Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)'s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don't] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don't loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school).Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won't. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills. So, after a while I let the victims go, yet not without providing them, for the road, with one striking example of “rhetoric” applied to current news, so that no doubt be left in their mind that they are not dealing with something they can reduce to what they think they know but with something actually “admirable,” in sum “novel” and “powerful.” Life need not be frustrating.For some time now I have been testing publicly the impact of this uncompromising proselytizing, and I have learned a great deal about perceptions of rhetoric among an educated public, which in France we call the “honest public” (the assumption being that uneducated folks are dishonest by mistake, while educated ones should know better). I write a regular column for a leading French online, public intellectual magazine, Les influences (www.lesinfluences.fr). My blog is called Le rhéteur cosmopolite (The Cosmopolitan Rhetor). During the recent French elections, Le nouvel observateur plus asked for my collaboration—which caused some stupor among readers but created somewhat of a fleeting sensation. I call a spade a spade. I am a rhetor and I am cosmopolitan. I refuse to take a leaf from Stanley Fish's acribic blog in the New York Times, The Opinionator: I do rhetoric, not opinion. I am still hoping the Onion will run a spoof of Fish and call it “The Onionator.” Professor Fish is very smart indeed at peeling off onion layers of opinions, until what is usually left are the bitter tears of his contrite liberalism defeated by illiberal public arguments. In my own blog I never let my political opinions color my analysis: I also peel onions, but I do not expect anything in return (except fans, like a mysterious “Corinne,” who followed me from my previous blog on Mediapart, Les oies du Capitol [The Capitoline Geese], to Les influences when I got contracted). My own opinions are private; they are long-standing prejudices that have hardly changed since I reached the age of reason, and they are unlikely ever to alter. Like ancient, imperious Gods they command me when I cast my ballot or get involved in politics. Otherwise I keep them in check. It makes for uneasiness, but that is the destiny of those who keep Sextus Empiricus on their bedroom pedestal. A commentator, on another site, chastised me on account of my “pessimism.”Be that as it may, “Le rhéteur cosmopolite” led to a book (Paroles de Leaders, [2011]) and then to another (De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis [2012]), as I watched the word “rhétorique” pass through phases of public “admiration” and become implanted, as it were, in current parlance. I say “current” because here again Descartes is right on the money when he describes who is more likely to be struck by admiration: “In any event, although the intellectually challenged are not by nature inclined toward admiration, it does not follow that clever people are always prone to it, unlike those who in general have enough common sense but not a very high opinion of their own capacities” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxxvii, my translation).Descartes, having lived in Holland where weighing gold was akin to weighing thoughts to the smallest ounce, offers a fine observation of life and of public life. The last part of his definition is, in my view, a rather neat description of commentators on social networks and, to be frank, the rank and file of journalists. So, I have been observing how professional media persons or social media interjectors “admire” rhetoric, how they awake out of the opiate slumber of “information” and confess “admiration.”It all began early in 2010 when Sciences humaines, a respected monthly mainly read by the teacherly professions, ran a two-page-long eulogy of my Hyperpolitique (2009) titled “Un grand discours vaut mieux qu'une petite phrase”; it carried a catchy center-page insert that read “Rhetoric was a Jesuits' diabolical invention of persuasion.” An advance copy of the article (richly illustrated by orators at full throttle in the old Third Republic chambers) triggered commentary on prime-time radio (France-Inter [“Revue de presse,” 26 Jan. 2010]) by an anchor who dedicated his program to “political talk.” He addressed three ideas that he claimed came out of my book: that in Britain public speaking is a like a tennis match, that in the United States it is “soft and hypocritical” (!), and that in France it is a “theaterocracy.” My telephone started to ring. Everyone listens to that program: it gives the chattering classes something to sound smart about, for a day. I hardly recognized the arguments of the first chapter of Hyperpolitique but was keen to see how the journalist (who attended a top school and is a philosophy major) managed to summarize it against the grain of public opinion: Gallic stereotypes are that British are underhanded, Americans pugnacious, and the French clear thinking. Clearly, my argument about rhetorical cultures, however bent by him to create controversy, had led him to revise his opinions about universals of public speaking in democratic cultures (oddly, he left out what I wrote about the German rhetorical world).Then something unexpected happened, as the press awoke from its information-induced opiate sleep—management journals and financial magazines began taking an interest in my book. Le nouvel économiste (25 Mar. 2010), a leading, salmon-pulped, financial weekly, interviewed me and ran an article titled “Le goût de l'éloquence” misspelling “rhétorique” as “réthorique” (as did the French C-Span, LCP, in a ticker during a broadcast in which I was invited to comment on the Socialist Party's primaries). It gained momentum. “Rhetoric” was being adopted by business people who, had they read analyses in Hyperpolitique about the “delirium” of “labor talk” and the rhetoric of trust or contract management, may have realized I was on their case and not on their side. It was my turn to be struck with “admiration.”What made the surprise all the more novel and forceful was the fact Le nouvel économiste article, uniformly laudatory and actually well written (except for the displaced “h,” but copy editors are no longer what they used to be), appeared in its “Leadership and Management” section and placed the emphasis on “eloquence” in its title. It highlighted three key points or catchphrases set in inserts that, read in sequence, produced the following syllogism: rhetoric teaches that social life is a transaction of arguments, transaction is good, and thus rhetoric should be taught at school. I was stunned by the boldness of the enthymeme. Soon after, a professional newsletter for senior staff at state agencies, hailed “rhetoric” as a new tool for labor relations (“Rhétorique à la rescousse,” Lettre du cadre territorial, 1 June 2010). Rhetoric had reentered public awareness where I did not expect it, in that very audience who, we are so often told, controls and understands “the real world”: the world of finance, of demand and supply, of accumulation of capital and return on investment. Yet, not under the guise of rhetoric as such but still draped in the quaint nobility of “eloquence.” Striking such a pose is rather typical, I often find, of the conservative dowdiness of financiers who entertain obsolescent images of high culture, even when they collect cows dipped in formaldehyde solution—to them “eloquence” spoke of artful elevation and of cultural capital.The grafting of “rhetoric” onto public idiom was taking and, to size up the change over the years, I simply needed to look back at what Les Échos, France's main daily financial paper, read by stock-exchange people, had written back in 2006 (in its supplement “Les enjeux,” Apr. 2006). A columnist had asked a rhetorical question, “How does a HR manager tell workers they are being laid off?” Her answer was a laundry-list of self-help tips in public address, appended with a substantial list of secondary reading—a motley of manuals, ancient and modern, among them my Art de parler (2003). However, my book is not a manual of persuasive writing. It is nothing like the unrivaled Hodges' Harbrace Handbook (2009). It is not even a primer for public address—both are the sort of books French elite professionals, trained in grandes écoles, dislike and distrust and despise and abandon to the college-educated crowd. L'art de parler is a historical anthology of rare and, to the noninitiate, complex manuals of rhetoric. “Eloquence” does fit in Les Échos' readers' idea of high culture and social codes of distinction, but it is actually an unpractical notion if the purpose is sweet-talking workers unions. As Les Échos declared Art de parler “illuminating,” I wondered, “Of what?” Not of “rhetoric” for the word “rhetoric,” let alone the concept, was absent in that self-help article. I got an answer after the publication, that same year, of my Mahomet (a history of narrative topoi about the founder of Islam): two leading Arab philosophers, Malek Chebel and Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of The Malady of Islam), reviewed it who acknowledged its belletristic and cultural value but stopped hesitatingly at the doors of the ivory tower, as it were—Meddeb just hinted at the possible, hermeneutic value of “rhetoric” in public affairs (in this case, the debate about Islam in France). Later on he and I had a lively public exchange. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became clear to me that it all evinced a desire and a lack, that is, a lack of knowledge as to what the lack actually is or was.By the time in mid-2011 that my blog had become a regular feature, its essays were being taken up by other online magazines (often lifted without even my knowing, always a good sign), and invitations to contribute elsewhere had become routine. Paroles de Leaders was out. Mentions in the press acknowledged “admiration,” spoke now of “rhetoric” in curious, somewhat inquisitive tones—gone was pejoration. They responded to the novelty and force of the surprise in two ways.On the one hand, notably feminist or women writers wrote of “manipulation,” describing me as “cantankerous” and as “filling [my] fountain pen with Pastis” (Le Monde, 18 Aug. 2011) or (in an otherwise level-headed and well-intentioned interview) as a master at explaining “wondrous jugglery” (Terrafemina, 14 Oct. 2011): they played out stereotypes commonplace in some feminist circles that men exert persuasive power through hectoring or dazzling display or self-inebriation of speaking, while women's rhetoric is irenic and conversational and coactive (see my Gender Rhetoric [2009] for contrasting views on the subject). On the other hand, leading magazines mostly read by the financial professions spoke of “rhetoric” as a novel, surprising, forceful, and desirable management tool (which, I guess, would reinforce the just-mentioned stereotype). Here is a florilegium: for Les Échos (7 Oct. 2011) Paroles de Leaders is “ruffling and lifts the veil on the mystery of leadership”; in L'express (16 Nov. 2011) the star column “Tendançologie” (“Trendology”) hailed this new approach on “how to become a leader.” The September 2011 L'expansion Management Review, a quarterly of reference only sold by subscription, judged the book “indispensable.” The lesson easily drawn, with hindsight, from these punchy reviews is clear: the medias and their audiences no longer shunned the word and the idea of rhetoric and gave rhetoric, properly spelled, a prime spot. I asked the marketing department at one of my publishers (Bourin) if they had a hand in it. “No, the financial press just likes what you write; it is new, and they see its usefulness.” Descartes was possibly correct in judging who is more prone to “admiration.” I have taken part in a number of national television and radio broadcasts in which the word “rhétorique” was cast about generously, like aspersions at mass, yet not without an ever-so-slight hesitation, the sort one has when tasting a new dish, and I even discerned a twinkle of daring in the eye of the show host. It amuses me always to see the word rising on the horizon and popping up, not in derision or pejoration but as an intellectual evidence, a lack-filler.If I have retraced this short history, a surrogate confession of information opium eaters and their discovery of rhetoric as a management and public affairs (ephemeral) panacea, the reason is not vanity. Rather, it has to do with identifying our place in the lack, with how, as rhetor(ician)s, we interact with public affairs, how we are placed.The bracketed “-ician” is an indication of our unstable place, of an instability that should be, for us, a matter to ponder. Say “rhetor” and one risks confusion with “orator”—the risk is that popular perceptions will infer from the denomination itself our purported ability to persuade, as if specialists of rhetoric ought to be better shod than when it to our public And the same perceptions will also in of being and smart to be if it that, we are persuasive in of public say and it in a that is, as professional as the French it The will but we will be at to explain what we actually Here is an it has to me over and over again when a to a that I have to tell the at that I am not a professor at the and rhetoric is not a I get a as if I were to something about my On another getting a at my I had this in is as it on my and what I had never a what rhetoric, think came a smile of followed by this from the I and I was not as I had just a on the rhetoric of on at and was my thoughts on rhetoric as the de The “-ician” because it to a and in a as in de a has two main to create a of and to is what the and the were me, me. I am a be that as it rhetoric is not a it is a and a that the as it is the lesson at the very of the lesson of the and the rhetoric is but in need of and (a is to in a by in the of under the “Rhetoric or a and Rhetoric Rhetoric is also a to the world as because it is the of the fact that is as I to call it. may explain management is so in for all its on that are and in to if not the is usually to explain this which one have possibly are indeed they were would be and and would not to those who to that are or as they are of it, in the of is to In my I to rhetorical idiom to in public affairs, a I also to show that on the of rhetorical can be I do so without any for the of I where the lack is at the word and the of to that which one has without its idea by in his as a key notion for is no I in or our idiom to to that is to what be of to The public out of “admiration,” some of our idiom and some of it. The of course, is to see our idiom to what in an culture like the French this is than in a culture where self-help is over The risk however is to be in public as who may become to and commentators on I believe that, to being eaters of our own we ought to size up the value of the to the and to attention to the of life.

Reviewed are: The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, editors, The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide, 3rd edition, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner, editors, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, editors, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Becoming a Writing Researcher, Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer

In 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commemorated its 50th anniversary by launching an anniversary Web site, which includes links to a photographic timeline, videos, and documents that the agency views as important in telling its history. This article uses concepts from narrative theory and visual rhetoric to analyze the images used in the NASA History Timeline, paying special attention to why certain images were selected as historical markers over other photographs that are more widely published and televised. Specifically, the author uses arguments from Sontag’s On Photography and Barbatsis’s “Narrative Theory” to explain how NASA’s photographic narrative provides a story with a plot that spans from triumphs and tragedies in space exploration to pioneering efforts in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

Scholarship across the fields of rhetoric, history, and religion credits Frances Willard for her activist work, most notably her contribution to the nineteenth-century temperance movement. Although this scholarship references Willard's religious motivations, it is silent about one of the causes that Willard was committed to, women's preaching, and rarely cites her book, Woman in the Pulpit. By offering a close reading of the rhetorical and theological features of Woman in the Pulpit, this essay (1) suggests that Willard introduces a feminist theological resolution to the separate spheres ideological debate of the nineteenth century—the prevailing discourse that men should lead in political/public space, and women should occupy domestic/private space; and (2) recasts Woman in the Pulpit as a central text in Willard's repertoire—a magnum opus of sorts that represents her feminist brand of Christian Socialist thought.

This essay examines actresses on the London stage between 1660 and 1890, focusing on the investigative topoi of pregnancy and rhetorical access and charting the starts and stops that characterize women’s entry into public forums. The performance schedules of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London actresses reveal that both married and unmarried women routinely performed while “big with child.” With the ascent of new constructs of sex and gender, however, women’s recourse to and options on stage narrowed considerably. Victorian actresses developed new career patterns and rhetorical strategies to accommodate pregnancy’s increasing relegation to the private sphere, their delivery thus reflecting and responding to a changed social context.

This paper examines a unique reflective writing assignment used in an undergraduate social work course on human sexuality. We ask what new understandings reflective writing mediates (Vygotsky, 1978) regarding sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender relations—oft-neglected topics within pre-professional academic programs. One goal for this assignment was to mediate future social workers' abilities to differentiate between thoughts and feelings, and we evaluate the degree to which students did so in their writing. By adapting Hatton and Smith's (1994) framework for analyzing reflective writing, we also distinguish between descriptive and dialogical reflection, identifying and analyzing examples of both within the students' writing. Findings suggest that students engaged primarily in descriptive reflection, but also engaged in some dialogical reflection. We argue that both are useful but that the latter mediates deeper and more useful learning. We present recommendations for enhancing reflective writing assignment design in pre-professional academic programs.

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

Drawing on interview data regarding literacy practices done in tandem with housework, this article presents an array of recipe uses among retirement-age women. Given their backgrounds as professionals who came of age during second-wave feminism, the women see little value in “domestic” practices such as cooking literacies (Barton & Hamilton). However, the women’s uses of recipes for a variety of rhetorical purposes, in and out of the kitchen, are valuable material and social reflections of the women’s success in acquiring traditional literacies in school and at work.

In being denied literacy under Portuguese colonialism and its aftermath and in caring for their own literacy and selves, African slave women and their land-born descendants, Cape Verdean women, became the protectors of many African-centered Cape Verdean cultural literacies (CVCL). Like Linda Tillman who specializes in culturally appropriate methodologies of research, I define cultural literacies as the various ways of “thinking, believing, and knowing that include shared experiences, consciousness, skills, values, forms of expression, social institutions, and behaviors” that tie individuals to different and specific discourse communities (4). I use CVCL to refer to literacies used by a large majority of Cape Verdeans with the understanding that Cape Verdeans also belong to social groups with other sets of literacies that are just as valid as CVCL (Gee vii-ix; Street 77). Koladeras may be understood as women who improvise, string together, and sing complicated, impromptu tales about their lives and those in their community, especially during feasts for saints. I argue that koladeras, because they are present in feasts for saints throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora, are transgenerational, transmigatory literacy educators of CVCL. In the pages that follow, I provide a brief historical account of Cape Verde as it pertains to the formation of CVCL, and I discuss—through the opening narrative, an account shared by Nha Titina (a koladera), and my own experiences—how koladeras are literacy educators responsible for the survival of CVCL throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora despite institutional attempts of erasure.

Ruminating on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick around failed pedagogy and a confused cat, I consider ways to provoke new streams of critical thought in my composition students around issues of gender and sexuality without “pointing.” Thinking about Jean Genet's novel Querelle and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name, I delineate the specifics of how I teach these two difficult, often incomprehensible texts in an introductory class. In reviewing the confusion these works can provoke in student discourse upon reading and viewing the texts, I emphasize the role of disorientation and dislocation in the mapping of student thinking and writing, ultimately reemphasizing the importance of nondemagogic, malleable pedagogy in the teaching of sexuality and gender, particularly with composition students who are exploring and amplifying their voices. Teaching Querelle is like unleashing a virus of confusion and intrigue on student writers, but the incoherence it creates also creates opportunities to explore new ideas and horizons in these developing thinkers/writers.

In this introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Writing Research, we review four decades of research, bringing writing to the forefront in conversations devoted to gender and literacy. We identify the impetus for much of the research on gender and writing and situate the four articles in this special issue within three themes: gender patterns in what and how students write, cognitive and socio-cultural factors influencing gender differences in student writing, and attempts to provide alternatives to stereotypical gender patterns in student writing. These interdisciplinary themes, further developed within the four articles, underscore the need to consider gender as a complex social, cognitive and linguistic characteristic of both reading and writing.

Girls are more likely to outperform boys in the development of writing skills. This study considered gender differences in language and working memory skills as a possible explanation for the differential rates of progress. Sixty-seven children (31 males and 36 females) (M age 57.30 months) participated. Qualitative differences in writing progress were examined using a writing assessment scale from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). Quantitative measures of writing: number of words, diversity of words, number of phrases/sentences and grammatical complexity of the phrases/sentences were also analysed. The children were also assessed on tasks measuring their language production and comprehension skills and the visuo-spatial, phonological, and central executive components of working memory. The results indicated that the boys were more likely to perform significantly less well than the girls on all measures of writing except the grammatical complexity of sentences. Initially, no significant differences were found on any of the measures of language ability. Further, no significant differences were found between the genders on the capacity and efficiency of their working memory functioning. However, hierarchical regressions revealed that the individual differences in gender and language ability, more specifically spoken language comprehension, predicted performance on the EYFSP writing scale. This finding accords well with the literature that suggests that language skills can mediate the variance in boys' and girls' writing ability.

This paper focuses on the ways girls use digital environments, like Word, PowerPoint and chatting programmes, for writing and communication purposes. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and by adopting a critical discourse framework, we will explore the relationship between girls and new media, especially the ones related to digital writing, in terms of three interconnected variables. The first one is related to the role of the two most important socialisation institutions, home and school, at the present historical juncture, characterised by intense mobility and an expansion of traditional forms of literacy. The strategic choices of the girls’ families and their schools’ teaching practices contributed significantly to the formulation of their digital writing practices. The second variable is gender. Our data clearly show that a substantial number of girls were more inclined than their male peers to use word-processing and presentation software, performing, thus, the school discourses of ‘diligent students’. The third key variable concerns the personality of the girls who filtered in their own unique ways their social experiences, overcame limitations, took initiatives and appropriated technologically-mediated writing media for personally meaningful ends that enhanced their school and/or entertainment Discourses.

This study attempts to integrate a gender perspective in the research of children's conceptions about learning to write. We analyzed the individual interviews of 160 schoolchildren - equally distributed between boys and girls - in the eight grades from kindergarten to seventh grade in elementary school in Argentina, in order to explore gender-related patterns in their conceptions of learning to write. The lexicometric method was applied to the transcriptions of children's responses. Subsequent qualitative analysis of modal responses revealed distinctive gender differences regarding both the content and the form of responses. We describe and interpret such differences within a theoretical framework that distinguishes two different modes of discourse and thought: the gendered conversational styles studied by Tannen, and the two modes of cognitive functioning proposed by Bruner. Results show that boys tended to adopt a report talk style and to present traits that are close to those proposed by Bruner in his portrait of the logico-paradigmatic mode of thought. Girls, instead, tended to adopt a rapport talk style and to integrate to a greater extent a set of procedures characterizing a narrative modality, by speaking at length of human actions, intentions and feelings. These findings underscore the educational potential of considering gender as an important (and still unexplored) aspect that influences children's(and most probably teachers') conceptions of how one learns.

This article maps the diverse theoretical disciplines that inform writing research and in particular, how these disciplines have researched the relationship between writing and gender. This is presented against the background of a changing theoretical landscape in research in gender. In particular, it will consider the paradigm shift from discourses of difference and disadvantage to discourses of diversity. Research on writing has not always acknowledged this changing lens, and gender research rarely focuses on writing. The aim therefore is to map out these different approaches, explore how they have impacted writing classrooms and to add to the call for a reconfiguring of gender in writing research as a complex and diverse category rather than as a fixed and essential characteristic we each possess.

Abstract Sor Juana's 1680 arch, designed and written in her role as professional writer for Church and state, consisted of commissioned words, art, and performance to celebrate the arrival of the new viceroy. It is significant as the remaining trace of a seventeenth-century female exerting high-level political influence on the closed, patriarchal society of New Spain. Reading and writing about the arch presents multiple challenges, including lack of the full "text" for what was an ephemeral event as well as a problem in recent feminist criticism, which insists on seeing Sor Juana as only a rebellious iconoclast. I argue that the work, and Sor Juana herself, must be read as having both a conservative, hegemonic agenda and radical critique of dominant ideology. This "both/and" move, which I position as necessary for a robust feminist approach, helps us better understand the complexity of Creole identity and belonging in colonial Mexico. Notes 1This is the only English translation of Neptuno alegórico, cited henceforth as "AN." I have consulted both the Spanish text and English version. Sor Juana's baroque Spanish is difficult, and this translation is often too literal and doesn't always make sense. It also renders the verse of the Explication in prose form. When necessary I provide my translation of the Spanish text from the fourth volume of Sor Juana's Obras completas (OC). 2 Obras completas vol. IV and Vincent Martin and Electa Arenal's recent edition of Neptuno alegórico contain select contemporary art work portraying the mythical themes Sor Juana uses, suggesting what the paintings may have looked like or drawn from. 3I'm indebted to Martínez-San Miguel's excellent discussion of criollismo and Sor Juana. 4In fact, the vicereine who was about to arrive was instrumental in fostering much of Sor Juana's subsequent work and was responsible for its publication in Europe. 5All translations of scholarship in Spanish are my own. 6Cf. Bacon, e.g.,: "Some praises come of good wishes and respects, which is a form due, in civility, to kings and great persons, laudando praecipere, when by telling men what they are, they represent to them, what they should be." 7Sor Juana may have copied many passages from a Spanish treatise on mythology without attribution, probably to foreground her Latin (over Spanish) knowledge and boost her affiliation with classical European learning (McNichols 6, 68–77). 8 Non is a negative meaning "not"; plus means "more"; and ultra can mean "beyond," "to an extent or degree exceeding," "on the farther side," and "on the other side." 9See Proverbs 31:10, which praises the virtuous (not strong or valiant) wife. I thank Thomas Hall for his assistance in translating this passage and identifying the source.

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER scores and scores on two other tests designed to measure writing ability: the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test and the SAT Writing Section. Predictive evidence was determined by coefficients of determination between ACCUPLACER scores and end-of-semester performance measures. A longitudinal study was also conducted to investigate the grade history of students placed into first-year writing by established and new methods. When analyzed in terms of gender and ethnicity impact, ACCUPLACER failed to achieve statistically significant prediction rates for student performance. The study reveals some limits of placement testing and the problems related to it.

Permeable textual discussion occurs when the unofficial texts and discursive practices and personal histories that are already recognized and valued in students’ cultures are scaffolds to academically sanctioned literacies. Ideally, permeable textual discussions are safe havens where students’ identities (racial, gender, world views) are intentionally interwoven with classroom texts, and classroom communities are formed that responsively address matters of student identity. Yet the social contexts and instructional practices of academic tracking may shape how students reveal their identities during textual talk. This project examines the conditions of permeability during textual talk in tracked classrooms taught by the same teachers using the same texts. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, the author examines how two tracked urban middle school language arts students of African American heritage revealed and hid their identities during textual talk and the instructional moves that precipitated textual talk.

ABSTRACT This article considers the emergence of methodological patterns, or “sanctioned narratives,” within feminist rhetorical historiography, arguing that with just a few exceptions these patterns have anchored our work to conceptions of the woman-as-rhetor exercising deliberate, strategic agency against her world, rather than within it. While this conception has been enormously productive in redefining what “counts” in the history of rhetoric, it also constrains our attempts to pursue broader methodological projects that take as their subject the interworkings of rhetoric, power, and gender. After describing the ways that existing methodological patterns have become entrenched, this article offers one method for shifting our commitments, a feminist-materialist methodology. Influenced by theories of posthuman agency and by actor-network theory, this method can help feminist rhetoricians pursue broader conceptions of rhetoric that will allow us to intervene more effectively in the rhetorical production and transformation of gender relations and power dynamics.

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, feminist scholars have collectively produced a coherent and substantial body of research and established feminist rhetoric as a discipline. This article argues for linking feminist rhetoric with comparative rhetoric so as to open up conversations about theories, methodologies, and processes between the two fields. Examining a hybrid feminist discourse through early-twentieth-century Chinese women's texts, the author suggests that we rethink feminist rhetoric and historiography from a cross-cultural perspective and that Chinese women's rhetorical practices—negotiating cultural flux in contact zones—can be used as a model for current feminist scholarship. As the discipline moves toward a new dialogic paradigm, such a cross-cultural frame can help us examine our assumptions, reconsider our priorities, and discover and develop multiple local terms and concepts in reading texts across various historical periods and social, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries.

This article discusses our university’s attempt to analyze whether our system of First Year Writing placement serves the needs of our diverse student body. The theory behind Directed Self Placement (DSP) is appealing, so our program adopted a modified version of it, and after several years, decided to evaluate it quantitatively. The authors, a First Year Writing professor and a psychologist trained in statistical analysis, teamed up to gather and analyze data. We sorted our sample by course grade, standardized test scores, gender, race, and prior course grades, running regressions and searching for correlations between these data and our DSP matrix. Our research shows that DSP in the modified form of our placement matrix does not predict student success as measured by First Year Writing grades as well as simple standardized test scores do. Though placing students using test scores alone has limitations, we conclude that DSP, at least in the simplified form in which we use it, does not correct for these limitations, and therefore is not preferable.

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy’s role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods research approach is engaged through surveys, pre/post-semester questionnaire data, transcribed interviews, and writing-about-writing essays. Uncovering the 39.6% of students who—through this research—are discovered to feel constrained rather than liberated by technology and who believe that technology amplifies their place in the literacy hierarchy, this article articulates the identity politics inside the multimodal composition classroom and introduces the term “hypermediated fractures” into the pedagogical conversations surrounding feminist pedagogy and the teaching of digital literacies in first-year composition.

Book Review| November 01 2011 Review: Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, eds, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-5538-1 Rhetorica (2011) 29 (4): 440–442. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.4.440 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford. Rhetorica 1 November 2011; 29 (4): 440–442. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.4.440 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn (re)introduced the art of silence, and in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe (re)introduced the art of listen...

440 RHETORICA visivamente in maniera efficace, mediante il frequente accostamento dei testi su due colonne afffiançate. Il volume è rivolto in egual misura a studiosi di retorica e medievisti: i primi apprezzeranno l'ampio spazio dedicato al ruolo svolto dal trattato nella storia dell'ars dictaminis e ai rapporti intrattenuti con la tradizione retorica precedente nonché il piglio técnico e specialistico che caratterizza l'illustrazione delle problematiche principali proprie del genere; per i secondi risulterà intéressante la ricostruzione delle dinamiche culturali dell'ambito cassinese, lo studio del riutilizzo delle fonti e il confronto testuale con autori del tempo. In ogni caso il volume di B., grazie alla mole di informazioni fornite nei Prolegomena e nelle note, si profila come uno strumento indispensabile e imprescindibile per lo studio della retorica epistolare medievale, ma anche per quello più generale della figura di Alberico di Montecassino. Non resta che auspicare, per un testo che ne è ancora privo, una traduzione italiana, che potrebbe risultare utile per chi si accosti a quest'opera con interessi non legati esclusivamente alia storia della retorica o del Medioevo. Vera Tufano University di Napoli Federico II Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, eds, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-5538-1 As its title suggests, this collection of essays includes a wide range of approaches, some distinctly literary, others verging on the sociological. It is divided into three parts. Part I, /z'Our Mothers' Maids': Nurture and Narrative," comprises four essays, Part II, "Spinsters and Knitters in the Sun," five, and Part III, "Oral Traditions and Masculinity," again five. The Introduction, by one of the editors, Mary Ellen Lamb, follows a list of brief biographies of the contributors. The Afterword is by Pamela Allen Brown. The work has a useful bibliography and a satisfactory index. The frontispiece, reproduced on page 86, is from Richard Braithwait's "Art Asleepe, Husband? A Boulster Lecture" published in London in 1588. Pages 122 and 123 show illustrations of the criers of London from the late sixteenth century, one from a woodcut and the other from an engraving. The contributors include some who are already leaders in their field and some very promising younger scholars. Most of the contributors hold po­ sitions at universities in the United States, though one is at Oxford and one at Groningen in The Netherlands. Canadian universities are well represented, with contributions from Mount Allison, Waterloo, and Guelph. A persistent consideration for those of us who work with the texts of the past is the question of how far modern theories can illuminate the practice Reviews 441 of earlier times. Although some modern theories can indeed suggest useful ways of approaching the literature of the past, there is still the ever-present danger of the kind of anachronism that treats the values of our own times as normative. Some of the essays in this collection seem to me to fall into this trap: these are for the most part exercises in misguided ingenuity, neither illuminating the texts themselves, nor establishing the usefulness of the theory. Yet some contributors use modern theory to very good effect, notably Eric Mason, whose use of Derrida's theory I shall discuss below. Many of the essays discuss classic literary texts: there are three on works by Edmund Spenser and three on plays by Shakespeare. However, some deal with texts much less generally familiar, and many of the most interesting essays are on topics closer to popular culture or social history. Notable here are two essays in Part II: Fiona McNeill's "Free and Bound Maids: Women's Work Songs and Industrial Change in the Age of Shakespeare," and Natasha Korda's "Gender at Work in the Cries of London." It is especially encouraging to see discussions of the importance of music, both in these essays and in "'When an Old Ballad is Plainly Sung': Musical Lyrics in the Plays of Margaret and William Cavendish" by James Fitzmaurice. Demonstrating as it does the importance of pathos, the use of music and also the musical element in oral discourse should be of particular interest to rhetoricians. It is impossible, given...

Abstract As Seattle’s mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a mans. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women’s suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that womens roles in the nation functioned similarly to mens roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.

The Present Tense staff would like to welcome the guest editors for our 2012 special issue on medical, gender, and body rhetorics.

Gendered appearance inWorld of Warcraftis of particular interest because it seems to infiltrate interactions between individuals without serving a functional purpose within the game itself. It provides an opportunity to look at avatar choice in environments that have a primary purpose aside from existing as an arena for creating identity, and possibly the opportunity to uncover some new insight into why individuals select avatar gender the way they do.

We are recruiting submissions on medical, gender, and body rhetorics for publication in a 2012 special issue.

Queen Mary I was crowned in 1553, becoming the first reigning queen of England. In order to provide a powerful image of female rule to her people, Queen Mary invented a rhetorical strategy that reflected her society's oppressive gender expectations of chaste silence so that she could become a powerfully voiced ruler. Her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth I, later mirrored Mary's strategy. England's first female monarchs created an image of female rule by employing the figures of the spouse, the mother, and the maiden, embodying conventional roles for women in Tudor society, and reclaiming them as images of power.

Young appears coy here about the status of his sexuality. He seems invested in rendering a story that highlights how he is constantly perceived as a "faggot" due to his failed performance of proper (black) masculinity and his ability to speak WEV. But he never explicitly claims a gay identity, leaving the reader to speculate.

Through the usage of academic autobiography, this paper examines the difficulties inherent to embodying seemingly incongruous identities outside of the mainstream. Examining metrics for inclusion often utilized in the black, feminist, queer, and BDSM communities, I attempt to locate where women with intersecting identities find and build networks that enable them to both “belong” and to fully express the complexities of their subjectivities without compromise.

‘Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions’: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom” considers the ways that George Clinton’s two funk projects, Parliament and Funkadelic, create new spaces for nonnormative heterosexuality and creative production. I explore issues of embodiment , sexual fluidity, and community in P-Funk’s iconography, lyrics and sound and then consider ways that black male fans have gained a sense of imaginative freedom from their music. P-Funk’s solidly funking music, hallucinatory and often politicized music, experimental cover art and wildly threatrical stage shows create a new a queer space for black heterosexual men. Most significantly, P-Funk’s music explores black experience, particularly bodily, sexual and sensual experience at points of ambiguity, vulnerability, pain, desire, and laughter, using tools of music that speak to their listeners individually and internally, as well as collectively. This power to harness emotionally strong and sometimes inchoate feeling had a powerful effect on its audience—prompting some to find unity and empathy with other black men.

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.

Abstract Royster and Cochran use the words of African American women writers to enrich our view of intersections between American civil rights discourses and the discourses of human rights as a global concept. They focus on both individual and collective activities of the women and contextualize this activism within the larger framework of the rise of individual human rights language in twentieth century international relations. Notes 1Sam Occom (1723–1792), a progenitor of Native-American literature, was a Mohegan minister and political leader who worked to protect the cultures, traditions, and practices of indigenous peoples. He was an advocate for their political autonomy, spiritual well-being, and their education, as evidenced by his associations with Dartmouth College. 2A simplistic measure of this positioning is a keyword search of a top-ranked research university's library (The Ohio State University). "African Americans Civil Rights" yielded 1,346 entries. "African Americans Human Rights" yielded 194 entries. 3For a complementary argument about connections between civil rights and human rights, see Kirt Wilson's Keynote Address at the 2010 Public Address Conference on Human Rights, "More than Civil Rights: The Fight for Black Freedom as a Human Rights Struggle." Also, as noted below we are distinguishing between human rights as a set of values, policies, and practices exercised by individuals and groups and human rights values, policies, and practices that function universally in international relations and thereby beyond the boundaries of nation-states. 4In presenting this analytical framework, we note the persistent ways in which the master narrative of self-determination, peace, and justice for all gave rise to special allowances among the Western powers, creating various illogicalities for those not in power, a situation that, as we explain with more detail below, has pushed persistently the double-edged sword of hope and rage/despair. 5The analytical framework for this essay is drawn from Royster's larger manuscript project, currently entitled A Nation Within: Utopian Desire, Radical Action, and the Voices of African American Women. 6In addition to its linkages with Christian discourses, Wheatley's quotation also suggests the impact of Enlightenment values on human rights discourses and a more inclusive approach to human dignity and human rights. Further, a case can be made that Wheatley positions herself as a witness to this "absurdity," the discontinuity between the words and actions that prevailed so dramatically during her era. 7For a book-length treatment of affective mapping, see Flately. 8This use of "museum piece" mirrors the use of this term by Spitzack and Carter (407). 9Insightful and compelling as a discursive framework, the quest for "civil rights" as a response to the disempowering conditions and effects of slavery, rather than the quest for "human rights" as a global concept, has been the norm in scholarly analyses of racial oppression in the United States. Examples of civil rights scholarship include leading scholars, such as: Stampp; Woodward; Gutman; Franklin; Sundquist; and others. More attention to the connection of struggles in the United States for civil rights to struggles globally for human rights include: Eric Foner; Anderson; Henry J. Richardson, III; Shuler; Soohoo, Albisa, and Davis; and others. 10Space limitations do not permit a full explanation of how transnational feminist scholarship (e.g., Alexander and Mohanty) has enriched contemporary human rights discourses or how women of African descent, including African-American women writers, continue to be pacesetters in making insightful connections, analyses, and interpretations. 11This explanation is based on Eleanor Hinton Hoytt. 12Note that elite African-American women broadened their horizons in the twentieth century through foreign travel, with increasing numbers participating in both individual and organized trips. By the mid-twentieth century, foreign travel had become a booming business among this group, as evidenced by the highly successful Henderson Travel Agency, founded in 1955 by African-American woman entrepreneur Freddye Henderson in Atlanta, Georgia. Furthermore, the push to be philanthropic was very much in motion, as verified by Gill's discussion of the community activism of beauticians in Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (2009). 13For example, prominent writer H. G. Wells drafted an international bill of rights in his New World Order. 14The drafting subcommittee was composed of eight individuals from the United States, Lebanon, Great Britain, France, China, Australia, Chile, and the U.S.S.R., which appointed a "working group" of the first four state representatives listed. Rene Cassin, the lead author in drafting the UDHR, states all 58 nations contributed to the final shape of the UDHR. The UDHR was adopted unanimously, albeit with eight abstentions from the Eastern bloc, on 10 December 1948. 15Dorothy Jones discusses why the positioning of the term dignity in the Preamble and Article 1 is significant as a statement of intent for the whole document. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline Jones Royster Jacqueline Jones Royster is Ivan Allen Jr. Chair and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0525, USA. Molly Cochran Molly Cochran is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610, USA.

In Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action , it is suggested that communities build internal cohesion by negating portions of their constituencies in rituals of purification.  Over the past thirty years these dynamics have been evidenced in the role that eating disorders have played in the development of contemporary feminist consciousness.    While key feminist authors have been framing these conditions for the larger public, the manner in which anorexia and bulimia have been projected through these writings has become increasingly problematic.

This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning women's gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

198 RHETORICA discussion in these essays, Stowers' A Rereading of Romans, Justice, Jews, and Gentiles provides outstanding examinations of Paul's uses of prosopopoieia, among other oral speech genres familiar to the auditors of the time. Similarly, Antoinette Wire's The Corinthian Women Prophets, a Reconstruction Through Paul's Rhetoric, among its other merits, suggests contextual sources for puns and humor in Paul's references to the veiling of women and to their prophetic speech. Philip Kern's Rhetoric and Galatians, Assessing an Approach to Paul's Epistles provides a good companion to the essays by Black and Watson in this volume in reviewing the numerous approaches to Paul's letters that are increasingly being combined with one another to both reconstruct the contexts and auditors of the New Testament gospels and epistles, and assess the innovations introduced into classical genres and understandings of the meanings they conveyed. Like Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels?, studies of New Testament innovations and improvisations based upon clas­ sical models are provided in Jo-Ann Brandt's Dialogue and Drama, Elements of Greek Tragedy in the Fourth Gospel and Dennis E. Smith's Prom Symposium to Eucharist, the Banquet in the Early Christian World. These readings continue the examination of literary and rhetorical readings of the New Testament in conversation and sometimes in conflict with one another. Black and Watson have provided an examination of these current critical issues within and alongside reappraisals of Kennedy's work in a manner that does credit to their title: words well spoken. C. Jan Swearingen Texas A&M University Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian's Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis. Patristics Monograph Series 19, Washington, DC: The Catholic Uni­ versity of America Press, 2008. xiv + 210 pp. ISBN 978-0-8132-1526-6 The Tertullian authorship of Aduersus Iudaeos has been disputed over the past two centuries. In this book Dunn argues that a rhetorical analysis of Ter­ tullian s Aduersus Iudaeos can resolve the uncertainties respecting its origins. He sets forth in an excellent manner the status of authorship assumptions, provides a detailed rhetorical analysis, and constructs a substantial case for all the parts of the manuscript being authored by Tertullian. He contends that the disputed last part was written before Tertullian's Aduersus Marcionem rather than being copied from it. Furthermore he declares that the Aduersus Iudaeos has been neglected because of doubts regarding its authen­ ticity. He points out that Robert Sider in his Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (1971) did not include the Aduersus Iudaeos nor did he list it in his catalog of Tertullian's writings. Dunn first addresses the differences of opinion regarding the text. He next explores the intended readership, and contends that "pamphlet" is Reviews 199 the best appellation because Tertullian's intent is advocacy (p. 28). Dunn's lhetoiical analysis consists of three aspects located in as many chapters, structure, argumentation, and style. The final chapter is in essence a summary of the arguments in the book. There is an extended bibliography, a general index, and a Scripture citations index. in the first chapter Dunn sets out a history of scholarly reflections on authorship and in the process supplies an important breakdown of those who doubt the integrity and authenticity of the Aduersus Iudaeos and those who support it. Those opposed were Krovmann, Dekkers, Aulisa, Semler, Burkitt, Quispel, Quasten, Neander, Akerman, Labriolle, Efroymson, Crosson, and Ev ans. Those accepting were Noeldechen, Grotemeyer, Harnack, Williams, Saflund, Trankle, Fredouille, Monceaux, Simon, Gager,Aziza, Moreschini, Schreckenberg, Barnes, and Otranto. Dunn along the way sets out the diverse nuances prov ided bv these authorities. Dunn ascertains that the authorship controversy is related to the recent concern ov er the degree of contact between Jews and Christians in early third century Carthage. Contemporary scholars are offering new clues that the contacts between Jews and Christians were considerable. Scholars who so argue include J uster, Simon, Krauss, Williams, Parkes, Blumenkranz, Wilken, Blanchetiere, Hornbury, de Lange, Wilson, and MacLennan. Other scholars, however, have claimed that anti-Jewish polemics were chiefly designed to assist the Christians in establishing "self identity," since Jews and Chris­ tians were going their own separate ways. These include Eiarnack, Barnes...

Book Review| March 01 2011 Rhetoric, Representation, and Display: Gender and Political Communication in America Rhetoric, Representation, and Display: Gender and Political Communication in America. Janis L. Edwards. E. Michele Ramsey E. Michele Ramsey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (1): 169–172. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940528 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation E. Michele Ramsey; Rhetoric, Representation, and Display: Gender and Political Communication in America. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2011; 14 (1): 169–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940528 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I thank Xing (Lucy) Lu, Arabella Lyon, and Bo Wang for reading early drafts of this essay, and for their highly constructive comments. Notes 1For starters, see Hum and Lyon, as well as Combs, Lipson, Lyon ("Rhetorical"), Mao ("Studying"), Wang, Wu, and You. 2I assume we are not disputing the singular contributions his work has made to comparative rhetoric. 3Hum and Lyon also point out the danger of conducting comparative rhetoric through the lens of one's own tradition without reflection, and they further discuss the importance of crossing borders and acknowledging one's (partial) standpoint (155–156; 159–160). 4In fact, Hum and Lyon have explicitly discussed four different approaches—including feminist approaches to Chinese rhetoric—that scholars have developed in the past in carrying out their comparative rhetorical work. They have also called for a need to develop revisionist readings and to recover lost perspectives (157–161). 5Lu also recognizes and indeed discusses the interdependence of description and appropriation or what she refers to as historical and scriptural hermeneutics (Rhetoric 21). 6Lipson also reminds us of the difficulty of casting aside "both the theoretical lens and related values and apparatus through which Western scholars have come to view human communication" (3). In the same essay, drawing on Steven Mailloux's work Lipson also proposes using the term "cultural rhetoric" to underscore the importance of culture and to focus on the rhetorics of different cultures (22–24). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuMing Mao LuMing Mao is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program at Miami University, 356F Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.

Scholars in rhetoric are increasingly attentive to the power of places and spaces to shape rhetorical performance. This article takes up the connection between ethos and location identified by several recent scholars, arguing that affiliation with and representation of material environments plays a crucial role in ethos. Ethos strategies are further shaped by genres, which are theorized as locations and environments in order to capture a fundamental dynamic between strategy and social norm. To demonstrate the strengths of understanding ethos in relation to both geographical and genre location, I analyze the ethos-maneuvers of Mary Austin, prominent early twentieth-century feminist, activist, and nature writer whose thirty-year public career merits attention from rhetorical scholars. In articulating how genre shapes Austin's efforts to develop her location in the deserts of the American West into a persuasive public ethos, I argue that ethos emerges in genre-specific formations.

“It occurred to us that people learning about our field may benefit from a better sense of where feminism lives in the hidden spaces of rhetoric and composition: in the practices and attitudes of those who constitute the field.”

The present study documents everyday adult writing by type of text and medium (computer or paper) in an in vivo diary study. The authors compare writing patterns by gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, age and working status. The study results reveal that (a) writing time varied with demographic variables for networkers, but these variations disappear for workers; (b) all demographic groups spent more time writing documents than prose; (c) most demographic groups spent an equal amount of time writing using computers and paper, but younger and higher educated groups spent more writing time on the computer, while older and less educated groups spent more time writing using paper than the computer; and (d) workers spent more time writing using computers than paper. Implications of the study findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research are also given.

Abstract The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century. Notes 1In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS. 2I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions. 3Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).

New York Times articles on environmental issues attempt to constitute an audience transcending gender, race, politics, and religion in its pursuit of environmentally sound behavior. While some articles' use of a rhetoric of sacrifice is undercut by fear appeals and an exclusionary narrative strategy, other NYT articles come closer to transforming the rhetoric of sacrifice into a widely inclusive, aesthetically grounded, and celebratory narrative strategy. Taken together, the articles seek to transform readers not so much into environmentalists as into what Foucault described late in his life as “artists of living.”