Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Critical Digital and Media Literacies in Challenging Times: Reimagining the Role of English Language Arts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/2/researchintheteachingofenglish30639-1.gif

Preview this article: Comment & Response: A Comment on “Journals in Composition Studies, Thirty-Five Years After”, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/2/collegeenglish30627-1.gif

This conversation among five activists in Brooklyn, New York, explores the intersections between local anti-war organizing efforts and recent response to issues of gentrification, development, and displacement. Four of the five participants are university professors and members of a neighborhood peace group formed after 9/11; the other participant is an organizer for Families United for&hellip; Continue reading Intersections: A Place to Do ‘the Work by Deborah Mutnik

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric launches two features. The first is a dedicated Special Section, a space for shorter articles addressed to a specific theme, problem, or question. The second, In Focus, is a book forum in which several scholars take up a recent leading monograph and the author of the monograph offers a reply to their reflections. These new features will appear regularly in coming issues. Individually and together, they seek to encourage directed study and hopefully a bit of debate on pressing issues and contested questions that appear at the nexus of rhetoric and philosophy.The inaugural Special Section is addressed to a question that was frequently and somewhat famously posed by Paul Ricoeur—From where do you speak? It is a timely question—and perhaps a pressing one, at least as the grounds of expression feel more and more unstable, perhaps less as a function of inspired invention that takes flight from the given topoi than deepening divisions over whether there remain any common commonplaces. The matter of where and how to stand—and find standing—in the name of expression is on our minds, especially in the midst of historical and emergent forms of violence that work to contain language, dislocate the power of words, and displace the potential of speech.Co-edited and introduced by Louise du Toit, the three articles that compose the section emerged from the 2018 meeting of the Society of Ricoeur Studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the first time that the society gathered on the African continent. In different and often subtle ways, each article both recalls Ricoeur's influence on South African political thought and reflects on the struggle to overcome apartheid (apartness) and turn South Africa into a “home for all.” In 2019, now twenty-five years since the formal end of the regime and the beginning of nonracial democracy, apartheid's colonization remains evident. There are many who remain trapped and so without a place to speak in a way that might make a difference. Between past and future, the question of the transformative commonplace looms large.What then to say in the midst of violence? What is a plausible and proper response to rhetorical violence?With an evident concern for these questions and showing marked divergence over how they are best answered, the inaugural In Focus is addressed to Philippe-Joseph Salazar's book Words Are Weapons: Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror. Published first under the title Parole Armées: Comprendere et combattre la propagande terroriste, the French edition of the work was recognized with the 2015 Prix Bristol des Lumières.As with its counterpart, Salazar begins the English translation with a challenge to a long-standing topos, the “pacifist illusion: that weapons yield to words,” and closes with a difficult call to arms. The four essays addressed to Salazar's work, along with the author's own reply, reflect closely and carefully on this difficulty, the challenge of how to hear, interpret, and respond to the caliphate's rhetoric. The debate that ensues—and it is a debate, not least over whether Salazar is somehow guilty of “rhetoric”—turns not a little on how to best understand rhetoric itself and how to grasp its potential in the midst of terror. The topoi are not stable and the signs are difficult to read, all of which suggests a need to recall Jean Paulhan's concern as to the human “rendered speechless” (6). Are there too many or not enough flowers in the park?

Cristina and Isabel’s invitation to be interviewed for this edition of the journal is an honor. I apologize to all readers in advance for a contribution that could have been much better with more time, but I’m grateful to have the chance to comment on a topic that has been the motivating factor in my&hellip; Continue reading Interview with Roseann Duenas Gonzalez by Isabel Baca &#038; Cristina Kirklighter

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

In our current cultural era of numerous social movements, it is often easy to lose sight of what drives individuals and collectives toward action. As the editors and contributors of Unruly Rhetoric...

While previous research on peer feedback in L2 writing has stressed the importance of training in giving useful comments on peer’s writing, very few studies have specifically explored metacognitive training in peer review interaction in terms of the perception and actual reviewing practices of L2 learners. This mixed-methods study employed a 12-week intervention course in L2 writing, in which eighteen Secondary One students, aged 12–13 years, received metacognitive training in peer review interaction. The training focused on metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulations. The results showed that, first, metacognitive training in peer review interaction helped change the perception of these young learners and increased their level of engagement and collaboration during the five peer review tasks. Second, metacognitive training appeared to encourage students to provide more content-related feedback than language-related feedback during dyadic interactions. Finally, it was found that the students were able to seriously consider their peer feedback when revising the peer-reviewed drafts, but written feedback had a much higher chance of being incorporated than did oral feedback. The pedagogical implications of these findings were discussed.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.

This book draws in the reader with its scope, its humor, its brio, and its learning. In many ways, it is a collage, as the writer, Laurent Pernot, openly suggests when he says that he is classifying a fleeting domain (82) in this study of the “sous-entendu.” Not until the reader reaches the end of the text do many of the kaleidoscopic elements find even a temporary pattern. The opening chapter is filled primarily with modern and contemporary examples of what is understood from what is “not said” in political, social, literary, mediated, and everyday communication. But chapter two, “La Rhétorique du discours figuré,” turns out not to be simply a history of parallel classical examples, but at the core of the discussion. When the reader arrives at the “Catalogue Additionnel” with which the book ends, we have learned to appreciate the apparently random list of strategies that is listed in the context of this “discours figuré.”In Chapter 2, Pernot lays out the difficulty of placing the sous-entendu in a classical rhetorical system – although he finds many examples of it, and gives a foundation for its classical significance, in the works of Hermogenes and Quintilian. The discours figuré is a problem because rhetorical systems are intended to help clarify persuasion, while much language speaks to us through what is understood rather than explicitly said. For contemporary people studying the history of rhetoric, it is often taken as a given that rhetoric is a fluid and sociohistorically contextualized way of thinking about communication. Pernot reminds us that the discourse figuré was a slippery concept for classical rhetoricians. Its double meanings do not seem to have fit the concepts of either scheme or trope, and this discourse emerged in response to the need to talk about and comprehend how the unstated, or unsaid – yet understood – significance of words, the sous-entendu, was conveyed and received. He calls the discours figuré “un corps rhétorique flotant” (47). What this book does is remind us not so much that rhetoric attempts to make language “adequate” to reality, but that it never can be. Language is a material medium. We have to learn to work with it in our own particular socioverbal ecologies.The chapter titles are themselves a categorization of the sous-entendu, from the discours figuré, to (among others) herméneutiques du soupçon, faux-semblants, un boeuf sur la langue, and le franc-parler. Within each of them, Pernot gives a huge range of examples, each usually generating a strategy of double meaning appropriate to their sociohistorical context: from Verlaine, he derives the chanson gris, from Barthes the texte oeuf, and so on. One of this book’s own sous-entendus runs throughout these categories: it is clear that listeners to and readers of words develop their own strategies for engaging with the sous-entendu. This he explores through concepts of paratext (pacts with writers), context (interpretive communities), and textual criteria (internal elements particular to the audience member) – all of which create conditions for “devining” and “deducing” rather than “explaining,” such that the rhetor and the audience member cooperate over the “sense.” This allows one to distinguish the double meaning working through realization (connivance, or complicity), from that working by preventing realization (manipulation).The author, who is really quite funny and conversationally direct in an inviting and appealing manner, seems to come into his voice in chapters 5 to 8. Chapter 5 is a sustained study of Greek rhetoric/oratory/writing in the first two centuries CE during which the Roman Empire included “Greece.” The question here is: how to sustain Greek identity in the face of Roman power, and the chapter becomes a study of activism that insists on difference and alternatives in Greek culture, rather than change of the Roman. The study of faux-semblants in the work of Dion Chrisostome and Aelius Aristide is a textbook example of positive activism from which many could learn today, and is written by a scholar as familiar with the rhetoric of classical Rome and Greece, as with that of seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries.It is telling that the examples of Dion and Aristide as activists eschew irony, sarcasm, and satire, to develop other strategies. Each expects the particular community for whom they write, to understand the “other” meaning, and yet each is skillful enough to ensure that the dominant community will not be able to “prove” or even notice that “other” meaning is there. Pernot throws in Molière’s comment on satire not working as effective critique because it keeps you on the same grounds as the person/group/institution you are critiquing. Instead, we have a catalog of alternatives, including Aristide’s use of omission: for example, an entire eulogy about the Roman Empire that manages never to use the word “Rome.” What is significant is the way Pernot’s study continually segues from the classical to the modern, here to Valéry on Anatole France. It goes on to perform a political flip, as it moves to Genet’s critique of what is no longer an intentional silencing that speaks loudly, but a sociopolitical silencing that hides, evades, and manipulates – that of postcolonial institutions that erase the cultural reality of the invaded.Pernot also takes on the difficult terrain of France in World War II and the co-existence of the Resistance with the Nazi occupation. He circles around the work of Louis Aragon and the concept of “contrabande” – again with contextually important terms such as “mots croisés” and the field of “un boeuf sur la langue.” The writer’s focus on Aragon encompasses many other writers of the period and shifts into a commentary on censorship and on the “sur entendu” of manipulation in the silencing of peoples in, for example, India under British rule, or China under early Communist rule. The commentary is infused here, as with so many other places in the book, with some life history of the central orators/writers. A reader is drawn into the contextual field of these kinds of sous-entendu through an intimacy with the people being discussed. This particular chapter comes back to World War II through Lenin and then Brecht, listing Brecht’s “five ruses” for double meaning, before returning to France. The sous-entendu is a voluntary, skilled, silencing that speaks volumes to an informed listening audience and engages them in making significance. The “sur-entendu” is an imposed silencing that contains and limits.The study underlines the way the language of dissidence is too often linked to the power it critiques, leaving it weakened in the face of the propaganda that follows on from censorship. The terrain of totalitarian political rhetoric, and the strategies of sous-entendu developed by Klemperer, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, formulate distinct responses to the actualities of their sociohistorical time and place. Political correctness is introduced as a contemporary device that is both challenging the “sur-entendu” of normative language about, for example, sexuality, and generating a sous-entendu critique. It would perhaps have been interesting to listen to an analysis of the one becoming weighted into the other, but Pernot persists in a conversational style that insists on familiarity, creating contexts for its own sous-entendus. For example, in the book’s chapter on sexual “ellipsis,” the author leads us through a gallery of writers from Molière, Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, to Dante, Manzoni, and the film “Gone with the Wind.” Here, one of the book’s implications indicates that the readers’ responses to the ellipses in the sexual narratives tells us as much about their own social and sexual mores as those they interpret.Moving on to “plain-speaking” or franc parler, and an assessment of critical responses to the whole project of the sous-entendu, Pernot turns to a fascinating study of how “truth” can be weaponized. The book’s own sous-entendu of today’s “fake news” is set in the classical context of Quintilian’s concerns with the rhetorical figure of “sincerity” and then in the contemporary context of Foucault’s parrhesia. I found this commentary particularly helpful for its presentation of the cynic as “autosuffisant,” and the ethical dimension of the way the sous-entendu casts truth, power and subjectivity into mutability and out of anything “sufficient.” Truth, like the sous-entendu, is embedded in the ethics, contexts, and perspectives of the sociohistorical time.The introduction of Foucault allows Pernot to get to what, for this reader at least, is a highly significant sous-entendu for this book: that Foucault, as many another person today, takes rhetoric as manipulative to distinguish it from parrhesia – almost as if rhetoric is inevitably a “sur-entendu.” Yet rhetoric encompasses both sides of the coin – Dion Chrysostom is an example of the sous-entendu for Pernot, and of parrhesia for Foucault. At this point, the extensive discussion of classical discours figuré falls into place. In many ways this book is a justification of rhetoric as an important field for today, by looking at what the classical world did when treating it as fluid rather than narrowly systematic – speaking truth to power, producing generative activism, engaging people in particular social change.The “Mot à la Fin” re-states that the book is not trying to provide a “guide,” or a global vision for the concept of sous-entendu. This is a collage of different ways that European verbal cultures communicate through what they do not say, and a reminder that this is a long and vibrant tradition. To conclude, Pernot uses the image of a game of billiards. This attempt to talk about what is not-said, or not-yet-said, or not-able-to-be-said, or not-even-culturally-recognized is like a game of billiards in which the writer sends the examples bouncing off the sides of the table, perhaps into pockets for a short time, until another game in another place, at another time. It is thoroughly entertaining, and one of its more humorous sous-entendus is that it invites critical play.

I am grateful and honored to have served as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric for four years (2016–2019). A valedictory is an occasion for expressing gratitude, here to all who have made my four-year stint as editor meaningful to me.First, I express gratitude to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) and its Board. During Katya Haskins tenure as editor, the ASHR board voted to devote one issue of the journal to the best papers presented at the ASHR symposium. This policy ensures that the journal represents the interests of ASHR members. In the absence of such a policy, the contents of journal would depend entirely on what came in willy-nilly through the Taylor and Francis portal. If the editor was one who, let us charitably say, was not famous for stretching the boundaries of the discipline, the journal might soon reflect only an editor’s narrow interests. During my tenure, the ASHR policy generated special issues “Rhetoric In Situ,” curated by Kassie Lamp, and “Diversity in and Among Rhetorical Traditions,” curated by Scott Stroud, thus ensuring that Advances documented current interests in visual and material rhetoric and in rhetoric outside of the Western tradition. This policy and Kassie and Scott’s good work helped me to meet my pledge on assuming the editorship to continue Katya Haskins effort to expand the journal’s purview. I should also thank the editors of the other special issues published during my tenure, one on Quintilian, edited by Jerry Murphy, on the occasion of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the discovery in St. Gall, Switzerland by Poggio Bracciolini of the first complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; and a most interesting special issue on Rhetoric and Economics edited by Mark Longaker.Under my tenure, Advances also inaugurated the policy of publishing book review forums – three – and book reviews – sixteen – over the four years. The forums enabled me to ensure that the journal continued, in a tradition begun by Robert Gaines in his tenure as editor, to be a place for debate and focused discussion. For the book review forums, I owe special thanks to Heather Hayes, who helped organize them. A forum on a critical edition of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 Address at Carnegie Hall by Tiffany Lewis and the publication in this issue of a translation of work by Chaim Perelman by Michelle Bolduc and David Frank ensured that Advances remained a depository for primary material, as Robert Gaines hoped it would. For help with this focused issue on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, I thank Andreea Ritivoi for work on the introduction and for her critical eye and good advice.From its beginning under the editorship of the journal’s founder Rich Enos, Advances has taken seriously its commitment to publishing the work of emerging scholars. Sometimes what that means in practical terms is issuing a “revise and re-submit” for manuscripts that the editor knows will require two, three, four revisions on its way to meeting the journal’s expectations. When I committed to such manuscripts I pledged not only my own time but the time of reviewers as well. Reviewing even the most polished of manuscripts requires critical intelligence and tact and takes hours of uncompensated time. We could not continue as a scholarly community without the commitment of talented, conscientious reviewers. I am most grateful to all who served as reviewers for manuscripts I sent them. I don’t feel I can thank all here (though I considered it) but I will single out Glen McClish, Dave Tell, James Fredal, Michele Kennerly, Brandon Inabinet, and James Kasterly for their help and, especially in Glen’s case, sage advice.I certainly would be remiss if I did not thank those who readied manuscripts for production: my three editorial assistants, Allison Prasch, Tara Wambach, and Brittany Knutson, and the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota, embodied in its Chair, Ron Greene, who paid for their help. I thank Taylor and Francis for supportive collegiality and the Press’s Megan Cimini, who, in response to queries, was always helpful, always professional, and always immediate.

The history of Chaim Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s “new rhetoric” and its arrival on American shores tells an interesting story even when in its most condensed and basic form. The product of a philosopher who had discovered rhetoric relatively late in his career working closely with a scholar who was well-versed in literature, the new rhetoric was brought to the United States by another philosopher turned rhetoric enthusiast (Henry Johnstone). The story is well known and its main point, no matter how obvious, deserves to he stressed: rhetoric and philosophy have a history of not only repudiation but also discovery and embracing. This relationship is significant for this special issue because the essays we feature appropriately focus on some of the deepest and, often, most difficult aspects of the new rhetoric, including, particularly, the sometimes easy to miss or underestimate philosophical assumptions behind some of its main concepts (such as the arbitrary from an epistemological perspective or the universal in the context of logic). Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca pursued a theory of, specifically, argumentation, as the main title in the French original of their book signaled, but one embedded in a theory of knowledge that was quite ahead of its time in certain aspects – one might say even post-structuralist avant la lettre in its emphasis on community, truthfulness, and the individual subject.Many scholars in our discipline have complained that the work of the two Belgians is insufficiently studied, even though their status is as high as that of thinkers who receive far more attention, such as Kenneth Burke. The reason for this relative neglect, comparatively speaking, might be in part connected to the simple fact that they were not American. We take this possibility seriously: we recognize the need for more translations from Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s rhetorical corpus that would make an expanded corpus more accessible and for more work situating their rhetoric in its historical context. Thus, this special issue consists of a translation; an essay that examines the role of translation in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s own work, not just as transposition from one language into another but more broadly as a transfer of ideas across intellectual traditions; and two critical essays. This structure reflects, we hope, some of the general challenges scholars face when engaging with the work of the two Belgian thinkers, from the need to expand the corpus of their writings about rhetoric for English-speaking audiences, to the importance of thematizing translation as a conceptual focus that matters in their case, and finally to the continuing demand for analytic applications of their theoretical ideas.With the first contribution to this special issue Advances in the History of Rhetoric continues a long-standing commitment to publishing translations of important works in the history of rhetoric – in this issue a translation by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank of Perelman’s “l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance” (hereafter, l’arbitraire), a work first published in 1933. This work serves as a philosophical proemium to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric (NR). The burden Perelman accepts in l’arbitraire is to discredit the idea – dear to logical positivists and rigorous empiricists – that there are procedures – deductive, inductive, empirical – that can, if followed, produce conclusions that are logically necessary and therefore universally valid. This same argument Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s set forth in the Introduction and Framework to the New Rhetoric some twenty-five years later. All argument ultimately rests on an element that is arbitrary,1 Perelman argues in 1933, concluding that, in Frank and Bolduc’s translation, “tolerance between groups, all of which are established by means of value judgments”2 is the only basis for all reasonable truth claims. If we substitute NR’s “noncompulsive elements”3 (NR 1) for “arbitrary,” and NR’s “community of minds”4 and “preliminary conditions”5 (NR 14) for l’arbitraire’s “tolerance between groups”, we can readily see l’arbitraire as providing the philosophical underpinnings of NR. The work will be of interest to theorists studying Perelman’s philosophical development or attempting to place the New Rhetoric in its philosophical milieu.The second contribution to the issue is Michelle Bolduc’s “Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric,” which is based on a section from her forthcoming Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric. We think the work is an important and fascinating contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the “new” rhetoric. Bolduc traces how Perelman took inspiration from the Italian philosopher Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (translated into French as Li Livres dou Tresor), an encyclopedic work that included a section on rhetoric, heavily influenced by Cicero’s De Inventione. Perelman was led to the work by Jean Paulhan, an important literary theorist whom Perelman most likely discovered through Olbrechts-Tyteca. Thus, Bolduc documents Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the origin of the new rhetoric, a role that has been under-appreciated. Latini’s Ciceronian and therefore philosophical (as distinguished from literary) sense of rhetoric was most compatible with Perelman’s. As Bolduc also documents, Perelman’s philosophical orientation contrasted with the more literary and linguistic interests of his contemporaries Barthes, Genette, and Ricoeur, with whom Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca shared a complicated relationship. What is most interesting about Bolduc’s history is how differently Paulhan and Perelman understood the importance of Latini’s work on rhetoric. The intellectual genealogy Bolduc reconstructs points to potentially fertile further investigations into the differences in philosophical assumptions and method of study between Perelman and some of the most prominent French language theorists of the time. These differences make it tempting to wonder if perhaps Perelman had a very different vision, not only of rhetoric, but more broadly of language and discourse than, for example, Barthes and Genette. Put bluntly: was he, similar to Ricoeur, too much of a heretic by the standards of these diehards of structuralism? By tracing the historical trajectory of Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca road to rhetoric, Bolduc helps us understand how unique, or even idiosyncratic, they most likely were in the intellectual context of the time, dominated as it was by structuralism.Perhaps this unique, unorthodox intellectual position is partly the reason their contribution to rhetoric is in the paradoxical position of being simultaneously praised and criticized, often for the very same ideas. Praised for conceptual sophistication, but also charged with incoherence or internal contradictions, considered both very general in their applicability and accused of being too dependent on (often obscure) philosophical examples, these ideas have nonetheless exerted a deep influence on the field. Yet they continue to baffle scholars who wish to assess their analytic purchase and to apply them saliently. Two concepts are especially fraught: the universal audience and the dissociation of concepts. It is fitting, then, that our two analysis essays offer a provocative reading of the universal audience by Alan G. Gross, and, in Justin D. Hatch’s essay, an illustration of how the dissociation of concepts can function subversively, not only influencing our perception of reality but in fact transforming it. A senior scholar and a junior one show us both how relevant the New Rhetoric is for enduring rhetorical questions, and, at the same time, how difficult it can be to pin down the conceptual scope of its terms. Gross’s focus is on clarifying what Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca meant by “universal” in coining the term of art “universal audience,” and to this end he puts Perelman in dialog with himself, or rather with a (mis)-representation of himself. Parsing out carefully various readings of the concept of the universal audience, Gross builds upon his own work, done in collaboration with Ray Dearin, as well as expands it to address more recent (by his account) misunderstandings. Whereas Gross addresses fellow rhetorical critics rather reproachfully at times, Hatch finds himself in large agreement with other scholars who have engaged with the dissociation of concepts. The main task he sets for himself is to clarify the analytic significance of the term and to assert, more forcefully than previous scholars, the epistemic and political power of dissociations of concepts.We see these four contributions as advancing the study of the New Rhetoric in significant ways, getting us ever more closely to giving its authors a fully deserved comprehensive attention.

Preview this article: Interchanges: Response to Joyce Olewski Inman and Rebecca A. Powell’s “In the Absence of Grades: Dissonance and Desire in Course-Contract Classrooms”, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/71/1/collegecompositionandcommunication30298-1.gif

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/71/1/collegecompositionandcommunication30291-1.gif

It is my sincere pleasure to author my first Editorial since joining Communication Design Quarterly as Editor in Chief in 2018. It is a real pleasure to work with the dedicated, inspiring group of people that form the Special Interest Group for Design of Communication, and a true honor to be trusted with the work of all who submit to CDQ 's pages.

Authors in issue 3.2 of _Prompt_ share writing assignments developed for engineering, math, and English courses.

In this article, we argue that Down syndrome (DS) advocates seeking to intervene in medical exigences are poorly positioned by their audiences of patients and physicians. To combat this problem, we find that some advocates, specifically mothers of children with DS, recuperate their ethos through two primary rhetorical strategies: shaping contexts and developing invitational ethos. Advocates are able to more freely draw from maternal authority when they shape the contexts of their messages, creating new venues and limiting their audiences. On the other hand, advocates can also appease medical authority by developing an invitational ethos in which they create the conditions for their own participation and offer their own perspectives. Through the use of these two strategies, advocates are able to claim their positions as mothers, while still cultivating positive ethos.

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: The Politics of Teaching Literature, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30238-1.gif

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/81/6/collegeenglish30220-1.gif

The Roman thinker and politician Cicero may seem worlds away from us and our twenty-first-century problems. As long as he lived, Cicero's practical aims were to strengthen the power of the senatorial class and his own personal influence over others. He did not view the republic as a means toward collective betterment, and never questioned his rich and aristocratic peers' militaristic values and commitment to an empire secured by violence and economic exploitation. Despite these and other issues, renewed scholarly interest in Cicero arose in the last years of the twentieth century and has continued to grow. It has been fueled by the reemergence of interest in republicanism and the Roman tradition, in particular in Cambridge School intellectual history and political theory that began with the publication of important work in the 1970s and 1980s by (among others) J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.Having myself repeatedly made the argument that Cicero is a useful thinker for us today, particularly in his complex, ambitious treatment of rhetoric as the core art of politics—and precisely because he is both a pragmatist accustomed to balancing competing interests and a politician sensitive to the role of fantasy and desire in politics—I should say at the outset that I approach Gary Remer's book with sympathetic interest. Remer ably guides us through key elements in and arising from Cicero's conviction that the act of speaking is the field not only of legitimate politics but of moral decision making and moral action.What Remer calls Cicero's “political morality” is intimately bound up with Cicero's views on the instrumental and aesthetic elements of speech. Remer's most significant advance in this now fairly well-articulated field of study is his overview of the rich legacy of Cicero's thought, from the first-century CE rhetorician Quintilian to Lipsius, Edmund Burke, the Federalists, and John Stuart Mill. If some readers find that Remer defines this “Ciceronian” tradition too broadly, they will find his consideration of these thinkers from a Ciceronian perspective worth reading nonetheless.It is a truth universally acknowledged that politicians have tough decisions to make. Where Machiavelli advises princes to do what is practically useful rather than what is honorable, Cicero declares that it is possible to pursue both the utile and the honestum at the same time. The orator is the person best placed to do this, and (not incidentally) to live the life of deliberated action that Cicero praises in his On the Republic as the life most worth living. On what grounds? In Cicero's view, morality is inherent in the orator's professional activity: the nature of persuasive speech, the act of one human being speaking to others with a view to moving or changing them, tends to constrain the speaker from behaving viciously. By contrast with Aristotle, who treats ethics as the external constraint on oratorical practice, Cicero suggests that the rules of persuasive communication internal to the relation between speaker and audience provide built-in constraints to thought and action.Here is the scene Cicero has in mind, simplified for the sake of brevity, which he dissects in greatest detail in his three-book dialogue On the Orator. The orator seeks to move, teach, or please others: movere, docere, delectare. In the first act of speaking (which might be a gesture or an expression), a multivalent exchange is instantly constructed, and through the whole course of it the speaker must obey various important constraints. To be understood, the orator must obey rules of comprehensibility. To be believed, the orator must obey rules of plausibility and common sensibility (echoes of Habermas are relevant and appropriate here). To move the listeners, to ensure that they learn, to create pleasure—to effect change, in short, an altogether more complex and nuanced process—the orator must obey rules of decorum. As Adam Smith (professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh before he took a chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow) comments in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, “When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he find that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper” (1.3). The orator faces a steep uphill climb when he seeks to persuade those whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities he offends.In chapter 1's comparison between Aristotle and Cicero, Remer rightly identifies the other-directedness of Cicero's speaker as a distinctive element in his moral thinking. Keenly attuned to the perspective, range of experience, and interests of his listeners, Cicero's orator keeps within their ambit and moderates his speech accordingly. The decorum he embodies and performs amplifies his audience's sense of what is suitable as it articulates the orator's prudential view of how and what the audience should believe and do. Further, in the argument Remer develops in chapters 2 through 4, which places Cicero in dialogue with Machiavelli and Lipsius, the orator qua politician is well placed to assess which types of moral obligations he will obey. These obligations are role-specific and flexible, according to need and circumstance. For example, when Brutus committed murder in the course of founding the Roman republic, he obeyed the “role morality” of a person devoted to the good of the collective rather than to other individual human beings, including his son (70). Since the politician obtains his status through the iterative legitimating acknowledgments of the political community, the legitimacy of his role-specific actions is always under review according to communal values and standards. This engine keeps the orator in check. It effectively encompasses moral law as well as the ever-changing circumstances that guide moral decision making.To Cicero, speech is the civic glue of the republic. His ideal orator, that is, the ideal republican citizen, is one who cultivates a heterogeneous, passionate style of speech and manner that reflects the variety of his experiences in real life and in his imagination. “It is necessary for the orator to have seen and heard many things, and to have gone over many subjects in reflection and reading,” Cicero says in On the Orator. “He must not take possession of these things as his own property, but rather take sips of them as things belonging to others…. He must explore the very veins of every type, age, and class; he must taste of the minds and senses of those before whom he speaks” (1.218, 223). As Remer accurately notes, the orator must not simply act out these feelings like an actor; he must perform the emotional labor and feel the feelings he expresses to his audience.These assertions place Cicero and his ideal orator into what Remer arrestingly calls in another context “an uneasy state of equipoise.” Remer is right to say that Cicero's orator cannot look to perfect universal law as his everyday guide; he must cope with the plural community. Plurality means that we cannot reliably know what each of us believes or why, what we will think or do next. We should keep in mind that the Roman republic, like our own, is an unchosen assembly—unlike the democracy of the Athenians, who carefully reviewed each applicant to their citizen body and in the course of the fifth century, decided to winnow out men without two Athenian parents. A republic is not a kin group, so we do not resemble one another. In our plurality of perspectives, goals, hopes, and dreams, we probably do not like one another very much. (The realities of pluralism have always made me skeptical about Aristotelian accounts of citizenship that model themselves on friendship.) As Cicero says rather plaintively in On Moral Duties book 1, it's not always easy to care about other human beings. A genuinely plural politics cannot emerge from agreements with preselected partners who already know how to play the game. We must instead expose ourselves to people and views that we don't have a say over, even as we seek to influence others; we must feel what they feel. Visible emotion is the raw edge of exposure; it builds the connection.Particularly now, in the age of Trump, master of the passionate in-group appeal, this may give us pause. What, we may ask, controls or constrains this passionate orator? As we have seen, Remer replies that the Ciceronian orator must cultivate propriety or decorum—the capacity of self-government guided by the orator's sense of communal mores. We can go slightly further to define decorum as the awareness of the watchful gaze of the community, whose approval the orator needs to work his persuasive powers and exert his fullest authority. To speak persuasively is to forcefully articulate one's views and try to impose them on others. But to speak with decorum is to own a self-critical sensibility, a flexible command of vocabulary and cultural values, a capacity to conform with social rules and moral norms, and to risk vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. After all, we never know exactly what someone will say in reply to us, and Cicero discourses at some length in On the Orator about the stage fright that rightly afflicts good orators, who are keenly attuned to the audience's unpredictable nature.Central to Remer's reclamation of Cicero for modern political morality is the Roman rhetorician's pragmatic treatment of the necessity of emotion in political speech. Remer is correct to underscore this important aspect of Cicero's thought, but he remains somewhat squeamish about its implications, and in my view this leads him to overemphasize the value Cicero placed on self-restraint and reason. I do not agree with Remer that the vision of rational argument that Cicero articulates in his dialogue On the Laws is a “better” form of speech than the emotion-laden oratory he describes in On the Orator and other rhetorical treatises—and which he famously practiced himself. Cicero has far too much to say about the importance of emotion in creating bonds among citizens of the republic for this to be a plausible view. When his friend Atticus asks Cicero whether his proposed law to keep oratory moderate and free from passion is feasible, Cicero replies that it refers not to men of today, but to “men of the future who may wish to obey these laws.” While this statement suits the spirit of On the Laws, an experiment in Platonic philosophizing, it strikes me as at best a tepid endorsement of moderate oratory. Against this experiment I place Cicero's warning in his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his friend (and the future assassin of Caesar), that restrained, dry, “Attic” oratory will always fall short. This strong opinion captures Cicero's deep conviction that emotion is not only necessary for political speech; it is a key driver of building republican political community. The orator's capacity to channel and convey emotion is at the heart of the intersubjective relation between the orator and his audience that Remer describes so compellingly in chapters 1 and 2.Remer leaps too quickly from this intersubjective relationship between orator and audience partly sustained by shared emotion—and the craving of the audience for emotional oratory that carries them away, that bathes them in delight (52)—to the “better” decorum Cicero describes in On the Laws. Having established the necessity of the performance of emotion for the purposes of sustaining intersubjective community, rather than jump with him to the normative ideal, I would have liked him to delve further into the controls Cicero places on the expression of emotion, and the larger implication for Cicero's view of the republic.Cicero had one excellent reason to advocate for decorum in day-to-day political speech: fear. As he knows from years of factional strife and civil war, fear kills politics and kills freedom. Decorum means restraining the overreaching behaviors elites are prone to that create fear and increase public mistrust. Only after learning to moderate behaviors that arouse fear among his fellow citizens can the orator explore the “very veins of every type, age, and class” that allow him to speak to and for the whole community. The elite class to which Cicero belonged cultivated moderation as a virtue: this was part of their stranglehold on power, but it also restrained them.But Cicero also sees a fundamental tension between decorum and the capacity to struggle against injustice or outright threats to the republic. His insight into this tension is why, in the Verrine orations—passionate speeches against corruption, extortion, and elite overreach in the province of Sicily—Cicero warns against elite institutions like lawcourt juries sitting too comfortably in their univocal exercise of power. This is why his history of the Roman republic in On the Republic book 2 is a history of cyclical conflict and violence, and why in On the Laws he reminds his interlocutor that tribunes, who voice the people's concerns, are necessary for the good of the republic. Cicero repeatedly clears space for dissensus, for conflict, because he sees, and worries, that the comfortable stability of the homogeneous elite always threatens to tilt into arrogance and violence against the people.So his ideal orator is one who feels, who is necessarily and constantly alive to the beliefs and feelings and fears of others, with the proven capacity to imagine and identify with the experience of others. Emotion is not instrumental in value; its expression is intrinsic to acknowledging and navigating the tense antagonisms that constitute the republic.But this does not answer my question about what prevents the orator from emoting his way into tyranny or the incitement of murder, as Cicero did when he advocated the extralegal executions of Catiline's fellow conspirators. My thinking here is informed by David Velleman's and Herlinde Pauer-Studer's work on the distortion of moral norms in their analysis of diaries and letters written by those who personally carried out acts of murder during the Holocaust. The reason why Nazi perpetrators were not deterred by morality, in their view, is that their moral principles “were filtered through socially conditioned interpretations and perceptions that gave events a distorted normative significance.” Recall Remer's treatment of the exchange between orator and audience. As he rightly describes the scene, orator and audience cultivate norms together. When the orator voices emotional arguments against injustice, does he take time, as Cicero sometimes though not always does, to acknowledge other points of view? Or does he use emotion to set one group against another? If the latter, does the community endorse that use? We can learn from the fact that Cicero expresses his greatest rage and contempt when he speaks out against elite rivals. He does not deploy it in a sustained way against entire groups in the republic, particularly disempowered ones, such as the poor, immigrants, or slaves. A norm emerges here, one informed by Cicero's warnings about elite overreach and the people's vulnerability and fear.Classical scholarship emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in response to an urgent necessity: the need for a secular discourse of collective politics, a discourse that offered alternatives to the rule of king or church. As a classicist, I want my field to reclaim its historical role in giving people language with which we can articulate our roles in collective life—which means diving deep into the tempests of public discourse in the classroom or in our research. I am glad to join Gary Remer in arguing that Ciceronian rhetoric can, as it did in the early modern period, help us think a new style of political thought and action. I hope his book leads to further work along these lines.Black Lives Matter, the descendants of Occupy and related political movements, rightly insist that we must together invent a politics that gives a part to those who have no part, as Jacques Rancière memorably put it. To do this, those in conditions of power and comfort must not simply speak for the silent many who live in conditions of precarity. The challenge is how to create a dialogic style of talk and action that allows for the politically destitute to enter the space of politics in conditions of nondomination. If we seek fresh thinking toward a new politics, we do well to focus on oratory, the art that (as Cicero says) brings together word and action, mind and body, reason and passion.

In response to current trends in Composition as well as the challenges of langauging and pedagogy in the global reality, this qualitative classroom-based action research study was designed to gain a better understanding of strategies, practices, and competences exhibited by students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds when composing, reading, and responding to the narratives of their peers in a multi- lingual composition class. In a focused presentation of a single student case study, the manuscript conceptualizes ‘effective’ writing in global contexts, outlines successful strategies to gain the ‘buy-in’ from culturally and linguistically diverse audiences when composing transnationally and translingually. The study concludes by suggesting ways and strategies to transform ‘traditional’ peer response assignments to engage global rhetorics and transnational frameworks for the sake of all students and their success communicating across languages, rhetorics, borders, and modes.

Interactive Writing (IW) is a powerful support for language and literacy development; however, its emphasis on using oral language to construct written language can present challenges for deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students due to their unique and diverse language experiences. Teachers (n = 14) using Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) with grade 3–5 d/Dhh students in a variety of settings were observed using a space referred to as ‘the language zone’ to address the unique language and literacy needs of d/Dhh students.  The language zone is the designated space in a classroom where the creation, translation and revision of ideas is made visible.  Researchers developed a flowchart with three tiers to document the three purposes for which the teachers use the space.  Accompanying scenarios provide concrete examples of three distinct ways in which the language zone can be used.  Teachers can use this language zone flow chart as a tool to recognize, analyze and select instructional moves that have the potential to positively impact the language and literacy proficiencies of d/Dhh students.           Acknowledgments: The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R324A120085 to the University of Tennessee. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Background: Professional communication instructors give profuse feedback on student writing in service or introductory courses; however, professional communication has traditionally borrowed feedback practices from first-year writing. In addition, professional communication instructors have relied on lore instead of data when giving students feedback. Literature review: Three recent studies examine the content of feedback comments given by professional communication instructors; nevertheless, these studies open questions about how professional communication instructors enact their pedagogical values when giving feedback. Research questions: 1. What do instructors value when teaching professional communication service courses? 2. What do instructors emphasize in their feedback? 3. To what extent do instructors' values align with the feedback that they give on students' writing? Research methodology: To answer these questions, this pilot study does close qualitative work to test interview questions and a coding scheme formed by inductive content analysis. I triangulated four interviews about instructors' pedagogical values with content analysis of their 599 feedback comments on students' writing. Results and discussion: The results reveal three implications: Rhetorical terminology may contradict the goals of professional communication, overly conversational or directive feedback may not give students tools to improve their writing, and borrowing pedagogical training from first-year composition may not prepare instructors to teach professional communication. Conclusion: Tensions between instructors' values and their feedback comments highlight a lack of consensus about professional communication's pedagogical values for the service course, particularly higher order values, such as audience analysis or purpose through giving feedback.

Reviews 325 Following Baudrillard, Gogan asserts throughout the book that "percep­ tion itself is rhetorical (8). He means that "language use brings about percep­ tion (8). Here is where I think many a materialist, but also many a more traditional scholar, will have a hard time following. For if the claim were sim­ ply that tropes and the use of language shapes human perception, there could be no argument. What you perceive as the just, the normal, or even—more concretely the sexual is inevitably affected by the categories and images through which you process your perceptions. Moreover, even the object world itself is created as a set of distinct identifiable objects through the existence, elaboration, and circulation of linguistic categories. There was a world in which oxygen did not exist, grav ity was not a concept, and in which the atoms of Lucretius were v ery different from those of Einstein or Niels Bohr. In the end, howev er, these observations do not establish the claim that "language use brings about perception." The prelinguistic infant has percep­ tion. My dog, whose language use is minimal, perceives. And this elementary recognition is important. While there may be no human perception worthy of entering into symbolic exchange not shaped by language use (i.e., rhetoric), that is v ery different from saying "perception is rhetorical." The latter asserts there is no necessarv referent of perception. It asserts that all perceptions are merely simulacra and in no sense representations. Phantasia, on this level, is triumphant, and meaning has disappeared. Nonetheless, Aristotle's position, which Gogan quotes approvingly, is very different. For Aristotle, phantasia ("appearance") is what mediates between perception and judgment (144). Thus, while there may be no judg­ ment without rhetoric, aisthësis ("perception") exists and so differential judge­ ments can be made. Indeed, the appearance on which judgment is predicated must be rigorously separated from perception itself. In a world of "alternative facts" and of "fake news," a world in which climate science is a matter of opin­ ion, the imperative not to reduce experience to the exchange of interchangeable simulacra, all equally unmoored from perception, has never been more urgent. Baudrillard was masterful in predicting and analyzing the rhetoric of our post­ truth society, but we will need something more to survive it. Paul Allen Miller University of South Carolina Michele Kenrterly and Damien Smith Pfister, eds., Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780817359041 When Edward Corbett first published his didactic volume Classical Rhetoric for the Modem Student, the context was mid-century television cul­ ture, and many of Corbett's examples, which were intended to demonstrate the continuing applicability of traditional tropes from ancient Athens, relied on familiarity with mass media. Since that time - when Corbett marveled at the introduction of the data-rich medium of microfilm - much in information 326 RHETORICA technology has changed dramatically, including the advent of personal com­ puting, the rise of social media platforms, and the ubiquity of access to dis­ tributed networks. Of course, there were significant works published on classical rheto­ ric and digital communication during the nineties, including Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word and Kathleen Welch's Electric Rhetoric dur­ ing the Web 1.0 era. Although Lanham and Welch are not contributors to Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, this new volume is a notable achievement in representing a very broad range of perspectives from classi­ cal rhetoric - including concepts from Aristotle, Plato, Protagoras, Isocrates, and Gorgias - and applying them to seemingly ephemeral online phenom­ ena expressed in networked publics. The introduction to Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks outlines the case for understanding the ancients through contemporary digital practices and vice versa; at the same time, it resists simplistic or arbitrary "cutting and pasting" (2) of heterogeneous sources without sufficient justification. It observes that the texts in the collection represent a range of possible linka­ ges between present and past: historical antecedents, analogues for practi­ ces, heuristics for theoretical framing, and cues to conventions such as social customs and moral orientations, as well as relations of renewal. Many of the essays outline broad theories to explain internet infra­ structures...

Abstract In this article, I argue for the importance of investigating covenantal rhetoric as a multipronged rhetorical device that can be used by political leaders to moralize discourse and strategically manage competing covenantal tensions in response to a particular social, economic, and/or political exigence. Specifically, it explores how President Ronald Reagan drew on the Puritan covenantal framework to usher in an era of free-market economics and transform it from a chaotic and self-interested system into a covenantal economy in which people could fulfill their moral obligations to self, God, and others. Using covenantal form, Reagan eased the tensions between freedom and order, grace and works, and individuality and community in a way that provided a moral foundation for his tax and welfare policies and a moral safety net for all who had faith in God’s grace. Within Reagan’s covenantal economy, trickle-down economics was framed as both an economically feasible and morally commendable process in which entrepreneurs and welfare recipients could join together in a “circle of prosperity” without government interference or the obligation to provide direct material assistance to others.

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/70/4/collegecompostionandcommunication30177-1.gif

Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery—how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to reverse it, or if it’s even possible to do so. The essays in this issue advance that effort in a time when demagoguery is once again on the rise.