Abstract Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic's perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), the author of what is commonly regarded as the European Renaissance's most influential magical text, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533). In investigating the rhetorical strategies contained in Agrippa's famously ambiguous retraction of his occult works we may uncover an equally polysemic stance toward the ability of language to deal with both the everyday world and the realm of the sacred, a stance that uses textual instantiations of paradoxes of self-reference to forcefully undermine the apparently paradigmatic magical identification of signifier and signified. Acknowledgment I thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on this article. Notes 1See Lehrich (Language of Demons and Angels) for a comprehensive analysis of the three books. 2See Zika for an overview of Reuchlin's influence on Agrippa. 3"…, lapides loquitor, caveant ne cerebrum illis excutiat." J.F.'s use of the alliterated "b"s in his English translation is perhaps more effective in its Anglo-Saxon brutality. 4Note that the quotation marks are not in the original Latin but added by J.F. for the English translation of 1651. 5Again, the quotation marks are an addition of J.F.'s English translation and are not in the Latin original. 6See Kneale and Kneale (228–231) for a discussion of the Liar's context in medieval logic. 7See Sainsbury (114–132), Simmons (2–7), and Hofstadter for accessible re-formulations from the nineteenth century onward. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Miles Chris Miles is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magusa, Mersin 10, Turkey. E-mail: chris.miles@emu.edu.tr

Historians of rhetoric have largely neglected eighteenth-century Language Origins Theory (LOT). Yet, as a theory that interconnects language, human nature, and human difference, LOT is an important and central inquiry to modern formations of rhetoric, particularly in how they engage with ethics of difference. Examining how the Scottish rhetorician and Enlightenment intellectual, Lord Monboddo, bases his rhetoric on an ethically problematic version of LOT, this article urges historians and students of rhetoric to be wary of the traces of LOT in canonical rhetorical histories as well as in contemporary theories and pedagogical practices.

This article considers why, in the wake of Ernest Boyer's work, the promise of a transformation of university teaching has not been broadly realized and what that implies for faculty development projects. It discusses the assumptions that place the professional development of teaching outside of disciplinary boundaries, both literally and figuratively, and considers the consequences of that placement. It then turns to the scholarship of teaching and learning, considering what it offers to and implies about the disciplinary practices it proposes to transform. In response to this examination, the essay proposes that the Boyer Report attempted to alter teaching by arguing that teachers and the systems that support them needed to change, an argument that failed to convince college faculty to change. The article concludes with the proposal that the real exigence facing college faculty is that the way students raised in a culture saturated in electronic media learn is dramatically different than the way people learned a generation ago. That shift in learning is the exigence that requires a transformation of teaching.

This article explores, through the lens of a WAC faculty developer, how it is difficult to maintain disciplinary neutrality when developing any program; both teaching and learning can easily become codified through the lens of one person, field, or group. By using the work of, among others, Krista Ratcliffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Bartholomae, I make a case for working differently with stakeholders: collaborating within a discipline and including students in faculty development plansas both learners and mentors. If we mutually examine our definitions (“teaching,” “learning,” “writing,” “students”) and engage in rhetorical and reflective listening, we can move away from a model of teaching as rules, templates, and regulations; we can begin to engage our own assumptions along with those of our students, changing together the very definitions that constrain the evolution of our own mutual development.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

As Scott Newstok notes in his introduction, Kenneth Burke presents a problem for the field of Shakespeare studies. On the one hand, Burke exerts a durable influence there; one can even chart the eb...

In recent years, scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have given increased attention to the various ways that rhetoric and religion intersect. To explore this relationship further, this article employs Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad and the methods of pentadic analysis proposed by Floyd Anderson and Lawrence Prelli in order to analyze two texts, Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourseand Obama's “Pentecost 2006 Keynote Address.” In our analysis, we aim to reveal the motives locked within Crowley's and Obama's texts to demonstrate how their attempts to open the universe of discourse—that is, to provide ways of bridging the divide between political liberals and religious conservatives—shut down the possibility for dialogue. We then offer counterstatements—what Anderson and Prelli refer to as “expressions of alternative orientations toward social reality” (90)—that may serve to open the universe of discourse.

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

Ann George and Jack Selzer's Kenneth Burke in the 1930s joins two major collections of essays by Burke himself—Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives and Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare—to mark 2007 as a...

In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.

Kenneth Burke bases his theory of identification on Freud's; however, whereas Burke insists that identification is a symbolic act that therefore remains available for conscious critique and reasoned adjustment, Freud reflects on an affective identification that precedes the distinction between “self” and “other.” This nonrepresentational identification—Freud sometimes calls it “primary identification”—remains stubbornly on the motion side of the action/motion loci, impervious to symbolic intervention. This article argues that Freud's scattered insights on primary identification undercut any theory of relationality grounded in representation, and therefore any hope of securing a crucial distance between self and other through conscious critique. It further argues that Freud's theory on identification presents rhetorical studies with a distinctly unBurkean challenge: to begin exploring the sorts of rhetorical analyses that become possible only when identification is no longer presumed to be compensatory to division.

Teachers of intercultural business communication may want to consider using problem-based learning (PBL), an instructional approach that places learners in problem-solving situations, that is, students are presented with messy and complex real-life problems that provide a context for learning concepts and developing skills. This article describes how ill-structured communication problems that emerge in intercultural business relationships in internationalizing small- or medium-sized enterprises are used to provide a context for learning. It explains how these problems are tackled by learners through the implementation of PBL in four stages: problem identification, information acquisition, information analysis, and problem resolution. Finally, it discusses the reactions of the students, external participants, and instructors to the PBL approach.

Abstract Of the sharp judgment of the South in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, prior scholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy—a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with God's purposes. This view of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his address obliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcing their affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which is then followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. This strategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Reconstruction: the Radical Republicans. Notes 1Many thanks to Rhetoric Review's two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose careful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me read Lincoln in the first place.

The chapters of David Fleming's story could, with modifications, be the chapters of all our stories (Burkean Parlor, Vol. 25.4, 2005). Until fairly recently, many of us have come into the disciplin...

Editor's Note: Several invited responses to this review will appear in RR's Burkean Parlor. Two, by Joshua Gunn and James Bunker, appear in this issue. We welcome responses by others. We have also ...

Scholars have shown that Kenneth Burke's research on drug addiction at the Bureau of Social Hygiene shaped his rhetorical theory in Permanence and Change, but less attention has been paid to another facet of this research, criminology, and its influence on Attitudes Toward History. In Attitudes, Burke uses a criminological framework, called the “constabulary function,” to characterize the rhetorical strategies political and economic elites use to bolster a deteriorating social order while deflecting attention away from broader, systemic problems. The constabulary function and its attendant terms—alienation, cultural lag, transcendence, symbols of authority, and secular prayer—provide a vocabulary for sociorhetorical critique. I examine how Burke's theory of the constabulary function grew out of his criminological research, consider how that theory informs key terms in Attitudes.

Abstract Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, this article argues that the fixation of some scholars on the status, size, and identity of rhetorical studies is symptomatic of an apocalyptic perversion. An attention to the apocalyptic tone of recent discussions about "Big Rhetoric" in conference papers and journal articles bespeaks a characteristically phallogocentric ideology of discrimination between insiders and outsiders. An examination of the ubiquity and character of this tone, I suggest, forever precludes a united rhetorical studies for two reasons: (1) we enjoy our apocalyptic too much; and (2) apocalyptic is central to the identity of rhetorical studies because it is central to disciplinarity as such. Insofar as the urgency of the apocalyptic tone is sometimes a pragmatic and political necessity, an argument is made in favor of a more playful, polytonal apocalypticism that can help us better reckon with—and sometimes avoid—rhetoric that excludes. Acknowledgments The author thanks Carole Blair, Diane Davis, Debbie Hawhee, and the blind reviewers for their helpful suggestions and wise counsel. Notes 1Arguably, the first love object is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice; the implications of this article of faith will be detailed in my later remarks on the apocalyptic (see Silverman; and Schwarz). 2I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny (also see Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double" 341–366). 3That is, he is both celebrated and cursed for establishing order in the idiom of the negative. I should indicate that by "Big Rhetoric" I refer not only to the globalization of rhetoric (or what is sometimes termed the rhetoric of inquiry), but all the related issues that are collected under that name via anxiety about disciplinary identity, including: (1) how ought we define "rhetoric"? (2) how should we define rhetorical studies as a field? by object or recourse to method, or by pedagogical mission? (3) who "owns" rhetoric or where is rhetoric better situated, in departments of English or Communication Studies? (4) is there such a thing as a "rhetorical tradition?" if so, what constitutes that tradition? (5) who does or does not have the authority to define rhetoric and rhetorical studies? (6) is rhetoric inclusive or mutually exclusive of cultural studies? and so on. These many questions all speak to the fundamental anxiety about what rhetoric is and who we are as rhetoricians, and I am focused on the whole of this anxiety vis-à-vis discipline, not any one question in particular. 4The primal horde refers to a mythic scenario developed by Darwin and elaborated by Freud to explain the emergence of the social contract and incest taboo: the idealized and primal father seizes all the women for himself, driving the sons away when they reach maturity. The sons, resentful of the father's despotism but desiring his love, agree to band together, kill the father, and eat him. They do so, however, only at the price of indigestion, for they find that their ideal leader is dead and are haunted by him; consequently, they agree to live as equals and to dispossess "the women" and practice exogamy (See Freud, Totem 201–204). 5This article is the most accessible and, in my view, most accurate description of the debate surrounding rhetoric and discipliniarity. I will nevertheless take issue later with what I think is a misreading of Dilip Gaonkar's positions. 6Of course, "criticism in crisis" is a tired hat, about which more shortly, but for the moment, we can trace it to Paul de Man's "Criticism and Crisis" (in Blindness 3–19). 7For the different ways in which a more interdisciplinary yet coherent, text- or practice-centered and historically mindful rhetorical studies has been called for, see Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies" 69–76; Fuller, "Globalization"; Keith, "Identity, Rhetoric, and Myth" 106; Leff, "Rhetorical Disciplines" 83–93; Mailloux, "Disciplinary Identities" 5–29 (also see his Disciplinary Histories for a revised version); Mailloux, "Practices, Theories, and Traditions" 129–138; and Mailloux, "Places in Time" 53–68. For arguments in favor of "Big Rhetoric" or globalization, see Simons, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics" 86–109; and Simons, "Globalization" 260–274. For a diversity of views on the issue of disciplinarity, see Herbert W. Simons' edited collection, The Rhetorical Turn, as well as the edited collection by Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Finally, one consequence of this decade-long discussion was the formation of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies—initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and many others associated with the Rhetoric Society of America—which brought together a diverse group of rhetoricians for three days in Evanston, Illinois in the fall of 2003. Descriptions of the discussions at the conference are printed in the third issue of volume 24 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). 8For a rumination on the "death" of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellberry, The Ends of Rhetoric, especially the introductory essay by the editors, which argues that in modernity "rhetoric" has given way to the delightfully more-syllabic "rhetoricality." 9My argument, however, is deliberately elliptical, as it attempts to underscore the performative dynamics of the debate over "Big Rhetoric" performatively. By "performative" I mean to suggest that the frequent masturbatory, petulant tone and prose of the present essay is both "fun and games" as well as argumentative, a point that will become clearer as the essay progresses toward the analysis of "tone" as a rhetorical device. From time to time I use the word "playful" to denote this approach. As an aside, an important if sadly over-critiqued element of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis is their playful tone and wildly associative writing techniques, which are deliberately employed to accompany the more traditional, syllogistic argument (and sometimes in Derrida's case, against the syllogistic argument). Slavoj Žižek's work is perhaps the most accessible example of performative writing in this sense, but for a full-throttle example of this "style" of performance, see Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume One: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). "All you consumer fascist types, you know who you are," opens Rickels on the topic of his style of writing, "cannot be stopped from policing the middlebrow beat to which intellectual discourse was condemned a long time ago" (xv). Although Rickels insists that his "obscurity" is less a "style of writing or argument" than the juxtapositional demand of the objects of his analysis, his rhetoric is unquestionably strategic. 10Most breaks with Freud among psychoanalysts were a consequence of disagreements about drive theory. Some thinkers believed that the drives were not sexual but something else; for example, Jung believed the drives were spiritual in nature, whereas Adler eventually argued humans are driven by self-esteem. Others advocated a complete abandonment of the drive model in favor of more "relational" model, which generally goes under the name of "object relations theory." For the classical textbook on the latter, see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations. 11The better explanation here, however, is that he does not seem to give a shit, when he understands his obstinacy and petulance to be precisely what the Other wants! He very much gives a shit (by hoarding his stuff, as it were) and wants to be disciplined! See Karl Abraham, "Contributions" 370–392. 12Initially Freud believed that the drives always aimed toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain in accord with "the pleasure principle." Eventually, however, Freud changed his mind to suggest there is a "death drive," or a pursuit of something beyond pleasure and life (see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's thinking in this respect would lead Jacques Lacan to suggest that, in the end, all drives are death drives. I will discuss this later in terms of "jouissance" or "enjoyment." 13The late James P. McDaniel's recent article, "Speaking Like a State," identifies "political enjoyment" as the problematic jouissance of our time. He argues that only by owning up to satisfactions of sadism, cruelty, and pain that all of us harbor through the processes of self-knowledge and "ironic self-suspension" can we start to counter and avoid the terrible political events (and the destructive, local responses to those events) in these "times of terror" (346). In a certain sense, the critique I advance here shows how the same "psychosocial economy of enjoyment" is in play in our discussions of disciplinarity as well. 14I acknowledge that such a shift from the psychoanalytic theory of the individual psyche to the "group behavior" of rhetoricians is controversial to some readers. In his understudied monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud links the two levels via the function of the "object" (understood as another person) in the individual psyche: "In the individual's life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology…is at the same time social psychology as well" (3). My approach is similarly informed (that is, that groups behave in an analogous manner to individuals; e.g., class behavior often reflects Oedipal arrangements). For a more thoroughgoing discussion of this important theoretical tangle, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic" 338–395. 15I would be remiss not to point out that this some who enjoy tend to be gendered male, a point well made by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter at the same disciplinary moment that Big Rhetoric became a concern. I will return to their essay later (see Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 383–409). 16For more on this evangelical riff, see Lundberg and Gunn, "'Ouija.'" 17The most recent are Steven Mailloux ("Places in Time") and James Arnt Aune's ("The Politics of Rhetorical Studies") essays in the February 2006 Quarterly Journal of Speech, which are revised versions of papers each delivered at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetorical Societies meeting in Evanston, Illinois in 2003. As the present essay attests, the theme of the 2006 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America guarantees there are yet more and more to come. 18The keynote address by Steven Mailloux, "One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Contingent Universality of Rhetoric," revisits the Big Rhetoric debate, as did a number of papers on the 2006 RSA Convention Program. 19For the bottom feeders such as me, the suggestion here is that tone marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a rhetorical quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 20 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Dolar, "The Object Voice" 19–20. 21"Voice" is a mediating, sister concept to tone, and has received closer scrutiny in rhetorical studies (see Vivian, Being Made Strange; and Watts, "'Voice'" 179–796). 22If "mourning" is "a feeling-tone perhaps unique in the modern university," as James Arnt Aune has suggested ("Politics" 71), then apocalypticism is what the discourse of the modern university shares with the current administration of George W. Bush. The difference between the academic and federal apocalyptic, suggests Ellen Messer-Davidow, is that conservatism truly mourns and moves on, whereas the academic Left seems stuck in its nostalgic weeping. Space limits expanding the argument I offer later beyond the local, however, I would suggest inability of rhetorical studies to "get over itself" or "its death" is the same problem of the academic humanities as well; we simply cannot reckon with our dehabilitating and discriminatory perversity (see Messer-Davidow 1–35). 23For context, the complete comment from the blind reviewer was as follows: "Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." 24For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Graff, Walzer, and Atwill's The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. 25James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see Darsey 199–210). 26Once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion, then we are led to a renewed responsibility to re-read our written work and be ever wary of tone. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her perversion to stop hurting the self and others. Owning up to one's role in the continuance of oppressive ideological norms is difficult, but as many of those who critique ideology have argued, the systemic character of ideology requires a degree of reflexivity. 27That the latter is the founding motto of any academic department was an argument often told by Robert Lee Scott to his students during many of his rhetoric seminars. My thanks to Dr. Scott for this humorous truism. 28In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone—one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other—may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean, and so on). 29Stylistically, Nietzsche famously yoked the feminine to tonal hollows (wombs), water, and the oceanic (see Derrida, Spurs; and Irigaray, Marine Lover). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

The official apology is a discursive phenomenon with complex rhetorical significance and must be distinguished from the apologia. The main difference is that the official apology entails an element of regret and acknowledgement of wrongdoing that makes it an even more delicate rhetorical matter than the apologia—not least because it involves a collectivity such as a nation state. The symbolic nature of the assumption of guilt is therefore particularly clear. This article argues that official apologies, however circumscribed by public skepticism, nevertheless may serve important functions as loci for articulating the norms of a society at a given time. The article discusses how the official apology raises a host of issues concerning rhetorical agency and argues that this particular type of rhetoric is promising point of departure in the ongoing pedagogical and theoretical exploration of the concept of rhetorical agency. By integrating theories of epideictic rhetoric and of rhetorical agency, the complexity of the official apology is analyzed, and through a reading of an official apology by the Danish Prime minister, the essay examines how rhetorical agency is both established and undercut by the speaker.

Using the Victorian writer Samuel Butler's response to Darwin's Origin of Species as an example, I argue for a method of reading characterized by the process of fascination and seduction. Such an antimethodical method not only requires a different kind of agency on the part of the reader, but it also resituates rhetoric as an art of response to the dynamic flux of the communicating world.

This essay inquires into the meaning and usage of eikos, an important term in early Greek rhetorical theory Based on a survey of 394 uses of the verb eoika (of which eikos is the neuter perfect participle) in texts ranging from Homer to Isocrates, it argues that the traditional translation of eikos as "probability" is in some ways misleading. Specifically, the essay proposes: 1) that "to be similar" is the core meaning of eoika, 2) that all other senses of eoika can be seen as extensions of the "similarity" sense, 3) that the "befittingness" sense of eikos continued to be of great importance in the early Attic orators, and 4) that the sense of eikos as that which is befitting or socially expected, and the sense of eikos as that which is verisimilar, work in tandem in the "profiling" strategy of some eikos arguments.

Research Article| January 01 2008 "Terministic Screens," Social Constructionism, and the Language of Experience: Kenneth Burke's Utilization of William James Paul Stob Paul Stob Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (2): 130–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655306 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Stob; "Terministic Screens," Social Constructionism, and the Language of Experience: Kenneth Burke's Utilization of William James. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (2): 130–152. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655306 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

The German Philosopher Hans Blumenberg causes vehement disputes among German scholars. To some, he is a rhetoric scholar, to others he is not. As a result of the disagreements on Blumenberg’s categorization, a new rhetoric approach has been created: Rhetorische Anthropologie, Rhetorical Anthropology. In fact, Blumenberg should be considered a New Rhetoric advocate. In order to prove this hypothesis, this article provides a comparison of Blumenberg and an indisputable New Rhetoric advocate: Kenneth Burke. The significant parallels between Blumenberg and Burke will clear up the German dispute, allude to some underlying problems within the discipline in Europe, and recast Rhetorical Anthropology from its status as a unique cast of rhetorical ideas.

IN CAMILLE K. LEWIS' RECENT ARTICLE, “Publish and Perish?: My Fundamentalist Education from the Inside Out,” Lewis makes public the intended final chapter of her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism. 1 Introducing the chapter, Lewis recounts the conflict she experienced with Bob Jones University (BJU) over the chapter’s content, a struggle that eventually led to her resignation from the school in 2007. Lewis acknowledges that along her journey she has become more prophetic and less sagacious, a move readily apparent when one compares chapter six with the first five chapters. Yet Lewis’ goal is neither simply to expose nor to rant but to imagine “a productive criticism for sectarian rhetoric and religion.” 2 In short, Lewis fears that Jim Berg, dean of students at BJU, represents a recent trend toward a rhetorically tragic frame, and she puts forward instead the more comedic frame offered by Walter Wink and Jim Wallis. Lewis’ goal is certainly admirable, but at the end of the day her criticism is not as productive as it could be. Her most recent rhetoric is, from one perspective, captivating, but it is not Burkean enough, because it is not romantic enough, to use her own frame.

As Aristotle began to codify rhetorical practices in Greece, a theoretical and pragmatic text on argument, the Nyaya Sutra, emerged in Ancient India, founding one of six key philosophies of India. Though it describes in detail a procedure of reasoning based on a five-part method of dialogic presentation, the rhetorical emphases of the Nyaya approach have been mostly overlooked. This essay proposes Nyaya's inclusion in the field of rhetorical studies, exploring its methods within their historical context, comparing its approach to the traditional logical syllogism, and relating it to the contemporary perspectives of Stephen Toulmin, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman.

Working-class people perform class identities. These performances are marked with ironies in which working class symbolizes power and powerlessness. Such performances elide linear meaning-making in favor of poetic paradox and help us understand the contradictions of working-class life. The New Deal, a chapbook by my great-grandfather, represents an occasion for understanding how one working-class person used language to consider his life's contradictions. The chapbook articulates a unique “working-class poetics” and suggests why rhetoricians ought to locate representations of the paradoxes of working-class life.

Technology mediated learning (TML) is gaining interest from both academic researchers and communication professionals as training with Internet technology and Web-based distance learning become increasingly popular. This paper investigates social norms, individual-level cultural orientation (collectivism), and affective commitment (internalization and identification) and studies their influences on the system users' (or learners') attitude toward sharing knowledge by email in the TML environment. An empirical test of the proposed model was conducted in the pilot test (n=155) and the main test (n=411). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for TML, knowledge management, and e-collaboration are discussed in the paper.

444 RHETORICA Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). In the "Editors' Introduction" to this new edition of Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran present an impressive overview of Blair's life, work, and legacy. They trace the publication, reception, and influence of the Lectures, providing partic­ ularly insightful discussion of the multitude of abridgements and derivative works that represented Blair's work to so many. They sketch Blair's early education and his university training, then lead readers through his life as a preacher, man of letters, and university lecturer. Finally, they assess Blair's place in the history of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory. The "Introduction" provides an authoritative survey of scholarship on some of the key issues related to Blair's work including Blair's influence on the teaching of writing in universities, on the emerging discipline of literary criticism, and on the continuing shift of the focus of rhetorical theory from oral declamation to written language (especially belles lettres). FerreiraBuckley and Halloran's extensive research in archival materials related to Blair's career and published work allows them to contribute new insights to all of these lines of inquiry. This reader found particularly interesting their reminder that Blair's Lectures not only informed later college curricula but also played a significant role in "schools, in literary societies and clubs, and in home study" (xxi). An annotated copy of the Lectures in St. Andrews University's rare book collection, for instance, provides evidence of the ways that individuals studied and used the Lectures, and I wanted to hear more about that body of evidence. Ferreira-Bucklev and Halloran end their Introduction with an innovative analysis of the curious fact that Blair "makes little mention of the works of any of the great visual artists who were his contemporaries" despite his "heavy reliance on visual metaphors and analogies" (xlvi-xlvii). Similarly, they note that Blair says nothing about contemporary music. Despite repeated references to the connections between poetry and music, Blair never acknowledges work by contemporaries such as Handel and Purcell, both of whom had set English poetry to music. While acknowledging that his inattention to contemporary art and music may simply reflect Blair's "pedagogical purpose," the editors argue that the larger significance of these lacunae may lie in the fact that "the printing press had long since created the conditions for a kind of sedentary cosmopolitanism in the textual realm" (xlviii). In short, Blair did not get out of Scotland much and " 'the age of mechanical reproduction' of visual and musical works would not arrive for another century," leaving his "experience, while rich in the literary arts,... impoverished with respect to other media" (xlviii). Through arguments like these, Ferreira-Buckley and Halloran's Introduction suggests new lines of inquiry into Blair's Lectures. Beyond the "Introduction," this volume consists mostly of an edition of the Lectures based on the 1785 London edition, which contained Blair's Reviews 445 corrections to the 1783 first edition. As a textual edition, the volume is something of a puzzle. To he sure, the text seems trustworthy with regard to what textual editors traditionally termed "substantives"—the words of the chosen copy text—but some of the editorial decisions, and the lack of textual apparatus, leave the goals of the edition unclear. The main goal of the volume is to bring the 1785 edition of Blair's Lectures back into print (it was last published in facsimile by Garland in 1970, five years after Southern Illinois University Press published a facsimile of the 1783 edition). While the 1785 edition is no longer in print, the entire text is currently available online (in a searchable facsimile edition) through Gale's Eighteenth-Centun/ Collections Online. (This new edition is also searchable online via Google Book Search, though one can read only a limited number of sample pages on that site.) The editors argue further that to "truly understand Blair's influence, scholars must begin to study differences among editions and abridgments, because what readers took away from Blair's Lectures...

442 RHETORICA Judy Z. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 208 pp., $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8093-2677-9. Humanists who study medical discourse are a diverse crowd. They hail from disciplines ranging from anthropology and bioethics to rhetoric and composition studies. Lacking a lingua franca, these scholars understandably draw from the divergent traditions of their primary fields. What has ar­ guably been missing is a comprehensive account of medical discourse aris­ ing squarely from the rhetorical tradition. University of British Columbia rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal's Health and the Rhetoric ofMedicine fills this void. Demonstrating the heuristic potential of rhetorical principles for un­ derstanding health and medicine broadly construed, Segal offers a series of lucidly-rendered case studies investigating the role of persuasion in shaping patients, practitioners, and illnesses alike. Segal insists on the uniqueness of particular medico-historical moments. In “Chapter One: A Kairology of Biomedicine," she advances “a study of historical moments as rhetorical opportunities" (23). To illustrate kairology's application, Segal traces shifting accounts of the patient narrator from the eighteenth century forward. Her emphasis is not medical history per se, but how medical history reveals the types of persuasion enabled by particu­ lar changes in medicine. Kairology thus informs the rhetorically-focused medical histories to come. However, her analyses derive insights from Ken­ neth Burke and an eclectic mix of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Segal presents seven analysis chapters flanked by a theoretically-based introduction and conclusion in a compact 158 pages of text. These build on Segal's previous publications including reprinted portions of three essays. After the opening chapter on kairology, "Chapter Two: Patient Audience, The Rhetorical Construction of the Migraineur" examines how physicians' char­ acterizations of headache patients influence the doctor-patient encounter and preferred treatments. Segal tracks the construction of the migraineur in medical writing from 1873 through the twenty-first century wherein the migraine personality has become situated in pharmacological terms. "Chap­ ter Three: The Epideictic Rhetoric of Pathography" analyzes illness narra­ tives, and their study, as value-laden rhetoric of praise and blame. Segal focuses on three complicating narrators: the pro-anorexia internet narrator who interpellates the community, the resistant narrator of Barbara Ehrenreich who challenges the tyranny of cheerfulness in breast cancer narratives, and the commercialized narrator of Carla Cantor whose hypochondria queststory represents the pathologized subject. "Chapter Four: Hypochondria as a Rhetorical Disorder" unpacks the strategic ambiguity of hypochondriacs' discourse recasting the condition from a medical mystery to a mystery of motive with historical and current examples. In "Chapter Five: A Rhetoric of Death and Dying," the book's most haunting and personal chapter, Se­ gal interrogates end-of-life rhetoric by analyzing dialogue surrounding her Reviews 443 mother's death and advanced care planning interviews to argue that in­ stitutionalized end-of-life encounters structurally impede fair deliberation. "Chapter Six: Values, Metaphors, and Health Policy" awakens the "sleeping" metaphors in health-care-policv rhetoric, exposing the values underlying medicine is war, diagnosis is health, and body as machine, for example. "Chapter Seven: The Problem of Patient 'Noncompliance': Paternalism, Expertise, and the Ethos of the Physician" addresses problems of physician authority as embedded in the terms patient non-compliance, adherence, and concordance. In her concluding section, Segal underscores the rhetorical lexicon's utility for comprehending medicine and health. Segal ably mixes insightful application of principles to particular cases with mid-level theorizing about the place of rhetoric in medicine and health. Although she draws from an interdisciplinary reservoir, her core an­ alytic concepts are well known to suasion scholars: kairos, genre, audience, metaphor, narrative, interpellation, and ethos. A second strength is her at­ tention to intersecting interactional, public, and institutional discourses. Her persistent focus on persuasion, clear prose, and accessible explanation of concepts make this volume a solid choice for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric. It should also be useful for medical human­ ists who want to access rhetorical insights: her book shows how rhetorical thinking can uncover historical particularities while fostering generalized insights. The scope of cases considered is impressive, as are the connections to history of medicine scholarship. One of the...

Reviews Heinrich E Plett, Rhetoric uud Renaissance Culture. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. 581pp. scholars. Most of us excel in one or two areas, but he has contributed valuable work in four different fields: historical and theoretical studies of came to general attention with a substantial monograph (based on his 1969 Bonn doctoral dissertation), Rhctorik dcr Affekte. Enylische Vkirkuuysdsthetik im of the importance given to moving the feelings in English Renaissance rhetoric, an understudied topic at that time, remains worth reading and might have become trulv influential had it appeared in English. Professor Plett had already published a student text, Einfidiruug iu die rhetorische Fextanalyse (Hamburg, 1971), which moved from rhetorical criticism into general linguistics, a mo\ e which he consolidated in Textwissenschaft und Textanalyse. Senuotik, Empiustik, Rhctorik (Heidelberg, 1975), subsequently translated into Rumanian (1983). Plett's latest work on rhetorical theory is Systematische Rhctorik: Konzcpt uud Analysen (Munich, 2000), which attempts a svstematization of rhetorical figures using modern linguistic terminology. In 1977 Plett produced the first of several volumes collecting essays bv himself and other scholars, Rhctorik. Kritischc Positional zum Stand dcr Forschuny (Munich). In consecutive vears he published complementary vol­ umes deriv ing from conferences held at the Zentrum fiir Rhetorik- und Renaissance-Studien that he had founded at the University of Essen, each containing 18 essavs in German, French, and English: Renaissance-Rhetorik. Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin, New York, 1993; see my review in Renais­ sance Quarterly, 49 [1996]: 438-40), and Renaissance-Poetik. Renaissance poetics (Berlin, 1994). Another conference he organized produced a volume called Die Aktualitdt der Rhetorik (Munich, 1996). Having been so active in providing a forum for other scholars' work, it was only fitting that his colleagues re­ paid his good deeds with one of the best Rhetoric Festschriften of recent years, Rhetorica Movet: studies in historical and modern rhetoric in honor ofEieinrich F Plett, ed. P. L. Oesterreicher and T. O. Sloane (Leiden, 1999). Heinrich Plett's work has always been marked by a wide reading and the diligent use of primary and secondary sources, an important compoRhetorica , Vol. XXV, issue 4, pp. 435-448, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . G2007 by The international Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2007.25.4.435. 436 RHETORICA nent of scholarship which resulted in his producing a wide-ranging primary and secondary bibliography, Englische Rhetorik und Poetik 1479-1660. Eine systematische Bibliographie (Opladen, 1985; see my review, Wolfenbütteler Renais­ sance Mitteilungen, 13 [1989]: 75-80). A decade later Plett issued a corrected and enlarged edition, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics. A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden, 1995; see my review, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5 [1998]: 260-65). Professor Plett describes the volume under review, Rhetoric and Renais­ sance Culture, as "the result of more than thirty years' work on Renaissance rhetoric" (p. vii). It is systematically organized (the chapters are labelled "AF "), beginning with an overview of the "Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric" (pp. 11-84). Then comes the longest chapter, “Poetica Rhetorica. Rhetorical Poetics in the Renaissance" (pp. 85-294), divided into the five stages of composition (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio). The survey widens to take in rhetoric's relationship with the visual arts and with music, in a chapter awkwardly titled "Intermedial Rhetoric" (pp. 295-412). Chap­ ter D, “Poeta Orator: Shakespeare as Orator Poet" (pp. 413-498) consists of five parts, four of which the author has translated from essays published in German between 1981 and 1995. Chapter E, "Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence" (pp. 499-552), is profusely illustrated (the volume as a whole con­ tains 94 plates), and is followed by two detailed indices, of names and sub­ jects. The volume is handsomely designed and printed, with a commendably high degree of accuracy. Although the over-all structure is clear, there is an unfortunate degree of overlapping between sections, and the same quotations reappear several times over, often with the...

As we begin a fresh academic year, anticipating new challenges, frustrations, and, we hope, rewards, I find myself thinking of Kenneth Burke’s “unending conversation” (The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: U of California P, 1941, 110–11). In our classrooms we continue that unending conversation in our discipline, engaging with the knowledge built in the past, beginning to build new knowledge.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

While Richard Weaver, R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Robert Streeter have been most identified with rhetoric at the University of Chicago and its institutional return in the 1950s, the archival record demonstrates that Frederick Champion Ward, dean of the undergraduate “College” from 1947 to 1954, and Henry W. Sams, director of English in the College during Ward’s tenure, created the useful tensions for these positions to emerge.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

This article reconsiders the debate over the origins of rhetoric by the historical reconstructionists and neosophists beginning in the 1990s. It contends that both are misled by relying only upon texts overtly identified as “rhetorical theory” and suggests that other ancient sources offer significant insights into the “origins” and contemporary theorizing of rhetoric. It examines the legend of Corax and Tisias, arguing that the narrative of rhetoric's originator is folkloric expression intimately related to other narratives of the korax—“raven”—in natural histories and myths of Apollo. It concludes by theorizing rhetoric as a “koractic” art of pollution.

While rhetoricians are familiar with Kenneth Burke's epigram Ad bellum purificandum, little attention has been paid to why the “purification of war” would be Burke's purpose in A Grammar of Motives. Yet the Grammar, with its theory of dramatism, was written throughout a conflict Burke called “the mightiest war the human race will ever experience.” This article recovers Burke's wartime writings and explores the impact of World War II on his intellectual development. Arguing that Burke's dialectical project was conceived as a specific, hortatory response to the absolutism of total war, it recontextualizes Burkean themes of ambiguity, transcendence, dialectic, and action as it “rhetoricizes” dramatism, placing it within its original cultural/material conversational parlor.

From the editor: When you enter the parlor of “unending conversation” that Kenneth Burke dramatizes in Philosophy of Literary Form, you “listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught th...

334 RHETORICA ration" among antebellum women (because Truth's speech was reproduced by Frances Gage). Because Regendering Delivery provides so little analysis of African American women speakers' unique struggles, this relatively uncriti­ cal treatment of white antebellum reformers' relationship to Sojourner Truth is disappointing. Chapter 5 and the conclusion, which would have benefitted from further development, foster confusion over the book's theory of delivery. Nevertheless, this criticism should not deter scholars from picking up this fine book, which makes important contributions to the feminist study of the history of rhetoric. Roxanne Mountford University ofArizona Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 283 pp. A book entitled The Rhetoric ofManhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators was probably as inevitable as was the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. As gender studies matured as an academic discipline, the scholarly examination of masculinity could not remain far behind, despite the expected quip that all previous scholarship was "masculine studies." In fact, men's studies forms an important complement to women's studies and deserves to stand as an important element of rhetorical studies as well. Anyone interested in exploring the overlapping fields of rhetoric, on the one hand, and ideologies and practices of masculinity, on the other, will find The Rhetoric ofManhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators an important resource for scholars of ancient rhetoric and rhetorical theory more generally despite the fairly narrow focus revealed by the subtitle. As the full title suggests, Roisman has limited his focus to one genre— ancient oratory—which in turn further limits his study to a roughly onehundred year span of Athenian history, from the late fifth century to the 320s bce. In practice, the focus is even narrower, as this study must inevitably rely most heavily on a small handful of orators (chiefly Demosthenes and Lysias) with the largest corpus of orations. However, this tight methodological lens brings its own benefits, and in fact is less restricting than it might at first appear to be. In the first place, as Roisman himself notes (quoting Loraux), the context for ancient oratory—the political life of the city and its citizens— was so thoroughly imbricated with notions of masculinity that "the true name of the citizen is really aner [man], meaning that sexual identity comes first" (1). Thus what it meant to be a virtuous citizen, friend, and speaker, a benefit to friends and a harm to enemies, can be seen as largely co-terminous within the political and legal arena with what it meant to be a virtuous and capable man in general. Reviews 335 Further, though ancient oratory was once suspect as too rhetorical to be reliable as historical evidence, it is now valued as an important resource precisely because it depends for its effectiveness on its believability to its audience. More than any other genre, oratory had to appeal to beliefs that the audience was willing to accept. This does not mean that orations accurately reflect social practices and behaviors, but it does suggest that they remain within the bounds of what politically active Athenian men thought they and their city valued, and how it ought to put those values into practice. This study of ancient orations turns out to be a particularly valuable resource for self-representations of and for Athenian men. The Athenian masculine ideology that Roisman discovers turns out to be quite broad and complex, including standards of behavior in youth (chapter 1); the roles and responsibilities of the adult male as husband, father, kin, friend, and citizen; the role of shame (chapter 3); the relationship between masculinity and social status (chapter 4); military service (chapter 5); the struggle for power (chapter 6); the negotiation of desire and self-control (chapter 7); the mastery of fear (chapter 8); and old age (chapter 9). Of particular interest for historians of rhetoric in this context are sections devoted to the struggle for political power and assertions of manliness be­ tween speakers and audiences. Roisman reveals not only the value of oratory as a source of information about masculine ideology in ancient Greece but shows as well how oratory was...

This article uses qualitative material gathered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to construct a model of the rhetorical activity that occurs at the boundaries between diverse communities of practice working on complex sociotechnical systems. The authors reinterpret the notion of the boundary object current in science studies as a rhetorical construct that can foster cooperation and communication among the diverse members of heterogeneous working groups. The knowledge maps constructed by team members at LANL in their work on technical systems are boundary objects that can replace the demarcation exigence that so often leads to agonistic rhetorical boundary work with an integrative exigence. The integrative exigence realized by the boundary object of the knowledge map can help create a temporary trading zone characterized by rhetorical relations of symmetry and mutual understanding. In such cases, boundary work can become an effort involving integration and understanding rather than contest, controversy, and demarcation.