Although rhetoric and city life have been closely aligned since ancient times, urban planning documents have received little attention as rhetorical texts shaping discourse about citizenship. The Plan of Chicago, a key document in the history of US urban planning, not only proposed improvements, but, more importantly, its visual and verbal language constructed an idealized and ideologically infused conception of the city and its citizens. By enacting what Burke called a representative anecdote, the Plan constitutes a specifically commercially oriented city and citizen, foregoing other possible identifications.

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

Even as deficit model science communication falls out of favor, few studies question how written science communication constructs relationships between science and industry. Here, I investigate how textual microprocesses relate scientific research to industry practice in the Washington State wine industry, helping (or hindering) winemakers and wine grape growers in making research relevant to their work. Critical discourse analysis of a corpus of wine science texts suggests that textual microprocesses continue to enact a deficit paradigm: scientists as knowledge producers and the industry public as knowledge deficient. Through its extension of features of scientific discourse, the industry-oriented literature abstracts research practices from context which could aid in drawing relationships with industry practices. In aggregate, these texts suggest an opportunity to increase research relevance to industry practice by writing the research–industry relationship differently, recontextualizing research in practice.

Although standard language ideologies have been well researched and theorized, the practices that lead to the reproduction and enactment of these ideologies deserve attention. Specifically, there remains a need to study language that both reveals reliance on standard language ideologies and perpetuates these ideologies within the field of writing studies, undermining the field’s efforts to challenge standard English’s ongoing privileged position. This article examines the role of language in perpetuating perceptions of standard English as linguistically neutral regardless of personal or field-wide views about linguistic equality and the value of linguistic diversity. Specifically, I describe the discursive practices of standard language ideologies—what I term standard language discourse—that allow for a positioning of standard English as normal, natural, non-interfering, and widely accessible. Finally, I explore how to resist or challenge this positioning.

We present a dramatistic analysis of the discourse of Syrian President Assad and his opposition in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Comparing terministic screens and world views expressed in the discourses, we find that the Assad regime believes it is not responsible for the current conflict, and is justified in the use of violence against rebel groups. Rebel groups overtly reject Western values and seek to depict their current and planned violence as morally justified.

We present a dramatistic analysis of the discourse of Syrian President Assad and his opposition in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Comparing terministic screens and world views expressed in the discourses, we find that the Assad regime believes it is not responsible for the current conflict, and is justified in the use of violence against rebel groups. Rebel groups overtly reject Western values and seek to depict their current and planned violence as morally justified.

Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.

This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue on argumentative patterns in discourse, more in particular on argumentative patterns with pragmatic argumentation as a main argument that are prototypical of argumentative discourse in certain communicative activity types in the political, the legal, the medical, and the academic domain. It situates the studies of argumentative patterns reported in these papers in the pragma-dialectical research program. In order to be able to do so, it is first explained in which consecutive stages the pragma-dialectical theorizing has developed, what the study of argumentative patterns involves, and why the identification of argumentative patterns represents a vital stage in the development of pragma-dialectics. The description of the theoretical innovations that are introduced and the exposition of their relationship with the standard and extended pragma-dialectical theory create a conceptual and terminological framework for understanding the background and the rationale of the current research projects.

This article reviews the history of federal adult education policy in order to draw composition scholars into broader educational policy discussions shaping literacy instruction at all educational levels. Adult education policy in the 1960s framed literacy as an element of human capital necessary for economic advancement, a limited characterization reinforcing assumptions that literacy education should generate more productive workers. These early policy discourses are reflected in our current economically driven educational climate, and I suggest that examining such historical and discursive contexts provides composition scholars and educators a stronger basis for actively engaging in policy conversations impacting their work.

John Dewey is a philosopher who seems perpetually on the verge of rhetoric. He displays a continual interest in the necessity of communication for democracy, and yet he often remains vague (maddeningly so) as to what shape such communication should take. While this would seem to limit his usefulness for rhetoricians, the opposite has proven true. As scholars of rhetoric, we now find ourselves in the midst of a renaissance in studies of Dewey. Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice seeks to both consolidate the gains made by such scholarship and further encourage rhetoricians' interest in Dewey's work. Namely, the various authors in this volume concern themselves with treating Dewey's writings as contributions to a broader “democratic culture” (2) of which rhetoric is a vital, animating component. In doing so, they offer a collective argument as to why Dewey is, and should remain, a rich resource for rhetorical inquiries into democracy, treated here as both a practice and a way of life.Trained Capacities is divided into three sections, each dealing with an aspect of Dewey's scholarly work and his career as a public intellectual. The essays in the first section, “Dewey and Democratic Practice,” look to Dewey's engagement with the perpetually important yet problematic subjects of science, philosophy, and religion—“the architectonic assumptions of democratic practice” (20). William Keith and Robert Danisch lead off this section with “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” They begin by arguing that “Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric,” which is no surprise to rhetoricians familiar with Dewey's work (28). Rather, they argue, Dewey's unification of scientific thinking and democratic deliberation provides a “sociology of rhetoric,” or “a systematic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices” (28). For Keith and Danisch, Dewey supplies a way of discussing the structures through which rhetorical action is made possible in the first place. Publics who are facing problems must attend to the ways in which their specific structural contingencies delimit the available means for developing democratic practices and arriving at sound judgment. Keith and Danish's essay is rich with ideas, and sure to provoke further discussion amongst pragmatist philosophers and rhetoricians alike.Philosophy and Rhetoric readers will want to pay special attention to Scott Stroud's contribution to Trained Capacities, “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric.” We found it to be one of the high notes of this edited volume in that it goes beyond “the account of rhetoric that Dewey held (or failed to hold)” in order to craft a “Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric” (48). This is a worthwhile project that has been under way for some time, but Stroud does something too few have done by bringing Kenneth Burke into the mix. The result is enjoyable and provocative. Deweyan rhetoric scholars will likely have intuited the linkages between Burke's notion of orientation and Dewey's understanding of habituation on their own, and it is this intuition that Stroud fleshes out for the book's readers. Stroud argues that Deweyan morality is situational and that Burke helps us understand how these situations are constructed linguistically via grammars of motivations and purpose. Individuals' responses to these situations are habitual, as they have already been oriented to them by the language of their respective communities. However, that does not guarantee that the individual's habituated responses are helpful—sometimes they are trained incapacities.Stroud suggests that our various trained incapacities call out for reorientations. He reaches beyond Dewey's preference for respect and civility and embraces Burke's notion of impiety. Drawing on Richard Rorty's understanding of the strong poet, Stroud suggests that the poet and the ironist are the artful critics most suited to addressing public moral dilemmas. Importantly, such artistic provocations are not undertaken for their own sake but rather (in keeping with a Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric) to answer actual problematic situations. Finally, in true Deweyan form, Stroud insists that these artful incongruities should take place experimentally if the project of moral reorientation is to result in moral development.Scholars have long been fascinated with Dewey's conflicting views on religious faith, and they go to great pains to demonstrate that his democratic faith was closely tied to his religious beliefs. Paul Stob's contribution, “Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community” extends this project. He begins with Dewey's response to William Jennings Bryan's discourse during the Scopes trial, noting Dewey's frustration with Bryan's “divisive, antagonistic, intolerant religious rhetoric” (66). Is there any room for such “fire spitting” in Dewey's Great Community? For Dewey, religious rhetoric should tend toward inclusivity, and its uses should be governed by the kind of society it is likely to produce. Stob argues that rather than dismiss religious rhetoric outright, Dewey appreciated the power of religious symbols as evinced by his own use of religious rhetoric. Stob contends that in using religious rhetoric himself, Dewey did not simply co-opt religious symbols but also infused “public culture with a new religious purpose” (68) and direction. Stob argues that Dewey's own rhetorical project—one characterized by religious dissociation and democratic faith—cemented his reputation as a minister of democracy. In the end, “Dewey's gospel, like Bryan's gospel, relied on judgments of sin and evil, of hope and deliverance, of community and communion” (80). The key for Dewey was to dissociate religiously infused language from the kinds of dogmatism that breed division and instead turn it to the work of creating the Great Community.Part 2, “Dewey and His Interlocutors,” is of particular interest to rhetoricians since it shows Dewey practicing the sort of democratic culture that the book as a whole works to theorize. Essays by Jean Goodwin, Louise W. Knight, Keith Gilyard, and Walton Muyumba treat Dewey's public interactions with the familiar figures of Lippmann, Addams, Du Bois, and James Baldwin, respectively. While these authors tread familiar ground, they nonetheless shed new light upon the close connection between Dewey's interactions with his various interlocutors and his subsequent public pronouncements. Across these essays the message is clear: “indispensable opposition” (as Goodwin figures Lippmann) is of vital importance to a democratic culture animated by rhetorical practice. Such opposition is no small matter, and these essays demonstrate the mutual influence necessary to sustain a democratic public. However, for those who pick up Trained Capacities with the hope of learning more about either rhetoric or Dewey's philosophy, it is worth noting that the essays in this section tend to focus more on the respective interlocutor than Dewey himself. Rhetorical theory and philosophy take a backseat to history—albeit history that is fascinating and very well written.One exception to this section's overt focus on history is Jeremy Engels's “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War.” Engels investigates Dewey's rhetorical uses of Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of affirming the necessity of democratic faith. It was through his invocation of the historical Jefferson, Engels argues, that Dewey attempted to build “an ontological, prepolitical foundation that would keep Americans from straying too far from the democratic cause and that would keep democracy itself from transforming into something else entirely” (94). Engels supports this claim by supplying a fascinating, though necessarily brief, genealogy of Jeffersonian tropes in American democratic theory (which surfaced in a variety of forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Engels's primary purpose in doing so is to demonstrate the importance of history, and its rhetorical translation into new situations, when responding to antidemocratic challenges. In Engels's telling, Dewey's democratic faith was beset by a “crisis of war and exception” (103) not unlike our own. He responded by turning to Jefferson's writings, seeing in them a moral foundation for a lasting democratic faith. The challenge for rhetorical theorists today is to understand “how best to render democratic faith to the jaded ears of a postmodern generation” (103), a particularly salient problem for citizens struggling with the prospects of a seemingly endless war on terror. No easy answers are given, but the lesson is clear: attending to Dewey's rhetoric of democratic faith better equips us, immersed as we are in our in our own conflict-laden politics, to confront the challenges of crisis and war that necessarily and tragically lurk at the margins of democratic culture.The essays in section 2 serve as a powerful reminder that Dewey's contributions to both democratic theory and rhetoric were at their most robust when they reflected his engagements with equally committed interlocutors. As Knight states, summarizing the outcome of Dewey and Jane Addams's disagreements over the First World War, “Addams had learned from Dewey and experience, and Dewey had learned from Addams and experience. Their debate over World War I illustrates how they applied their ideas of pragmatism to their own lives as well as a point made often in this book: that when, over time, debate turns into shared inquiry, there is mutual learning on both sides” (121).Though Dewey did not directly engage in rhetorical theorizing, his work nonetheless affirms the social necessity of rhetoric for the vitality of a democratic society. This point is particularly evident when we turn to Dewey's work on education, which is taken up in the third section of the book. Evincing concern for the ways in which Dewey's philosophy can be applied to rhetorical pedagogy, the essays in this section demonstrate that practice is the central link between Dewey's pragmatism and “experimental” methods of rhetorical instruction designed to inculcate democratic values. As Nathan Crick observes in “Rhetoric and Dewey's Experimental Pedagogy,” such an “experimental attitude … is not merely one facet of democracy; its cultivation within a public is the culmination of democratic social life itself” (186). In short, as students are given lease to test ideas through rhetorical interaction, their capacity for healthy skepticism, self-reliant inquiry, and other critical tools necessary for sustained democratic practices increase exponentially. As Donald Jones is quick to point out, encouraging this type of rhetorical engagement is no easy task for the teacher. Nonetheless, such an experimental attitude is necessary for the building and maintenance of a truly democratic culture.To be clear, Trained Capacities is not concerned with crafting a clear narrative in which Dewey's work is transformed into rhetorical theory, nor one in which Dewey is treated as a rhetorician. Rather, Trained Capacities moves beyond such strict binaries—“Dewey and Rhetoric,” or “Dewey as Rhetorician”—and instead treats his pragmatism, public engagement, and commitment to education as equally valuable components of an overarching faith in democratic culture. Central to, and constitutive of, such a democratic culture is the practice and teaching of rhetoric. It goes without saying that such a broad, sweeping project is bound to miss some things, to focus too much on others, and to appeal to a variety of readers from all over the intellectual spectrum. Even so, Philosophy and Rhetorics's readers will want to read Trained Capacities, which is a welcome contribution to studies of pragmatism and rhetorical theory. The individual chapters, each with their various strengths and weaknesses, work in concert to create the beginnings of a Great Community of Dewey scholarship.

Writing researchers have long attempted to classify and describe patterns of citation and source use both to describe disciplinary differences, and to identify discourse-level characteristics of new knowledge production. The analysis of large corpora has provided great insights about the formal characteristics of citations, but little information about their rhetorical nature, which we know from interview studies as central to the understanding of source use practices. This study reports on an attempt to understand and describe patterns of source use across disciplines, genres and levels of participation through systematic verbal data analysis of documents produced by sixteen participants in expert/novice pairs (faculty advisor/doctoral advisee) from four disciplines (Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences). The results of this analysis showed that, despite some disciplinary differences, all participants used similar patterns of reference use, namely elaboration, evaluation and relation to one’s own work.

Citation practices have been and continue to be a concentrated area of research activity among writing researchers, spanning many disciplines. This research presents a re-analysis of a common data set contributed by Karatsolis (this issue), which focused on the citation practices of 8 PhD advisors and 8 PhD advisees across four disciplines. Our purpose in this paper is to show what automated dictionary methods can uncover on the same data based on a text analysis and visualization environment we have been developing over many years. The results of our analysis suggest that, although automatic dictionary methods cannot reproduce the fine granularity of interpretative coding schemes designed for human coders, it can find significant non-adjacent patterns distributed across a text or corpus that will likely elude the analyst relying solely on serial reading. We report on the discovery of several of these patterns that we believe complement Karatsolis’ original analysis and extend the citation literature at large. We conclude the paper by reviewing some of the advantages and limits of dictionary approaches to textual analysis, as well as debunking some common misconceptions against them.

Two long-standing assumptions on which writing centers operate are that individual tutoring helps students’ writing development and that the actual talk of such tutoring enables such development (Bruffee, 1984; Lunsford, 1991; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2015). Questions, long thought of as one of the most important pedagogical tools, enable writing tutors to tap into students’ knowledge of writing, help them clarify the writing task, advance their thoughts, and advise them indirectly on how to proceed further. Whereas writing center lore has emphasized the importance of questioning in non-directive tutorials, scholars have only recently begun to explore empirically tutors’ actual use of questions more generally in tutorials, the differentiated functions of questions, and the strategic use of questions in tutorial discourse (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014).In this study we present an original, empirical scheme for coding question types in writing tutorials derived from 15 writing tutorial sessions in our own corpus of the genre. We apply this functionally oriented scheme to one typical session to show how questions operate locally, how they are distributed across a session, as well as how they achieve both pedagogical and organizational goals within such interactions. The use of questions in this tutorial is compared with question use in 14 other sessions to discover patterns in tutors’ questioning behavior. Our findings provide insight into how tutors’ strategic use of particular question types can empower students to become more active participants in the tutorial.

The rise of digital humanities has led many writing researchers to consider using digital tools to analyze rhetorical patterns in text. Yet taking a digital approach to the analysis of texts is a complex task. We are faced with a variety of techniques and tools, all of which require significant investment to learn and use. How can we best understand the costs and benefits of adopting a particular approach? Are they simply alternatives or can they be integrated? The three sets of authors in this special section attempt to address these questions by using alternative methodologies to analyze a common set of documents. The following opening piece serves as an introduction to the project. In it, we place their research in the context of taxonomy of approaches to text analysis, and review prior attempts at integration. Following the articles, a closing piece examines the prospects for integration. In it, we provide a brief review of the results of the analyses followed by an examination of their commonalities and variations. Finally, we conclude with the considerations that should be taken into account in choosing a method for textual analysis, as well as a discussion of the potential for an integration of methods.

This study examines links between essay quality and text elaboration and text cohesion. For this study, 35 students wrote two essays (on two different prompts) and for each, were given 15 minutes to elaborate on their original text. An expert in discourse comprehension then modified the original and elaborated essays to increase cohesion, resulting in a 2 (prompt) x 2 (original content, elaborated content) x 2 (original cohesion, improved cohesion) design. Expert raters scored the essays for overall quality and text coherence. In terms of overall essay quality, increasing text content (i.e., elaboration) and improving cohesion both led to significant gains in expert judgments of writing quality, and a combination of both elaboration and improved cohesion led to increased scores over increased cohesion alone. Judgments of text coherence were increased by improved cohesion (but not elaboration); and a combination of both elaboration and improved cohesion led to higher human ratings of coherence in comparison to the original and elaborated versions. The results have important implications for writing theories, writing success, writing pedagogy, and standardized testing.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s writing textbook, “They Say / I Say,” has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates,however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook’s templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how two particular “moves” discussed in the textbook are realized in three large corpora of professional and student academic writing. The analysis reveals important differences between the textbook’s wordings and those preferred by student and professional writers. It also uncovers differences in use of “interpersonal”functions of language by experienced and less experienced writers. In offering this detailed analysis of academic prose, I aim to extend calls to recenter language in writing research and instruction. I conclude with implications for discussing academic argumentation with students.

This article examines the 2014 Sino-American University Student Digital Micro Film Competition, a collaboration developed and administered between the University of Central Florida in the United States and Shanghai University in the People's Republic of China (PRC). By using qualitative text analysis and visual content analysis to review key materials and events from this case, the researchers studied information design and cross-cultural communication practices of various aspects of the partnership. The resulting analysis reveals unique information design challenges associated with cultural differences in communication practices, visual design, and administrative style. The summary of the case and the results of the related research presented here also provide readers with information design strategies that can facilitate design practices---and the associated coordination of event planning---across different cultural groups.

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

108 RHETORICA numbering is still useful; Behr edited orations 1—16 in 1968 and Keil in 1898 (reprinted) edited 17-52. In addition Behr in 1981-86 translated all the works of Aristides in 2 volumes. Raffaella Cribiore, New York Richard Leo Enos, Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. Revised and Expanded Edition. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012. 272 pp. Cloth: $60. Paper: $32. Adobe ebook: $20. ISBN-13: 978-1-60235-212-4. When Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle's first edition was released in 1993, the reviews were not flattering. Carol Poster's review in Rhetoric Society Quar­ terly (26.3) called the book, "quite disappointing, containing little information that is not readily available in the libraries of most research universities." Similarly, William W. Fortenbaugh, writing in Philosophy and Rhetoric (28.2) notes that "Enos's discussion of Homer and the rhapsodes disappointed me, despite the fact that I am no expert in Homeric questions." The early cri­ ticisms of the book seem unduly harsh considering the territory Enos is exploring. Fortenbaugh, for instance, sums it up nicely as "for it [Enos's book] confronted me with material either long forgotten or rarely considered," but then drops this consideration from his critique. What Poster and Fortenbaugh did not recognize at the time was that Richard Leo Enos was planting the seeds of his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric. Enos begins his theory in the first edition of Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle and expands this idea in several iterations leading to the expanded and revised second edition. In his 2002 article in RSQ (32.1), "The Archae­ ology of Women in Rhetoric: Rhetorical Sequencing as a Research Method for Historical Scholarship," Enos argues that research needs to cut through "pedantic refinery, exhibiting two traits essential to research: a passion for discovering primary sources and the cavalier, but resourceful, methods by which they go about solving their research problems." It is in this spirit that the Revised and Expanded edition attempts to reinterpret early Greek rhetorical tradition through archaeological and epigraphical evidence—and in cultural context. This is exactly what the Revised and Expanded edition addresses. In the nineteen years since the original edition was published, Enos refined his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric. The new edition is almost twice the length of the original and attempts to answer the criticisms of the earlier edition. What early critics misunderstood was that Enos was not attempting to be comprehensive in his chapters, he was attempting to redefine method in rhetorical inquiry. Expanded from the original five, Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle's nine chapters are loosely chronological following his theory of Archaeological Rhetoric, including a strong bibliography developed since the initial volume. It is, of course, impossible to fully represent every aspect of Enos's arguments and examples here, but several high points are worth noting. Reviews 109 The first two chapters consider the development Homeric literature as a discourse genie spread by the Greek rhapsodes. Enos explains that once this body of knowledge was created, the discourse modes of heuristic, eris­ tic, and protreptic were needed to expand and recite the hymns. His discus­ sion of the rhapsodes better explains the shift in Greek culture from true orality to a written medium. Using archaeological examples, Enos examines inscriptions that explicit archaeological evidence, predating Homer by sev­ eral hundred years, reveals that this early form of paragraph was already being standardized within an oral culture" (49). These examples of written text were actually attempts to quantify elements already deduced in speech. Chapters III through V explore the problem in studying Hellenic rhetoric: scholars often assume that rhetorical acts were practiced only by the educated few. Professor Enos argues that during this era craft and functional literacy was widespread. Given the emerging development of alphabetic systems, the ability to decode was readilv available. His archaeological evidence is intrigu­ ing to the growing functional literacy among the tradesmen of the polis, such as the recording of votes bv citizens on potsherds, or ostraca. Chapter IV and V are perhaps the most interesting chapters in the volume. Sicily's "rhetorical climate" (97) is important because it frames the contributions of Corax and Tisias, and the importance of Gorgias to the...

Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethno- linguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composi- tion course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writ- ers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

The controversy about vaccines and autism presents an opportunity to explore how science is constructed in public debates about health and medicine. Rhetors who argue against a connection between vaccines and autism insist that their opponents are irrational, while rhetors arguing for a link insist that their fears are rational indeed. This analysis poses an alternative way of understanding the vaccines-autism controversy, suggesting that it is partly fueled by differing perceptions of the boundary between science and non-science. Using the concept of boundary work as a lens, this article uses generative rhetorical criticism to examine artifacts within the controversy and explores rhetorical constructions of scientific evidence, the forum of scientific discourse, scientific expertise, and the scientific capability. The findings suggest that rhetors’ awareness of disciplinary boundaries is just as important in the construction and reception of their arguments as their knowledge of scientific facts and principles.

I argue for conceiving agency via dispossession rather than possession, specifically in the context of prison writing. While the study of prisoner discourse tends to link agency and resistance to the subject through what I term the recuperative narrative, I map out an alternative paradigm through an analysis of Nawal El Saadawi’s prison memoir and Václav Havel’s prison letters. I demonstrate how the prisoners write to retain their fundamental address-ability and response-ability that is the condition for any sense of self, and not (only) to reclaim a subject position and voice. I conclude by considering how this response-ability provides the potential for resistance, a kind of agency and resistance that does not rely on notions of the individual will. I argue that our primary dispossession can serve to redress the unequal distribution of forcible dispossession and that rhetoricians have a significant role to play in this project.

This article introduces the concept of stylization and illustrates its usefulness for studying online discourse by examining how writers have employed it in order to parody sexist products such as BIC Cristal for Her, using genderlect in order to introduce dissonance into and reframe patriarchal discourse. A corpus analysis of 671 reviews, written from August through October 2012, confirmed a dramatically higher presence of lexical items and adjectives often stereotyped as feminine, compared to a reference corpus of other parody reviews, as well as the GloWbe corpus housed at Brigham Young University. A qualitative analysis shows the stylized use of these features, and how they contribute to the construction of personas that are intended to mock the sexism inherent in BIC’s advertising. This analysis hopes to encourage more attention to how stylization functions in emerging online genres.

In most assessments of students’ argumentive writing and in most research on the topic, students write on topics for which they have no specific prior preparation. We examined development in the argumentive writing urban middle school students did as part of a two-year dialogic-based intervention in which students engaged deeply with a series of topics and participated in various kinds of electronic and verbal dialogic activities related to the topic. Students’ achievements exceeded those typical of the extemporaneous expository writing of middle school students. The gradual developments observed over time included ones in (a) addressing and seeking to weaken the opposing position, (b) identifying weaknesses in a favored position and strengths in an opposing one, (c) connecting and integrating opposing arguments, and (d) using evidence to weaken as well as support claims. In addition to identifying a trajectory of what develops in the development of argumentive writing, these analyses support the claim of dialogic argumentation as a productive bridge to individual argumentive writing and highlight the contribution of deep engagement with the topic in enhancing writing.

Based on Vygotsky’s theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of development evidenced through the dialectical tension of tool and sign. Data were drawn from a series of reflective memos I authored during a seminar for new doctoral students designed to encourage the development of their identities as educational researchers. In an effort to understand how the tool and sign functions played out in this developmental context, I employed three methods of analysis: (a) I parsed them into evidential units of induction or deduction, (b) I positioned each unit on semantic differential scales to indicate the assumptions and authorial roles manifested, and (c) I examined how these positions were discursively realized through problematizing, intertextual reach, procedural membership, and reciprocal membership. The analysis demonstrates how examining the dialectical relationship of tool and sign illuminates the developmental trajectory of a student writer.

We discuss the benefits of using corpus linguistic analysis, a quantitative method for determining the "aboutness" of talk, in conjunction with discourse analysis in order to understand writing center talk at a micro-and macrolevel. We exemplify this mixed-method approach by examining a specialized corpus of 20 writing center conferences totaling more than 75,000 words. Our analysis also uncovered words that differentiated writing center talk from reference corpora and thus helped reveal the aboutness of the writing center talk. For example, student writers said "I don't know" far more frequently than any other 4-gram, and tutors said "You're going to" far more frequently than other 4-grams. We close by discussing the possibility of creating a corpus of writing center talk that researchers could use to ask and answer a broad range of research questions.

This article proposes a “pedagogy of riffing” and examines how satire and some earlier forms of metacommentary can help first-year composition students appreciate the mediated nature of contemporary current-events discourse. Beginning with comic news and working back to those pioneers of cultural riffing, Mystery Science Theater 3000 , this article examines the nexus of rhetorical awareness, citizenship, and riffing. I argue that using forms of metacommentary, situated within a pedagogy of riffing, helps students to locate themselves in the larger discussion of politics and informed citizenship.

This essay critiques science diplomacy discourse generated by President Obama’s “New Beginning” speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, which launched a program of action in education, science, technology, and innovation to build trust between Muslim-majority countries and the United States. I contend that the Cairo Agenda sparked parallel dialogues, carried out in two separate loci of discourse: the official public sphere through which the Cairo Agenda was promoted, and a reticulate public sphere dedicated to Muslim science. My critique explores the quality and substance of the border crossings between these two arenas. I introduce science diplomacy’s value as a strategy for cross-cultural engagement, then illustrate and comment on the dialogues taking place within the Cairo Agenda and Muslim science arenas. I conclude with observations and recommendations to build and strengthen the lattice work between these arenas, and prospects for creating a cross-cultural ethos to guide the purposes and practices of science.

This article reports a discourse analysis of journals from adult learners during a 1-week residency in Cape Town, South Africa. The theoretical posture is a critical dialogic perspective, making use of a postcolonial understanding of intercultural interactions. The purpose of the study was exploratory. The analysis suggests that demographic variables (e.g., race), prior international travel, and experiences during the residency influence the amount and pace of cognitive change. Results include both questions for future research and suggestions for educators.

A hybrid assignment, a research-based academic essay paired with a research-based weblog, incorporates elements from both personal and academic writing to challenge students to critically think about how and why they write privately and publically. Students writing into this new model of public discourse can experiment with stance and tone across genres to exercise their abilities as responsible and flexible writers.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the figures of life and death as rhetorical and material conditions for self-consciousness and mutual recognition, notoriously described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It turns to Hegel's treatment of life and death, concepts that—according to Hegel's mature system—anticipate and prefigure the struggle for recognition and its master-slave dialectic. Part 1 analyzes the Philosophy of Nature, with attention to how the sex relation, species-life, and the diseased body “pathologically” figure the life and death of the nonhuman (animal) organism. Part 2 takes up Hegel's “Anthropology,” which opens his Philosophy of Mind, exploring the problematic relationship between (reproductive) sex and love as an incipient politics of woman, family, civil society, and state. Part 3 brings Hegel's world-historical system into dialogue with contemporary biopolitics, arguing that recognition today is driven by a world-historical discourse on bios and that Hegel's “pathological” figures might occasion a productive critique of affirmative biopolitics.

There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race.Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers’ one an African American man, the other a White woman’ in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers’ investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations.

Current research suggests that attention to language variation in teacher preparation can promote equity and narrow achievement gaps, particularly for African American students. However, persistent ideologies about language and race can stymie teachers’ desires for equitable teaching.Teachers who take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation still struggle in the moments of enactment due to expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es). In this article, I conceptualize these struggles as linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) and use discourse analytic and qualitative methods to present illustrations of preservice English teachers’ LIDs as they grapple with deficit language ideologies in relation to course work about language variation. In the focal illustration, I use positioning theory to illustrate the LIDs faced by a student teacher when responding to a student’s blog writing that included features of African American English. The findings show how this participant and others hadlimited awareness of how they were positioned racially until the moment of teaching in which they struggled to articulate and enact linguistically informed principles; in some cases, this positionality led to avoidance of future discussions of race and language. The findings advance past scholarship through generative description of students’ internalized deficit language ideologies and teachers’ struggles with implementation related to valuing language variation. Findings show the affordances and limitations of code-switching for addressing language variation in classroom interactions and the need for preparation about when, how, and why to have conversations about language variation, including greater understanding of language-related ideological triggers.

While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of English language learning, this article asks what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally. Specifically, I examine how the transnational political economy of English literacy is negotiated discursively at one US-based IEP (Northwest IEP) through teacher and student talk. From this discourse analysis, I suggest that, in addition to the difficult and time-consuming tasks of language learning, students in my study were involved in and recipients of another, much less visible type of literacy management: the ongoing valuing and defining of each other’s prior literacy-related knowledge vis-à-vis their and other students’ access to global Englishes. Thus, Northwest IEP did more than situate students in relation to privileged English literacy. That institution also served as a broker for the shifting status and subsequent privileging of global Englishes. This dynamic gives insight into how multilingual spaces come to mediate the broader transnational political economy of English literacy. Ultimately, this research shows the value of looking into institutes at the periphery of US higher education, which broadens the field’s linguistic terrain to situate US-based composition as one of many actors across the transnational landscape of higher education.

This article seeks to center what lies before, beside, and beyond normative modes of linguistic communication in the classroom and in literary scholarship. Framed by my experiences with my disabled brother, I focus mainly on Disability and Difference, a section of English 2 that I developed and taught at Brooklyn College for five semesters between 2008 and 2010. Throughout, I pay particular attention to mental disability; stigmatized and silenced, it is often unspoken and unspeakable. I begin by outlining some of the ways that students can benefit from exploring disability and how it frustrates linguistic representation. I then discuss ways that academic discourse, as well as pedagogical practices and policies, may begin to better account for mental disability. I conclude by briefly considering a kind of disability aesthetics that privileges the inarticulate and inarticulable, one that might allow students and scholars to appreciate the extent to which literary studies is already enriched by the same kinds of non-normative articulations that are deprivileged in our modes of formal discourse.

Thus far, professional editing has not been researched extensively in writing research. This article zooms in on sub-editing in newswriting as a form of professional editing, addressing three research questions: (a) What are the ways in which a news article’s text is altered?, (b) Are some types of news article altered more significantly than others?, and (c) Are certain news article sections more prone to alterations? Merging the contextualized insights of fieldwork with a corpus-based discourse analytic research perspective, we trace the differences (viz. additions, deletions, translocations, replacements) between the “initial” (right before sub-editing) and “final” (published) version of six different types of news article, (frontpage, headline, long, medium, short, and news wire article) in a corpus sample of 30 broadsheet articles. Our findings are first that—contrary to popular belief that sub-editors mainly “hack away” at news stories, or merely “trim the fat”—additions prevail. Second, we found that most interventions occur in high-stakes articles. Third, we discovered the largest number of interventions in the “entry points” of an article, that is, where—according to eye-tracking research—readers stop scanning and start reading. We discuss our findings in the light of training for professional newswriters.

Expectant parents use health communication messaging to make decisions about their childbirth plans. Recently, women have increasingly chosen to use doulas, or people who provide non-medical support during childbirth. This essay analyzes how a hospital designed public communication through promotional efforts regarding their no-cost, volunteer doula program. We use rhetorical analysis to analyze 19 promotional texts. By analyzing these materials through the rhetorical method of presence and absence, we found that the health discourse related to the doula program gave presence to expectant mothers. Additionally, the benefits of doulas, especially in relation to fathers or partners, remained absent in promoting the volunteer doula program. Through specific communication design recommendations, we focus on how to improve this communication to increase the use of doulas in our community, and in other communities. We conclude with implications and limitations of the study.

Reviews 437 proposta d identificazione dell autore di questa declamazione con uno dei piu importanti maestri di retorica del tempo: Mario Vittorino. Conformemente ai criteri delle Edizioni dell'Universita di Cassino, entrambi i volumi propongono delle traduzioni che combinano felicemente limpidezza espressiva e riproduzione delle peculiaritá dello stile declamato­ rio, spesso aspro ed ellittico. Entrambi propongono poi un apparato biblio­ gráfico ricco e di grande ntilita, aggiornato al 2013. Si tratta nel complesso di due opere che riescono a coniugare con grande armonía la ricchezza e profonditá del commento filológico con una puntúale trattazione e contestualizzazione anche di problematiche di carattere piu generale. L'argomentazione e sempre esaustiva e di grande chiarezza . Grazie a queste doti tanto il Matheniaticus curato da Stramaglia, quanto il Sepulcnini incantation curato da Schneider risultano al tempo stesso un prezioso strumento di lavoro per gli specialisti e un valido mezzo di diffusione delle declamazioni presso un pubblico studentesco purtroppo ancora raramente sensibilizzato verso questo tipo di testi. Ai i ssandra Rolle, Université de Lausanne James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 424. Cloth $105.00, paper $35.00 ISBhf(paper) 9780226016481 There is a narrative that portrays rhetoric as an often-maligned theory of human discourse, educational regime, and practice. It is a superficial narra­ tive that has been under increasing assault since the new rhetoric's birth dur­ ing the 1920s and 30s. I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke began the revision with novel conceptions of rhetoric as a social practice; Richard McKeon, Henry W. Johnstone, Ch. Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Ernesto Grassi advanced it in mid-century with reflections on rhetoric as at the core of philosophy (or philosophy of a certain sort); by late century John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, among others, were rebuffing the subjugation of rhetoric to philosophy with an aesthetic interpretation based on a recuperation of the elder sophists' vision; and in this century scholars such as Diane Davis and Thomas Rickert continue the assault with formulations that carry rhetoric beyond the human and into such domains as the ambience of materiality. Although these thinkers conceptualize the new rhetoric from divergent start­ ing points and in different frames, they share a common desire to disclose what lies beneath a facile rendition of rhetoric as mere persuasion, namely its abiding centrality to what makes us human. This is the animus of James Crosswhite's Deep Rhetoric. Beginning with the observation that "we are rhe­ torical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other" (p. 17), Crosswhite seeks to understand how ordinary rhetoric, whereby we seek to influence and provide direction, assu­ mes a world with "dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, 438 RHETORICA human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so brings the very possibility of philosophy and science into its realm" (p. 17). This is the realm of deep rhetoric, a realm that plumbs the depth of what makes us human and aligns with a transcendent aspiration of the new rhetoricians that by striving to understand rhetoric as an intellectual, educational, political, and social pur­ suit we will come to better understand the human condition. Deep Rhetoric has as its subtitle a list of terms that serve as its organizing discussions: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. These are not ran­ dom choices. At its core, Crosswhite's book is concerned with the central problem that has been to the fore of rhetorical thought since World War I: overcoming through public argument the quest by power to gain a monopoly on violence and to use its monopoly to dominate others. Deep Rhetoric seeks a worldly stance open to and that opens the possibihty for transcending the narrow logoi of instrumental rationality, logoi constituting the calculus of a system logic that dehumanizes others by excluding those dimensions of pathos and ethos that make humanity and community possible. The book opens with a consideration of what deep rhetoric means. Crosswhite draws contrasts between historicist views that position rhetoric in terms of its origins at a specific time and under specific conditions, such as...

Through an analysis of student writing and interviews, this article examines hyperbole as a neglected rhetorical device. The authors trouble notions of hyperbole as error and argue for a—reconceptualization of hyperbole as potentially highly communicative and able to convey emotional tone, passion, and significance while maintaining brevity.

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) has emerged as an academic field primarily devoted to opening inquiry into the relationship between human and nonhuman objects. By treating human and nonhuman things as ontologically coequal, this emerging philosophical school has rejected the correlationist and anthropocentric tendencies of most ethical systems. However, as objects expand and multiply, some become so big that they can't be seen, understood, or described in the ordinary spatiotemporal sense. Precisely because they are here but cannot be consistently experienced, these unique objects have severely complicated our lifeworld. For example, global warming can be remedially understood as a sum of many small objects (particulate matter, sunlight, thermometer readings, hurricanes, raindrops, etc.), but it is also an object itself—one so massive that we can't point to it or wrap our (scientific) heads around it. Similarly, plutonium-239 can be thought of as a simple object (an isotope or fuel for a nuclear reactor), but with deadly radiation and a half-life of 24,100 years, its real scale is not comprehensible. Oil fields, capitalism, cities, and endocrine disruptors share a similar set of properties.These objects, coined “hyperobjects” by Timothy Morton, are very real; yet, they exist beyond, and independently of, the reality of humans (15). Part 1 of the book is dedicated to defining hyperobjects, while part 2 addresses the social issues raised by OOO. Part 2 also offers unique solutions and some poignant criticism of the rhetoric of environmentalists. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Morton seeks to answer two questions: what are hyperobjects, and how can we develop ethical, political, and social systems that account for the unique characteristics of hyperobjects? In answering the first, Morton details five shared properties of hyperobjects: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity.Hyperobjects are viscous because they are stuck to us and we are stuck to them (28). The feeling of heat on the back of our necks is emitted by global warming and becomes stuck to us in the form of rashes, burns, and cancer. The bisphenol A (a controversial industrial chemical used in plastics), radiation, and mercury flowing through our bodies may not be visible, but they are quite real: “They are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off” (35). Global warming can't be wished away by denialists, and plutonium-239 doesn't lose its radioactive force simply because humans have decided it would be better off stored in Yucca Mountain. In short, the property of viscosity certifies the presence of hyperobjects.Hyperobjects are nonlocal because they are not here, despite the fact that human objects feel their presence. For example, most of the worst effects of global warming will be geographically limited to the people least responsible for the phenomenon. Decisions made in developed countries to produce and consume billions of tons of carbon will primarily impact the periphery at a dramatic scale. Shorelines in Pacific island countries will recede and indigenous nations in the Arctic will lose vital components of their local culture. However, drowning islands and melting ice are just local manifestations of “some vast entity that” we are “unable directly to see” (47–48). Importantly, these local manifestations do not function synecdochically—we do not come closer to the hyperobject of global warming simply because we see that it has “distributed pieces,” nor do we understand the hyperobject of radiation by surveying Chernobyl (49).The property of nonlocality diminishes the ability of science to prove the evolution or effect of hyperobjects. Scientific devices are intrinsically local, which leaves ample room for skepticism with regard to strict causality. For example, traditional scientific measurements can't guarantee that carbon emissions strengthened Hurricane Sandy or that the Daiichi nuclear disaster definitively caused radiation exposure in Berkeley. This geographical distance feeds the denialist meme that cold weather in one locality denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming writ large. Morton regards this “right-wing talking head” strategy as a “desperate attempt” to avert the ontological disaster posed by global warming (48).Hyperobjects are temporally undulated because they are “time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind” (58). Hyperobjects are here now, but their dramatic timescales confuse and irritate cognitive maps. Although humans can likely comprehend the number 24,100 (the half-life of plutonium-239), it is extremely difficult for humans to understand, or scientific instruments to measure, the effect of radiation throughout that period of time. The natural reaction to this temporal stretching out is to withdraw from or displace hyperobjects: send the nuclear material to Yucca or inject captured carbon into oil reservoirs. However, these quick fix solutions ignore, or repress, the environmental costs that will be shifted onto future generations. Morton finds that temporal undulation provides fodder for global warming denialists because any future projection based on scientific measurements is inherently uncertain, and scientific certainty has been rhetorically constructed as the primary justification for proof of anthropogenic global warming. Modern belief systems tend to prioritize the present and do not sufficiently account for future objects.Hyperobjects are phased because they occupy a high-dimensional space that makes them “impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional human-scale” (70). Surely humans experience tsunamis and feel radiation sickness, but those are simply “snapshots” of the hyperobject that occupies a more complex space (70). Selecting one “thin slice” of the hyperobject to analyze is just as likely to weaken our understanding of the hyperobject as it is to improve it (70). Morton uses the study of an iceberg (pictured on the front cover of the text) to illuminate phasing. Given adequate light and distance, humans can see the tip of an iceberg. However, 90 percent of the iceberg is under water. The scientific reaction to this dilemma is to move the camera underwater, but this choice distorts the part of the iceberg that sits above water, rendering a complete picture impossible. The scientist faces other choices as well. Should she move in close to the iceberg, or is there some perfect critical distance? If she gets close she may miss important context, but if she moves too far away, she misses the undulations and imperfections of the surface. Should she drill or melt part of the iceberg? If she did, she might end up knowing more about the iceberg she intended to observe, but she would have fundamentally altered the object of study in the process. Should she map the movement of the iceberg? This may tell her something about the pedigree of the object, but she can't trace back forever, and she won't ever perfectly know the future itinerary of the iceberg. None of these dilemmas deny the reality of the iceberg; rather, Morton sees them as emblematic of the failure of the modern scientific tradition. The more that modernity develops indexical signs to mark hyperobjects, the larger the “not-all set” becomes as well (78).Hyperobjects are interobjective because they constitute the mesh that floats in and around other objects (83). Hyperobjects are causal webs that leave footprints on other objects. In other words, many hyperobjects are “crisscrossing” force fields (93). Global warming leaves a footprint on the back of our neck, and endocrine disruptors leave footprints on our breasts and thyroids. As in any interconnected system, manipulation of one object has cascading effects on other parts, either changing the form of other objects or creating “gaps and absences” in the mesh (83). Humanity seeks benign substitutes (e.g., margarine for butter, or Splenda for sugar), but each of these has unpredictable effects that extend beyond itself. Importantly, the appearance of these markers only tells us about the “past of a hyperobject,” which seemingly distorts the metaphysics of presence (90). Although some scientists and philosophers chase the tail of hyperobjects, Morton argues that they are “never present” and that this end of the present lifeworld is precisely the “reaction shot” necessary to spark the radical transformation of ethics proposed in part 2 of his text (93, 95).The second part of Hyperobjects transitions from the definitional to the normative, outlining ethical, political, and social systems that account for “the time of hyperobjects” (97). The precipitous pace of environmental degradation has placed human and nonhuman objects in grave danger, a peril that is not accidental and not solely relegated to future generations. Hyperobjects shatter the contemporary lifeworld: the natural world can no longer be considered a national park that humans can observe from “behind the windshield of an SUV” or a conservation area to be preserved for future generations (127). The future is here, and it is the job of philosophers to show that this lifeworld has come to an end—there is no longer (if there ever was) a difference between substance and accident, nor a difference between the human and the natural (101). Facing fatal substances that will outlast anything resembling a close relative of themselves, humans must develop an “ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger” and learn to democratically coexist with nonhuman objects (124, 121).Morton launches three poignant criticisms at modern environmental philosophy. First, he argues that environmentalism, by merely greening the existing social order, is doomed to continuously reproduce fatal substances (116). Modern environmentalism finds salvation in technologies that reproduce, or at least don't address, the fundamental dangers of hyperobjects. Although Morton does not use these examples, his criticism underscores the irony of “environmentally friendly” hybrid Hummers, corn-based biofuels, and natural-gas fracking (at least it isn't coal, right?). Sustainable capitalism, to Morton an oxymoron, merely attempts to preserve a lifeworld that is no longer with us.Second, he argues that environmentalism is too anthropocentric: it is focused on preserving human objects, often at the expense of nonhuman objects. Utilitarianism, to Morton a profoundly self-interested philosophy, attempts to protect “humanness,” which is a “fictional idea” that “ecological awareness actually refutes” (131).Finally, Morton contends that environmentalism is too focused on developing persuasive strategies (public relations) that don't radically alter the existing ontological order. Citing the inevitable failure of PR as a motivating force, Morton notes that “we need to get out the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business” (181). Humans are in denial about “their role in the Anthropocene,” so reasons (rhetoric) will not reverse their apathy. Morton implies that rational discourse has failed and that the affective domain must be awakened through the magic of art. Controversially, Morton notes that “no further proof is required” and more “reasons” actually “inhibit our responsible action, or seriously delay it” (183).Morton is deeply concerned about the apathetic right as well as the failures of the environmental left. He seeks to shatter the existing ethical framework and to pick up the pieces with a fundamental ontological transformation, in the form of object-oriented art: art that “sticks to us and flows over us,” not to make us think, but to “walk [us] through an inner space that is hard to traverse” (189, 184). As examples, he cites the sound art of Francisco Lopez and Jarrod Fowler and Robert Ashley's She Was a Visitor. These pieces “resist classification” as music yet still stimulate a contemplation (rest) that attunes humans to the nonhuman hyperobject (187). It is impossible to describe these truly postmodern works, but that is likely the point. For Morton, it is this dizzying contemplation that will help humans wake up to hyperobjects that have been, are already, and most definitely will continue beyond human existence. Postmodern art is part of the magic that Morton believes will alter the environmental behaviors that persuasive strategies have failed to change.Scholars of rhetoric and philosophy will find Hyperobjects engaging in a variety of ways. Morton is intensely concerned with denialist strategies that hyperbolize uncertainty to justify apathy toward the hyperobject of global warming. Yet, he is equally troubled by the cynicism of the left that “maps perfectly both onto the U.S. Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism” (157). For him, the job of philosophers is to awaken humans to the fact that their lifeworld has come to an end and attune them to their nonhuman coequals (101). This conundrum requires a diminution of academic distance: academics must engage to forge an ethical system that doesn't “reduce or dissolve” nonhuman objects (157).Hyperobjects also seeks to broaden the objects of study for philosophers and rhetoricians. Instead of seeking to persuade or writing persuasion onto art, scholars are beckoned to appreciate atonal music, which allows nonhuman objects to confront us. Interestingly, Morton focuses primarily on sight and touch as the basis for his phenomenological encounters, often heavily focused on the reality of the object at the expense of understanding language as experience. However, hyperobjects don't simply deliver affect; language certainly shapes and mediates human understanding of nonhuman objects—a point Morton himself models by his intentional use of the phrase “global warming” instead of “climate change” (8). Thus, this text provides a starting point for rhetoricians and philosophers to explore the way language, undoubtedly a hyperobject itself, interacts with the interconnected mesh of objects.Morton's methodology sways “somewhat sickeningly between phenomenological narrative and scientific reason,” which is both necessary and discomforting (6). His text is focused on actually existing objects that he says have a “reality [that] is verified beyond question” (7). And his faith in the ability of science to determine some facts (the existence of global warming, the power of black holes, the influence of radiation on the body, etc.) is firm. He even draws on this faith to deny the truth of other's phenomenological experience, by criticizing the skeptics who deny global warming based on their own local experience (being situated in colder weather). However, Morton also claims that he is stuck, “unable to go beyond” first-person “situatedness” (5). Although I do not intend to deny the value of phenomenological criticism (or the scientific facts supporting the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis), there is certainly a tension between his method and results that merits further exploration.Hyperobjects also presents useful insights for scholars interested in humanist and posthumanist ethics. Morton's criticisms of environmental apathy, leftist cynicism, and global warming denialism are persuasive. Humans have spurned nonhuman objects that will be “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking” (201). And, our relationship to those objects continues to wreak devastation on the human and nonhuman world. For Morton, this dilemma requires a shattering of the human-nonhuman hierarchy, a democratic coexistence, and recognition that the being of a “paper cup” is as profound as humanness (17).If this sufficiently shatters human-centered ontology, it is not entirely clear how we should pick up the pieces. Morton proposes atonal music and object-oriented art to stimulate an object-oriented ontology, but unfortunately he provides little evidence that these strategies will change environmental attitudes. Even if such strategies generate respect for the nonhuman world, some further ethical centering will be needed. Human objects face choices daily, decisions that once made will result in the destruction of some nonhuman objects (e.g., to eat local meat or globalized vegetable produce, to drive or ride the bus to work, to breastfeed or feed with formula), and by flattening hierarchies of objects, OOO provides no template for ethical environmental action. In the face of this ethical impasse, human objects anthropomorphize nonhuman objects by writing human language onto them. We find mountains thinking, stones speaking, hammers wanting, and cigarettes demanding, and we act as if we can understand the desires of inanimate objects. Unfortunately, for those invested in OOO, this act of attributing human traits to nonhumans seems to strengthen the primacy of humanness and weaken the democratic coexistence that Morton theorizes. For rhetoricians and philosophers interested in environmental ethics, the challenge now is to develop viable ethical systems that preserve human and nonhuman life in the age of hyperobjects.

In the last twenty-five years, researchers from diverse fields of inquiry, including rhetoric and communication studies, have sought to “mine contemporary discourse and dominant logics that often b...

“The fact that Internet memes significantly influenced the discourse around the 2012 presidential election suggests that rhetoricians should take memetics seriously.”

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that for John Milton in Paradise Lost and Areopagitica freedom was a rhetorical quality of action: an ethical capacity to address a situation by means of language. I contrast Milton’s approach to that of Thomas Hobbes, for whom freedom was only a state. These reflections suggest that Milton’s rhetorical freedom, a capacity to act amid oppositions by virtue of the wisdom and power of discourse, offers the outlines of an alternate modernity.

ABSTRACT Freedom is a contested concept, at once bound up with and promising transcendence of social bonds. This article examines the understanding of freedom particular to rhetorical theory, a troubled freedom that is the negotiation of constraint. Articulating this concept in negotiation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “universal audience,” the article explores a key implication of troubled freedom for the governance of human persons. Given that human personhood is a rhetorical phenomenon, that persons emerge in flows of tendentious discourse, the article urges a rhetorical approach to democratic constitution writing. Constitution should be composed to foster the rhetorical capabilities of demoi.

I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, 2.36Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of MotivesCome, taste freedom with us.—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom is the precondition of choice and will, essential to his sense of the human; Pussy Riot, on a more celebratory note, extends an invitation to freedom’s banquet but tacitly acknowledges that that invitation needs to be accepted. The sixty and more rhetoricians who gathered to mull over this pairing of rhetoric and freedom in San Antonio in May 2014 at the biennial symposium of the American Society of the History of Rhetoric brought with them that open spirit—a utopian urge to pursue freedom as a ground, a practice, and a potential outcome of rhetorical action. They also brought their deep rhetorical knowledge of the complexities of this subject: their awareness that this long-standing relationship between rhetoric and freedom is paradoxical, fraught with deception, and at times a spur to violence.The distortions of the term in political/popular discourse since 9/11 suggest that the time is right for a scholarly return to “freedom.” Casting himself as “author” of and “worker” for freedom, George W. Bush (2003) has now branded his own presidency and its legacy as a “Freedom Agenda.” Can freedom be authored, or forced, by one state onto another? Does “working for” freedom through military invasion not constitute the most basic violation of freedom? Although it is unlikely that such questions will be posed within the Bush Institute, a think tank “separately managed” by the Bush Foundation over the objections of trustees at Southern Methodist University adjacent to which it is housed (Traub 2009), we rhetoricians have the space, time, and conditions for contemplating and working through questions that the creation and naming of the Bush Institute raises. What is the relationship between freedom and the state, especially states that purport to be democratic? What are the personal conditions that enable rhetorical acts? Who are rhetorical persons and to what extent can we grasp their “freedom,” or lack thereof? And what will we rhetorical beings, or at least some of us, risk to win the pleasures and rewards of collective freedom?The articles brought together here, expanded versions of talks delivered at the symposium, explore these questions through an impressively diverse range of rhetorical approaches. To get a grasp on rhetoric and freedom, as these scholars demonstrate so compellingly, requires making fine distinctions, paying close, critical attention to stance and voice in historical texts and material culture, especially with regard to the state (Pernot; Lamp); it requires attending to questions about rhetorical personhood in relationship to governance as presented in Early Modern and Enlightenment political philosophy (O’Gorman; Stroud; Allen); and it demands that we direct our analysis beyond the page to the significance of space and body in the performance of protest under conditions of unfreedom (Trasciatti; Haskins). In what follows I introduce the articles offered here by reflecting on the topoi of freedom and rhetoric emerging from them—as a report on what I have learned from them and in hopes of framing and enhancing your reading experience.Freedom enters into rhetorical history and theory early on through a founding statement and performance of Athenian democracy: the funeral oration Thucydides (1954) attributes to Pericles, Athenian general and statesman, delivered early in the course of the war against Sparta, 431 BCE. Honoring the first to fall in the traditional state funeral, Pericles offers an encomium of the polis that celebrates several different kinds of freedom. As soon as he designates Athens as a free country (in the epigraph above), Pericles notes with praise that the fathers added to the city an empire; thus, the freedom of the first democracy was from the beginning contaminated by conquest and slavery. It is appropriate then that our issue begins with studies of the constraints on free speech and expression under empire. Laurent Pernot unveils the intricate processes through which Greek rhetors under the Roman empire were able to weave critical perspectives into their orations: a practice of using “figured discourse.” Kathleen S. Lamp approaches the question of freedom and captivity from the Roman side, reading state art in the Roman empire—representations of captives and conquest in sculpture, painting, and architecture—not merely to comment on the images but to ask: What happens when Roman citizens view this art? As citizenship becomes more and more available to subjects across many categories of difference, does the experience of viewing produce anything like freedom? Or does it rather foster imperial relations?The word for “free” in the passage from Pericles previously quoted is the superlative form of autarkês, meaning self-supporting or independent, as a sovereign. The same roots serve to designate imperial sovereignty (autokratoria) and the emperor (autokratês). It therefore is not surprising and is symptomatic of the state of rhetoric studies at present that the Athenian democracy praised by Pericles is, for the some of the authors in this special issue (e.g., O’Gorman; Allen; Trasciatti), a point of reference, sometimes an inspiration for the historical figures they study, but not a sanctified origin. And it is also fitting that this special issue closes as it opens, with essays that focus on the ways repressive states—the United States during World War I (Trasciatti) and Russia in the contemporary era (Haskins)—limit and punish free expression especially through the control of space and bodies. In each case, the analysis draws out the power of collective action and the rhetorical impact of bodies “prepared for freedom” (Trasciatti).As the ancient funeral oration proceeds, Pericles declares that “in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 1954, 2.41). Here it seems (eidê) that each man appears to be self-sufficient with reference to his body (to sôma). The general, like so many leaders since, must obscure the cruel paradox of destroying persons in the service of the freedom of the state. The “seeming” to be free and the reference to the body intrude as an unconscious into Pericles’s glorification of the solider who is “owner of his own person.”Burke’s (1950) sense of the person (in the second epigraph) is like and unlike that presented in the ancient Greek oration. Couching his project within the extreme limits of war, killing, and enslavement to dictatorship, Burke acknowledges the ultimate boundaries of freedom as life or survival—“good to remember, in these days of dictatorship” (50). The self imagined here might be that self-sufficient or sovereign: the solitary and defended self who can arm himself or herself against persuasion as aggression. And yet as Burke begins the section on “traditional principles of rhetoric,” he introduces the notion of persuasion “to attitude,” “attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination” (50), qualities of a different sort of rhetorical actor. Several articles offered here in a similar fashion explore and expand the concept of rhetorical freedom as a practice, an activity, and a capacity of the person. Ned O’Gorman, for example, reads Milton against Hobbes to find in the former the concept of rhetorical freedom as a quality rather than a state. Scott R. Stroud discovers in Kant a rhetoric wherein autonomy is enacted across multiple agents toward an educative end. And Ira J. Allen presents rhetorical personhood as the characteristic of citizens who are capable of crafting collectively new forms of democratic governance.In all the articles we gain a sense of freedom as an incomplete process, a struggle requiring risk and effort but one with rewards worth savoring (as in the third epigraph). Freedom is an enticement: something sweet to taste and something to be shared. In praising Athens, Pericles remarks not only on the polis and its warriors but on daily life: “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other” (2.37). Here the word for “freedom” is eleutherôs, coming from a verb that means to loose or let go. This freedom is available to all and reminds us of the creativity and open expression that draws rhetorical thinkers of all eras to the ancient polis despite its limits. We might find a modern parallel in Burke’s (1950) ideas about the sublime: “by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own comparative futility. The identification thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations (though the effect is made possible only by our awareness of these limitations)” (325). The courageous activists presented in Mary Anne Trasciatti’s work on antiwar protestors who defied the Espionage Act during World War I and in Ekaterina V. Haskins’s study of Pussy Riot’s daring performances aimed at Putin’s authoritarian regime and the Church patriarchy supporting it give us a sense of the dangerous lengths to which rhetors will go, in the face of limitations and futility, to seek a common freedom.Through this fine work, we readers are offered more than a taste but rather strong draughts of rhetorical scholarship on freedom. I invite you to imbibe, to slake a thirst, but at the same time to whet your appetite for evermore rhetoric and freedom.