lares Dept of English, University of Southem Mississippi, Southem Station Box 5037, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Victor Skretkowicz, Victor Skretkowicz Dept of English, University of Dundee, Dundee DDl 4HN, Scotland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Don Paul Abbott, Don Paul Abbott Dept of English, University of Califomia, Davis, Califomia 95616, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Paul Bator, Paul Bator Dept of English, Stanford University, Stanford, Califomia 94305, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas Miller Thomas Miller Dept of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (4): 431–454. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Garrett, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, C. Jan Swearingen, Edward Schiappa, Jameela Lares, Victor Skretkowicz, Don Paul Abbott, Paul Bator, Thomas Miller; Short Reviews. Rhetorica 1 November 1998; 16 (4): 431–454. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431

October 1998

  1. The Role of Burke's Four Master Tropes in Scientific Expression
    Abstract

    The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

    doi:10.2190/bm93-7y2g-bug4-bggy

September 1998

  1. Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self by Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle
    Abstract

    Reviews 443 historians than for those studying the impact of rhetorical tradition, practice, or survival. Its lack of focus renders it uninviting, but its very specialized, well-documented articles have much to offer. Victor Skretkowicz University ofDundee Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) xv+274pp. In Loyola's Acts, Marjory O'Rourke Boyle demonstrates that Ignacio Loyola's account of his life is deeply influenced by the traditions and techniques of classical rhetoric. In doing so, she challenges "the premise of modern interpretation, which regards Loyola's life as "an autobiographical narrative" which is "a factually historical document" (p. 2). In Boyle's view, Loyola's Acts {Acta patris Ignatii) is far from an autobiography in the twentiethcentury sense of that term. The work is, rather, is an example of what Boyle calls "the rhetoric of the self", a variation of the classical genre of epideictic oratory. The epideictic character of the Acts determines the text: "Although epideictic rhetoric assumed the matters for praise or blame to be true, it could by the rules exploit the techniques of fiction, so that every detail was not necessarily factual" (p. 3). So it is with Loyola's life, a narrative that is morally true, but not necessarily empirically accurate. As epideictic rhetoric, rather than autobiography, the Acts is an exercise in praise and blame: praise of God's glory and condemnation of Loyola's vainglory. Although the title suggests that Loyola's Acts is about Loyola's life, Boyle's book is more properly about Renaissance rhetoric broadly conceived. Boyle shows how Loyola's narrative is dependent upon the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Petrarch, Erasmus, and the many other authorities of the rhetorical culture of early-modern Europe. So great is this dependence that Boyle maintains "Loyola's piety is established in the renaissance revival of that rhetorical culture" (p. 9). To support this contention she advances an impressive display of evidence from Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance theological, 444 RHETORICA philosophical, and literary sources together with contemporary scholarship from the corresponding disciplines. This display of erudition is all the more remarkable because it is presented with concision and clarity. These are two qualities often absent from current humanistic prose but, as Boyle reminds us, both explicitly and by example, clarity is a virtue of classical rhetoric (p. 5). One result of Boyle's broad intellectual and cultural approach to the Acts is that Loyola himself seems removed from his own narrative. This is a necessary consequence of analyzing the Acts as rhetoric rather than autobiography. Boyle contends that Loyola refuses a "prominent authorial role" and is therefore quintessentially a type rather than an individual (pp. 148-49). This preference for the archetypal over the individual facilitates Loyola's presentation of the broad epideictic themes of praise and blame. Thus in each of the four chapters ("The Knight Errant," "The Ascetic," "The Flying Serpent," and "The Pilgrim"), Boyle considers the qualities and circumstances of Loyola's character that offer edification for readers of the Acts. As instances of epideictic rhetoric the episodes depicted do not so much represent a literal account of events in Loyola's life as they present opportunities for demonstrative oratory. A good deal of recent scholarship has illuminated the ways in which rhetoric has exercised a formative influence on Renaissance literature. Although much has been done in this area, we probably still do not fully appreciate just how pervasive was rhetoric's role in the Renaissance. Boyle has certainly advanced this appreciation by offering a rhetorical reading of a work presumed to be autobiographical, a reading informed by the work's cultural and intellectual context, rather than by critical standards derived from other genres and other eras. Moreover, Boyle demonstrates the value of recognizing epideictic rhetoric for what it is, a moral voice which spoke forcefully to antiquity and the Renaissance and, if we attempt to understand it, continues to speak to us today. Thus in Loyola's Acts, Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle presents an impressive addition to our understanding of rhetoric and literature in the Renaissance. Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis ...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0009
  2. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition ed. by Andrea A. Lunsford
    Abstract

    Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0004
  3. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women ed. by Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan
    Abstract

    Reviews 441 discrepancy between ideal simplicity and actual practice, as for instance among the Byzantine iconoclasts who were also patrons of secular art. At the least, this study on the tensions between modes of discourse suggests interesting directions for further study. Jameela Lares University ofSouthern Mississippi Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp. This is a collection of essays by different authors on women who either wrote against, or were victimized by, misogynists. It closes where it begins, with Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan associating Hillary Clinton and four queens: Isabel, Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth I and Mary II (pp. 7, 275-81). It is a connection made in other papers, but here it is supported by another between the Republican Rev. Pat Robertson and John Knox (pp. 4-5). Where these title essays are destined to be short-lived, the critical essays sandwiched between vary enormously in subject and approach, are learned, and bear re-reading. But as there is no apparent theme to the entire book, and the organization is simply chronological, I try to group the material here into meaningful clusters. Only Jane Donaworth, choosing examples from Madelaine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathusa Reginald Makin, and Mary Astell, especially in Part 2 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697), deals with the call for a revival of classical rhetorical education for women. Throughout the rest of this book "rhetoric" has other meanings. Daniel Kempton explores how Christine de Pizan teaches women to survive male oppression by 'dissimulation' or hypocrisy in Cité des Dames (1405) and Trésor de la Cité Des Dames. "Rhetoric" means "cant" or "slander" in the demonising of Anne Boleyn that Retha Wamicke describes; in the reiteration of allusions to women as breeding stock that Jo Eldrige Carney identifies in Shakespeare s Henry VIII; and in the representation of women as commodities to 442 RHETORICA be bought, sold, won or lost in the wagers of Puritan Whigs that Arlen Feldwick produces multiple examples of in the royalist Margaret Cavendish's comedies. In balancing the accusations of promiscuousness leveled by Jacobites against Mary II, or eulogies by her supporters, W. M. Spellman urges rejection of conventional seventeenth-century biographical material in order to reassess Mary's active political role in episcopal appointments. There are three essays on Elizabeth I. Ilona Bell contrasts de Feria's and de Quadra's accounts of Elizabeth's "rhetoric of courtship", comparing "Camden's retrospective vision of the virgin queen" (pp. 61, 77). Lena Cowen Orlin collects examples of Elizabeth's "spousal trope", of her "fictional motherhood" of her state and nobles, and her "trope of royal kinship" towards a "figurative family of European sovereigns" (pp. 89-95). Dennis Moore places Henry Howard's unpublished "Dutiful Defence of the Lawful Regiment of Women" (1590) into the context both of other defenses of female rule, and attacks upon it. Elaine Kruse compares propaganda against Hillary Clinton with that used against Catherine de Medicis after the 1572 massacre at Paris, and Marie Antoinette, all vilified on the grounds that they control power. And Elizabeth Mazola sees in Anne Askew's semiautobiographical Examinations her "larger project to educate her accusers about their epistemological faults" (p. 164). In the remaining essays the focus is not on rhetoric so much as on women and politics. Gwynne Kennedy describes Margaret Cavendish's reformist intentions in the History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, where Cavendish repeatedly urges better government in practice rather than rebellion. The fly in the ointment is the Queen's vindictively cruel streak that manifests itself after she gains power: a "rhetorical marginalisation" that ' calls attention to...a disjunction in Isabel's characterization". There is also a separate note on Cavendish's authorship. And finally, Carole Levin describes two case histories of impersonation, the claim by Mary Boynton to be the daughter of Henry VIII and of Anne Burnell to be daughter of Philip II, reviewing the unfortunate consequences waiting those who almost talk their way into power. Although this book is in the SUNY series...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0008
  4. Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Thomas W. Benson
    Abstract

    Reviews 447 Thomas W. Benson, Rhetoric and Political Culture in NineteenthCentury America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. This collection of essays developed out of the third biennial conference on Public Address that was held in 1992. The contributors range from scholars such as Edwin Black who helped define modern rhetorical criticism to critics who are working to adapt rhetorical criticism to broader trends in contemporary critical theory. The respect paid to "old historicist" examination of individual orators is balanced by "new historicist" attempts to situate individual agency within the social construction of discursive practices. Thomas Benson characterizes the collection as a "a series of close textual readings of significant texts in American rhetoric, inquiring into the text, the context, the influence of pervasive rhetorical forms and genres, the intentions of the speaker, the response of the audience, and the role of the critic" (p. xiii). However, the works that he has brought together often challenge the assumption that critics determine significance by looking into texts and outside to contexts to discover the intentions of authors and the responses of auditors. For this and other reasons, this collection should be read not only by those who specialize in the "art of public address" but also by others outside communications departments who are interested in revitalizing the civic orientation of rhetoric and composition. The contributors engage in critical dialogues that give the book a coherence and richness that is too often lacking in collections of isolated essays. After a foreword by James Andrews and an equally brief preface by Thomas Benson, Edwin Black's essay, "The Aesthetics of Rhetoric, American Style", introduces a theme that echoes throughout the collection and resounds in Robert Hariman's concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of the Public Address". Black calls for attending to the aesthetic dimension of rhetoric by distinguishing two aesthetic modalities: "a dispositional or structural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of power, and a stylistic or textural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of character" (p. 4). Black's essay is followed by four pairs of essays: James Farrell and Stephen Browne on Daniel Webster's Eulogy to Adams and Jefferson, John 448 RHETORICA Lucaites and James Jasinski on Frederick Douglas's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", Martha Solomon Watson and David Henry on the "Declaration of Sentiments" from the 1833 American Anti-Slavery Society and the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, and Michael Leff and Maurice Charland on appropriations of Lincoln in works by Henry Grady, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Adams. The second contributors respond to the methods of their predecessors to develop and often provocative discussion of critical assumptions and modes of interpretation. These exchanges broaden the significance of the explications themselves, especially for readers who are interested in assessing the state of the art in research on public discourse. Such an assessment is offered in the concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of Public Address" by Robert Hariman. According to Hariman, research on public address has interdisciplinary significance because "public performances" provide an insider's perspective on discursive structures in action (pp. 164-5). Hariman characterizes the tension between "the traditional study of oratory and modern communications studies" as leading to a current "standoff between a neoclassical revival and an appropriation of poststructuralism" (p. 166). He insightfully explores the limitation and potentials of each perspective and then argues that both could be enriched by an attention to "persuasive artistry" that accommodated a "hermeneutics of fragmentation" as well as a concern for "civic memory" (pp. 166-171). By complicating rather than resolving the conflicts among his predecessors, Hariman's conclusion provides a rich context for rereading their explications and considering their broader significance. Research on the arts of public address gains in significance as distinctions between public and private and aesthetics and rhetorics are being reconfigured across the academy. This collection should provide a useful point of reference for mapping and advancing those interdisciplinary trends. Thomas Miller University ofArizona ...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0011
  5. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction by George Kennedy
    Abstract

    Short Reviews George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Comparative rhetoric, the study of rhetoric across different cultural traditions, is a potentially rich, extremely challenging, and thus, largely untouched area of study. Anyone reviewing George Kennedy's book on this subject must begin by commending him for his scholarly dedication and, even more, his courage, in venturing into such a demanding subject. As he describes it in his prologue, comparative rhetoric involves using comparison to identify the universals and the particulars in various rhetorical traditions, and then formulating "a General Theory of Rhetoric that will apply in all societies", with concepts and terms applicable across cultures. Kennedy construes the object of this inquiry equally broadly, defining rhetoric as "a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication". But Kennedy's comparative rhetoric very quickly becomes something much less ambitious. Kennedy gives pride of place to the terminology and theories of Western rhetoric, not just as a heuristically convenient starting point, but also as the limit of his inquiry. From Kennedy's perspective, the project is one of "test[ingj the applicability of Western rhetorical concepts outside the West" (p. 5). Specifically, to what extent can the rhetorical terminology of the Greco-Roman tradition describe the practices of other traditions? Kennedy makes two highly questionable methodological choices as he pursues this question. First, he rules out serious consideration of rhetorical terms and systems developed by other cultures, even as a categorization of their own practices, on the grounds that they are "unfamiliar" and their use would be "confusing" to the reader. Second, he refuses to explore the 431 432 RHETORICA possibility that Greco-Roman terms or concepts might be rooted in particular presuppositions that are not widely shared across cultures. With these two moves Kennedy has erased the most obvious sources of checks on, correction of, and resistance to his readings of these cultures. The "testing" of Greco-Roman rhetoric is reduced to a simple identification of similarities and differences; as Kennedy puts it, "I see no objection to the use of Western terminology to describe parts of a non-Westem discourse where these are clearly present" (p. 236). This is comparison with no methodological safeguards, and thus no struggle against such ever-present dangers of cross-cultural work as unreflective projection, forced comparison, and unexamined ethnocentrism. Caveat lector. The reader might be surprised to find that the first half of this book, titled "Rhetoric in Societies without Writing", begins with communication in animal societies. This reflects Kennedy's desire to ground rhetoric, not merely in human nature, but in nature itself; "[tjhe existence of elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in animal communication suggest that they are all natural parts of rhetoric" (p. 220). Kennedy then turns to speculation about the origins of human language, as a bridge to his discussion of rhetorical practices and terms in various non­ literate societies. The organizational principle here is developmental, for Kennedy believes that Australian aboriginal culture may allow us to see more clearly our (rhetorical) closeness to the animals, and also preserves the early stages of human rhetorical development. The objections to this kind of developmental theorizing have been voiced so often elsewhere that I see no need to reiterate them here. The second half of the book, titled "Rhetoric in Early Literate Cultures", starts with the Ancient Near East, moves to Classical China, then to India, and ends where it all began, with Classical Greece and Rome. In each chapter Kennedy introduces the culture's rhetorical practices, concepts, and theorizings, analyzes some representative examples of oratory or literary composition, and provides references and a bibliography. It is in these introductions to other literatures and the accompanying reference lists that I see one of the greatest values of Kennedy's book. These individual chapters will doubtless be Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0003
  6. Rhetorical criticism of public discourse on the internet: Theoretical implications
    Abstract

    The Internet and access to it have grown exponentially in the past three years. Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center reports that, since January 1994 when its first survey of Internet users was conducted, the Internet has grown from 1250 servers to over one million servers. There are over thirty million users of the Internet in the United States alone (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center). The versatility of the medium has increased along with its size, as the addition of Java technology and other features has increased the dynamism and interactivity of Web sites and as conveyance via television has increased access. Mass communications scholars and our colleagues in interpersonal, organizational, and small group communication have been studying computer-mediated communication [CMC] for some time. Mass communications researchers have been concerned with a number of questions-how First Amendment protections and intellectual and property rights transfer from print to CMC; what factors play a role in attracting audiences to Internet sites; what strategies can be used to determine accuracy of information on the Internet; and so forth (McChesney; Morris and Ogan; Reeves and Nass). Interpersonal communication researchers have studied the development and maintenance of relationships online (Walther; Parks and Floyd), while small group researchers have examined the dynamics of group process in computer-mediated environments (Savicki, Lingenfelter, and Kelley; Rafaeli and Sudweeks). In addition to these, there have been many other forms of communication research studying Internet discourse and interaction. But rhetorical critics and theorists are latecomers to the scene. There are many possible reasons for this. Many humanists have been slow to take up interest in discourse in electronic environments, perhaps because they suspect that critical work and critical theory will need to be changed to suit the new communication environments, and this is true because in a hypertext environment, author, audience, and text are dispersed. While such dispersion can and does occur in other modalities, computer-mediated discourse is particularly prone to it. The function of the author as originator of a message can be suppressed in groupauthored, disguised, or anonymous Internet postings. As I will show later, identifying the nature and reactions of audiences is made more difficult in computer-mediated environments. And when text becomes hypertext, the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability. As Ted Friedman (73) noted,

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391131

June 1998

  1. The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, and: Milton and the Revolutionary Reader by Sharon Achinstein
    Abstract

    Reviews 339 preachers' macaronic compositions, recently well-documented by Siegfried Wenzel. All ingeniously augment the means of sharing Christian wisdom among the laity. Georgiana Donavin Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp. Sharon Achinstein Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Hardly any student of modem American politics would fail to agree that the mass media—specifically television—play a key role in structuring political discourse. Whether or not individual politicians and their media representatives actually formally study mass communication, all know the forms, demands, and constraints of television. Failure to master the medium usually results in failure to win an election or carry the day in a discussion of public policy. Further, the medium creates a series of expectations in viewers, expectations that must be met or consciously manipulated and subverted by any political writer or speaker. Now, imagine reading a scholarly book on modem political discourse that may mention television but does not examine its characteristics as a medium or the viewing habits or demographics of the audience, and yet claims to study "media". Such is frequently the situation in current studies of the literature, politics, and political discourse of seventeenth-century England. The word "rhetoric" often appears in titles, and indeed in authors' arguments, but, on inspection, a reader hoping to find discussion of the ars bene dicendi as an epistemic approach to structuring political language will be disappointed. Too often "rhetoric" simply becomes a synonym for "language" or "trope", rather than a means of inquiry into the workings of argument. 340 RHETORICA The reasons for scholarly attention to political language in the period are manifest. The century claims what for many historians is the first modern revolution, complete with a nascent public sphere, people beginning to perceive themselves as public actors, and, most importantly, a free press that empowered both. It claims many writers engaged in pamphleteering who at any time would rank with the best in the language, from William Prynne and John Lilbume to Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Milton's stature as a poet guarantees attention to his political prose and to the politics of his great poems. Moreover, without question, the educational practice of the century, beginning in the grammar school, was relentlessly rhetorical. Rhetoric thus saturated seventeenth-century writers and readers as much as television does the modern political nation. The period is thus ripe for rhetorical analysis. I examine here two recent exemplars of Milton studies that illustrate the gulf between "rhetorical study" and knowledge of rhetoric that pervades current seventeenth-century scholarship. Both books have been extensively, and largely favorably, reviewed in reputable journals. One received the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America as the best book on Milton published in 1994. Both are learned and engaging, and both offer valuable insights into Milton's work. But the arguments of both are compromised by the writers' apparent unfamiliarity with the entire field of the history of rhetoric. In one case, the author's knowledge of rhetoric is limited; in the other, the author lacks any comprehension of rhetorical theory, principle, or practice. My purpose here is to highlight the ways in which this blind spot affects the theses of these two otherwise powerful books, and to call attention to two recent studies of other periods that admirably achieve, through their grasp of rhetoric, what the Miltonists attempt. In The Empty Garden, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offers a study of the Jesus of Paradise Regained as founder of a religious culture that offers a "new way of knowing and a new way of being" (xi) through self-knowledge gained by "reading", broadly defined as interpreting both the written word and the "text" of the world. Through his creation of Jesus, and his contrast of that Jesus to the Samson of the companion work Samson Agonistes, Milton becomes Reviews 341 a powerful cultural critic, ultimately arguing that the relationship between self-knowledge and self-representation may best be negotiated through politics. As Rushdy makes abundantly clear in his first chapter, "'Confronting the Subject: The Art of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0024
  2. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action ed. by Ian Worthington
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 308 these six essays demonstrate the breadth, status, and versatility of rhetoric as a field of inquiry, study, and practice. In their introductory essay, Bennett and Leff remark, "Working quietly against the grain of a specialized [academic] culture, Murphy has opened a conduit between historical scholarship and the classroom" (4). A lengthy bibliography of Murphy's publications and work in progress, contributed by Winifred Horner, follows the Preface. Like Murphy's own contributions to the field, the essays collected in Rhetoric and Pedagogy successfully "hold historical scholarship and current pragmatic interests in a useful relationship to one another" (4). By their own interest in bridging historical scholarship and current teaching practice, the contributors to this Festschrift honor Murphy's legacy and continue his work. Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard Ian Worthington ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: Routledge, 1994) xi+277pp. This collection of twelve essays is interesting for three reasons. First, it constitutes one more sign that rhetoric is undergoing a veritable renaissance. Second, it shows that classics, a discipline once indifferent or hostile to the rhetorical enterprise, is now willing to join other disciplines in recognizing rhetoric as a major force in the shaping of western culture (nine of the contributors to this collection are classicists). Third, and most important, this volume does not concern itself with rhetoric in isolation. Rather, it examines its many intersections with such genres as politics, history, law, epic, tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The various treatments of the particular intersections combine traditional and new insights, and open the path to many provocative questions. Likewise, they generally invite reflection and criticism. More importantly, however, the collection as a whole points to a maximalist project that takes rhetoric beyond the orators, who practised it and the philosophers, who discussed Reviews 309 it. In so doing, it suggests that richer understandings can be had when placing rhetoric at the center of the Hellenic culture and crossing it with other genres (i.e. epic, tragedy, comedy, history). In this regard, the collection recommends itself in its entirety much more than any one of its chapters. The common framework that all contributors share comes from the distinction as well as the connection between rhetoric as the study, and oratory as the practice of persuasion. According to the editor, "The aim of this book is to bring together...discussions of the relationship of Greek oratory and rhetoric to a variety of important areas and genres, at the same time reflecting new trends and ideas now at work in the study of rhetoric" (ix). In the first chapter, "From orality to rhetoric: an intellectual transformation", Carol Thomas and Edward Webb trace the emergence of rhetoric along the orality-literacy continuum. Relying on but also refining the work of George Kennedy, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and Thomas Cole, the authors point out that even though rhetoric benefited from the contributions of literacy it nevertheless retained its initial oral character. This chapter examines rhetoric along the registers of composition, delivery, and analysis, and pays attention to four features: uses, persuasive intent, magical aura, and the speaker's esteem. In chapter 2, "Rhetorical means of persuasion", Christopher Carey argues that of the three Aristotelian pisteis, pathos and ethos are more indirect while the third, logos, is a more direct means of persuasion. Carey illustrates the uses of pathos and ethos in the actual speeches of orators such as Demosthenes, Aeschines and Lysias, and concludes that Aristotle's distinctions are considerably "neater" than their actual use shows. In chapter 3, "Probability and persuasion: Plato and early Greek rhetoric", Michael Gagarin seeks to minimize the Platonic influence on our understanding of classical Greek rhetoric. His thesis is that Plato's widely accepted claim that the orators prefer probability over the truth is demonstrably wrong. Gagarin reviews the uses of probability arguments in the surviving speeches of orators and sophists and finds no evidence supporting Plato's claim. Gagarin's study shows convincingly that the orators generally value truth; however, they resort to probability when RHETORICA 310 the truth of a case is unknown, unclear, or subject to differing interpretations. In chapter 4, "Classical rhetoric and modem theories of discourse", David Cohen takes a brief but...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0016

May 1998

  1. The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the Dream of the Good City
    doi:10.1023/a:1007735612744
  2. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory
    Abstract

    Research Article| May 01 1998 Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory Christopher Lyle Johnstone,Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp.Kathy Eden,Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp.James L. Kastley,Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293.Gabriele Knappe,Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp.Thomas P. Miller,The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 ppKwesi Yankah,Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory, African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 194 pp. George Pullman, George Pullman Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Richard A. Miller, Richard A. Miller Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas M. Conley, Thomas M. Conley University of Illinois, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Martin Camargo, Martin Camargo Department of English, 107 Tate Hall, University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kermit Campbell, Kermit Campbell Department of English, Parlin Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Lynee Lewis Gaillet Lynee Lewis Gaillet Department of English, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (2): 227–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation George Pullman, Richard A. Miller, Thomas M. Conley, Martin Camargo, Kermit Campbell, Lynee Lewis Gaillet; Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory; Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception; Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodemism; Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England; The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces; Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Rhetorica 1 May 1998; 16 (2): 227–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227 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. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.227
  3. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory
    doi:10.2307/358948

March 1998

  1. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory by Christopher Lyle Johnstone
    Abstract

    SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0031
  2. Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory by Kwesi Yankah
    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0036
  3. Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism by James L. Kastley
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0033
  4. Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women
    Abstract

    In the late Renaissance in England and France women appropriated classical rhetorical theory for their own purposes, creating a revised version that presented discourse as modeled on conversation rather than public speaking. In Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Conversations Sur Divers Sujets (1680), and Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (1684), Madeleine de Scudéry adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, feminizes rhetoric by analogies from women's experience and inserts women into empiricist rhetoric by assuming discourse based on conversation rather than public speaking. In Women's Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell revises sermon rhetorics, claiming preaching for women, but preaching in private spaces, in the Quaker prophetic fashion. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1701), Mary Astell adapts Augustine, proposing a women's college to promote a "Holy Conversation", and a rhetoric of written discourse treating writer and reader as conversational partners. These women use categories of the ideal woman to contest the gendering of discourse in their culture, questioning "private" and "public" as defining terms for communication.

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0029
  5. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces by Thomas P. Miller
    Abstract

    RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0035
  6. Review essays
    Abstract

    Christopher Lyle Johnstone, ed. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. viii + 196 pages. Craig R. Smith. Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1998 (1997). xiv + 456 pages. Robert J. Connors. Composition‐Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 374 pp.

    doi:10.1080/07350199809389099

February 1998

  1. Grounds of Assent in Joseph Priestley's A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism
    Abstract

    Abstract: Despite Joseph Priestley's contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley's rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley's Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.

    doi:10.1525/rh.1998.16.1.81
  2. "Persuasion Dwelt on Her Tongue": Female Civic Rhetoric in Early America
    doi:10.2307/378325
  3. Persuasion Dwelt on Her Tongue: Female Civic Rhetoric in Early America
    Abstract

    Taps research in American studies to learn more about rhetoric and writing instruction in post-Revolutionary America. Merges the separate (and gendered) histories of early 19th-century American rhetoric, breaking down the separate spheres in contemporary historical and literary scholarship. Examines civic rhetoric found in texts that represent women’s schooling.

    doi:10.58680/ce19983677
  4. Rhetoric through Media
    Abstract

    Assignments appear in every chapter. I. EXPLORING CONCEPTS. 1. Seeing Rhetoric Through Media. Overview - Key Terms: Rhetoric, Media, Text. Keeping a Journal. Issues. Genres - Observing and Classifying Texts. Texts as Myths - Reading Takes Place From Within Belief Systems. Jennifer Ditri, Cheerleaders are Athletes, Too! Reading News and Popular Texts - Practice of Critical Reading. 2. Reading Media. Overview - Reading Interactively. Issues. What's a Medium? - Definition and Background of the Term. Learning From the Media. Being a Raymond Williams, Keyword: Consumer. Doing Without Media. Journal Entries: Marci Nowak, Jennifer Ditri, Mark Maxson, Stacey McAfee, Michael Halstead, Meredith Roedel. Clutter and Context - Ways to Deal with Overload. Strategies for Reading S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, Who Are the Elite? Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Real Elite. Conventions - Noticing What is Taken for Granted. Conventions in Writing and Writing Classes. Bill McKibben, 7:00 a.m. II. MEDIA AND PURPOSES FOR WRITING. 3. Making Use of Observations - From Prewriting to Drafting. Overview - What Critical Reading of Can Add to the Writing Issues. Writing as Your Medium - Genres and Conventions in Speech and Writing. William Stafford, A Way of Writing. Writing Essays as a Conventional Act - Crossover Between Conventions in Texts and in Writing. Broadcast News, Tom Gives Aaron Some Tips on Reading the Journal Entries: Teri Hurst. How Writers Write - Myth of the Born Writer. George Plimpton, Interview with Ernest Hemingway Karen Kurt Tiel, Note About The Loop Writing Process. Prewriting - Devices for Exploring What You and Your Readers Know. Drafting - Pulling it All Together. Readers' Roles - Text Invites Us to Play Along. Cassandra Amesley, How to Watch Star Trek. Readers' Roles in Essays: Linda Weltner, Joys of Mediocrity Kirkpatrick Sale, Fighting the Darkness Danielle Smith, Publishers' Clearing House. 4. Gathering and Evaluating News and Information. Overview - Confirming Our Basis for Judgment. Issues. Stories in the News - Narratives Which Guide Our Interpretation. Midland County Review, Barcia Joins Conservatives in Fight Against Unfunded Mandates. Sabrina Cantu, It's O.K. to Make Fun of Jesus, If He's Black. How to Search for Information - Search Strategies for News and Information. Stacey Cole, Negativity in the Media. What Counts as News? - Problems with Definitions and Reception. News as Rhetorical. Forms of News. News as Commercial. James Amend, A Spicier, More Racey New Medium. News and Entertainment. Reading the News Comparatively - Earthquake in Japan, as Treated in Several News Media. Problems in News. Keeping Informed - Health Care Reform. Bill Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Great Health Care Debate. Propaganda. Objectivity and Fairness. Appendix: Transcripts of News Reports on Kobe Earthquake. CBS Evening News. CNN Report. All Things Considered. NPR Morning Edition. 5. Close Attention to Detail: Regarding the Commercial. Overview - Value in Analyzing Unvalued Texts. Issues. Why Ads? - Effective Rhetoric in the Face of Audience Resistance. Collecting Ads - Categories as Part of Making Meaning. How to Read a Commercial - Rhetorical Devices in Print Ads. Tara L. Prainito, Advertising's Enhancements. Analyzing a TV Commercial - Technical Events in Television Commercials. Transcript and Analysis of Midol Commercial. Aaron Kukla, Analysis of a Chevrolet Camaro Ad. Categorizing Commercials. Problems. Ads as Propaganda. Ads and Effects. Dirt - Ambiguities in Boundaries Between Texts. Leslie Savan, Don't Inhale: Tobacco Industry's Attitude-Delivery System. 6. Reading Pictures. Overview - Connections Between Visual and Verbal. Issues. Appeal of Seeing - Reliance on Sight. Pictures and Narratives. How to Read a Picture. Signs, Codes, and Conventions. Visual Images and Descriptive Writing. Problem: Gaze. 7. Entertainment as Information. Overview - What Entertainment Texts Tell Us. Issues. What's Entertainment? - Business or Cultural Context. Entertainment as Play - Reactions to Popular Culture. More Dirt - Transgressions in Entertainment Texts. Why Do They Want You To Play? - Entertainment and Hegemony. Arthur Asa Berger, Genre Migration. Audience's View - Dominant, Resisting, and Negotiating Positions. Problems. Taste. Popular Music. Roches, Mr. Sellack. Violence. Carl M. Cannon, Honey, I Warped the Kids. John Leonard, Why Blame TV? Todd Gitlin, Imagebusters: Hollow Crusade Against TV Violence. Children's Entertainment. David Foster, Sexist? Racist? Violent? Terrence Rafferty, No Pussycat. Science-Fiction. Race and Entertainment Media. Stereotypes. Todd Gitlin, From Inside Prime Time. III. RECONSIDERATIONS. 8. Discovering Contexts and Deeper Purposes. Overview - Critical Thinking About Writing. Issues. Representation and the Natural - Denaturing Natural. Labeling - Cues for Interpretation. Appellation and Ideology. Ideology: Definitions and Illustrations - Three Paradigms: False Consciousness, Any Set of Values and Assumptions, and Specifically Values and Assumptions. Reading Die Hard - Ideology as Reflected in a Popular Text Dominant Ideologies. Reading Texts for Ideology. Lisa Straney, Analysis: Nike Ad. Ideology and Metaphor. Problems. Example of PC - Who Gets to Complain About Political Correctness? Brian E. Albrecht, Team Names Still Stir Controversy. Candy Hamilton, Where a Tomahawk Chop Feels Like a Slur. John K. Wilson, Myth of Correctness. Nostalgia. Further Reading. Bob Garfield, Pizza Hut Has the Crust to Roll Out Incorrect Celebs. 9. Revision: Bringing Drafts to Completion. Overview. Issues. Why Revise? - Raising Your Game. Writing as Conversation. Strategies and Tactics for Revising. Computers and Revision. A Few Tactics for Revision - Leave It Alone Nutshelling Bombing: Impersonation. Shannon Peacock, From Dais-ed and Confused. Eric Nelson, From Words Mean Things and Integrity Matters. Sample Revision: Media in the Courts. Collections of Writing. Portfolios - Draft and Exhibition. Class Publications. 10. Developing Style and Audience Awareness. Overview - Style as Product of Interaction Between Persona, Subject, and Audience. Issues. Some Bad Advice About Style. Style as Ornament. Style as Clarity - E.B. White's Disappearing Author. Reducing Unnecessary Difficulty - Some Practical Advice. Style as Constitutive Or Would You Rather Be a Dog? - Audience as Appellated by the Text. Hegemony and Style. Daniel Zwerdling, Interview with Leslie Savan. Ira Teinowitz, From The Marketing 100: Rich Lalley, Red Dog. Style and Audience. Words, Words, Words. Beverly Gross, What a Bitch! Bad Rhetoric - Some Deceptive or Sloppy Devices. Rush Limbaugh and Rhetoric. Recognizing and Correcting Bad Rhetoric. William Lutz, Doublespeak. 11. Expanding Resources. Overview - Dynamic Media. Issues. Collections as a Basis for Your Own System - Adding Other Media. What to Expect - Electronic Media: Hopeful and Pessimistic Assessments. Electronic - Rhetorical Implications. Search Procedures. Hypertext - Implications of a New Form. Internet as Source of Information: A Test Case - Reactions to Oklahoma City Bombing on the Internet. Cyberporn - Circulation Through of Sloppy Research. Library Material - Searching for More. Some Reservations about the Internet. Herbert J. Gans, Electronic Shut Ins: Some Social Flaws of the Information Superhighway. M. Kadi, Q: How Tall is the Internet? A: Four Inches Tall.

    doi:10.2307/358578

January 1998

  1. Grounds of Assent in Joseph Priestley’s A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism
    Abstract

    Despite Joseph Priestley’s contemporary importance, little has been written on his rhetoric, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762). Most commentators group him with the other new rhetoricians Smith, Campbell, and Blair, ignoring the philosophical foundations as well as the political and educational practices that informed Priestley’s rhetorical theory. Located within a larger context of reform and a specific rhetorical situation at Warrington Academy, Priestley’s Lectures illustrate his attempt to establish rational argument as the most compelling way for Dissenters to argue for religious and civil liberty, a goal that clearly distinguishes Priestley from his Scottish contemporaries and that marks the source of his most original contributions to eighteenth-century rhetoric.

    doi:10.1353/rht.1998.0040
  2. The Rhetoric of Fraud in Breast Cancer Trials: Manifestations in Medical Journals and the Mass Media—And Missed Opportunities
    Abstract

    In 1994, the Chicago Tribune announced in a blaring page-one story that fraud had been discovered in an important nine-year-old medical study which compared two treatments for early-stage breast cancer. The study had assured women that lumpectomy plus radiation was as safe as the more invasive mastectomy procedure for early-stage breast cancer; however, the revelation of fraud called these results into question. We examine the reactions of two professional medical journals to demonstrate how negotiations for upholding ethical norms in science took place within the pages of these publications. Then, we analyze the public discourse surrounding the fraud and show that much of the coverage was devoted to scandal. Both forums missed opportunities: professional journals ignored a chance to explore the blurry boundary between “writing up” and “making up” results that all scientists must negotiate in interpreting and publicizing data, while public discourse neglected women affected by the fraud.

    doi:10.2190/9pe1-w6bt-mqwu-jevu
  3. Reviews
    Abstract

    African‐American Orators: A Bio‐Critical Sourcebook, edited by Richard W. Leeman. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1996; xxvi+452. Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America, edited by Thomas W. Benson. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1997. 200 pp. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross & William M. Keith. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. 1997. 371 pp. Reading in Tudor England, by Eugene R. Kintgen. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996; 235 pages. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory, edited by Christopher Lyle Johnstone. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Paper, 196 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391114

October 1997

  1. Beyond Liberation and Excellence: Reconstructing the Public Discourse on Education
    doi:10.2307/358419

September 1997

  1. An adaptation of aristotle: A note on the types of oratory
    doi:10.1080/07350199709389088
  2. “Neither oratory nor dialogue”: Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the genre of Plato'sApology
    Abstract

    In the first half of On Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' mature critical essay, he presents the case that Isocrates, Plato and represent the three finest stylists when it comes to speaking with the diction approved by audiences. In the process of making an argument for the Demosthenic ideal, Dionysius needed to find commensurate speeches by Isocrates and Plato to compare with Demosthenes. For Isocrates, he compared the most elegant portion of On the Peace with a portion of an epideictic from Demosthenes' Third Olynthiac. It was a good choice. However, for Plato, finding an appropriate speech in the philosopher's writing proved more difficult. Of course, we would readily assume that by the first century BCE Dionysius should have felt compelled to use the Apology as the Platonic exemplar. It clearly ranks as one of the impressive speeches in all of history. For his part, were he not to use it, Dionysius was well aware critics would complain that the Apology presents itself as the ideal choice for this kind of analysis. So in anticipation of this objection and his otherwise obscure choice to use Socrates' funeral oration in the Menexenus, he dismisses Plato's Apology as something other than a true forensic and therefore not a viable candidate. He offers the following tantalizingly cryptic reason: There is one forensic by Plato, the Apology of Socrates; but this never saw even the threshold of a law-court or an open assembly, but was written for another purpose and belongs to the category neither of oratory nor of dialogue. I therefore pass over it. (On Dem. 23). Within his own lifetime Dionysius already felt compelled to respond to charges of impiety for committing the sin of suggesting that one could find infelicities in Plato's compositional style. In a letter responding to Gnaeus Pompeius' complaint that, You should not have exposed the faults of Plato when your purpose was to praise Demosthenes (Gn. Pomp. 1), Dionysius responded that had he not objectively compared the best discourses of Isocrates and Plato with those of his argument would have been unpersuasive as well as a criti

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391106

June 1997

  1. History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion by Ronald H. Carpenter
    Abstract

    Reviews 347 dimension often missing (a point mentioned by Trevor Melia in his erudite Comment). Here rhetoric reaches its fullest extension, becoming one with the domain of poetics - but that should come as no surprise to historians of rhetoric. Jean Dietz Moss Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). Ronald Carpenter's History as Rhetoric argues that the stories of past events we call "history" draw upon the resources of rhetoric and can serve to shape a public understanding of the world. For postmodernists, this may not qualify as news, but Carpenter is no postmodernist. He relies pri­ marily on methods that would satisfy the most doctrinaire neoAristotelian or New Critic. He uses the tools of "scientific history" and traditional literary analysis to demonstrate the rhetoricality of history. The focus of Carpenter's book is on American historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Frank L. Owsley, and Barbara Tuchman. He attempts to show how each of these writers employs techniques of style and/or narrative in an effort to achieve "opinion leadership" beyond the realms of academic history. In the cases of Turner, Becker, Mahan, and Tuchman, Carpenter argues that they achieved an effective "rhetorical impress," making his case by means of close readings of their texts com­ bined with documentary evidence of the responses of actual readers. As his one negative example, Carpenter attempts to show that Frank Owsley's contribution to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand failed in its persuasive purpose. Carpenter devotes three chapters (one each on Turner, Becker, and Mahan) to the effects of style, and three chapters (another on Mahan, plus one each on Owsley and Tuchman) to techniques of narrative. In a long concluding chapter, he ranges more broadly across historical and popular writings and even motion pictures to show the pre­ science of Turner's frontier hypothesis in respect to twentieth-century American attitudes toward warfare, and to urge the need for alternatives to the frontiersman metaphor in war-related public discourse. Carpenter is at his best when working as a rhetorical analyst on archival materials. In his chapter on Frederick Jackson Turner, for exam- 348 RHETORICA pie, Carpenter traces the evolution of Turner's style, starting with analyses of primary sources from Turner's high-school and college days, and mov­ ing from those to the later professional writings. Drawing upon both clas­ sical and modem stylistic theory, Carpenter teases out the stylistic lessons Turner learned as a student and shows how those lessons found their way into his mature work. Carpenter then uses published reviews and corre­ spondence from readers to support an argument that, through the power of an "oratorical" style, Turner helped establish the frontiersman as an archetype of American culture. The chapter is a model of stylistic analysis and of cautiously developed argument. Equally interesting and somewhat more venturesome in interpreta­ tion is Carpenter's treatment of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns ofAugust and its role in John Kennedy's decision making during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. That Kennedy had drawn lessons from Tuchman was previously established, and here, as elsewhere in the book, Carpenter acknowledges his debts to other writers with meticulousness and grace. Carpenter's own purpose is to get at specific rhetorical techniques that might account for Tuchman's influence. He draws on Tuchman's correspondence with edi­ torial adviser Denning Miller in an effort to understand the compositional choices made in the writing of her book, and uses Hayden White's tropical theory to characterize the resulting narrative form. He simultaneously develops a speculative argument that draws on documentary evidence to show how specific narrative and stylistic features of The Guns of August might account for its role in Kennedy's thinking during the crisis. Throughout the chapter, Carpenter interweaves narrative, rhetorical analysis, theoretical explication, and the citation of documentary evidence in an admirably coherent and persuasive form. In the Tuchman chapter, Carpenter focuses on the rhetorical effect of a single work on an audience of one. In other chapters he examines rhetori­ cal effects wrought on audiences...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0016
  2. Science, Reason, and Rhetoric ed. by Henry Krips, et al
    Abstract

    344 RHETORICA and yet know all it takes to be American" (p. 245). In the Afterword, Clark and Halloran reiterate that one of their inten­ tions in editing this volume was to encourage more narratives of the histo­ ry of rhetorical theory and practice in the nineteenth century. In its poten­ tial for encouraging additional studies and new theories of cultural and public discourses, this volume has certainly taken a considerable step toward fulfilling its editors' hopes. Rosa A. Eberly Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, eds. Henry Krips, J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). This volume of twelve essays and six comments treats a continuingly provocative subject. The book, the product of a conference convened to inaugurate a new program in the rhetoric of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offers some illuminating discussions of the varied appearances of rhetoric in the practice of science. That practice the editors describe carefully in the introduction to the volume. Describing three possible approaches to science, they seek to adopt the third: studies which would "stress the variety and complexity inherent in the production of scientific knowledge and also the attendant human contexts within which science is made and established." Thus they would accept even "accounts of science that are patently not rhetorical." The paths not chosen include a Gorgianic view—science, unable to produce truth, develops strategies of inquiry and uses rhetoric to construct tropes and audiences—and the view that science is sub specie rhetoricae. The book promotes reflection about the relation of rhetoric and science, but, unfortunately, it contains no index to facilitate the examination of concepts, terms, and names. My focus here will be on what seems to me to be the contribution of the volume to rhetoric of sci­ ence studies and on the problems presented by the ahistorical approach of some of the essays. From the editors' introduction, it should not be surprising that the nature and practice of science is the focus of the volume. The nature and practice of rhetoric as an art in itself, however, receives little attention. Most authors proceed as if rhetoric is simply a familiar term without a his­ tory or a discipline, but whose presence in science should be remarked upon. This curious approach is exemplified in the lead-off essay by Stephen Toulmin, the title of which, "Science and the Many Faces of Reviews 345 Rhetoric, would seem to promise to furnish the necessary background. In an attempt to bridge the gap envisioned by philosophers between the polar extremes of rhetoric and rationality, Toulmin turns to the Organon of Aristotle to illustrate the varied and overlapping types of reasoning prac­ ticed by human beings. But his account disappoints by its brevity. In his survey of the Organon, although he makes brief initial reference to the Analytics and the use of dialectical or topical reasoning in science, he then moves on to rhetoric, failing to treat Aristotle's conception of rhetoric or to remark on its relation to dialectic, a point that would seem to illuminate both science and a rhetoric of science. He intends, he says at the end of his seven-page essay, only a "'clearing away [of] the underbrush,"' making no attempt to discuss "questions about the rhetoric of science, or about scien­ tists as rhetors." J. E. McGuire and Trevor Melia, whose responses to Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science (1990) have appeared twice in Rhetorica, again reply neg­ atively to Gross's view that science is merely rhetorical invention and rep­ resentation, always relative to time and place (p. 77). Neither foundationalists nor nonfoundationalists, they position themselves as minimal real­ ists, seeing the actual practice of science as constitutive of science. They argue for a "proportionalizing rhetoric" (one that presumes a balance between representation and investigative practice) which would reflect "the proportionalizing strategies of scientific fallibilism" (p. 86). Several studies attend to sociological aspects of rhetoric. Trevor Pinch, in his analysis of the presentation of the Cold Fusion Process, demonstrates the importance of analyzing spoken rhetoric within its con­ text as a means to understanding both the presentation and reception of science by different audiences. Steve Fuller calls for...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0015
  3. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric ed. by Gregory Clark, S. Michael Halloran
    Abstract

    340 RHETORICA singularly persistent—and, one might add, singularly disturbing in some contexts—would be thoroughly vindicated. Whatever one's perspective, however, no one who is seriously inter­ ested in early modern culture, the history of pedagogy, or the history of ideas can afford to neglect this major contribution. Terence Cave Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, eds. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's point of departure for this important collection of essays is Gerald Graff's claim in Professing the University that the collegiate oratorical culture in the first half of the nine­ teenth century linked college curricula with the "literary culture outside" (pp. 2-3). Yet as their introduction makes clear, "the culture outside dur­ ing the early years of the nineteenth century was not 'literary' in our sense of the term, but oratorical. Its most prized symbolic work was that of the orator" (p. 3). In fact, "literary" is just one species of expertise that began to develop during the course of the century. As Clark and Halloran write in their introduction, "both the theory of rhetoric taught in the schools and the practice of public discourse sustained outside them were transformed during the nineteenth century from those of the neoclassical oratorical cul­ ture into those of the professional culture we see characterizing both col­ leges and communities by its end" (pp. 5-6). Clark and Halloran use the Burkean concept of transformation to describe the changes in nineteenthcentury oratorical culture, and though the historiographical stance of the introduction and the collective practices of the nine essays are somewhat at odds, this collection makes a significant contribution to scholarship describing the move from a collective moral authority to an individual authority which became grounded, ultimately, on notions of expertise. Further, the volume contributes to studies of collective reading and writ­ ing practices by positing "oratorical culture" as a concept beside "audi­ ence," "community," "rhetorical culture," and "public" to describe where and how groups analyze and produce discourses collectively. In "Edward Everett and Neoclassical Oratory," Ronald Reid argues that Everett's successes and failures "illustrate the nation's changing Reviews 341 oratorical culture" (p. 29) because "Everett exemplifies the declining repu­ tation of neoclassical oratory" (p. 30). Reid contends that Everett's reputa­ tion declined because he could not adapt the neoclassical oratory in which he was trained at Harvard to the needs of Jacksonian democracy. Thus Reid's essay replaces Clark and Halloran's introductory trope of transfor­ mation with that of paradigm shift—"the old oratorical culture" versus "the new oratorical culture." The tensions among different conceptions of permanence and change within Reid's essay force us to question whether oratorical culture, or any culture, is not always undergoing transforma­ tions and how serviceable the notion of "oratorical culture" is for studying change. The contradictory tendencies inherent in belletristic rhetoric are taken on more directly by Gregory Clark in his essay "The Oratorical Pulpit of Timothy Dwight." Clark's argument centers on how Dwight combined Scottish conceptions of taste with the Evangelical Calvinism of his infa­ mous grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. The combination, which resulted in a distinctive theory and practice Clark calls "oratorical poetics," empha­ sized "the force of the language of sentiment" in service to "sustaining a common moral and political culture" (p. 58). Though Dwight's lectures on rhetoric are lost, Clark uses edited editions of the lecture notes of two of Dwight's students to reconstruct what Dwight probably taught. Instruction, of course, raises the question of native ability and of who was authorized to instruct whom. Again, Clark emphasizes the contradictions inherent in belletrism and Enlightenment rhetorics of all kinds, and articu­ lates how those contradictions asserted themselves in early nineteenthcentury America in particular. Russel Hirst's essay on Austin Phelps, Bartlett Professor of Oratory in Andover Theological Seminary from 1848 to 1879, is a rich historical study of how individualism and collectivism manifested themselves in the orato­ ry and homiletic theory of a less-known figure in the history of rhetoric. Valuable as it is both historically and for...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0014
  4. Delivering Delivery: Theatricality and the Emasculation of Eloquence
    Abstract

    Ever since Aristotle noted in the Rhetoric that, when fashionable, delivery ταύτό πoiήσϵι τη υποκριτική (has “the same effect as acting”; 1404a), classical and medieval rhetorical theorists fulminated against a crowd-pleasing oratory that had devolved into a theatrical spectacle more akin to that provided by the comic “actress” or the “effeminate” male. It cannot be coincidental, however, that, as the fifth rhetorical canon documents the theatricalization of rhetoric, it also offers companion testimony about the so-called emasculation of eloquence. In this essay, I examine the early belief that legal and religious rituals crossed gender lines into effeminacy at they same time that they crossed genre lines into theater. Close analysis suggests that the persistent association between theatrics, bad rhetoric, and effeminacy struck four different targets in a single, well-conceived blow: it marginalized women, homosexuals, bad oratory, and theater by casting certain types of speakers and speech as perverse and disempowered. Delivering delivery today thus entails exposing the ways in which early theorists themselves attempted to deliver it from evil.

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0009
  5. Researching the body: An annotated bibliography for rhetoric
    Abstract

    In one way or another, an interest in has been present in from writings of Gorgias and Plato, through treatises on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres,' and on to work of Kenneth Burke, particularly his notions of identification and consubstantiality.2 As in many disciplines, has played its part implicitly in rhetorical theory and pedagogy. For example, reader response criticism addresses in terms of affective and subjective aspects of epistemic and composition theory; rhetorical interest in memory addresses theories of knowledge, sources of inspiration, and subjectivity in prewriting (see Rider, Reynolds), all of which are body-centered; bodily delivery remains a concern in speech communication. The rhetoric of and, more specifically, of medical science, explores ways in which medicalized is both socially and discursively constructed (see Duden). More recently, feminist rhetoricians such as Janice Norton have begun a historiography of which focuses on need to reread a rhetorical theory that theorizes without reference to sexual difference. Only recently, however, has the body as such become explicit locus of debates about interrelation of power and discourse. This annotated bibliography surveys germinal texts which read in terms of epistemology, gender construction, and social inscription of meaning. Its intent is to assist rhetoricians who wish to investigate as a crucial site of intersection of persuasion, discourse, and power. More explicit discussions of began when Anglo-American feminists asserted that the personal is political and French feminists exhorted us to write body. Since then, a number of disciplines have begun to work out what this focus on personal and could possibly mean: gendered body? symbolic body? social-political body? discursive body? While feminists are credited with initiating discussions of female as text or site in which issues of power are hotly contested, has become locus of cultural, historical, sociological, philosophical, and literary, as well as gender studies. As Anthony Synnott reminds us, is

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391098

May 1997

  1. The Role of Public Argument in Emerging Democracies: A Case Study of the 12 December 1993 Elections in the Russian Federation
    doi:10.1023/a:1007795204237

March 1997

  1. L’effet sophistique by Barbara Cassin
    Abstract

    Reviews 215 expediency. Jean-Louis Labarrière treats Aristotle's remarkable compari­ son of deliberative oratorical style to skiagraphia, or chiaroscuro, in painting. In Section IV, Alexander Nehamas, in an essay that first appeared in Rorty's 1992 collection on the Poetics, writes on pity and fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics, while André Laks (following influential essays by G. E. R. Lloyd, J. Lallot, and I. Tamba-Mecz and Paul Veyne) attempts a unifying interpretation of Aristotle's theory of metaphor. We have here, then, a formidable collection of essays by students of ancient philosophy, one which future scholars of rhetoric will need to take into account. If the shadow of Plato looms large behind most of the essays, that should come as no great surprise. As is the case with all col­ lections, it would be easy to fault this one for what is omitted or ignored here: it would have been valuable, for example, to have such a group of philosophers comment in more detail on the presocratic / sophistic back­ ground of the Rhetoric. But that would be to miss the virtues of what is included. I prefer, as I have indicated, to take the publication of this col­ lection as an auspicious omen for the philosophical study of rhetoric in general, and of the Rhetoric in particular. John T. Kirby Barbara Cassin, L'effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, NRF Essais, 1995), 693 pp. To readers who are not quite acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of French publishing, the release by Gallimard of Barbara Cassin's L'effet sophistique may seem unremarkable. However, for such a mainstream publisher to take the major step of printing nearly seven hundred pages of rhetorical analysis, even in a series devoted to philosophy (NRF Essais), is most remarkable. It means, in terms of France's intellectual landscape, that "rhetoric" has broken into a different field of readership, more accus­ tomed to reading (and giving credence to) Jean-François Lyotard than, say, Marc Fumaroli. Setting aside this strategic effect, L'effet sophistique bears all the charac­ teristics of being a major work on at least three counts. Firstly, it heralds a shift in French philosophy from denying history of rhetoric the status of a discipline to its reincorporation in philosophical debates. However, Cassin's work keeps its distance from both deconstruc­ tion and history of ideas (as in De Romilly's Les grands sophistes dans 216 RHETORICA l'Athènes de Périclès [Paris: De Fallois, 1998]). Secondly, L'effet sophistique has the merit to question sources and to provide new translations and insights into mistranslations (Cassin also heads a team working on a Vocabulaire européen des philosophies). A main tenet of Cassin's method is to immerse her reading-as-translation into the history of readings of particu­ lar texts such as Gorgias' Praise of Helen or Sextus Empiricus' Aduersus mathematicos VU, 65-87, or Galen's Libellus de captionibus and excerpts from Lucian as well as the remains of Antiphon the Sophist. Thirdly, it offers conceptual tools to formulate a theory of political or civic discourse not unrelated to current debates on the nature of democracy, diversity, and human rights. In this respect, L'effet sophistique truly does justice to the art of rhetoric by inscribing an analysis of the Sophists in the history of their reception by ancient and modern philosophy and in "current affairs." What is most topical is the way Cassin articulates the opposition of what she terms "Arendts' Greece" and "Heidegger's Greece" (pp. 248-69), by way of conclusion to a chapter on "City as Performance." She elucidates how Arendt constructs the primacy of politics over philosophy by resort­ ing to Protagoras. L'effet sophistique formulates one central question: in the conflict between the two logoi that haunts ancient thought, between ontology and logology, between the Sophist and the Philosopher, how did the First and the Second Sophistics position themselves as key operators in the inven­ tion of "fictionality"? Can we reconstruct the rhetorical history of that "Other" of philosophy and of good Politics, the Rhetor—either Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon or Philostratos, Ælius Aristides, Lucian, and Longus—and, in the process, obtain a...

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0023
  2. Cicero and Quintilian on the Style of Demosthenes
    Abstract

    Cicero and Quintilian were critics of oratory who knew Greek well. They both have much to say about Demosthenes and are important figures in the history of Demosthenic scholarship. Cicero discusses Demosthenes mainly in the Orator, which he wrote primarily as an answer to the Atticists and as a defence of his own oratory. His comments, therefore, tend to be tendentious and to reflect Ciceronian practice more than that of Demosthenes. Quintilian, on the other hand, who was a critic rather than a practicing orator and who does not have an “axe to grind,” makes many perceptive comments about Demosthenic oratory.

    doi:10.1353/rht.1997.0019