456 RHETORICA passant par Horace. Quant à Martial, s'il recourt, comme d'autres, à l'ironie, à l'ambivalence ou à une forme d'hyperbole qui dépasse le vraisemblable, c'est aussi par l'agencement même de ses poèmes que, dans le cadre d'une une lecture suivie, il permet de repérer la critique. Avec la partie sur l'Antiquité tardive, on est en plein dans la rhétorique. En effet les poèmes étudiés sont majoritairement des panégyriques ou des invectives, et les poètes en suivent scrupuleusement les codes. Tel est le cas de Claudien (Br. Bureau) et de Sidoine Apollinaire (R. Alexandre). Mais les choses, là encore, peuvent être retournées. L'irrévérence elle-même, ou plutôt l'invective, peut se retourner en éloge, comme dans le Contre Eutrope qui est en creux un éloge de Stilicon. Dans le panégyrique pour le sixième consulat d'Honorius l'irrévérence consiste simplement à exprimer des idées politiques et on obtient une sorte de miroir des princes, un portrait idéal de lui-même offert à Honorius pour qu'il s'y conforme. R. Alexandre présente une étude très intéressante du point de vue rhétorique sur trois panégyriques d'empereurs, montrant comment les circonstances extrêmes induisent une forme de réserve qui peut paraître irrévérencieuse. Sidoine gauchit les éléments traditionnels du panégyrique, retourne les exempta, mais surtout recourt à la prosopopée pour faire dire par d'autres ce qui est difficile à entendre. Le développement sur le discours figuré à propos du panégyrique de Majorien est, là encore, très bien venu. Des genres « mineurs » sont aussi pratiqués, où l'irrévérence se montre plus naturelle. Il s'agit d'une épigramme et une deprecatio de Claudien, dirigées contre un certain Hadrien (Fl. Garambois-Vasquez) et d'une épigramme d'Ausone que M. Squillante analyse comme «désémantisée» , le poète transformant l'irrévérence en pur jeu poétique. Une bibliographie, un index locorum et un index hominum complètent utilement cet excellent volume, qui touche à un enjeu central dans la rhéto­ rique: comment dire sans dire? Sylvie Franchet d'Espèrey Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi. Rhétorique et idéologie dans l'Histoire des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Essais sur le Moyen Âge 47), Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2010. 388 pp ISBN 978-2-74532-041-4 En 1999, Jean-Marie Moeglin rappelait dans un article de synthèse 1 histoire des rapports entre 1 «historiographie moderne et contemporaine en Reviews 457 France et en Allemagne» et «les chroniqueurs du Moyen Âge1 ». Dans cette histoire longue, il repérait l'émergence, très tardive en France, de 1 idée selon laquelle << l'analyse du 'travail de l'historien' a une valeur propre» (p. 327): de cette «vision neuve du texte historiographique» (p. 332), témoigna en particulier la parution (en 1980) du livre de Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dons l'Occident médiéval. D'autres travaux, et pas seulement en France, lui succédèrent, tous consacrés à la poétique spécifique mise en œuvre par l'historien médiéval, à sa pratique, à son statut et à celui de son texte. Ces tra­ vaux, attentifs à la logique propre de ces textes et de leurs conditions de production, ont pris pour objets tant la production latine que les productions en langue vernaculaire, qui la transposent et rivalisent avec elle ou entre elles. L'ouvrage de Françoise Laurent s'inscrit dans ces perspectives2 en s'intéressant hardiment, comme l'annoncent le titre et l'introduction, aux «choix idéologiques et rhétoriques» (p. 12) de l'«écrivain» Benoît de Sainte-Maure, qui à l'initiative d'Henri II Plantagenêt succède à Wace dans les années 1170 et écrit sa propre version de l'histoire des ducs de Normandie. Afin de replacer le texte dans son «contexte historico-littéraire» (p. 12), l'Auteur privilégie donc l'analyse conjointe de la « rhétorique » et de «l'idéologie», dimensions de l'œuvre dont la définition reste certes problématique. La dimension « rhétorique » semble bien référer ici à un ensemble de règles, dessinant une norme de l'art d'écrire nécessaire à une réception contrôlée de l'œuvre selon le triple enjeu cicéronien (placere, docere, movere), que Françoise Laurent rappelle à chacune des articulations de son livre. Cette construction rhétorique maîtrisée est « offerte » à Henri II, dont Benoît n écrit pas la « vie » mais vers qui, pourtant, «convergent tous les événements historiques et toutes les aspirations de l'écrivain» (p. 134): les règles d'écriture que Benoît mobilise brillamment dans la nouvelle langue gouvernent une démonstration concertée de la «perfectibilité» du lignage (p. 167), tendu vers la «vie» du duc-roi Henri, «gemme pretiose» couron­ nant les autres «ovres» (vv. 10098-10104). Dans la première partie de l'ouvrage, intitulée «Les enjeux de l'Histoire des ducs de Norman­ die» (pp. 19-136), et dans le dernier sous-paragraphe de l'ouvrage (à la fin de la troisième partie), intitulé «Les redites de l'histoire» (pp. 337-341), ces règles que l'Auteur repère de manière très détaillée ] Saint-Denis et la royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, éd. F. Autrand, C. Gauvard, J.-M. Moeglin (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 301-338. 2Citons, sur le même thème, le livre de Laurence Mathey-Maille. Écriture du passé. Histoires des ducs de Normandie (Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2007) 458 RHETORICA dans les lieux (rubriques de manuscrits; prologues et épilogues;«frontières du récit», entre excursus initial et «fin suspendue») où se manifeste l'« intention auctoriale» (p. 22) de Benoît sont celles d'historiographes chrétiens, d'Eusèbe de Césarée à Aimoin de Fleury. Dans la deuxième et dans la troisième parties, intitulées respective­ ment «Portraits et panégyriques des ducs normands » (pp. 137-230) et«Les voix de l'histoire» (pp. 233-342), les règles mises en œuvre avec brio par Benoît dans l'éloge et le discours représenté sont celles de la rhétorique classique antique, telles du moins que les comprennent et les utilisent les historiens grecs ou latins. Dans le cas des composantes du discours (rapporté ou direct), par exemple, l'Auteur rappelle que les historiens latins privilégiaient largement la narration (brève) et l'argumentation: Benoît, qui exploite abondamment les techniques du discours, suit leur exemple (pp. 291-295). Mais dans l'écriture de Benoît, transparaît aussi une «rhétorique scolaire»: l'acte com­ plexe de compilation (que l'on reprocha longtemps aux historiens médiévaux) ou encore les procédés d'amplifientio et de variatio en sont, comme le montrent les Arts poétiques des xiie et xiiie siècles, des traits stylistiques fondamentaux. Ce sont toutes ces règles, travaillées dans le creuset d'une nouvelle langue, que Françoise Laurent repère par le moyen de nombreuses études d'extraits. Ce travail, dont nous ne pouvons ici rendre compte de toute la richesse, propose au fond deux processus parallèles de contex­ tualisation de l'œuvre de Benoît, propre à restaurer sa spécificité en prouvant son insertion dans deux traditions précises. D'une part, il montre la captation (p. 108) par la langue vernaculaire des caractères les plus prestigieux de la « littérarité » latine, selon l'expression de Mi­ chel Banniard: ce «beau langage», que véhicule la rhétorique grécolatine (p. 345) et que Benoît explore et exhibe, donne à son entre­ prise historiographique une garantie d'autorité éthique et esthétique. Le passage (ou translatio, p. 345) à la langue vernaculaire rendait nécessaire cette captation dans une société où c'est au latin, celui des ecclésiastiques maîtres de l'Église et de ses rituels, que revient le pouvoir de convaincre et de persuader, de «faire-croire» et de sauver. D'autre part, le travail de Françoise Laurent expose la façon dont ce «beau langage» est soumis aux exigences d'une rhétorique chrétienne et de ses composantes: ce «haut langage» est soucieux toujours de marquer un écart avec un «beau langage» antique et païen. Le repérage des traits caractéristiques de Vhistoria ecelesiastica dans le texte de Benoît (pp. 26-43 et pp. 58-66), genre codifié par Eusèbe de Césarée à la suite et sur le modèle des Écritures, est sur ce plan précis un apport essentiel de l'étude: Benoît s'approprie concrètement un modèle bien repérable d'écriture de l'histoire des Reviews 459 hommes, consacré selon Karl Ferdinand Werner ou Martin Heinzelmann à la démonstration de l'économie du Salut dans les événements de l'histoire des hommes. Il intègre ainsi le «récit des origines» au début de son texte en langue vernaculaire (p. 63), comme Orose ou Raoul Glaber avant lui. En ce sens, Yestoire de Benoît est l'occasion d'une nouvelle captation de marques garanties d'autorité: celles de l'histoire écrite de manière autorisée et autoritaire par les hommes de Dieu, mais plus précisément en cette période de «réforme» , par les hommes de l'Église institutionnelle. Françoise Laurent propose d'ailleurs, à la suite d'Emmanuèle Baumgartner, d'adopter pour le texte de Benoît le titre d'Histoire des dues de Normandie, délaissant ainsi le terme contestable de «chronique» . Ce travail ample et riche ne manque pas d'ouvrir des problém­ atiques nouvelles. Si l'on prend pour repère les deux traditions repérées par Françoise Laurent dans ['Histoire, il est peut-être per­ mis de penser que ['Histoire de Benoît est aussi bien traversée de forces centrifuges créatrices d'un certain «écart». Ainsi, par rap­ port à la rhétorique gréco-latine que manipule si brillamment Benoît, Françoise Laurent montre la manière dont, comme indissolublement, ce langage «emprunté» véhicule dans les «lieux» de l'éloge et dans les arguments des discours une «peinture de l'homme» qui «offre un principe fondamental d'explication de l'histoire» (p. 319) et un«déterminisme humain» (p. 330). Dès lors, dans les portraits et les discours, Benoît semble contester la problématique même de Yhistoria ecclesiastica et sa causalité, fondée au contraire sur la «recherche constante d'une interprétation supra terrestre» (p. 341). De même, le livre de Françoise Laurent met en lumière le rapport essentiel et complexe entre l'historiographe et son roi, dont l'opposition fron­ tale à l'Église réformatrice est bien connue. Or, là encore, c'est une problématique essentielle de Yhistoria ecclesiastica qui est en ques­ tion: celle de la soumission du personnage royal et de ses actes à la volonté de Dieu et à l'interprétation, traditionnellement auxiliarisante , de son historiographe ecclésiastique, qui fait de la fonction guerrière des princes la «part cadette» de l'histoire3 . Au fond, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, Benoît accaparerait les marques de Yhistoria ecclesiastica mais il remplacerait le personnel ecclésiastique, seul véritable acteur des historiae latines, par son roi et sa lignée nor­ mande, n'hésitant pas à qualifier Richard Ier de «sainz» et dotant certains ducs-rois de compétences théologiques. Sans doute sous le 3G. Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 343, 460 RHETORICA regard approbateur du Plantagenêt: Wace, rejeté, ne qualifie jamais ainsi Richard Ier... C'est donc, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, s le roi qui fait l'histoire avec Dieu et qui dirige l'Eglise, qu'il recons­ truit et à laquelle il explique le fonctionnement social, comme l'a bien montré Georges Duby. Dans un contexte marqué par un conflit âpre avec le sacerdotium, Benoît serait en lutte contre une conception grégorienne, auxiliarisée, de la royauté, mais il utiliserait pour cela les mêmes armes qu'elle: on peut penser peut-être à la lecture du travail de Françoise Laurent que la rhétorique chrétienne et classique de l'histoire est la plus prestigieuse et la plus efficace. Et que le fait d'y replacer Dieu à côté du roi, sans médiation cléricale, est un acte intéressant de subversion de l'histoire des genres. S'il s'agit bien du même Benoît, il n'en serait pas à son premier coup d'essai: Fran­ cine Mora n'a-t-elle pas découvert le dossier d'une sévère «réaction cléricale» aux audaces du Roman de Troie4? Dès lors, les choix bien différents de Wace posent question: ne serait-il pas le seul des deux historiens à être resté fidèle à toutes les règles du jeu, rhétoriques et idéologiques, de Yhistoria ecclesiastica ? Le travail de Françoise Laurent invite ainsi à redécouvrir un texte important et à lui poser des questions renouvelées. Ce n'est pas là le moindre des mérites d'un ouvrage de recherche... Eléonore Andrieu, Université Bordeaux III, Michel-de-Montaigne 4«UYlias de Joseph d'Exeter: une réaction cléricale au Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, » Progrès, réaction, décadence dans l'Occident médiéval, éd. E. Baumçartner, L. Harf-Lancner, (Genève: Droz, 2003), pp. 199-213. ...

Reviews 447 A New History ofthe Sermon: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Robert H. Ellison. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2010. xiv + 571. ISBN 978-9-00418572 -2 Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to have had an insa­ tiable appetite for words. This much mav he said of most eras, of course, but certain forces conspired during our period to raise and distribute this hunger in distinctive w avs. Advances in literacy and printing technology, ex­ panding boundaries of public life, and the professionalization of authorship contributed decisively to this phenomenon. The result was an efflorescence of public literature broadly conceived, oral and written, polite and polemical. Among the many genres in which such growth is evident was the sermon. Here was a rhetorical form notable for its appeal to audiences of quite nearly all classes, its sheer ubiquity, its expression in written and oral venues, (fre­ quently in both), and its willing embrace of occasional as well as spiritual matters. Of the latter tendency, it is well to be reminded how sharply the ser­ mon was defined not only by theological trends, but also by shifting cultural developments, foreign and domestic affairs, and newly emerging exigencies across the social landscape. Little surprise, then, that students of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism have found in the nineteenth-century sermon an uncommonly rich subject for exploration; greater surprise that so little has been done to bring together leading specialists in the field and to offer up in one volume their respective research, insights, and arguments. Robert H. Ellison's A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century rectifies this shortcoming, and then some. An edited work including sixteen original essays, it aims to "examine the theories, theological issues, and cultural developments that defined the 19th-centurv Anglo-American pulpit (4)." The reader will find herein neither grand theory of the sermon, for which we may be thankful, nor any superintending methodology driving the analyses (ditto). We are provided, rather, with a genuinely multi-disciplinary set of investigations from scholars across the humanities, hailing from England, The United States, Canada, and Scotland. This ecumenicism is more than geographical: the authors take up an impressive array of issues associated with the sermon (about which, more below), and are keenly alive to the many and diverse ways in which the sermon both shaped and was shaped by its cultural milieu. Although I cannot do justice here to the range of contexts addressed by the authors, something of the spectrum may be suggested by a brief survey. Theologically, we learn of the sermon's place in High Church efforts to rein in its centrifugal forces; Methodist attempts to wrest it free from such conservative strongholds; Catholic and, inevitably, anti-Catholic variations; Jewish work in salvaging a place of its own; and Mormon sermonic practices in the Great Basin. Social issues of the day given expression by the form are treated with respect to, among other pressures, slavery, evolution, dueling, civil rights, and women's leadership in the WCTU. It is worth observing, too, how several of the authors locate sermonic forms and influences in 448 RHETORICA various other genres, including didactic literature, the novel, and protest rhetoric. Again, we are reminded of the protean character of the form, of its adaptability to vernacular interests, abstract theorizing; and even popular entertainment. So much is not to suggest a free-for-all. On the contrary, the collection grounds itself upon a set of shared aspirations and commitments that give to the project a degree of coherence not often expected of edited volumes. Each of the authors holds in common the following: 1) the value of detailed and well-documented historical recovery; 2) the importance of observing the interplay of form and content in the creation of meaning; and 3) the view that sermons cannot plausibly be extracted from their context, but are explicable only with reference to the material and symbolic forces within which they operate. The volume is accordingly designed to give both these differences and commonalities their optimal reach: most essays run from 3050 pages; documentation and footnoting is extensive and purposeful; and a splendid compilation at volume's end belies my suspicion...

454 RHETORICA Le poète irrévérencieux. Modèles hellénistiques et réalités romaines, textes réunis par Bénédicte Delignon & Yves Roman, CEROR 32, CERGR, Lyon, 2009, 432 p. Le lien de ce livre avec la rhétorique est clair, puisqu'il traite des rapports entre la parole et le pouvoir. Mais sa spécificité est d'envisager la poésie, alors que dans le cadre d'une telle problématique, on considère généralement la prose, notamment l'historiographie. Les éditeurs ont voulu justement associer, dans cet ouvrage collectif, des «historiens» aux «littéraires» . Les historiens étaient ainsi appelés à prendre en compte les textes poétiques non pas comme des «sources» , mais comme des textes dont la matière même et le travail du style révèlent le projet de l'auteur. Mais le pouvoir reste un thème éminemment historique et les éditeurs se sont efforcés de maintenir la tension entre les deux axes en conservant au volume une véritable unité, consolidée par l'introduction de B. Delignon et la conclusion-bilan de Y. Roman, qui se répondent. Mais d'abord qu'est-ce qu'un poète «irrévérencieux» ? Le mot français d'irrévérence, est directement calqué sur le latin irreuerentia. Il aurait pu être défini d'emblée, mais finalement chacun des auteurs donne un peu sa vision de l'irrévérence. Le plus souvent on l'a associée à la libertas, traduction de parrhèsia. Mais, au-delà de la simple liberté de parole, il y a toute une gamme de valeurs : l'irrespect, l'insolence, la critique, jusqu'à l'invective, qui en serait une forme extrême. Tel ou tel parlera plus volontiers d'indépendance que d'irrévérence. Le terme convient de fait bien à la figure du poète, qui à Rome ne peut vivre que dans la dépendance de personnages importants. Au fond, le poète irrévérencieux est le contraire du poète courtisan. II y a des genres poétiques irrévérencieux par nature : les iambes, la satire, Tépigramme et même certaines élégies. Plusieurs chapitres concernent ainsi Horace, Juvénal, Martial, mais aussi Ausone. Mais ce que l'ouvrage met le plus en évidence, c'est la présence de l'irrévérence au sein même de la révérence, dans des textes à vocation apparemment épidictique: épopée, hymnes et même panégyriques. C'est là surtout que se pose la question rhétorique d'une parole déguisée, indirecte ou à double sens. Le livre se présente en quatre parties: (1) Contexte politique et idéologique sous le Haut empire: quelle place pour l'irrévérence ?, (2) modèles hellénistiques, (3), Formes et natures de l'irrévérence sous le Haut empire, (4) L'irrévérence poétique dans la latinité tardive. Au début du volume est posé le contexte d'écriture, dans ses aspects ju­ ridiques, politiques et sociologiques. On constate du reste que l'appréciation de la liberté laissée au poète n'est pas facile: pour A. Suspène, qui étudie no­ tamment les lois réprimant la liberté d'écriture, l'espace laissé à une possible irrévérence est très faible face au pouvoir impérial; Ph. Le Doze, de son côté, met l'accent sur le fait que les aristocrates romains ont besoin des poètes pour façonner leur image et que la relation n'est pas aussi inégalitaire qu'avec le prince. St. Benoist, étudiant le thème de Yabolitio memoriae, montre qu'on ne pouvait pas effacer totalement les écrits des poètes. Deux cas particuliers de Reviews 455 poètes qui ont payé cher leur irrévérence sont étudiés: celui de Cornélius Gallus (F. Rohr Vio) qui est très tôt devenu un thème de controverse dans les écoles de rhétorique, et celui d'Ovide (P. Cosme). La partie sur la poésie hellénistique est conçue par les éditeurs comme un...

This article examines natural metaphors for authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia, an influential precursor to and source for today’s encyclopedias. Carefully situating Chambers’s chosen metaphors of the honeybee and the daw within both historical and genre contexts reveals important nuances of authorial originality in reference texts that are most often understood as explicitly non-original and uncreative. His decisions concerning intellectual property were driven by his understanding of the transformative aspects of encyclopedic authorship and his ethical positioning of the encyclopedist as a gatherer and distributor of knowledge. His use of the honeybee as a metaphor for encyclopedic authorship demonstrates a rhetorical astuteness that draws from England’s rich apiary tradition as well as deeply British symbolism that positioned the honeybee as royal, moral, and virtuous. Taken together, Chambers’s argument demonstrates the need for careful attention to situated, historical factors in discussions of authorship and ownership.

ABSTRACT This rhetorical analysis investigates Martin Delany's (1861) innovative yet understudied Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party as a significant instance of nineteenth-century African American generic transformation and constitutive pan-Africanism. I explore how Delany recasts the genre of the mid-nineteenth-century African missionary narrative—with its white supremacist standpoint—into a lean, tightly controlled secular report intended to establish (1) Delany's African American readers’ agency as potential African emigrants; (2) the value of Delany's leadership in the emigration movement; and (3) a powerful constitutive pan-African ideological foundation for the emigration movement and for black uplift more generally.

The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

ABSTRACTAs commemorative artifacts have come to saturate our public culture, many scholars have revisited the question of genre and the commemorative experience. Responding to this work, I argue that by subverting the commonplaces of our commemorative culture, certain works of public memory have the capacity to suspend audiences in a deferred event of identification. I describe the creative potential of this process by arguing that when compelled to forge common ground with an atopon (out-of-place) work of public memory, one can be unsettled in one's ordinary habits and resituated toward the world and toward others. By redescribing the problem of identification as it relates to the disruption of our everyday rhetorical encounters, this article's significance extends beyond public memory and suggests the transformative potential of suspense and the out-of-place in our broader rhetorical culture.

This article reports the findings from analysis of end-of-life court cases and case files from one state public guardianship administrator as well as interviews with guardians or surrogates to identify how language and principles of the courts are operationalized in end-of-life decisions for those who are unable to make decisions for themselves. We found that physicians and guardians worked well within the requirements of the genre to ensure the best interests for those whom they represent.

With an ecological approach to the genres that circulate within communities of practice, this article traces the overlap between technical communication and online gaming communities in terms of their rhetorical uses of technical communication genres. Through shared practices, technologies, and epistemologies, online gaming environments call upon gamers to become technical communicators and provide opportunities for technical communicators to apply their expertise within the gaming industry.

As America entered the twentieth century, a number of women contributed to the popular elocution movement through their publication of compilations of recitation, dialogues, tableaux, and other elocutionary genres. An examination of woman-authored elocutionary compilations reveals a nascent feminism: Through their selection of pieces that examine women's changing roles and celebrate women's accomplishments—both within and beyond the domestic sphere—women compilers encouraged novice women speakers to rethink their gendered societal roles.

Research problem: This study explores how established patterns, means, and services influence the users' first experience when encountering a novel self-service application. The application (DB Cairo) is a passenger information system for public transportation running on mobile phones. Research questions: Is the users' first experience with the application influenced by established communicative patterns, means, and services? Are they used as reference objects? Which attributes of the application are relevant? Is there a leading reference object (prototype)? Do reference objects vary depending on the personal factors age and gender? Literature review: Little is known about user experience in first contact situations regarding passenger information systems. For our investigations, we used a theoretical framework combining Linguistic Evaluation Theory, Prototype Theory, and Linguistic Genre Theory: Evaluations are regarded as an integral part of user experience. Evaluation is conceptualized as an act where a subject evaluates an object with a certain purpose at a certain time by comparing it with other objects. Every object has various attributes-some are relevant for the evaluation, and others are not. Communication quality is seen as a crucial complex attribute for the evaluation of communicative applications. Methodology: We conducted a qualitative study: Data from two user test series (n = 12)with thinking-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews were analyzed with qualitative content analysis procedures. The participants were male and female, age 25-35 or 55-65, mobile-phone users, and multimodal travellers. The tests were conducted in a laboratory with a computer-based mobile-phone emulator. Results and conclusions: Results show that the participants explore the application by comparing its attributes with attributes of reference objects. Reference objects vary depending on attributes of the application. Regarding topic-related attributes, participants rely on established artifacts, which form a topic-related multimedia network. Within this network, the website of German Railways functions as prototype. Age- and gender-specific differences were not detected. The findings indicate that research into user experience and development practice could benefit from reconstructing and analyzing topic-related artifacts. Limitations of the study were a small sample size, the test location, and environment. Future challenges are the investigation of influencing factors and the development of new methods/tools for data collection infield studies.

Research problem: This corpus comparison study examines the occurrences of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> as used in British and New Zealand engineering lectures in order to discover its frequency and functions and to consider its role in professional communication. Research questions: Is <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> as frequent in the academic genre of university lectures as in other genres of spoken English? (1) Does <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> have the same functions in British and New Zealand engineering lectures as found in a previous study at an American university? (2) Does a better understanding of the different ways that <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> is used in lectures have pedagogical implications for professional communication, especially for English as an additional language learners? Literature review: Previous studies show <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> mainly functions as a ‘”minimizer’” (merely, only, simply) in university lectures in America, and functions the same in British and New Zealand university lectures on engineering. <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog Just}$</tex></formula> also functions as part of a metadiscursive frame (let me <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> explain), and stance (the speaker's attitude toward the content communicated: don't <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> copy down what I've done). In response, English as an additional language learners can learn to recognize and distinguish the different functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> and use them appropriately. Methodology: The researcher used a corpus linguistics methodology to determine the frequency of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> and a discourse analysis method to see if the functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> identified in a previous study of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English applied to the corpus of British and New Zealand engineering lectures. These lectures are all part of the Engineering Lecture Corpus, which was started at Coventry University and includes AUT University in New Zealand. Results and discussion: The frequency of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> in British and New Zealand engineering lectures was high: it occurred in the top 50 words in the wordlists of both sets of lectures. <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog Just}$</tex></formula> was used in British and New Zealand engineering lectures the same way as in the American university, functioning mostly as a “minimizer,” often to reduce the imposition of what was being said or asked. It occurred much more frequently in the British engineering lectures than the New Zealand ones, often in short stretches of discourse. Its “locative” meaning, used when indicating a precise location, occurred more often in the New Zealand Electrical Engineering lectures and in the British Civil Engineering lectures. A study of the different ways that <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> functions, and the frequency with which it is used in spoken academic English should lead to a better understanding of its function in professional communication. The limitation of the study was the sample size, and the fact that it was an opportunistic sample taken from a limited number of lecturers in a limited number of universities. While adopting the functions used in the American study was a limitation, the additional category of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> used in multiword units was uncovered. Limitations of the unavailablilty of recordings to determine pronunciation differences was also noted, with examples provided to show possible misunderstandings. Future research would examine an expanded data sample, providing better representation of the language of lectures in the UK and New Zealand within and outside the subdisciplines of engineering, and investigating the ways that the pronunciation of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> affects its meaning. Other spoken academic and general corpora, such as the British Academic Spoken English corpus and the spoken components of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English could be studied for comparison purposes of the frequency and functions of <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\,\font \frog = w52tim\hbox{\frog just}$</tex></formula> .

Reviews Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne. Edited with an introduction by W. B. Gerard. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. 284 pp. + CD. ISBN 978-1611491210 $62.50 The charge against Laurence Sterne (1713-68) as a sermon writer was once that he was somehow insincere—lukewarm, sensual, distractible— and that, as a result of these alleged moral failings, his religious writing was suspect. The very great successes of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental journey (1768) further downgraded The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760, 1766, 1769). W. B. Gerard's Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne continues the efforts of Melvyn New and others to repair the double neglect to which the sermons were subject. Dismissed by Victorians in light of Sterne's supposed character, diminished as sermons by changes in popular taste, and tolerated by disappointed Shandeans looking for greater specimens of literary genius, the sermons of "Yorick"—never out of print, but in some critical disfavor since the early nineteenth century—are now receiving renewed attention. The current interest in rhetoric, religion, and literature serves the sermons well, as scholars are now equipped to evaluate Sterne's sermons with an appreciation for their particular origins, audiences, and uses. The essays in Gerard's collection agree that the view of Sterne as a hypocritical sensualist, unserious about Christianity and somehow careless about his pastoral duties, is both historically suspect and not very relevant to the actual sermons. Gerard's introduction reviews the critical history of the sermons—their initial success, later reduction to "ancillary" status within Sterne's oeuvre, and more recent recovery as religious addresses worthy of attention on their own account, and not merely as moral essays by a genius (p. 24). The repair of Sterne's reputation as a sermon writer began with pioneering studies by Wilbur L. Cross, Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Arthur H. Cash (whose historic essay on "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy" is included in the present volume), and James Downey, and was further enhanced by New's work in introducing and annotating the sermons for The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (p. 22). New argued that insufficient understanding of the nature of the Anglican sermon, with its late seventeenth-century influences and its special role in discouraging enthusiasm among ordinary parishioners, tended to distort reception, as did Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 3, pp. 331-349, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.3.331. 332 RHETORICA misplaced assumptions about the "comic" tendencies of Sterne's wit. Rather than looking for something uniquely Shandean, New suggested, readers should familarize themselves with the "the vast sea of sermon literature" and be attentive to Sterne's reworkings of tried-and-true messages.1 New s "Preface by Way of a Sermon," introducing the volume of notes, is a seminal essay for considering the sermons rhetorically, underscoring the need for deeper awareness of the contexts of Sterne's preaching, the demands of his pastoral duties, and the volumes of well-known sermons and homiletic writing that would have informed most preachers' compositions. Indeed, as most readers will rely at least in part on New's scholarship in tracking Sterne's influences, the two volumes of the Florida Edition are really the coordinate texts for this collection. The revolution of critical opinion has therefore brought us back to one of the original grounds for Sterne's popularity: his talents as a sentimen­ tal Christian moralist working in a popular genre of real importance to his contemporaries. The puerile criterion of "sincerity"—in which the lack of Methodist-style evangelical rhetoric is somehow held against a latitudinarian , antienthusiastic preacher—no longer obtains, and the romantic criterion of "originality" is reduced to its proper place, i.e., barely relevant in an age and to a form that sought to transmit approved, not innovative wisdom, as several of...

Effective ways of teaching technical communication skills to engineering students have been much discussed. This article reflects on one setting, a first year course in Technical Communication at a university in Sweden, where electrical engineering teachers, language and communication teachers and student counsellors work in close, team-based cooperation using a project model which requires the students to analyse, implement and communicate technical problems. The paper discusses the change in this course - from an EAP course primarily prioritizing language training which ran parallel with a project course - to one unified ICL course. The progression is described through the changes in the organization of the course, and the article focuses on one learning activity: interdisciplinary tutorials on project reports. Through a pilot study where these sessions were video recorded and mapped, we conclude that the presence of different roles became an asset for the range of what the students see as relevant for their project report. In particular, the technical report genre was critically analysed, including problematic areas such as textual sequencing and display of technical problems; data visualisation and commentary; and referencing.

Comparatively little research has been done on students’ perceptions of communication and communication activities in integrated content and language (ICL) environments. In the present study, student statements about communication and communication activities have been collected via interviews and surveys from students attending a mechanical engineering programme in Sweden. These statements are compared with statements from content teachers at the same programme. Results suggest that students and teachers share a common perspective that communication activities should address a couple of apprenticeship genres that students will use in their future professions. Consequently, there seem to be good reasons for identifying and practising the use of apprenticeship genres. However, the focus on a few genres is problematised as some students show frustration when encountering unfamiliar genres. The article therefore also discusses the potential need for a role where communication teachers facilitate communication activities such that students enhance their perceptions of communication and communication activities in order to better prepare themselves for addressing various types of communicative situations.

This article uses activity theory to analyse two different portfolio approaches as tools for programmatic assessment of Integrated Content and Language (ICL) programs. The two approaches include a) a model in which students construct portfolios by selecting artifacts from a range of different contexts and provide reflective commentary, and b) a model in which the portfolio consists of major textual artifacts produced across a design project, with no reflective component. Activity theory provides a tool to explore what these models can offer in terms of an assessment of the integration of content and language in disciplinary contexts, where texts serve to mediate the ongoing work of a discipline. By highlighting the work that texts do in context as well as the access to student meta-knowledge afforded by each portfolio, activity theory provides a means to understand the strengths and limitations of both models. Perhaps most importantly, it points to the need for portfolios to include well-designed reflections that can support both student learning and effective programmatic assessment.

Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment.

After reviewing the past ten years of TETYC’s “What Works for Me,” I claim these pieces offer writing instructors much more than mere teaching tips; rather, they evidence a genre in a fraught relationship to academic discourse, a genre that asks readers to consider how the ways we write the classroom affect composition as a field, our teacherly selves, and the students in our classrooms.

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

The idea of genre marks large-scale repeated patterns in human symbolic production and interaction, patterns that are taken to be meaningful. Genre thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. This report on a discussion of scientific and technical genres at the 2012 Vicentennial meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) briefly considers the differences and difficulties with different ways of defining genres and their relevance to science and technology, explorations of the ways genres change or evolve, and pedagogical applications of genre analysis in scientific and technical discourse.

A review of work being published in our journals establishes that we most often think of ourselves as passive intellectuals, engaged in critical reflection about rhetorics of science and technology. But another persona lurks in that scholarship as well—the rhetorician as agent of change making the world a better place. This paper argues that rhetoricians of science and technology need to think harder about how we take the academic understandings developed in our primary internal discursive genre and transform them into productive engagements with external publics. Whether we encounter those publics in the classroom or in civic forums or in scientific or technical organizations, we need to be able to translate our research findings to these empowered stakeholders in ways that are meaningful and constructive. By sharing best practices for pedagogy and public engagement, rhetoricians of science and technology can improve our chances of making an impact with our research.

Drawing upon concepts from service-learning theorists Sarah Ash and Patti Clayton’s DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (2009), this article suggests an innovative approach to critical reflection. Rather than create separate reflection assignments, which can be problematic for a number of reasons described in this article, the author offers composition teachers strategies for embedding critical reflection concepts into composition assignments to create a “reflective course.” The author provides models of types of reflective assignments from a first-year service-learning writing course, including a research paper, a proposal letter to a member of the community, and an oral presentation. These models are adaptable to many levels of rhetoric and composition courses, to many genres, and to students working with a wide range of community partners.

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.

This study examines the nature and value of empathic communication in call center dyads. Our research site was a multinational financial services call center that we came to know through grounded study techniques, including analyses of 289 stressful calls. Examining calls as communication genre revealed that agents and customers have conflicting organizational, service, and efficiency needs that undermine communication. But three types of empathic expression can mitigate these conflicts in some interactions. Affective expressions, such as “I’m sorry,” were less effectual, but attentive and cognitive responses could engender highly positive responses although customers’ need for them varied tremendously. Thus, customer service agents must use both diagnostic and enactment skills to perform empathic communication effectively, a coupling that we call empathy work.

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

Research problem: A construct mediated in digital environments, information communication technology (ICT) literacy is operationally defined as the ability of individuals to participate effectively in transactions that invoke illocutionary action. This study investigates ICT literacy through a simulation designed to capture that construct, to deploy the construct model to measure participant improvement of ICT literacy under experimental conditions, and to estimate the potential for expanded model development. Research questions: How might a multidisciplinary literature review inform a model for ICT literacy? How might a simulation be designed that enables sufficient construct representation for modeling? How might prepost testing simulation be designed to investigate the potential for improved command of ICT literacy? How might a regression model account for variance within the model by the addition of affective elements to a cognitive model? Literature review: Existing conceptualizations of the ICT communication environment demonstrate the need for a new communication model that is sensitive to short text messaging demands in crisis communication settings. As a result of this prefect storm of limits requiring the communicator to rely on critical thinking, awareness of context, and information integration, we designed a cognitive-affective model informed by genre theory to capture the ICT construct: A sociocognitive ability that, at its most effective, facilitates illocutionary action—to confirm and warn, to advise and ask, and to thank and request—for specific audiences of emergency responders. Methodology: A prepost design with practitioner subjects <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$({N}=50)$</tex></formula> allowed investigation of performance improvement on tasks demanding illocutionary action after training on tasks of high, moderate, and low demand. Through a model based on the independent variables character count, wordcount, and decreased time on task <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$(X)$</tex></formula> as related to the dependent variable of an overall episode score <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$(Y)$</tex></formula> , we were able to examine the internal construct strength with and without the addition of affective independent variables. Results and discussion: Of the three prepost models used to study the impact of training, participants demonstrated statistically significant improvement on episodes of high demand on all cognitive model variables. The addition of affective variables, such as attitudes toward text messaging, allowed increased model strength on tasks of high and moderate complexity. These findings suggest that an empirical basis for the construct of ICT literacy is possible and that, under simulation conditions, practitioner improvement may be demonstrated. Practically, it appears that it is possible to train emergency responders to improve their command of ICT literacy so that those most in need of humanitarian response during a crisis may receive it. Future research focusing on communication in digital environments will undoubtedly extend these finding in terms of construct validation and deployment in crisis settings.

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

Reviewed are: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Reviewed by Kara Poe Alexander Beyond Post process, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola, Reviewed by William Duffy Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for All Students edited by Val Gerstle and Lynda Walsh, Reviewed by Gary Vaughn

This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the “craft” of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers’s (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies: process, genre, author, and institutionality. Using research from composition studies and literary studies, the article examines the concerns each of these categories is beginning to confront as more and more creative texts recruit digital technologies. As such, the argument outlines four tiers that each work as a line of inquiry regarding the valuable—indeed necessary—ways to imagine concerns regarding craft in twenty-first- century creative writing studies.

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates' Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author's harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates' need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors. This paper undertakes a different approach. Isocrates' criticism of paradoxographic literature is based upon observations about what is and what is not allowed in moral epideictic discourse. Isocrates' specific instructions about proper and improper moral argumentation can function as hermeneutical tool to analyze Helen and Busiris. Only in Helen does he observe the rules of argumentation formulated in that very discourse. In Busiris, however, Isocrates adopts the typical modes of argumentation in paradoxographic literature as represented in the works of Gorgias or Polycrates. In consequence, his arguments in Busiris prove to be unconvincing when measured by his own standards formulated in the proemium of both Helen and Busiris. Consequently, the discourse ends in an apology of these arguments which is, once again, defective. In his corresponding discourses Helen and Busiris, Isocrates implictly demonstrates the moral and technical defects inherent in paradoxical discourse. He explicitly reflects these defects in the proemia and epilogues of both speeches. Helen and Busiris should, therefore, be understood as Isocrates' manifesto for moral discourse as opposed to paradoxographic showpieces.

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates’ Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author’s harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates’ need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors.

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

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

Through an examination of four current trends in composition instruction, this article presents a new lens for envisioning composition instruction that integrates the best aspects of the writing across the curriculum, genre-based curriculum approach, ecocomposition, and writing across communities theories of writing instruction. The "literacy landscape" proposed herein explicitly values the integration of student learning “incomes” within the composition classroom and derives from the author’s experience teaching within a large composition program that employed aspects of the genre-based curriculum, and both WAC approaches. The literacy landscape is envisioned to act both as a lens for imagining a more comprehensive approach to administering composition programs, as well as to teaching composition.

The article reviews the impact of digital environments on written modes and practices, with a focus on online collaborative works and “born digital” creations. Examples of these works and relevant Web sites are provided, in addition to learning activities for involving students in electronic environments. The pervasiveness of electronic contexts in our public and private lives means that writers and teachers of writing are now able to rethink all genres of communicative activity, written or spoken, and how these are deeply influenced or entirely reformed by digital media.

This article explores the notion of creativity as it relates to writing. It supports the tenet that all written texts, regardless of genre, contain creative elements to varying degrees, one reason being the representational aspect of language and, in particular, written language. It proposes that it would be more productive to examine written creativity on a continuum rather than through an exclusive dichotomy between creative and non-creative, and describes the elements that would be involved in such a continuum. The article explains some pertinent approaches to creativity, both linguistic and non-linguistic, and leads to a discussion of creative techniques on semantic, syntactic, and textual levels, drawing examples from a database of different texts.

Taking a hybrid approach of research and narrative, theory and reflection, this essay utilizes yogic theory as a lens to discuss how students can negotiate one of the more challenging aspects of their research writing: freely setting out into the realm of creative, original research while negotiating genre-based constraints. I present research on genre and the “containment” of composition that highlights some of the past and current discussion about the potentially inhibiting heuristics that can shut down students’ constructions of agency and creativity in researched writing. Drawing upon research in contemplative pedagogy, essential texts of yogic philosophy, and images of the body in asana, I use the philosophy and language of yogic practice to propose a pedagogy that invites students to see their way toward an embodied practice of research, one that helps them to acknowledge and negotiate generic constraints, seek innovation, and accept uncertainty in their research-based writing.

This study aims to provide scholars with insight into the task of writing research articles. Research questions: (1) What are the generic structures of research article introductions in three engineering subdisciplines? and (2) What are variations that distinguish the introductions of one subdiscipline from the others? Literature review: Swales's genre analysis method has proved to be an effective textual analysis to identify the structural organization of each section of research articles. Even though there seems to be a pattern in each section, previous genre-based studies also demonstrate that disciplinary variation is discernible. It thus remains to be determined whether research articles of different subdisciplines within a single discipline share the same organizational structure. Methodology: Based on journal impact factors, three datasets of English research article introductions representing three subdisciplines of engineering (civil, software, and biomedical) were compiled, consisting of 180 introductions with 60 from each subdiscipline. Then, the three datasets were analyzed using Swales's genre analysis technique to identify the structural patterns prevalent in the introductions of each subdiscipline. Units of textual analysis called moves and steps were quantified to capture variations among the introductions. Results and discussion: Analysis shows that these introductions generally adhere to a common rhetorical organization across subdisciplines. However, disciplinary variations are also captured, highlighting the unique characteristics and perspectives of each subdiscipline. The findings bear pedagogical implications, allowing English for Specific Purposes practitioners to prepare novice scholars to be able to publish successfully in their fields.

Abstract Formerly a synonym for oratory and elocution, "public speaking" after 1900 signaled, instead, a paradigm shift whereby extemporaneous-conversational speechmaking replaced declamation and oratorical composition. This study of more than 200 key titles published between 1730 and 1930 demonstrates that the modern public-speaking book emerged, not as an innovation in whole cloth, but rather from a generation-long process of selectively recombining materials extracted from preceding text genres. As a practical revolution, the new public speaking contributed to democratic, argument-rich public affairs and, as an intellectual movement, furthered the emergence of speech as a separate academic discipline.

Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

The object of this research is a learning method that uses email correspondence to promote the development of narrative writing skills in year 4 and year 5 students. Focusing on the written production of episodes of adventure novels and peer review, this learning method was applied to four classes in the Paris region over a 1-year period. The classes were paired in such a way that some students were required to read and analyze texts produced by correspondents (advice givers) while others carried out revisions using peer advice and suggestions (advice receivers). To describe the dynamics of writing, revision and learning, a qualitative analysis of the texts and suggestions given or received by the student partners is carried out. A statistical analysis comparing the texts produced by students in both groups is used to corroborate the findings of the initial analysis. Students showed an increasing awareness and consideration of the key characteristics of the practiced genre, resulting in an improvement of the quality of the texts in the course of the revision process and throughout the year. The texts produced by the advice givers improved more than the texts produced by the advice receivers. The findings are attributed to greater self-reflection and successive reformulations fostered by the elaboration of advice and suggestions.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

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

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aid-to-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

This article on digital writing identifies a range of genres that are employed by gamers, many of which evince dialogic rhetoric. Such discourse offers potential to decenter group power relations and thus suggests an opportunity to promote a democratic classroom.

Despite the legal and social ramifications of presentence investigation reports, little is known about them outside the legal community. The author uses the frameworks of genre theory and activity systems to analyze the documents, the criminal justice system’s ideology of sentencing, and the statutes and regulations that govern the reports. What emerges is an ambiguous and contradictory genre at odds with the philosophy of individualized justice underpinning its origins, a genre that has eschewed narrative for the sake of objectivity. The article further underscores the value of employing a flexible theoretical framework when studying workplace genres.