This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

Women first entered East Coast fire departments through forming ladies auxiliary groups, where women provided critical support services—offering assistance at the fire, holding fundraising events for the department, and building community relationships—while maintaining conventional gender roles. Exploring auxiliary work through the lens of collaboration reveals feminist strategies for creating ethos in a highly gendered workplace; this approach for studying the complexities of women’s movement between background and foreground roles opens new avenues for considering women’s navigation of rhetorical barriers in professional spaces.

This article combines an adaptation of the Toulmin model of argument with a framework designed to analyze assertions of technology-related expertise in order to examine how expert witnesses fulfill the legal requirements for explaining the methodology underlying their testimony within the combative and sometimes prejudicial conditions of the courtroom environment. Its findings support previous claims about contributions technical communication scholars can make to the legal field.

In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

ABSTRACT This essay argues that enargeia, the “vivid” quality of language that encourages listeners or readers to develop mental images, was an integral element of rhetorical strategy in the courts of Classical Athens. It relies on ancient evidence and modern comparanda. Ancient rhetorical theorists demonstrate how enargeia would have contributed to a sense of presence and simulated in Athenian jurors an experience similar to that of actual eyewitnesses. Modern lawyers and authors of trial handbooks advise litigators to appeal to their jurors’ imaginations with language that recalls ancient descriptions of enargeia and the related concept phantasia, “imagination.” The results of modern psychology research into the “vividness effect,” especially the distinction between figural and ground vividness, show how enargeia may have increased the likelihood of Athenian jurors accepting an argument. Lysias deploys ground vividness in On the Death of Eratosthenes (1) to draw his jurors’ attention away from the question of entrapment and figural vividness in Against Eratosthenes (12) to focus their attention on the crimes of the Thirty Tyrants. Finally, Aeschines’ description of the Thebans’ sufferings in Against Ctesiphon (3) may have harmed his case by emphasizing a weak point through misplaced figural vividness.

Dialogical egalitarianism is the thesis that any proposition asserted in dialogue, if questioned, must be supported or else retracted. Dialogical foundationalism is the thesis that some propositions are privileged over this burden of proof, standing in no need of support unless and until support for their negation is provided. I first discuss existing arguments for either thesis, dismissing each one of them. Absent a successful principled argument, I then examine which thesis it is pragmatically more advantageous to adopt in analytic philosophical dialogue. This requires identifying the goal of such dialogue, to the attainment of which the thesis would be so advantageous. To identify this goal, I draw on Douglas Walton’s typology of dialogues for an analysis of the types of dialogue of 110 representatively selected journal articles in current analytic philosophy. 95% of articles are found to instantiate persuasion dialogue. In light of the thus prevalent goal of persuading one’s opponent, I argue that the adoption of dialogical egalitarianism in analytic philosophical dialogue is pragmatically inescapable.

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 12 assignments designed to help students increase their online communication skills, conduct professional conferences, use advanced presentation software, develop problem-solving and critical thinking, gain greater awareness of gender effects in communication, and perform community service. These teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

Abstract This article situates the entrenchment of an American commitment to home ownership at a critical moment in U.S. history—the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 (NHA). An examination of the introduction, deliberation, and promotion of the legislation reveals how policymakers concretized the value and civic import of residential property. The analysis shows how policymakers, housing advocates, and NHA skeptics collectively framed borrowing for home ownership to be a progressive, secure, and patriotic investment. The NHA discourse illustrates the power of policy rhetoric to define American experiences and prescribe American values.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

Since the publication of Wendy Bishop’s Released into Language (1990), the disciplinary boundaries of composition and creative writing have been in question. More recently, as Douglas Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” (2010) suggests, creative writing has been assumed to exist as a subdiscipline of composition despite efforts during the past decade to develop a new discipline, Creative Writing Studies. The research reported on and analyzed here argues for creative writing’s disciplinary status by using Toulmin’s (1972) definition of disciplinarity as a basis for claiming writers’ aesthetic documents as data and reporting those data in an aesthetic form. In our study, 57 students in first-year composition were asked to write a creative piece concerning how they came to the present place in their lives. Students produced 57 artifacts, including 55 poems, one script, and one visual narrative. These data were subsequently represented in fiction—that is, we used a novel to present our findings in an effort to assert the differences between the ways findings might be rendered in composition as opposed to creative writing. This paper examines what each subject area views as evidence and how that evidence might be most profitably analyzed and discussed in an aesthetic document. We suggest that the process of writing the novel is a method, a mode of analysis, with the novel itself as the articulation of the researchers’ analysis of the original data. Using this method, we studied creative writing aesthetically as creative writing and offer a justification for doing so.

This paper aims to provide a linguistic analysis of prosodic patterns (especially the complex of suprasegmental phonological features which includes intonation, pauses and stress) underlying use of commas in texts written by Brazilian students. The analysed material consists of texts produced in the last year of primary education at a public school in an inner city of São Paulo State, Brazil. The object of analysis is composed of two kinds of comma use which occur in a simple scheme: unconventional uses and conventional uses of commas, both uses being defined from grammatical rules taught at school. The analysis leads to a theoretical discussion about the importance of orality in the way people approach writing and the relationship between orality and writing in text production practices at school. It is argued that accounting for the relationship between orality and literacy may reveal linguistic phenomena and important symbolic processes which are identifiable in the writing of young students who are going through the learning process of writing texts at school.

This article, integrating different lines of sociocultural and critical research, sets out to analyze argumentative writing in a 6th grade Cypriot Greek elementary classroom. Attention is directed to specific strategies used, such as repetition and paraphrase of each other’s words and of text meanings. These strategies are revisited as voicing tools, arising out of students’ engagement with a nexus of reading and writing events and with the ideological positions constituted through them. The analysis traces the bi-directional processes at work in this polyvocal community. Classroom activities, rather than seen as neutral, are redefined as constituents of a deeply dialogic universe, which privileges specific texts and voices and projects various identity positions onto speakers and writers. At the same time, this universe gives rise to specific scaffolds which help students in the appropriation of advanced generic resources. Students’ argumentative texts are shown to arise out of the integration of various dialogically-emergent strategies. Analysis illustrates how students, while drawing from prior texts, and acknowledging genre-related scaffolds, rework and contest social meanings and generic resources as part of their attempt to assert their voice vis-à-vis those populating their classroom community.

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and one by keyboard. Our results show a beneficial effect of text processing software, in terms of both the qualitative and quantitative writing output. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to detect distinct performance groups in the sample. These performance groups mapped onto three differing working memory profiles. The groups with higher mean WM scores manifested superior writing complexity using a keyboard, in contrast to the cluster with the lowest mean WM. The results also point out that more revision during the writing process itself does not inevitably reduce the quality of the final output.

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the speech act perspective can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts.

368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

In this article we argue that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is an indispensible philosophical-anthropological companion to rhetoric. We propose that appropriating Cassirer’s understanding of symbolic forms enables rhetoric to go beyond the dominant perspective of language oriented theory and fully commit to a widened understanding of rhetoric as the study of how social meaning is created, performed and transformed. To clearly bring out the thrust of our enlarged rhetorical-philosophical-anthropological approach we have structured our argument partly as a contrastive critique of Thomas A. Discenna’s recent (Rhetorica 32/3; 2014) attempt to include Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition through a reading of the 1929 debate in Davos between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger; partly through a presentation of the aspects of Cassirer’s thought that we find most important for developing a rhetorical-philosophical-anthropology of social meaning.

Bhimrao Ambedkar, famous for being a political ally to the “untouchable” castes and a political sparring partner to Gandhi in India’ss struggle for independence, is also well-known for his public advocacy for Buddhism. Starting in the 1930s, Ambedkar began arguing that he and his fellow untouchables should convert from Hinduism to escape caste oppression. Ambedkar was also influenced by his teacher at Columbia University, John Dewey. Religious conversion transformed in Ambedkar’s rhetorical strategy to a meliorative program. His rhetoric of conversion operated in three stages: reflection on one’s religious orientation, renunciation of a problematic orientation, and conversion to a more useful orientation. This study explicates the final phase of Ambedkar’s conversion rhetoric, the stage he only expands upon in his oratorical activity during his last decade of life. His rhetorical appeals to convert to Buddhism are found to be performative in nature and to be imbued with a Deweyan ethos of religious rhetoric as an emancipatory device for individuals and communities.

Abstract In 1961, the American Medical Association (AMA) funded a persuasive campaign called Operation Coffeecup. The campaign, which was designed to defeat Medicare, featured a speech by a young Ronald Reagan outlining the dangers of “socialized medicine.” The speech was recorded on a long-play record and distributed to the Women’s Auxiliary of the AMA, a group primarily composed of the wives of doctors who were instructed to write seemingly spontaneous letters to Congress detailing their opposition to the program. This essay investigates Operation Coffeecup mainly through a rhetorical analysis of Reagan’s speech. I argue that “socialized medicine” drew upon a problematic articulation of American culture that privileges the individual at the expense of the larger community. I conclude by discussing the thread of individualism that has persisted in the United States from the pre-Depression era mythos of rugged individualism to neoliberal discourses that shape debates about health policy today.

Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

For the literary translator, the question arises as to how she might approach the delicate task of migrating texts that resort largely to “a purely intensive usage of language,” while acknowledging that such texts share a mode of expression that transcends historical or critical periodization. If one is to focus on fidelity or equivalence, the aim should not be the production of a text that translates some underlying meaning or sense where signification and representation are fixed. Rather, the aim should be the meticulous rendering of its surface expression so that the text’s performative capacity can be realized anew in the target language and culture. The focus on what “might be” in language invites a parallel with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic genre in theatre and a rhetoric of translation that reflects the aporia of the source expression, in stark contrast to the centrality of the logos to traditional Western rhetoric. While ultimately unattainable, an approach to text as a Deleuzean “map” would seem an appropriate means for the translator to remain true the “intentio” of postdramatic texts.

From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation and Rhetoric surpasses this ontological threshold of persuasion and metatextual transcendence in a far more sophisticated way, exceeding also the sheer plane of textual mechanics. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a systematic inclusion of rhetoric-centered approaches in Translation Studies, and vice versa, would cross-fertilize not just those two fields, but how it also would help to shed light on some areas where a monolingual focus has all too often imposed significant limitations to progress. It will also provide a quick overview of what I define as a “Rhetoric of Meaning in Translation Studies,” and will also explore how the study of rhetorical correspondence at the micro level in source and target languages and texts may be substantially hindered by significant structural disparities at the macro level that may have not been systematically or successfully incorporated in the wider theoretical framework of Translation Studies.

Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

In chapters on the Gorgias and the Meno in his 1997From Plato to Postmodernism, James Kasterly argues that an important point made in the Gorgias is that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles. Its lesson is that philosophers will never succeed in persuading nonphilosophers if they rely on dialectic, with its premises grounded in epistemology (32, 34), and in the Meno, he finds a type of dialectic that functions rhetorically (67). In this new book, The Rhetoric of Plato's “Republic”: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, Kastely builds on his earlier work. He reads the Republic as Plato's effort to address the implicit challenge posed by Socrates' defeat in the Gorgias. Plato's purpose in the Republic, he claims, is to set forth and enact an alternative to dialectic, an alternative that he identifies as a philosophical rhetoric (that is, a rhetoric for philosophers), that would enable philosophers to persuade nonphilosophers to value justice and morality above all else. The Republic, on his reading, not only (if obliquely) argues for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic but also practices it and thus attempts to constitute interlocutors and engaged readers as the moral, justice-loving subjects of a new republic.The crucial passage that generates Kastely's reading occurs at the beginning of book 2, when Glaucon enters the conversation after Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus in book 1 has stalled. Thrasymachus, exhausted and frustrated by Socrates' dialectic interrogation and by Socrates' refusal to allow him to state his opinion directly (350e), has withdrawn from genuine engagement; instead, he placidly agrees with whatever Socrates proposes (351c). Glaucon challenges Socrates: does he want really to persuade them or just give the appearance of having persuaded them (357a–b)? Kastely argues that here Glaucon is referring to the kind of “persuasion” that Socrates has practiced on Thrasymachus—a nit-picking (from Thrasymachus's point of view) dialectic that wins on technical points but that changes few people's minds and hearts. Yet there is a potential problem with Kastely's interpretation, namely, that Glaucon does not state that the distinction he intends is between two types of persuasion (artificial and real); rather he states that the distinction is between two types of arguments on behalf of justice—arguments that propose behaving justly as prudent for the benefits that treating others well confers and arguments for living justly for its own sake, without reference to benefits. However, Glaucon may indeed mean both, as Kastely maintains. And in support of Kastely's interpretation, there are other references in the Republic to dialectic as a problematic way of convincing nonphilosophers: most noteworthy (among several) is Adeimantus's insistence that although philosophers can as a result of their training often defeat nonphilosophers in dialectical argument, this “victory” does not mean they have really persuaded their opponent or anyone (487b–d).For Kastely, the development and enactment of a rhetoric for philosophers is at the heart of the Republic: “Is it possible, then, for a philosopher to discover a rhetoric that would permit philosophy to have some sort of purchase on public opinion and persuade an audience of the truths philosophy has discovered? The Republic is aware of the importance of this question and has chosen to foreground it dramatically. It understands that, as a dialogue, it must provide an answer to that question, if philosophy is to be anything other than a deeply limited and esoteric activity. … For this dialogue simply not to self-destruct, Socrates has to make the case for a viable philosophical rhetoric” (122).The title of chapter 4, “Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion,” captures the major theme in much of the rest of Kastely's argument. The most formidable obstacle that the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers confronts is ideology, though Kastely does not use this term, perhaps regarding its usage in this context as ahistorical. In Kastely's words, it is the problem of our failure to recognize that “the desires of the soul have been shaped by a culture and are never encountered in innocent form” (66) or that “the work of political culture is masked, and it is mistakenly read as if current values and desires are the product of nature” (206). With regard to justice, in the view of most people we are just out of fear of punishment or of retaliation if we are unjust; if we could practice injustice to our advantage with impunity (the myth of Gyges's ring), we would, and, moreover, it would be natural for us to do so. Thus, the first challenge to the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers that it is in our interest to be just even if it means losing an advantage is to bring them to understand that all knowledge is “rhetorically mediated” (66). Rhetoric is not the problem but the means of cure: its duty is to make citizens aware of the rhetorical character of what they experience as natural.In chapters 5, 6 and 7, Kastely explores the particular obstacles Socrates faces if his aim is to persuade Athenians of what they may regard as ideologically counterintuitive and unnatural, namely, that a life grounded in justice is the best life. For instance, Socrates' advocacy of women serving as guardians (452a) is, on Kastely's reading, motivated not only by Socrates' belief that there is inherent value in women serving as guardians but also and primarily by his desire to illustrate how a reigning ideology blinds his interlocutors to alternative possibilities (101). While Socrates' interlocutors regard the proposal as unnatural, Socrates argues that thinking of women as guardians is only unconventional but nevertheless thoroughly reasonable.The greatest challenge Socrates faces in the Republic is persuading his listeners that philosophers should be kings. On hearing the proposal, Glaucon warns Socrates that were he to issue the proposal publicly he would be greeted with not only disbelief but also violent resistance (473e). Kastely observes that “Socrates is fully aware of the general population's low estimation of philosophy [and philosophers],” and his discussion of philosophy is a “self conscious rhetorical act designed to mollify an angry audience and to transform that anger into calmness” (109–10). If the response to the proposal were to be as extreme as Glaucon envisions, it is surely unlikely that the crowd would be prepared to engage in dialectic. The foremost rhetorical means Socrates uses to overcome these ideological prejudices are the famous images and analogies of books 6 and 7: the sun, the divided line, and the parable of the cave. Kastely reads these tropes as rhetorical versions of Platonic philosophy that can persuade nonphilosophers, treating them as evidence for his thesis that the Republic argues for and practices a rhetorical presentation of philosophy that is superior to dialectic, at least when it comes to discussing philosophy with nonphilosophers.But there is at least one problem with this interpretation of books 6 and 7 of the Republic. The argument that underpins Kastely's reading—that the Republic is about a search for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic—seems to me to rest on the assumption that Socrates could have presented a more technical and accurate description of these truths but instead took into consideration the limitations of his audience. He chose images because they were more effective than dialectic's definitions and divisions. But Socrates claims that the nature of the subject requires use of images. In a subsequent chapter, Kastely concedes that “even Socrates himself cannot claim with certainty that he has achieved a full philosophical vision” of goodness (157). At least through the period of the Republic, Socrates notoriously relies on analogies and images to describe the good. Socrates resorts to images because he has no choice, not because rhetorically images are the preferred means for a particular audience. In Kastely's defense, it is true that these images have an affective dimension that makes them appealing, and the fact that there are no alternative ways to express this vision does not make the images less rhetorical. They function rhetorically, neither dialectically as argument nor as the simplification of teaching.That a specific philosophical rhetoric is not thematized as such in the Republic leads Kastely almost necessarily to argue that Plato and Socrates enact their program through mimesis rather than overtly arguing for it. Socrates in effect says do as I do here rather than do what I say, since I don't say much about rhetoric. For Kastely, Socrates' criticism of the mimesis of epic poetry and drama is tacit admission of its effectiveness (210), and he would in fact employ it to a good end to advance his own program: “While the Republic ostensibly argues for a certain kind of rhetorical constitution through a specifically prescribed curriculum, what it offers its readers is in fact a different kind of education embodied in the mimetic presentation of an extended act of persuasion. Presumably, Plato intends this kind of education or rhetorical constitution for the actual readers of the dialogue—the readers who have already been subjected to the cultural influences that Socrates would undo or minimize” (79). At the heart of this mimetic theory is “an act of constitution or identification” (217). On Kastely's reading, the rhetoric Socrates enacts in the Republic is obviously not the rhetoric that Socrates criticizes in the Gorgias. The rhetoric that Kastely sees in the Republic is to be “understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). This Burkean description is not one that Plato would associate with rhetoric, though it is not impossible (given the way he envisions dialectic functioning) that Plato could imagine a type of dialectic that is similarly transformative. There are many varieties of dialectic in Plato, including less rule-driven varieties that resemble the semidisciplined conversation of the Republic. Kastely has appropriated for rhetoric what others (including Plato) might see as a version of dialectic. But perhaps this objection reduces to a quibble about names.Socrates' famous admission in book 9 that only divine intervention could bring about the rule of philosopher-kings would seem to announce the failure of the philosophical rhetoric that Socrates (on Kastely's reading) had hoped would mimetically persuade interlocutors and readers. Kastely's response to the challenge that book 9 presents is twofold. With most other commentators, he argues that Plato never intended to present an ideal polis in the Republic: the description of the guardians, the philosopher king, and so forth was never to be taken literally. The Republic is not about the formation of an ideal state; the description of the kallipolis that dominates is in fact a trope to show the formation of the properly ordered soul. If this is the case, then Socrates' admission does not thwart his purpose. Secondly, Kastely argues that Socrates' withdrawal from politics can be read as a rejection of the imposition of the philosophical life by a philosopher, who is, after all, a king, in favor of the transformation of individual citizens through the rhetorical means that he sees Socrates' enacting (181).Kastely's is a bold thesis. It asks us to accept not only that Plato came to accept a socially responsible role for rhetoric in the polis but also that in the Republic Plato acknowledges epistemologically that there is no escape from culture, that all “knowledge” is rhetorically mediated. It is also an honest book, as Kastely raises and addresses objections to his reading. Because it is an honest, rigorous book, I benefited immensely from the encounter with it, though I was ultimately not persuaded by its thesis.

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

Pericles is said to have been affected by Anaxagoras and therefore having improved his speaking skills. A generic influence of philosophical studies is usually supposed but there may be a more specific reason: it was possible to interpret the works of meteorologoi in a limited way, strictly rhetorical, renouncing cosmological speculation but acquiring an effective instrument of persuasion. Some anecdotes in Pericles' life help to understand how this philosophy was translated into political action. Anaxagoras not only improved Pericles' speaking skills but also provided a model of behaviour for any contingency.

Book Review| May 01 2017 Review: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, by Liesbeth Korthals Altes Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 325 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-8032-4836-6. Daniel A. Cryer Daniel A. Cryer Roosevelt University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (2): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.232 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Daniel A. Cryer; Review: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction, by Liesbeth Korthals Altes. Rhetorica 1 May 2017; 35 (2): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.232 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. © 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Messalla Corvinus, celebrated as one of the greatest orators of the generation after Cicero, offers an ideal case study for political life in the triumviral period and early principate. His distinctive style is reminiscent of what Cicero described as the middle style, exemplified by Marcus Calidius and Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilla and Pro Marcello. This style complemented his mild, accomodationist political persona, evident especially in his support of Augustus and his rejection of the office of urban prefect, in a synergistic fusion of style and ethos.

A quantitative research study collects numerical data that must be analyzed to help draw the study’s conclusions. Teaching quantitative data analysis is not teaching number crunching, but teaching a way of critical thinking for how to analyze the data. The goal of data analysis is to reveal the underlying patterns, trends, and relationships of a study’s contextual situation. Learning data analysis is not learning how to use statistical tests to crunch numbers but is, instead, how to use those statistical tests as a tool to draw valid conclusions from the data. Three major pedagogical goals that must be taught as part of learning quantitative data analysis are the following: (a) determining what questions to ask during all phases of a data analysis, (b) recognizing how to judge the relevance of potential questions, and (c) deciding how to understand the deep-level relationships within the data.

Following the Nat Turner rebellion, the Virginia State Legislature held a debate in early 1832 over the abolition of slavery in the state. Two sides, pro-abolitionists and traditionalists, sparred over a two-week period. Using dramatistic analysis, I undertake a case study of the debate, looking specifically for the terministic screens used by each side to ascertain their worldviews that ultimately led to a narrow defeat of the pro-abolitionists.

Following the Nat Turner rebellion, the Virginia State Legislature held a debate in early 1832 over the abolition of slavery in the state. Two sides, pro-abolitionists and traditionalists, sparred over a two-week period. Using dramatistic analysis, I undertake a case study of the debate, looking specifically for the terministic screens used by each side to ascertain their worldviews that ultimately led to a narrow defeat of the pro-abolitionists.

This essay assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s response to Booker T. Washington based on the economic principles structuring public-intellectual intervention in social crisis. Arguing that public-intellectual work relies on ethos-driven rhetorical engagement that conflates the public intellectual and his conceptual intervention as a single product to be marketed, I recontextualize the debate between the two thinkers in order to account for the intersection of their discursive activities in terms of competing public-intellectual models. While Washington relied on a closed-market model that situated him as the spokesperson for an otherwise silent black community, Du Bois worked to create opportunity for deliberation among a number of black publics, and Du Bois’s more democratically minded rhetorical modeling offers a version of public-intellectual work that resonates with the needs of the current moment.

Technical communicators, engineers, and designers in the automotive industry, as well as researchers with expertise and interest in this book. It provides provides a framework for better understanding and explaining the ecological, economic, and political stakes invested in contemporary culture’s use and valuation of automobiles. The book constructs an ANT-inspired framework for rethinking automobility. In the manner of similar projects, such as Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition that establish ANT as a primary mode of analysis, the book achieves its purpose of recovering terms from ancient rhetoric—techne, kinesis, energeia, hyle, logistikos, metis, tyche, and kairos—for the purpose of demonstrating how they always, already accommodated analysis of human and nonhuman agents involved in activities, such as transportation use and design. For this reason, the book could serve as useful reading in courses on professional communication as it pertains to transportation or ANT, and as food for thought for automobile industry professionals.

This paper makes an independent start with formalizing the rules for the argumentation stage of critical discussions (van Eemeren and Grootendorst A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, Ch. 6). It does not deal with the well-known code of conduct consisting of ten rules (the “ten commandments”) but with the system consisting of fifteen (or seventeen) rules on which the code of conduct is based. The rules of this system are scrutinized and problems they raise are discussed. Then a formal dialectical system is defined that reflects most of the contents of these rules. The aim is to elucidate the way the rules work and to show how a formal approach can be useful to achieve this. It is also shown how the present method can be used to study the nature of circular argumentation. While, generally, the formalization follows closely the original rules for the argumentation stage of critical discussions, there will also be proposed some modifications of the original protocol.

Pericles is said to have been affected by Anaxagoras and therefore having improved his speaking skills. A generic influence of philosophical studies is usually supposed but there may be a more specific reason: it was possible to interpret the works of meteorologoi in a limited way, strictly rhetorical, renouncing cosmological speculation but acquiring an effective instrument of persuasion. Some anecdotes in Pericles’ life help to understand how this philosophy was translated into political action. Anaxagoras not only improved Pericles’ speaking skills but also provided a model of behaviour for any contingency.

234 RHETORICA drawn to images from these periods - "the body's inside and outside, the heart offered on an outstretched hand" - that reveal "historically elaborated semiot­ ics of the self," expressing competing views of what constituted a moral bal­ ance of public and private (214). So, when she offers her detailed case study of irony and sincerity in the ethos of author Dave Eggers, it is grounded in a historical understanding of these terms. Historians of rhetoric may find themselves frustrated by aspects of Korthals Altes's book, a point she acknowledges as a likely effect of the wide net she casts. For example, her central term, ethos, is not as thoroughly historicized as are other framing concepts like sincerity, irony, and hermeneutics. While she traces these over centuries, her approach to ethos is to provide snapshots from ancient Greece and Rome and then to pick up the term in its modern uses in narrative analysis. This method drops at least one major thread that seems highly germaine to her project: the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos, robustly revived in the last two decades, as location or haunt. Korthals Altes's use of topoi answers her need to flesh out the rhetorical commonplaces of ethos construction, but her discussion of the textual, virtual, and physical spaces that modem authors inhabit calls out to ethos's more ancient meaning. Further, the degree to which ethos overlaps with related terms like posture, self, persona, and implied author, are never made clear. But in placing ancient renderings of ethos within modem methods of literary criticism, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation reminds us just how fraught and complex the practice of reading others has always been. Daniel A. Cryer, Roosevelt University Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. While reading Mark Garrett Longaker's recent book, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, I was struck by the author's reluctance to employ contemporary theory as a lens through which to evaluate Enlightenment perspectives on civic virtue, eco­ nomics, and rhetoric, for indeed, twenty-first-century rhetorical studies often marshal critical perspectives to try the past. While it is impossible to read his­ torical texts innocently, Longaker strives to explore his principal figures—John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer—on their own terms. Thus, I was not surprised when in his conclusion he explicitly addresses his approach, revealing that although he is "a political socialist and a historical materialist," he adheres to the principle audite et alteram partem: "listen even to the other side" (pp. 134-35). It is this careful listening, which enables Reviews 235 Longaker to articulate his subjects significance in the British Enlightenment, that perhaps best characterizes this fine volume. In his introduction, Longaker concisely presents his "principal argument"—that "in the late seventeenth, mid-eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries a British philosopher, a political economist, a rhetorical theorist, and a sociologist all tried to cultivate bourgeois virtue by teaching rhetorical style, each building on others' ideas and each addressing a unique stage of capitalist development" (p. 2). Each of the study's four chapters features one of Longaker's principal theorists, along with his key rhetorical emphasis: Locke and clarity, Smith and probity, Blair and moderation, and Spencer and economy. In chapter 1, Longaker astutely distills Locke's well-known recommenda­ tions concerning the abuses of language and his mistrust of disputation into "four rules to remedy language's infirmity" (p. 14). Conducting a "synthetic reading" of Locke's work, he then demonstrates how each rule elucidates dif­ ferent areas of the philosopher's corpus. For example, the "Rule of Propriety" describes Locke's view of both effective language and stable currency. Longaker closes the chapter by suggesting that Locke's actual prose style conforms to his rules of clarity and that his writings on education "developed a rhetorical pedagogy of clarity" (p. 37). Although most scholars of rhetoric who consider Locke tend to highlight a few of his well-worn...

This paper focuses on the use of the “exemplum” of Alexander in seven Imperial speeches by Libanius (4th c. AD). These are studied and analysed under both a macro- and a micro-perspective: in the first case, the analysis highlights the individual historical examples, their rhetorical function and their literary form. These aspects are subsequently discussed with respect to the specific literary genre, the position of exempla within the speech structure, as well as their aims and impact. Of special interest are the different ways in which Libanius uses the sometimes positive and sometimes negative image of Alexander in order to reinforce his argumentation and to guide his rhetorical strategy in specific pathways.

232 RHETORICA l'attenzione a generi e tipologie testuali apparentemente minori, come la scoliastica , l'epistolografia, la favolistica e altri ancora, di cui si rivendica persua­ sivamente, alla luce di una analisi minuta e puntúale, Taita caratura letteraria e la ricercata raffinatezza fórmale. Infime, va sottolineato corne Tindagine linguistico-retorica non sia pressoché mai fine a se stessa, ma concorra a illuminare strategie comunicative, intenzioni letterarie, prese di posizione ideologiche , e questo non solo per gli autori classici, ma anche per i testi umanistici, troppo spesso appiattiti da un pregiudizio critico che li vede come mero prodotto di una pedissequa riproduzione dei modelli antichi. Per tutte queste ragioni, Topera curata da Raffaele Grisolia e Giuseppina Matino si legge con grande interesse, stimola nuovi percorsi di ricerca, invita ad approfondire Tindagine sui testi e sugli autori presi in considerazione nei diversi saggi: che è quanto ogni autentico studio scientifico dovrebbe fare. Mario Lentano, Universita di Siena Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 325 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-8032-4836-6. In his contribution to the edited volume The Ethos of Rhetoric, Robert Wade Kenny observed that even after centuries of inquiry into ethos, it still "calls to us as something to be understood," a point powerfully captured in Liesbeth Korthals Altes's Ethos and Narrative Interpretation. Korthals Altes identifies as a narratologist, and though her book is not directed specifically at historians of rhetoric it offers perspectives on ethos that will likely be new and useful. Korthals Altes's focus on ethos is part of a rhetorical tradition in literary studies intent on considering the author, or the "implied author" as Wayne Booth defined it in The Rhetoric ofFiction, as an integral site of inquiry into the meanings of texts. Like Booth, she is drawn to ethos and rhetoric through Aristotle's "pragmatic" vision (6) that "elucidates what makes per­ suasive discourse effective and stipulates what means of persuasion can best be used in specific situations in the public domain" (2-3), and while she does not break new ground in her conception of ancient rhetoric (nor does she claim to), her uses of ancient terms aim to extend its influence in a variety of disciplines, particularly narrative theory, hermeneutics, sociology, and cognitive psychology. Uninterested in building ethos "as a consistently rigor­ ous analytical concept," she instead sees it as a node connecting "heteroge­ neous aspects of narratives" and the ways they are interpreted (xiv). Korthals Altes uses Aristotle's Rhetoric to build a methodological founda­ tion that serves her well throughout the book. For her, "the treatise's interest resides in Aristotle's subtle analysis of the various - rational, emotional, and social - components of persuasion and of the implied interactive mechanisms" Reviews 233 (3). She is less concerned with interactions between the three domains of logos, pathos, and ethos and more interested in those she sees contained in ethos itself. One such "interactive mechanism" lies in the connection between ethos and phronesis, which "crucially connects rhetoric to ethics" (257n6), important for Korthals Altes as she develops the argument that narrative literature cons­ tructs ethical codes in storyworlds and in the minds of readers. An interactive mechanism equally central to the book is "ethos topoi," which she briefly defi­ nes as "culturally recognized grounds for rhetorical credit" (62) related specifi­ cally to the character of a speaker or author that "provide an interface between perceived textual clues and cultural norms and shared character repertoires" (211). She notes that Aristotle's ethos topoi, developed as they were for "public speech in the Athenian state," are practical wisdom, virtue, and good will, and she defines these for her modern purposes to include the broad categories of morality, truth, expertise and experience, and social and political power (63), which she breaks into more specific qualities as her interpretive needs dictate. Ethos topoi serve as an important heuristic for what Korthals Altes calls her "metahermeneutic" project: tracing the complex interpretive path­ ways of a reader "assessing] a discursive ethos" (ix). She develops, for example, specific topoi for assessing the ethos of the "engagé," or socially engaged, writer, someone who at...

The essay explores Erasmus’ development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton’s printing of the translation of Cicero’s De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship propo ses a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus’ De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero’s rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.

Abstract This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.