All Journals
1433 articlesApril 2012
-
Abstract
The following feature draws a parallel between the “Burkean parlor” and the social networking site, Facebook. It also applies the Burkean pentad to the principle of motive behind Facebook users. In addition, it details several different types of Facebook pages and the growth patterns of each regarding purpose.
-
Abstract
In a letter of April, 1989, Kenneth Burke suggested that the process of writing A Grammar of Motives contributed significantly to the choice of identification as key term for A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke proposed two representative anecdotes for the study of the composing process of the Rhetoric: The story of the shepherd that appears in the Rhetoric and the story of some children who are born without the capacity to feel pain from the external world. If we follow out these leads, using the methodology of the Grammar to look at the work of writing the Rhetoric, Burke says that we will see how identification emerged as a “positive negative,” a program for negative thinking. We might also learn more about connections between the Grammar and the Rhetoric.
March 2012
-
Abstract
Abstract A close textual analysis of Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural encyclical Deus Caritas Est—God is Love is offered from the perspective of Platonic and contemporary rhetorical theory An acclaimed inspirational success, this letter proposes loving "encounter" and "response" as the fundamental dynamic of Christian communication; God is "felt" and made manifest in concrete love-of-neighbor. Benedicts "contact" orientation has significant implications for contemporary theory—humanity becomes ontologically contiguous, subjects are holistically embodied, Truth is grounded in co-felt exchange, and discourse is decentered by direct public engagement. Deus Caritas Est draws attention to ethical limits in Dramatism and Logology and advances embodied, invitational, and theological perspectives on rhetorical theory by showing how genuine love initiates and feeds a divine dynamic that can transcend divisions and unite humanity.
-
Rhetorical Forms of Symbolic Labor: The Evolution of Iconic Representations in China’s Model Worker Awards ↗
Abstract
Abstract As the steadily expanding cyberpublic presents both obstacles and opportunities for Communist Party rule in China, the party has responded by adapting the rhetorical strategies of the Model Worker (MW) commendations to a changing political environment Using role model representations to encourage particular kinds of citizen labor, the system has changed from Maoist single-lane authoritarianism to a multilane interaction between the public and the party. This essay investigates the epideicticfunction, adaptation, and modification of MW awards via Kenneth Burkes symbolic labor. Tracing the awards through the periods of leadership from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, I explore how the structure of the MW program has evolved into a rhetorical strategy capable of stabilizing party power through the moralization of party initiatives and the promulgation of party ideals despite increases in new media forms and institutions.
-
Abstract
The concurrent publication of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History—a collection of essays published over the span of three decades (1980–2005)—and Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity makes available and defines Nancy Struever's ongoing revision of the history of rhetoric and pioneering understanding of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. In Struever's own idiom, the all-inclusive “thickness” of rhetorical inquiry—as opposed to the discriminating “thinness” of philosophy—requires some concern for a thinker's intellectual career. Indeed, taken together, the two books allow for a useful, incremental gloss of the later Struever by the earlier and vice versa. Struever authorizes this continuity in her introduction to History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, linking the last essay in her collection, on Hobbes and Vico, to the more sustained analysis of the two thinkers provided in her most recent monograph. As a whole, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity aims at illustrating “rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, xix). Despite this adversarial claim—and her firm awareness of the perennial quality of the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy—Struever calls for an inside job: a rescue mission intended to liberate rhetoric by authentic rhetorical means. Among them, certainly, is a renewed intimacy between theory and practice, the “theory as practice” that Struever has called for in another work.1Struever's commitment to rhetoric as inquiry makes her wary of the academic “culture wars” that defined the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, ix). One of the most fascinating aspects of Struever's career, as it emerges from these pages, is her ability to distinguish herself or, as she would prefer, to “secede” from an intellectual world whose proclivity for language hardly translated into a historical and thus profound understanding and practice of rhetoric as an investigative mode. “It is one thing to take a ‘linguistic turn’ and proclaim language as the core of politics,” Struever claims, but “it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 91).In her quest for appropriate boundaries, Struever argues against the “dysfunctional colonization of rhetoric by literary criticism,” whose adherence to Cartesian philosophy compels us to interpret metaphor “as primarily cognitive; that is, as an introspective act of a Cartesian consciousness in an isolate realm of concepts” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 1:73).2 This approach is particularly detrimental to the field of intellectual history, where the reduction of rhetoric to poetics, or worse, to a “poetic epistemology” (Paul De Man, Hayden White, etc.), leads to a self-referential focus “on texts, on products, not the events of process” (2:67). Even a “philosopher's rhetoric” such as Ernesto Grassi's, in Struever's view, remains bogged down by external “definitions” and “judgments” that often turn rhetoric into just “a techne, with some epistemic pretensions and an easy relation to theoretical axioms” (1:70). Rhetorical pragmatism should forbid “professional interference,” appeals to “empty formal relations” or to “the essentialist premises of the logical categories.” According to Struever, rather, what we need is a “rhetorician's rhetoric” devoted to restoring the discipline to its civil domain through an “account of the rhetorical premises and procedures investing specific historical initiatives and their reception” (75).So much for the pars destruens of this venture. One could argue that Struever emerges unscathed from what she views as the “fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory” by paying heed to Vico's educational ideal. Struever's inclusive humanistic education gives her scholarship a fine edge: an equal mastery of the tools and concerns of Renaissance scholarship, intellectual history, political theory, and ancient as well as modern philosophy. More to the point, Struever shows that actual knowledge of Renaissance thought and practices can revise our fascination for Continental philosophy and protect against the pitfalls of contemporary theory's misplaced prejudice against the beginnings of modernity. A sympathetic reader of her work is bound to view the Renaissance and early modernity with the same new eyes Heidegger's unique approach to Greek antiquity afforded his students in the study of Plato and Aristotle. However, it would barely suffice to claim that Struever allows for an uncommon experience of the postmodern moment. Rather, her work thoroughly and successfully rewrites the future agenda of intellectual history and rhetorical inquiry.Struever fondly acknowledges the intellectual debts incurred to C. S. Pierce and Heidegger, from whose works she extrapolates insights that form her notions of “inquiry” and “rhetoric.” Pierce's antinecessitarian pragmatism defines the communal and temporal “constraints” of the logic of inquiry for our epoch: thought creates communal beliefs, which in turn tend to the establishment of “habits of action,” including inquiry. These premises “resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's belief, shared opinions (endoxa) and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion, as practice and goal” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 2–3). Working at a “supraindividualist” level, Pierce restores epistemology's dependence on community, the too often forsaken “locus of investigative action.” Inquiry is pragmatic: its subtilitas applicandi prevails over the correlated subtleties in knowing and interpreting (see History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 3:217–20).As for Heidegger, rhetoricians may yet learn how much they owe him. The neglected summer semester lectures of 1924 (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie) remain, “arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 6:127). These lectures offer an “extraordinary opportunity” for those willing to share in Heidegger's recovery of the unity of “discourse” (Miteinanderreden) and “political life” (Miteinandersein) according to the originary Hellenic initiative: the “authentic life” as “political life” (106). Among the moderns, only the early Heidegger allows rhetoric to reside squarely “inside politics.” The consequences of this recovery are momentous: Heidegger aids in bypassing the “inauthentic” Platonic definition of rhetoric as a trivial art and rescues this mode of inquiry from its own “bookish retreat” as an academic discipline divested of a “precise sense of duty to action” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 133). In hindsight, one cannot but regret that Heidegger's interest in rhetoric was short lived and gave way to poetic concerns akin to those of the literary critics (to say nothing, of course, of his nefarious political allegiance).By endorsing Heidegger's prominence in “modern revivals of rhetoric” and assimilating his interpretation, Struever takes pride of place in the now long and crowded history of his reception. Yet she sits askew with respect to many other like-minded students. Like those of, for example, Gadamer or Grassi, her reading of Heidegger resonates with Vico, rhetoric, humanism, and the Italian Renaissance and early modernity. Unlike them, however, Struever does not ground her sought-for reconciliation of Heideggerianism and Romanitas in a refutation of Heidegger's anti-Platonism. Indeed, Plato seems to hold no interest for Struever.Confident of Heidegger's restoration of rhetoric to its proper domain (in the civil operations of political life), Struever embarks on an actualization of its nature as inquiry. Despite its co-originality with philosophy (for some, like Heidegger, rhetoric even takes chronological precedence) and Struever's internalist ambitions, rhetoric's vital fear of solitude asks that this discipline be defined, at least preliminarily, in confrontation. In other words, rhetoric's quarrel with philosophy is both inescapable and generative, if only the true nature of such opposition is revealed as neither a “contest of faculties” nor as an “academic rivalry” but rather as a vivifying “confrontation of two major investigative initiatives,” each characterized by its own modal allegiance: “necessity” for philosophy and “possibility” for rhetoric. Struever promotes rhetorical inquiry's kairotic infiltration and colonization of that breathing space left open by Aristotle “between partial and complete actualization,” the space of “unrealized possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 6).Released into its element, rhetoric's “modal proclivity” and “revisionary capacities” are given full rein to create “counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy” (125). While this task may seem daunting, Struever's point is that it should not appear impossible. The rhetorical inquirer is not asked to rewrite history from scratch but rather to reveal “what might have been otherwise,” to indulge in exploring the “possible worlds” that open up by placing “actuality in a range of possibilities” (6). If we persist, past, present, and future may look different though strangely familiar: “The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture” (127).In conclusion to Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever poses a pertinent question: “Where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing?” As a matter of fact, once a three-dimensional view of “possibility” is conquered and inhabited, the “where” and “when”—temporal and spatial coordinates—matter less than the “how”: that is, the appropriate attitude and strategy. In this context, the formation of strong alliances becomes of paramount importance. Thus Struever's admiration for Hobbes and Vico, who, although rarely as officially and tightly allied as in her reading, team up against political theory's dependence on the universal moral truths generated in timeless solitude by Greek philosophy. As both “topics” and “practitioners” of rhetorical inquiry, Hobbes and Vico have a lesson to teach in academic disobedience that could promote the overhaul of a political philosophy that to this day remains “fraught with fashion” and “susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 19:80). “Politics demands novelty,” and Hobbes and Vico put their rhetorical “inventiveness” to the service of a “life science” that contests the “philosophical confections of ‘oughts’” (76). In this reading, the “early modernity” of Hobbes and Vico comes closer than some of these pages would suggest to the “Renaissance” of their best humanist predecessors: creative imitation, congenial alliances, and strategies of secession remain salient features of this subsequent alternative project.At the outset, the “case for the modernity of Early Modernity” rests on Hobbes's subtle appropriation of Aristotle, an appropriation that, in Struever's view, certainly glosses Heidegger's own. In this case, too, Struever's reading draws heavily on selected sources, including, the “generous frame for Renaissance inquiry” proffered by Wilhelm Dilthey's neglected Weltanschauung und Analyse. His merit is twofold. First, Dilthey manages to keep the “issues and tactics” proper to the history of rhetoric apart from those of the history of philosophy. Coming from Dilthey, the approach could only be sympathetic: humanists “are to be read as pyschologues and anthropologues” rather than as (failed) epistemologists and metaphysicians (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 4:2). Moreover, it is to Dilthey's credit to have emphasized the Renaissance revival of Romanitas—that is, the mutually constraining relationship of individual and sovereign will (imperium).Hobbes's “roman orientation” and concern for the res publica endows his Ciceronian reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric with a pragmatic slant (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 12). Hobbes secedes by reaching over Cartesian dualism and appropriating the “Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions” and “definition of the soul as principle (archē) of life”: “Soul is life” (13). The interaction and continuum of faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, passion, memory, and reason) inhibit a misguided distinction between “sensitive” and “cognitive” elements and “accommodate biology” in political life. “Nature as motion, as alteration,” restlessly seeks what it lacks: “If life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics” (22). The goal of rhetoric as “life science” should be to guarantee movement and endlessly postpone the end products of the “rational will.” The “therapeutic” freedom of open-ended deliberation, Struever claims, has greater value than the hit-or-miss liberty of action. This is how “Hobbes follows Aristotle … in the total politicisation of rhetoric” (17). In this frame, “rhetorical pessimism”—its concern for “process” not “end”—turns into a “competence” apt to produce “not so much a list of solutions” as “an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunctions.” On this point, Struever is perhaps too unflustered in admitting that “the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus” are bound to be a casualty of this new rhetorical campaign (124).Struever's sophisticated reading of Hobbes cannot be fully recounted here. It is clear, however, that the author enjoys partaking in the rowdy liberation of rhetoric her work promotes. Rhetoric's liberation in politics focuses on the motus animi that “fuels political behavior” and “drives political action” in a creatio continua insisting on “complication” (24) and “fluidity” (33). Struever's decision to read early modernity under the rubric of Dilthey's “impetuous subjectivity”—as opposed, for example, to Burckhardt's stiff “individualism”—is a productive one. But should one allow things to spin out of control? Hobbes and Vico offer a solution not by transcending the political but by extending its purview to the community and its sensus communis. A more precise sense of civil “wholeness”—not to be mistaken for philosophical “plenitude”—can be recovered in Vico's commitment to the “impersonal.” In Struever's narrative, Vico delivers what Hobbes promises: “If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercritical of the moralistic initiative” (49).Struever notes that Vico declares his secession at the outset of the New Science with an emphasis on “civil things” (cose civili) rather than “moral” (morali). At once, the private moral inquiry of political philosophy is forsaken together with “narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions” (42). Vico's historiography opts for an “impersonal agency”—“Achilles,” for example, “is not a proper name but a possibility of role”—that “tempers, corrects individualism as our sense of Struever's reading of and its to as a gesture” may be her in community as the place where knowledge is and Moreover, emphasis on community corrects the and of philosophy and its political At a closer if “necessity” is our only we might our will to be tightly emphasis on on the and on up to but to the of beliefs, that the range of civil actions” However, if to and it by which to that same that rhetoric or In other words, space is to the that political philosophy out of be Hobbes in Vico and still it of their for they as unrealized possibilities in Modernity” establishment and of rhetoric's true nature as inquiry the recovery of an authentic However, Struever is that her has its a author with so much of rhetoric and politics with her Struever this in her of the “academic or investigative of the most rhetorical of (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, Vico's well as those of thinkers such as and and thus interest in inquiry only its practice” In other words, comes up against as the is to own possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever may be these are not as or for yet how much should a like-minded reader from a creative of and practices of Struever would an of rhetorical initiatives as opposed to of a Struever's own she is more on this If her work is a to critical the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, a early modernity is with late modernity and the At this a of rhetorical in Hobbes and Struever on of and some affinities with Vico however, as as the of Indeed, is the only unrealized possibility in Struever's a casualty of a agenda that is a with on the of or, its of and the of rhetoric's “political the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, as a with to Struever in a fine of intended to up the emphasis on in inquiry and the nature of the philosophy a point that the of the and as and a shared a of Heidegger's is now closer at Struever her of “possibility” in contemporary inquiry with a of the best and most recent rhetorical initiatives in and much the is that a rhetoric in in our of and our solitude of and of like those of Hobbes and Vico, of their A revision is bound to an of its This is even if such a as in the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, is as a point in the of a and career. One that History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History is not more inclusive not of Struever's past As it is, it for how Struever's could be to of its as inquiry” is critical of or persuasion, and the The of an reader can be for of its with Struever's rhetoric study or in which to be are that her work will like a literary to those to the of what Struever calls a more defined concerns as a Renaissance still this of The Renaissance early she has been a in One would not to Struever's as a to that of the her work that the is to this its Yet we a are the Renaissance and early modernity or This is a in Struever's work her in of be Struever's recent for “early modernity” less to Hobbes's and Vico's historical than to her to place herself in res and historical The of early modernity certainly more unrealized than the of the In case, a less of the should be an those who, including Struever in her own are still in the of the to this point is Struever's in Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity with respect to another Yet the she calls for one can of that to which she her The continuity and of between the humanism, and Vico's early modernity to that Struever would be on a reader of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity has not read of her other many essays in History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History the “Renaissance” of and some may Struever's to up to the to rhetoric's to It is true that this approach has more often than not to a and definition of rhetoric as a rather than different of be clear, it is not the of that one but rather the that is in the a that, with Struever's and Gadamer to this vital in from which Struever is as she is from by her of of rhetoric as inquiry shows what our discipline would look like if from matter how this may its and are bound to appear just as “therapeutic” as Struever to be in to the moral from the civil rather than the other way The of by Struever to one of the most contemporary in of both its civil and Struever shows that we can the past more lesson for the
-
Abstract
Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.
February 2012
-
Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, by Debra Hawhee Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 94–97. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.94 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, by Debra Hawhee. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 94–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.94 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Abstract
The essay analyses several excerpts from Gabriele D'Annunzio's public speeches from the period of his reign in the town of Fiume as a self-appointed dictator. The concept of the “state of exception” as explored by Giorgio Agamben and Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnival are applied to a reading of D'Annunzio's exercises in political rhetoric.
January 2012
-
Abstract
Reviews Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges ofLanguage, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9 "There are only bodies and languages." Alain Badiou's proposition at the beginning of Logics of Worlds neatly sums up the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke as elaborated by Debra Hawhee in Moving Bodies. Hawhee's book is an excellent study of Burke's career-long preoccupation with hu mans as "bodies that learn language." Hawhee selectively tracks this pre occupation from Burke's earliest fiction through his engagements with bod ily mysticism, drug research, endocrinology, constitutional medicine, and gesture-speech evolution to his final recapitulations organized around the opposition between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. Hawhee's multidimensional discussion presents a powerful case for Burkean explo rations of the rhetorical primacy of bodies and language, what Badiou more generally labels "democratic materialism." In her introduction Hawhee defines the transdisciplinary framework she uses to examine Burke's thinking. Distinguishing it from interdisci plinary study, Hawhee describes contemporary transdisciplinarity as an "effort to suspend—however temporarily—one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, and multilevel inquiry," focusing on specific problems by drawing together radically different orientations (p. 3). Burke himself was a transdisciplinarian avant la lettre. His early critical method of "perspective by incongruity" brought together contrasting in terpretive frames to do productive explanatory work, and his svnecdochic clustering approach transformed associative constellations of terms into sug gestive meaningful wholes. Throughout Moving Bodies Hawhee provides a transdisciplinary kind of rhetorical history. She skillfully tracks Burke's in terpretive accomplishments in juxtaposing radically different discourses and tropically clustering terms associated with the body/language problematic. For example, in Chapter 1, "Bodies as Equipment for Moving," Hawhee pursues the "music-body-language cluster" through Burke's early fiction and music criticism to challenge past claims about his purported movement from aesthetics to rhetoric in the twenties. She persuasively argues instead that a distinctive rhetoric centered on bodily effects was there from the very Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 1, pp. 94-110, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 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.2012.30. IN4. Reviews 95 start. Hawhee explains how7 this Burkean rhetorical aesthetics arose from his fictional interest in characters' bodily rhythms and his critical interest in music s effects on audience bodies. Her account of Burkean talk about “bodies and their rhythmic/arrhythmic capacities" sets the stage for a rich rhetorical story about Burke's developing theories of language, rhetoric, and symbol-using generally. Haw7hee finds one passage in Counter-Statement to be especially significant, returning to it at least three times in Moving Bodies: The appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with 'bodily' processes." Rhetorical form appeals to somatic rhythms of “systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation, up and down, in and out, back and forth." In Chapter 2, "Burke's Mystical Method," Hawhee concentrates on Burke's engagement with bodily and intellectual strands of mysticism, es pecially in his tw7o books of the mid-thirties, Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. During times of crisis and alienation, Burke sug gests, mystics emerge to perceive things differently. As he puts it in Perma nence and Change, mysticism is primarily “an attempt to define the ultimate motivation of human conduct by seeing around the corner of our accepted verbalizations." Significantly, a valuable resource of such mystical insight can be found in the human body. Writing to Allen Tate in 1933, Burke asserts that during historical periods when, as in the thirties, ethical systems fall into disrepute, mystics often seek in bodily processes an ''undeniable point of reference outside the system whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up." For Burke, mystical bodies move thought tow7ard new7 perspectives and into unexpected meaningful associations. Hawhee...
-
Abstract
The essay analyses several excerpts from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s public speeches from the period of his reign in the town of Fiume as a self-appointed dictator. The concept of the “state of exception” as explored by Giorgio Agamben and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival are applied to a reading of D'Annunzio’s exercises in political rhetoric.
-
Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric by Jeanne Nuechterlein ↗
Abstract
102 RHETORICA authoritarians generally, wanted things their way, without acknowledging the criticism, flaws, or consequences of that way or how they got it." (234) Some more nuance is in order. Historians are well aware that proslavery thought ante-dated the abolitionist literature crisis of 1835, though the ampli tude of proslavery thought certainly increased after Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 and became substantially more strident post 1835. Another instance is Roberts-Miller's argument that many proslavery advocates portrayed slav ery as anti-modern (65-67). Those tropes are certainly in the proslavery lit erature and historians still frequently set up the old South as a place of pre-modern values against the market-oriented North. However, much of the movement (and also the rhetoric) was about how slavery was consistent with progress. Fanatical Schemes is difficult reading. It is dense. The discussion of secondary literature sometimes seems distant from the topic under study. For instance, juxtaposed are references to Orwell and proslavery thought (41, 219), the Nazis and slavery (218-19), and histories of Native Americans and contemporary debate over the Confederate flag (46). However, for those who are interested in the power of rhetoric and the contours of conservative thought, this volume will repay well the time spent with it. Roberts-Miller relocates ideas and words to the center of historv in this J study of how slavery was discussed. The big question one has is how do the ideas expressed here relate to reality? That is, even if the proslavery arguments had been more moderate, would the path of our nation towards proslavery actions - like secession - have been different? Did words cause war? Or is the discussion of proslavery thought more a dependent variable than an independent one? As we try to answer these questions, this important book may help re-ignite the scholarly study of proslaverv thought and the power of words and ideas. Alfred L. Brophy University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Refor mation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 242 pp. ISBN:978-0-271-03692-2 In the main, the terms and syntax of early sixteenth-century criticism of art are those of classical rhetoric. Most certainly, rhetorical analysis can illumine any visual or verbal persuasive event, regardless of self-conscious authorial intent or training. And early sixteenth-century Basel was the shared context of Erasmian (and Melancthonian) rhetorical publications as well as of Holbein's early (pre-England) work. Nuechterlein very usefully explores the context and considers the parallel tactics in Erasmian rhetorical theory and practice and Holbeinian visual rhetoric. She observes that Holbein "il- Reviews 103 lustrated , or drew marginal comments" on, Myconius' copy of Praise of Folly, suggesting he read it (67). There is as well an ingenious, useful dis cussion of the classical anecdotes Holbein selects for the “political rhetoric" of his decorative program (now lost) of the Basel Council chamber; she also notes possible linkages of the scenes to contemporary political scandal. Still, noting that Holbein s dev otion to variety as aesthetic value resonates with Erasmus s case for the virtue of copiousness, she correctly emphasizes a source of Holbeinian variety as current artisanal practice. Nuechterlein has amassed a great deal of rhetorical information—the available theory and expressive practices—but what rhetorical use does she make of her facts? Her primary, dominating rhetorical strategy is to dichotomize: opposing Holbein's “descriptive" art to the “inventive": phys ical to spiritual, body to mind, objective to subjective, observation of reality to “artistic", imaginative inv ention. But are not the "descriptive" portraits “inventive"? Could not a case be made that they are powerfully innovative? True, she asserts that Holbein achiev es a “middle ground" between descrip tive/ inv entiv e modes; but this does not do justice to the portraits' delivery of persons simmering with intent. There is the “Young Man, Age 32", alive to the possibility of engaging the viewer; and Holbein's portrait places Thomas More as oligarch, a man of power we know as intent on the cruel repression of heretics, a repression justified in his strenuous Humanist rhetoric. On the other...
-
Abstract
Reviews 97 catharsis and his writing vividly about his "gasping-gagging-gulping" and other persistent ailments. Hawhee's suggestive conclusion raps up her argument by focusing on Burke's famous formulation of the motion/action opposition in the eighties. Not the least of Hawhee's many accomplishments in Moving Bodies is her complication of this distinction, which she demonstrates is much more than a simple metaphysical opposition. Rather, the binary of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action serves Burke as the basis of a "multidirectional theory" that, while positing an irreducible distinction between body and language, nonetheless shows the two terms to be parallel and complementary in the extreme (p. 166). Again and again in Moving Bodies, Hawhee chronicles how Burke worked rhetorically through the body in different discursive fields. Burke thought literally about the body and its causal relation to language, and he thought figuratively with the body in his descriptions and explana tions of cultural production and reception. Indeed, within Hawhee's inci sive rhetorical biography, the static/moving and functional/dysfunctional body emerges as the very condition of possibility for understanding Kenneth Burke as a theorv-proving, symbol-using animal. Moving Bodies deserves praise not onlv for its full-bodied picture of Burke as language thinker but also for its proposal of an alternative materialist model for doing rhetorical history. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. 210 pp. Peter Mack sets himself an ambitious task in this short impressive book: to compare the ways Montaigne and Shakespeare composed essay and speech, respectively, following intellectual habits and practices acquired in their humanist grammar school education-and to explain why knowing this makes a difference. He begins by reviewing the reading and composition training of the schools—topical analysis from Agricola, culling of sentences, proverbs, and figures from Erasmus to furnish copious words and matter; learning the progymnasmata from Aphthonius to build complex verbal structures—then goes on to demonstrate how this training gave the writer a formal grammar by which to register the movements of a thinking mind. Thus an artificial method of reading and writing enabled the mimesis of natural human discourse. Mack adroitly showcases this insight through a close reading of De I inconstance de nos actions, whose very theme signals Montaigne's manner of stating a position—his own or his author s—then responding defensively or critically with historical and poetic examples, 98 RHETORICA contemporary anecdotes, Latin verses, and personal reflections, each of which subtly modifies its predecessor. He is Montaigne still, but becomes much more legible as we recognize the tools he's using to form his judgment. When he cited other men's words, Montaigne wrote, they were no longer theirs but his. In Chapter 2, "Montaigne's Use of His Reading," Mack shows in fine detail how Montaigne manipulates his sources to elaborate themes, strengthen them, and fashion oppositions that open them to fresh consideration. Sometimes he will wrest a line slyly from its context, as in Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir, where he quotes Ovid's "When I die I would like it to be in the middle of my work" to reinforce the wish that death might come amidst ordinary toil; in Amores 2.10.36, the work is sexual. In De la vanité, he quotes Horace at length on exercising moderation so as to owe little to Fortune, then drains that stance of self-satisfaction by warning, "But watch out for the snag! Hundreds founder within the harbour." More powerfully still, in Des coches he uses material from Lôpez de Gômara's Histoiregénéralle des Indes occidentales to turn its boastful message of conquest into a critique of European cruelty in the New World. In Chapter 3, "Montaigne's logic of fragment and sequence," Mack walks us through the temporal accretions and logical structures of two early essays, Book I's Des menteurs and Par diverse moyens on arrive a pareille fin, then focuses on the intellectual and emotional logic of a section of the longer De la vanité of Book III. Diagramming all three essays, he provides us with...
-
Abstract
Two paragraphs into Diane Davis's most recent undertaking and the attentive reader will recognize a work that is grand in scope. Davis's aim “to expose an ordinary rhetoricity—an affectability or persuadability—[as] the condition for symbolic action” is calling for no less than an acceptance of a new rhetorical philosophy and theory of a rhetoric that affects (and effects) all communication practices—a new philosophy that in turn demands an ethical paradigm shift in rhetoric studies (2). Her critique reveals the less-than-static foundations of the agent in contemporary rhetorical theories and, instead or alongside with, offers an “ecstatic” theory of “response-ability” that resituates the character of the rhetorical agent away from the concept of the self-interested individual, the free-willing agent. Such critiques require in-depth ontological and epistemological considerations, and Davis is up to the task.
-
Rhetorical Education for the Nineteenth-Century Pulpit: Austin Phelps and the Influence of Christian Transcendentalism at Andover Theological Seminary ↗
Abstract
This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.
-
A Review of:<i>Agency in the Margins: Stories of Outsider Rhetoric</i>, edited by Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler ↗
Abstract
Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler's edited collection, Agency in the Margins, is a welcome contribution to scholarship on rhetorical agency, adding to debates regarding “ownership” of rhetoric and what ...
-
Arguing the Courtship of Elizabeth and Alençon: An Early Modern Marriage Debate and the Problem of the Historical Public Sphere ↗
Abstract
Abstract This essay analyzes one moment that has forced a reconsideration of the historical public sphere: the debate between John Stubbs and Queen Elizabeth I of England over her proposed marriage to the French Duke of Alençon. Stubbs adopted an argumentative strategy in which scripture served as a source of universal truth on which to base arguments about politics. Unable to allow such a strategy to undermine her own authority, Elizabeth's response asserted the communicative, rather than transcendent, nature of argument. Reading the debate in this way, in turn, calls into question a historical, developmental model of rationality and the public sphere. Ultimately, I argue, the public sphere does not develop as a radical emergence to be documented, but instead operates as a rearticulation of argumentative positions that are consistently and always available. Notes 1There are a number of discussions of the political possibility of the public sphere specific to the field of rhetoric; a review essay by Tanni Hass, and a special issue of Communication Theory edited by Michael Huspek, give a good indication of the directions of these discussions. Gerard Hauser is explicit in describing the possibility of reforming politics through rethinking the public sphere, while David G. Levassuer and Diana B. Carlin exemplify the assumption of the “public sphere” as a thing with a real historical existence that can be measured and examined. 2Other scholars have discussed the controversy between Elizabeth and Stubbs in terms of more thematic strategies without directly discussing questions of contemporary rhetorical theory. Jacqueline Vanhoutte considers this debate as demonstrating the emergence of a rhetoric of nationalism by both Stubbs and Elizabeth, while Debra Barrett-Graves sees Elizabeth and other politicians as employing a rhetoric focused specifically on the concept of honor. Illona Bell's argument is that the queen “was less outraged by Stubbs’ militant Protestantism … than by his overt paternalism and barely concealed antifeminism” (101). Peter Mack, Janet M. Green, and Allison Heisch have treated Elizabeth's rhetoric in terms of contemporary formal practice, such as her handling of schemes and tropes, while Cheryl Glenn and Janel Mueller have discussed how Elizabeth adapted her rhetoric in light of her position as a woman monarch. 3Although he had already become Duke of Anjou by the time of his courtship with Elizabeth, I follow the scholarly convention of referring to him by his first title, Duke of Alençon, though Elizabeth refers to him at times as Anjou. 4All of these scholars were connected with what has been variously called the Leicester faction or the Sidney circle—that group of political and literary figures associated with Leicester and the Sidney family, and with the reformist Protestantism (among other reforms) generated out of Cambridge University throughout the sjxteenth century. 5As defined by Dudley Fenner in 1584: “Methode is the judgement of more axioms, whereby many and divers axioms being framed according to the properties of an axiome perfectly or exactly judged, are so ordered as the easiest and most generall be set downe first, the harder are less generall next, until the whole matter be covered, as all the partes may best agree with themselves & be best kept in memorie. For as we consider in an axiome truth or falsehood, in a sillogisme, necessary following or not following, so in Methode the best and perfectest, the worst and troublesomest way to handle a matter” (Fenner 167). 6He commissioned Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawier's Logike, for example. 7Although it should be pointed out that this is in practice only—in theory scriptural understanding was available to all. But divines such as Knox, because of their training and study, were often better equipped, so the thinking went, to help people come to an understanding of the truth of scripture. 8Wallace MacCaffrey sums up both the views of faction and of Stubbs's pamphlet as produced at the bidding of others: “Its central arguments were shrewdly considered, comprehensive, and very knowledgeable. Indeed, they were so well informed—and so close in content to the actual council debates—that the Queen had some ground for her suspicion that someone in the Council was behind Stubbs” (Making 256). 9It is impossible to say in fact that Elizabeth authored this proclamation; however, a number of factors suggest authorship, while the nature of proclamations themselves is such that to discuss them as belonging to the monarch is not erroneous. Frederic A. Youngs has noted this proclamation is one of the lengthiest issued under Elizabeth; it is also one of her only proclamations to do more than simply issue an agenda or reiterate a legal ruling, but actually engage an opponent. The exact legal nature of proclamations under the Tudors has been the source of much debate, in their day and in our own, but it seems most likely that under Elizabeth they were issued primarily to call attention to an existing law, and as such served mainly, due to their widespread distribution, as an educational or, in a different sense, propagandistic tool. These would be sent to local authorities throughout the country and in cities, and their contents would be disseminated and enforced by those officials—so that their effectiveness in implementation depended on the crown's relationship to the particular localities. In other words, while their legal status was uncertain, they are effective gauges of the intentions of the monarchy. More than this, these proclamations can be seen as attempts to intervene into public discourse by setting the terms of that discourse—they are efforts to shape the ways in which the world under the monarch is thought of—both in the sense that they serve as reminders of the presence and authority of the monarch, as well as in the sense that they connect a particular understanding of the world to that authority. In considering this as an expression of Elizabeth's political will that is fully implicated in her rhetoric, it is useful to point to Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, who collected the proclamations into the definitive anthology. They define a Tudor royal proclamation as “a public ordinance issued by the sovereign in virtue of the royal prerogative, with the advice of the Privy Council, under the Great Seal, by royal writ” (xvii). Whether or not they were in fact authored by a monarch's hand, proclamations were definitely authored as though by intention of the monarch, and always reflective of the monarch's interests; so Hughes calls the proclamation (vol 1, p. xxvii): “a literary form psychologically gauged to elicit from the subject an obedient response, favorable to the will and interests of the crown.” Given the personal nature of this particular proclamation, and given its unique features, to call the proclamation Elizabeth's seems to me warranted.
-
Abstract
This essay examines homogeneous, suburban commercial streets commonly found in the United States. These streets employ minutely regulated systems of order organized under the logic of automobile traffic. In a society where consumerism reigns, these streets and the spatial order they entail contribute significantly to the ideologies of everyday life. Because these streets rely almost entirely on driving, the walker opens a space of difference and rhetorical invention within these homogeneous spaces. Using Roxanne Mountford's notion of rhetorical space, I examine the fixity of these streets. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theorization of abstract space, or overdetermined spaces that attempt to crush any agency, I consider how tactics such as walking can open permanent room for rhetorical agency in abstract spaces. By attending to a common but particular rhetorical space that figures materially in the everyday lives of American consumers, I explore the possibilities of agency in a fixed rhetorical space.
2012
-
Abstract
The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper’s failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation—as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the utterance—often disadvantages students in their future writing endeavors. I conclude by suggesting one way to encourage students to situate their research writing as a part of—rather than separate from—an activity system. By making the research paper an integral part of a entire course sequence, students will be better equipped to understand the role that research and writing plays within a specific activity system.
-
Abstract
Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake to suggest a more robust understanding of transfer for writing . As I will show, uptake foregrounds the role that heterogeneity, selection, and problem-solving play in how literate learners encounter and make sense of new writing tasks at the convergence of prior genre knowledge and current, local genred events. This micro discursive space of uptake is an important site for thinking about transfer in that it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this article argues that, through uptake, high road transfer is reconceived as a dynamic, problem-solving endeavor where writers can be encouraged to proactively sort through and make selections in and amongst prior genre knowledge.
October 2011
-
Magic for a People Trained in Pragmatism: Kenneth Burke,<i>Mein Kampf</i>, and the Early 9/11 Oratory of George W. Bush ↗
Abstract
In 1939 Kenneth Burke's book review of Mein Kampf, in isolating how the “crude magic” of Nazism worked, called for rhetorical critics to enter the social and political scene of the day by resisting strongman rule wherever it appeared: “[A] people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic” (Philosophy 192). George W. Bush, who also had “crude magic,” used the Hitlerian rhetoric of a common enemy and a geographic center in order to realign post 9/11 attitudes sufficient to identify the non-Western other as a common enemy, to convert New York's fallen Twin Towers into a new and noneconomic symbol of US government, and to transform himself from a lazy cowboy into a medicine-man.
-
Abstract
In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn (re)introduced the art of silence, and in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe (re)introduced the art of listen...
-
“I Was Ready For a Mending”: Rhetorics of Trauma and Recovery in Doug Peacock's<i>Grizzly Years</i>and<i>Walking it Off</i> ↗
Abstract
Abstract Doug Peacock, known as the inspiration for Edward Abbey's George Hayduke in the environmentalist comedy The Monkey Wrench Gang, has published his own accounts of their relationship and his conservationist work. These memoirs recount his experiences with PTSD after serving in Vietnam and argue for grizzly bear conservation. By using trauma to establish identification with the audience, the texts encourage readers to value other species and their own while resisting the totalizing tendencies of Burkean consubstantiality. The texts build identification and preserve difference through narrative structure and appeals to collective memory that encourage empathy yet stress the specificity of personal experience. Notes 1 I thank RR peer reviewers Jeremy Engels and Randy Lake for their valuable suggestions and encouragement. 2 On the representation of My Lai in popular cinema and how collective memory of the war has evolved, see Owen.
-
Abstract
Drawing on Kenneth Burke's music reviews in The Nation, this article argues that the shifting music scene of the 1930s heavily influenced Burke's development of the key term “secular conversion” in Permanence and Change. While reviewing works by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Burke also witnessed audience reactions to (and often acceptance of) jarring atonal works by Schönberg, Debussy, and others, leading to music reviews that focused on musical as well as rhetorical matters. Burke's interest in music provides a “perspective by incongruity” that illuminates the often-overlooked key term “graded series” as a type of secular conversion that informs Burke's dialectic in A Grammar of Motives. A greater understanding of “perspective by incongruity,” “piety,” and “graded series” through music provides a window into the possibilities of linguistic transformation that bridges Burke's continuously merging, dividing, and transcending dialectic in A Grammar of Motives.
September 2011
-
Abstract
Reviews 443 Stephen McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Rhetoric in the Modern Era), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. x + 184 pp. ISBN 0-7914-6581-0 In a roundabout effort at offering praise, allow me to preface this review with information about the reviewer. I value histories that connect Adam Smith s "neoclassical aesthetic values"—such as "propriety and taste"—to social dynamics such as "class difference." McKenna derides this work as z reductivist" and "inadequate by itself" (p. 57), opting instead to focus on the history of ideas, the long intellectual heritage behind Smith's rhetorical theory. Despite reservations about such intellectual history, I admire Adam Smith: The Rhetoric ofPropriety. The question arises: What has McKenna done to impress this otherwise skeptical reviewer? To begin with, McKenna uncovers and explores Smith's debt to past rhetoricians, such as Plato, Gorgias, Aristotle, and Cicero. After summarily dismissing Marxist and post-structuralist accounts of propriety, McKenna explains why Adam Smith's rhetorical theory should be glossed in ancient Greek and Latin. Previous scholarship has depicted Smith as a "new" or "neo classical" rhetorician. Following others, such as Gloria Vivenza, McKenna chronicles Smith's dependence on earlier sources, particularly his ground ing in classical rhetoric. If Smith is among the first modern social scientists, then not just Smith himself, but economics and sociology as well, owe a debt to classical rhetorical theory. McKenna focuses on six precepts that characterize a classical view of propriety and that were appropriated by Adam Smith. In this genealogy, propriety 1) participates in the natural order of things, 2) is often recognized through the visual senses, 3) leads to a pleasurable aesthetic experience, 4) requires public performance, 5) involves a mean between extremes, 6) and depends upon circumstances (pp. 28-29). McKenna follows traditional tributaries as they feed an 18th-century British stream of rhetorical theory. For instance, the arch-stylist Gorgias feeds into David Hume's epistemological skepticism and the Scotsman's attention to pathetic appeal (pp. 31-32). Plato's insistence that propriety include a regard for the different types of soul contributes to Adam Smith's effort at promoting a stylistic plasticity able to mold various character types (p. 36). McKenna also follows contemporary contributions to Smith's rhetorical theory. In the writings of John Locke and the Royal Society, we see propriety defined in terms of the "plain style" so popular among empirical scientists. In the writings of Frances Hutcheson and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, we witness a relation among notions of "common sense,' rhetorical propriety, and the moral/aesthetic sensibility. Bernard Lamy and François Fénelon attend to propriety's aesthetic dimension, thus influencing Henry Home Lord Karnes, David Hume, and Joseph Addison. McKenna reminds his reader that Adam Smith remains the focal point by explaining how Smith positioned his own work on propriety against this lively and discordant set of voices. For instance, M^cKenna explains that Smith set 444 RHETORICA himself against Hutcheson and Fénelon by denying an innate moral sense, yet Smith readily adopted Lamy's contention that people recognize propriety through the visual senses (pp. 62-64). Chapters 2 and 3 amount to a narratio of past and contemporary sources to prepare the reader for McKenna's remaining confirmatio about Smith's rhetorical theory The last two substantive chapters treat Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres alongside his Theory ofMoral Sentiments, arguing against the common scholarly belief that the Theory laid the moral and ethical ground work for the Lectures. Rather, McKenna contends that the Lectures underpin the Theory by exploring "the basic elements of human thought and action," which make ethical behavior possible (p. 76). McKenna also explains that Smith brought something new to the conversation about propriety: "Smith's idea that the intention to communicate a given passion or affection originates in sympathy is an entirely new contribution to the theory of the rhetorical propriety" (p. 88). Seemingly mundane moments, such as Smith's extensive discussion of direct and indirect description, become fascinating when seen through McKenna's illuminating perspective. Allow one extended quote to exemplify but by no means exhaustively capture the...
-
Writing: An Essential and Powerful Communication Tool for Today’s ‘Three Dimensional’ Engineering Graduate ↗
Abstract
Today’s engineers are expected to be versatile, necessitating a bold shift in the direction of Australian undergraduate engineering education. Alongside the capacity for technical analysis, core engineering graduate attributes emphasise non-technical skills: (i) the ability to communicate effectively, (ii) the ability to function as reflective practitioners on multidisciplinary teams, and (iii) the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions within a global, economic, and environmental context. Increasingly, students are coming from a diversity of backgrounds – academic, cultural, and professional – and academics are being required to meet the complex professional demands they bring. Recognition of the need for literacy support where cohorts comprise a high percentage of students from a non-English-speaking background with strong science/math competence, yet little experience of writing academic English, is challenging. Effective literacy support requires early identification of problems in large undergraduate cohorts. Evidence demonstrates that literacy support is most effective when closely integrated with core assignments and relevant to dynamic professional practice.
July 2011
-
Abstract
Despite arguments to the contrary, division is as natural to the civic-minded human animal as is identification. Both sides of this natural inclination are explored in the works of Kenneth Burke, although the latter, rather than the former, tends to be championed. In this essay we explore Burkean ideas about the division/identification binary through a particularly personal and frequently ignored national example: Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. As the first woman ever elected to Congress, Rankin is known best neither for her work toward universal suffrage nor for her fight against corporate excess. Instead, she is simply the woman who voted against US involvement in both World War I and World War II.
-
Choosing a Rhetoric of the Enemy: Kenneth Burke's Comic Frame, Warrantable Outrage, and the Problem of Scapegoating ↗
Abstract
Kenneth Burke's dramatistic theory of rhetoric presents a significant tension between an “Iron Law of History” and a “comic” attitude. Comic framing in ironic awareness of one's own shortcomings in a conflict, as well as those of one's opponent, moderates aggression but also appears to dissolve the ground for the identification and censure of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Burke from engaging in the censure of wrongdoing. Although Burke does not explicitly and adequately counter the apparent inconsistency, he implicitly provides a meta-perspective advancing a possible resolution. Forceful scapegoating of scapegoating itself, through comic irony and double-visioned analysis, can guide, in serial progression, warfare and redemptive reunion. Wartime speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt illustrate the larger comic framing inherent in a rhetorical movement from “factional tragedy” to “comic” regard and reconciliation.
-
A Review of:<i>Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse</i>, by David Timmerman and Edward Schiappa ↗
Abstract
David Timmerman and Edward Schiappa's Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse sustains the substantive claim that ancient authors codified rhetoric in conceptual terms i...
-
Recording the Sounds of “Words that Burn”: Reproductions of Public Discourse in Abolitionist Journalism ↗
Abstract
Phonographic or verbatim reports, in claiming to replicate extemporaneous speeches, offer a version of interactions that occurred in public settings. The "technology" of record represented the dialogic nature of abolitionist oratory, creating a discursive space for identification for attending and reading publics. Authorized by an appeal to accuracy, full-text reproductions of speeches were both a reflection and a performance of publicness. Full-text records represented abolitionists as truthful (offering an alternative to proslavery designations of "fanatic"), while also facilitating the circulation of the sounds of abolitionist events, using the means of mass production. The rhetorical force of these records depended on their assertions of accuracy, as well as the aural and embodied public presence that they implied. The narrative created by the phonographer, operating in the transitional space between fixed and unfixed text, emphasizes the rational, inclusive nature of abolitionist public discourse, simultaneously creating and representing an abolitionist public sphere.
-
“<i>Truthing it in Love</i>”: Henry Ward Beecher's Homiletic Theories of Truth, Beauty, Love, and the Christian Faith ↗
Abstract
The preacher Henry Ward Beecher was once the most famous man in America. Although he is now often unnoticed, history has attested to Beecher's influence on important elements of contemporary rhetorical style and homiletic theology. In his largest pronouncement on the theory of preaching, his Yale lectures, Beecher set out a theory of preaching that declared the goal of preaching to be a core transformation of the listeners through an aesthetic connection to the Divine presence. As a part of this process, Beecher argued in favor of an ecumenically Christian form of “taste” that would sensitize the audience to the existence of a new kind of knowledge: a divinely inspired linkage of logos and pathos that Beecher referred to as the Doctrine of Love.
June 2011
-
Abstract
In this article, we describe an approach to teaching first-year composition that is built on a qualitative design for undergraduate research and writing. As writing instructors at a state teaching college, we see the need to move our students beyond the boundaries of expressivism, personal narrative, and argument and into the murkier, messier, and more critical territory of considering subjectivities, interpreting cultural texts and contexts, and, ultimately, coming to see the dynamic and dialogic nature of rhetorical situations and knowledge production. We have discovered that asking undergraduates to do field work as a way to enter the academic conversation allows them to shift from high school writing to college-level writing. Inviting them to delve into a primary research project of their own design grants them permission to construct their ownership, authority, and intellectual engagement of ideas. Case studies of the experiences of five student research writers illustrate the process through which, as ethnographers, students become actors in their own learning process.
May 2011
-
Abstract
‘In Context’ is aimed at giving contextualization its rightful place in the study of argumentation. First, Frans H. van Eemeren explains the crucial role of context in a reconstructive analysis of argumentative discourse. He distinguishes four levels of contextualization. Second, he situates his approach to context in the field of argumentation studies by comparing it with Walton’s approach. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing clearly between a normatively motivated theoretical ideal model and empirically-based communicative activity types. Third, van Eemeren concentrates on the ‘macro-level’ of contextualization: contextualization in institutionalized communicative activity types. He makes clear that the macro-context of a communicative activity type can be characterized argumentatively by describing the disctinctive features of the empirical counterparts of the four stages of a critical discussion in the activity type concerned. Fourth, he points out what the consequences of the macrocontextualization of argumentative discourse in a certain communicative activity type are for the strategic maneuvering that may takes place and the identification of fallacies as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Fifth, van Eemeren draws some general conclusions regarding the role of contextualization in the analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse.
April 2011
-
Abstract
The influences of Stoicism on the historical development of rhetorical theory are deeply interwoven into the history of rhetoric, from Cicero to the Enlightenment.1 In recent years, interest in the Stoics has enjoyed a revival in conjunction with discussions of cosmopolitanism, most notably the lively debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum's (2002) proposal for a cosmopolitan education, and some of the articles presented in this issue remind us of the connection between the Stoics and certain conceptions of cosmopolitanism. My interest in the convergence of these conversations stems from my own work on the possibilities and necessity of a cosmopolitan rhetoric for our time, a time characterized by massive displacements: the movement of people through geographical and social space, the homogenization of space, and the technological abolition of space (Darsey 2003).Nussbaum's inquiry into cosmopolitanism is occasioned by an urgent sense of movement across boundaries. Our time has been described as one in which “rootlessness, movement, homelessness and nomadism are the motifs of the day” (Skribs, Kendall, and Woodward 2004, 115). bell hooks begins her recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, with this poignant observation: “As I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going. Many folks feel no sense of place” (2009, 1). As Pico Iyer puts it: For more and more people … the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the furthest point is just a click away. (2001, 10–11)So Nussbaum, drawing from Stoic sources, feels the imperative to move beyond the borders of the nation state (2002, 3).In the world described by hooks, Iyer, and Nussbaum, the question for rhetoric is this: What is the proper rhetorical response to an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world? In a world in which place is rapidly disappearing, from where do arguments come? How can an audience be addressed? About this aspect of radical displacement, Iyer writes: “The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction.” The answer to the question “Where do you stand?” is, for Iyer, “treacherous” (2001, 25). Place has historically been inextricably connected to meaning-making and has, at least prior to very recent time, been the most convenient site of “culture.” As evidence of this relationship, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson point to world maps on which the world is represented as a collection of countries, “inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place… . It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely appended to the names of nation-states” (1997, 34). The mapping described by Gupta and Ferguson suggests two things: (1) a deep desire for definition, the dual and simultaneous operation of inclusion and exclusion; and (2) the conceit that the borders marked by the colored patches are as stable and constant as the mountains, rivers, and other geographical features that populate the map.The fiction of stability presented by the cartography exposed, where, then, do we find grounds for argument in a world in which stable ground has disappeared? What are the bases for argument? Where are the places we search for arguments in a world of flux? Are there any more commonplaces? One temptation, evidenced in the summer 2010 “Restore America” rally in Washington, DC, is to retreat into provincialism. Any cursory survey of recent news stories provides a disheartening number of examples of attempts to reconcile conflicting ethical claims too often retreating to a reassertion of the local. At the time of this writing, those stories include the passing of legislation in the Slovak Republic making that country the only European country to require that its national anthem be played daily in schools, at each town council meeting, and on all public radio and television programs. This, along with the requirement that all state business be conducted in the Slovak language has created concern among the Hungarian minority that these laws are part of a movement to ostracize ethnic Hungarians. In March 2010, a group of Latin American nations joined in a new bloc that excludes the United States and Canada, and in April, investigators found evidence of the revival of human sacrifice among Kali worshippers in Bolpur, India. Throughout the spring of 2010, the revival of Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq threatened the U.S. hope of establishing a stable government there, and a conflict between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China over access to information assumed the dimensions of an international crisis.In the United States in the spring of 2010, Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration became the focus of a nationwide debate, revealing a concern with the movement of people across boundaries. At the same time, a new battle in the ongoing war over sex education revealed concern with the movement of ideas across boundaries. Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, described the latest battle as “at heart … a battle over community standards. Berkeley liberals don't want their kids taught that premarital sex is wrong. Alabama churchgoers don't want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation” (2010, 16). Finally, in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, 2010 the justices were asked to consider whether a Christian organization of law students at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco could be allowed to discriminate against students unable or unwilling to affirm the group's statement of faith, which includes the promise to refrain from sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That is, the court asked to what degree should those sharing a public space and resources be required to adhere to the same values?The examples of retreats into parochial sureties can be multiplied almost indefinitely: burkas in schools in France; the continuing controversy over how to handle Eritrean families living in the United States who insist on subjecting their daughters to what, for them, is a religious ritual, but which we call female genital mutilation; states such as Oklahoma and Wyoming drawing up bans on Sharia law. And so on.On October 16, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made international news when, in a speech to young members of the Christian Democratic Union, she declared multiculturalism to be an utter failure in Germany (Weaver 2010). The following week, William Falk, in his editorial in The Week, wrote: The boundaries between cultures are eroding, due to widespread immigration, economic interdependence, and the Internet, forcing modern societies into an uncomfortable paradox. We believe that every cultural group, religion, and nation has the right to self-determination. But we also hold as a bedrock principle that every human being is born with inalienable rights—including the 50 percent of us who are women. Is it our business to free Muslim women from their shrouds and subservience, to bring a halt to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East? Do we have the right to object to China's insistence that democracy and human rights do not apply there? Genteel tolerance alone will not resolve these questions. The collision of values has begun. How that conflict plays out will determine the shape of the next half-century. (2010, 7)As Falk's editorial suggests, each of the conflicts referred to here is the symptom of a contested boundary: in some cases a boundary that has been transgressed, in other cases a rampart being built against the barbarians who are perceived to be at the gate. These fragile walls and fences have failed to maintain what Gupta and Ferguson call the “play of differences” necessary to meaning-making. “The structures of feeling that enable meaningful relationships with particular locales, constituted and experienced in a particular manner, necessarily include the marking of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through identification with larger collectivities,” they write. “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community and different from those who are excluded from it” (1997, 19). Rhetorically, these examples represent instances in which enthymemes have failed to cross borders, geographical propinquity without community; those with no shared grounds for agreement find themselves having to share the same social space.The alternative to provincialism as a response to an increasingly complex and integrated world is cosmopolitanism. In 1998, Ulrich Beck published in The New Statesman a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” declaring that, just as 150 years prior the moment had been ripe for The Communist Manifesto, the moment was ripe, at the dawn of a new millennium, for a cosmopolitan manifesto: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue which has to be opened up and organised. What is this global dialogue to be about? About the goals, values and structures of a cosmopolitan society. About whether democracy will be possible in a global age… . The key idea for a Cosmopolitan Manifesto is that there is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics… .These questions are already part of the political agenda—in the localities and regions, in governments and public spheres both national and international. But only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved. For this there has to be a reinvention of politics, a founding and grounding of the new political subject: that is—cosmopolitan parties. These represent transnational interests transnationally, but also work within the arenas of national politics. (1998, 28)Beck's call repeatedly draws our attention to place and to the necessity of transcending place. Beck is concerned with the issues of a world in which our fates are bound together but our focus too often remains stubbornly local. Consider the recent climate talks in Copenhagen and the ongoing debates over global warming, what to do about it, and who ought to do it.But Beck's manifesto is notable more for its representativeness than for its originality. Seventy-one years before Beck published his manifesto, Hugh Harris, writing in the wake of “the great war” and two years after the First International Conference on Child Welfare, surveyed the calls for cosmopolitanism among his contemporaries. Harris noted that, while the events of the early years of the twentieth century had done much to give the ideal of cosmopolitanism its “present intellectual currency,” the ideal itself “is not merely ephemeral doctrine, but one that has been transmitted to us through the ages” (1927, 1). Harris notes the “prevalent opinion” that cosmopolitanism in the Western world begins with the Stoics (2). Though Harris sets out to correct what he identified as the “prevalent opinion … that prior to the Alexandrian age and to the foundation of the Stoic school, Greek thought had not advanced beyond the conceptions of a narrow city-state patriotism and of an irreconcilable barrier between Hellenes and barbarians” (2). Harris locates the Greek origins of the cosmopolitan ideal much more broadly—in poetry, science, philosophy, and religion.The prevalent opinion, fueled by the proclamation of Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “citizen of the world,” is tenacious, and it was given a major infusion of new energy when Martha Nussbaum published her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in 1994 in the Boston Review. There were 29 responses to Nussbaum's article published along with the article itself, and two years later the article was republished in book form along with eleven of the original responses and five new ones (Nussbaum 2002, 3). For all of the various responses the article has provoked, it is notable that almost no one takes issue with Nussbaum's claim that the intellectual lineage of cosmopolitanism in the West runs from Diogenes the Cynic through the Stoics to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace. I want to suggest that, as students of rhetoric, perhaps we should.From a rhetorical perspective, Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitan education presents at least four problems. First, Nussbaum celebrates the Stoics as champions of a universalizing and antiprovincial rationality, but the emphasis on rationality, necessarily if paradoxically, is exclusionary. As Peter Euben has noted in his cross-examination of Nussbaum's proposal, Stoicism sponsored “a new exclusiveness based on differential commitment to and practice of rationality… . Very few exceptional humans could be full members in the community of reason,” Euben goes on to argue (2001, 266, 268–270). Rhetoric has long been identified with democracy and inclusiveness, and contemporary work—beginning with Stephen Toulmin and extending through Walter Fisher's work on narrative and Michael Billig's work on argument—has made great strides toward maintaining and even extending that tradition through the articulation and legitimation of mundane forms of argument that are not necessarily logical. Work by Sally Planalp and others has extended our understanding of the role of the emotions in persuasion.Second, Nussbaum's proposal neglects the praxis of real political contention. As Fred Dallmayr has put it: “[I]t is insufficient—on moral and practical grounds—to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation” (2003, 434). Dallmayr goes on to remind us that Diogenes the Cynic, whose example was followed by most of the Roman Stoics (Cicero being the exception), “was described as an ‘exile’ from his city who paid little heed to ‘political thought’ and adopted a ‘strikingly apolitical stance’” (435). Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Nussbaum “quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the idea of a universal ‘moral community’ and ‘world citizenship.’ But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, ‘Man is by nature a political animal,’ has proved to be far more prescient than the Stoic doctrine” (2002, 74). While the question of nature in the human political character has been contested ground at least since Hobbes, we have, whether by nature or by necessity, historically found our existence as part of a polis, and there can be little contesting of Aristotle's asseveration that “politics is the master art,” and rhetoric its ethical branch. A rhetorical theory that neglects politics be no rhetorical theory at and a cosmopolitan that neglects politics be of many of the issues our world within itself a toward the very that the call for a cosmopolitan to to the one the to all human as of their shared for against based on or the other of is by extending to only in the in which they are with (2003, and Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitanism based on universal reason is to our in the degree that it is itself in it is the of our that the grounds of reason itself have been reason has no from which to if we to the claims of against the of the the universal As puts it, of and the cultural of the universal work against its claim to a (2002, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of the universal values and of are not only in practice by a part of they are not in all of in perhaps even Western (2002, response to the of the universal is to it as an of of and … an alternative to Nussbaum's I am to a as the for a theory of rhetoric, a theory of rhetoric that can the world of and and among The of were early in a they were citizens of the and though they were notably by for their as they the of and it was their from that allowed them to put moral questions at the of public Harris includes the in his survey of the of cosmopolitanism in them with the and the and in particular to the of While most of the the of among them only a few of those an between the of the and their Harris Yet it is that is in a of and their to the Western intellectual tradition may be a rhetorical practice with this cosmopolitan following the of that the while they may be and are for a cosmopolitan rhetoric their multiculturalism into or a kind of that the were of the point of or that their were based on is not by the and contemporary find evidence of ethical in the of the the of concern with in interest in the social of proper the in which the to rhetoric bring about for the and us that there is evidence for all of the that they were in politics, often at very necessarily then, making ethical and that or four of the as a of the political they represented beyond the the evidence even more if we include who for the of over war and for a who to his what in to as of It is not that the any idea of but that they it as “the of of in to the Stoics who to and that the case can be a cosmopolitan rhetoric based on the have these over Nussbaum's First, it be a deeply or not the were of rhetoric, they were inextricably with the rhetorical and political of their The were of a rhetoric, being in displacement, ought to the of a world with the of The were and as as as the were also as and is not to the movement of but as Kendall, and Woodward is about of and just as much as it is about of is not only but also and As a rhetoric in displacement, a rhetoric should the of a rhetoric, not bound by a universal ought to be to forms of argument and the possibilities for argument and in that a Stoic rhetoric is not and as and others have us out of the of a alternative for in the between the two world and in that to our own moment in Hugh Harris the poignant for a cosmopolitan understanding that he found in the intellectual of There is, on the one a to see our historical as in of there is, on the other a to historical for our as that we have this before and that our will see us through In a rhetoric represent a with the of but one that has never enjoyed widespread this is its perhaps this time we can it
-
Abstract
ABSTRACT As Cicero details in his De Officiis (On Duties), Stoic ethical theory proceeds from a poetics of virtue according to which people act dutifully by performing the roles (personae) in which nature has cast them. Stoicism's dramatistic conception of duty fits within the theatrical dynamics of ancient rhetorical practice, theory, and pedagogy and is a noteworthy precursor to persona theory in contemporary rhetorical studies. Furthermore, the centrality of decorum to Stoic personae theory gives it a poignant rhetorical quality, especially given the circumstances during which Cicero introduced it to Roman readers.
-
Abstract
ABSTRACTIn this article, I present a mode of cosmopolitanism that builds on Stoic and Kantian views toward not just rational cosmopolitan agents but rhetorical ones. I outline a new rhetorical approach to cosmopolitanism that addresses the challenge of “otherness.” This rhetorical cosmopolitanism focuses on the conditions for deliberative and participatory practices that bring us before others; it seeks to help us recognize that the way we develop actual—and not just abstract—political relationships to others is fundamentally rhetorical, not just rational or emotional. I explore the debates over the inclusion of minorities in the European Union, particularly focusing on the Muslim population, in order to outline a rhetorical cosmopolitanism that accounts for the place of emotions in discourses of citizenship.
-
Abstract
Students' writing of parody can provide a more persuasive vehicle than conventional academic writing to move students from their intuitive awareness of irony to critical analysis of rhetorical strategies. Combining parody writing with strong critical reflection can encourage a more complex view of language choices, audience identification, genres, and persuasion.
-
Abstract
The interview provides a look at Burke in his twilight years as well as something of the sound of his eloquent but halting talk in that period. Burke's ideas in the transcriptions offer insights about his method and philosophy that could prove helpful to scholars but would also make a useful introduction to Burke as a philosopher of language. They also tell the story of humorous profound American thinker still vigorous in a green old age.
-
Positive Identification through Being the ‘Occasional Asshole’: A Burkeian Analysis of “Dear John,” by Poet Tony Hoagland ↗
Abstract
This paper gives a brief overview of the redemption drama as found in the work of rhetorician Kenneth Burke and applies this drama to the poem “Dear John” by Tony Hoagland. The poem is examined through the Burkeian lens, with special attention to the elements of the redemption drama, while also highlighting the use of humor as an effective rhetorical strategy.
-
Abstract
Kenneth Burke’s sociological criticism of literature as “equipment for living” situates the work of art as a response to a situation that is essentially social; literature serves a therapeutic role insofar as it diagnoses and dissolves maladaptive social categories and orientations. Burke’s complementary notion of “perspective by incongruity” describes the way in which artists push a system of belief or interpretive scheme to its limits by deliberating creating effects which escape its means of formalization. In the work of Gilles Deleuze, we encounter similarly the artist of literature and discourse who assumes the role of a physician of culture and seeks to produce new possibilities for life by multiplying available perspectives for action. In judging whether the rhetorical appeals and interpretive schemes they offer are medicine or poison, our criteria shall be whether they constrain, narrow, or otherwise limit life (gridlock), or whether they provide new possibilities, experiences, and configurations of knowledge for living (counter-gridlock). Through the incongruous imbrications of Burke and Deleuze, we discover a resonant pragmatism in which art, literature, and ethics become something more than tools for refining the ways in which we currently experience the world. Rather, they offer means for a way out of the orientations which configure and constrain our capacity to actualize potentials for a better tomorrow.
-
Abstract
In Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action , it is suggested that communities build internal cohesion by negating portions of their constituencies in rituals of purification. Over the past thirty years these dynamics have been evidenced in the role that eating disorders have played in the development of contemporary feminist consciousness. While key feminist authors have been framing these conditions for the larger public, the manner in which anorexia and bulimia have been projected through these writings has become increasingly problematic.
-
Abstract
This paper clarifies Burke's ideas on education in his 1955 essay entitled "Lingusitic Approach to Problems of Education" and relates it to the context and circumstances to which Burke was responding at the time of that essay. The papers shows Burke's writing as an expression of his characteristic position as a thinker, that is as a responsive dialogist who used it as a tool of invention. Using archival materials from the Kenneth Benne papers at the University of Vermont, the paper tells the story of Burke’s essay and his relation to the key ideas in educational theories at the mid-point of the 20th century.
-
Abstract
I argue that a sub-area of Burkean criticism should be developed using Burke’s constitutional dialectic to examine constitutions as the primary objects of study. To demonstrate the possibilities of this strain of criticism, I use Burke’s constitutional dialectic to examine the draft constitution for an Islamic state urged by the worldwide movement Hizb ut-Tahrir. In that document, internal conflicts and differences, not to mention challenges coming from ideologically incorrect states, are anticipated and woven into a comprehensive plan offering Islamic answers to citizens’ problems and to the problem of the state’s place and purpose. I argue that the draft constitution is a systematic strategic act of totalizing comprehensiveness that trades agency for order, with troubling consequences.
March 2011
-
Participating on an “Equal Footing”: The Rhetorical Significance of California State Normal School in the Late Nineteenth Century ↗
Abstract
This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning women's gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.
-
Abstract
This essay discloses distinctive but overlapping realist, communicative, and critical dimensions of Burke's concept of recalcitrance. Previous scholarly uses of the concept have tended to yield only partial understandings of one or another of these three distinctive dimensions. Moreover, that previous work overlooked some of Burke's pivotal and revealing writings on the term when elaborating its meaning, including his designation of the term's application to factors that substantiate, incite, and correct statements. This essay offers the term's first comprehensive account that integrates overlooked writings and yields its full range of conceptual dimensions and applications as Burke had envisioned them.
-
Abstract
Abstract This essay draws on concepts developed by Kenneth Burke to examine how a rhetoric of national insecurity has saturated phishing research and antiphishing campaigns. In response to the widespread public dispersal of antiphishing campaigns, it calls for a new terminology that challenges the underlying racial violence that characterizes its current practices. Notes 1Jakobsson and Myers define phishing as "[a] form of social engineering in which an attacker, also known as a phisher, attempts to fraudulently retrieve legitimate users' confidential or sensitive credentials by mimicking electronic communications from a trustworthy or public organization in an automated fashion" (1). 2In July of 2009, Symantec observed a fifty-two percent increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. 3Robert C. Miller and Min Wu argue, "Phishing succeeds because of a gap between the user's mental model and the true implementation, so promising technical solutions should try to bridge this gap" (291). Note how the technology becomes the agent of intervention. 4See, for example, Gurak and Warnick. Later, I will discuss how phishers utilize peer networks to share components of phishing solicitations in order to make the process more efficient. This use of file-sharing technology complicates more sanguine perspectives on the role that collaboration and sharing play in digital networks (see Devoss and Porter; Moxley). I am not alone in pointing out the dangerous limitations of digital technologies such as emails and online forums (see Holdstein; Moses and Katz; Blair and Takayoshi). 5Jenkins writes, "New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments… . Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises" (27–28). 6I am grateful to RR reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Jim Zappen for their helpful feedback on this essay. Thank you RF, MM, and MH—you are indispensable.
February 2011
-
Review: Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, by Ruth Webb ↗
Abstract
Book Review| February 01 2011 Review: Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, by Ruth Webb Ruth WebbEkphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009. 238 pp. ISBN 9780754661252. Rhetorica (2011) 29 (1): 113–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.1.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, by Ruth Webb. Rhetorica 1 February 2011; 29 (1): 113–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.1.113 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.