AbstractThis paper aims to discuss a well-known concept from argumentation theory, namely the principle of charity. It will show that this principle, especially in its contemporary version as formulated by Donald Davidson, meets with some serious problems. Since we need the principle of charity in any kind of critical discussion, we propose the way of modifying it according to the presupponendum—the rule written in the sixteenth century by Ignatius Loyola. While also corresponding with pragma-dialectical rules, it also provides additional content. This will be termed the dialectical principle of charity, and it offers a few steps to be performed during an argument in order to make sure that the participants understand each other well and are not deceived by any cognitive bias. The meaning of these results could be of great significance for argumentation theory, pragma-dialectics and the practice of public discourse as it enhances the principle of charity and makes it easier to apply in argumentation.

Rhetoric and psychoanalysis have a long history of entanglement. As Patrick Mahoney wrote, it would be “hard to exaggerate the historical and intrinsic significance of rhetoric for psychoanalysis”; Aristotle's Rhetoric could even be said to constitute “the first major psychological treatise in the West.”1 Diego Enrique Londoño, drawing on Juan Rigoli, has documented the influence of rhetoric on eighteenth and nineteenth century alienism,2 while Michael Billig, Risto Fried, and others have sought these links in Freud and later theorists.3 Although Jacques Lacan gets most of the credit, two pioneering women beat him to the punch in systematically introducing rhetorical concepts (especially metaphor): Gertrude Buck and Ella Freeman Sharpe.4 Rhetoricians, in turn, have enriched their craft through psychoanalytic thinking—first with Sigmund Freud (most notably in Kenneth Burke), then Carl Jung,5 with a great deal of later work inspired by Lacan,6 although authors like Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott also make occasional appearances.7Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is the latest effort to find resonances between rhetoric and psychoanalysis to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. The book is quite short and by necessity focuses on a few key thinkers—Burke represents rhetoric, while Freud and Lacan epitomize the psychoanalytic tradition. Although Adleman and Vanderwees find some connections that are sure to be of interest to psychoanalytically inclined rhetoricians, they unfortunately do so while almost entirely omitting decades of significant work forging these links. Todd McGowan's blurb declaring the book “a miracle” for describing connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis that “now seem clear and self-evident, but only because [Adleman and Vanderwees] have written this pathbreaking work” is sustainable only if one discounts the work cited above, plus many dozens of articles and books published by graduate students and junior rhetorical scholars. Lundberg's Lacan in Public, which undertakes a much more comprehensive study of the connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis, is cited only to support a minor claim about Quintilian; if one were to ask a rhetorician working with psychoanalysis today to recommend a single volume on the topic, Lacan in Public might very well be the choice, whatever the rhetorician's opinion of the book. While it is always easy to lodge criticisms based on the omission of one's idiosyncratic favorites, the absences in Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may set limits on the execution of its ambition. Rather than a continuation of scholarship on its overall topic, this book is a commentary on Lacan, Burke, and Freud narrowly, which does not diminish its contributions to that end but does make plain a missed opportunity to accomplish a larger goal.8Adleman and Vanderwees begin with a brief account of the “missed encounters” of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. Their central premise is that the two disciplines, “when closely scrutinized, often appear, uncannily, as each other's doppelgangers” due to their inquiries into human motives and their “perennial struggles with legitimacy” (1). This “peripheral status” as “third-class” denizens of “the republic of knowledge” is a major theme in the book (27). The authors claim that rhetoric disproportionately focuses attention on “pragmatic compositional concerns” while “almost none is allocated to bringing rhetorical theory to bear on . . . persuasion, influence, identifications, and propaganda” (9). This misconception is perhaps a product of the authors’ thin engagement with contemporary journals in the field (including this one), many of which do precisely this and few of which are cited. The phrase “new rhetoric” in the book's title might suggest some engagement with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaïm Perelman, but their work is not discussed—a particularly surprising choice because Lacan's own essay “Metaphor of the Subject” (which is cited) was written in direct response to Perelman. This is in line with a greater emphasis on the influence of psychoanalysis on rhetoric, rather than the converse or cross-pollination. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric therefore repeats the “missed encounters” it identifies rather than benefiting from this “unending conversation.”Despite the decision not to deeply commit to the literature about the intersection of its two primary fields of interest, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric makes a number of contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The first four chapters of the book engage with Burke fairly extensively. Chapter 1 explores the resonances between Burke and Freud, while Chapter 2 focuses closely on the concepts of symbolic action and attitude. The equation of attitude with Lacan's objet petit a, the “hallucinatory motor of desire” (45), is particularly interesting as an approach to the perennial problem of the relation between rhetoric and desire. Chapter 3 deals with identification as a concept in Freud and Burke with special reference to Burke's “Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” perhaps a particularly timely work which can be appreciated differently through a more thorough exposition of Freud's conceptual influence on Burke. Chapter 4 applies Burke's thought to conspiracy theories, an area where others have already leveraged psychoanalysis to good effect.9The last three chapters are somewhat more theoretical and, while the thread of Burke's thought persists, they lean toward Freud and Lacan. Chapter 5, about the origins of Freud's free association, is primarily of historical interest (and could perhaps benefit from engaging work on the pre-Freudian influence of rhetoric in psychology). Chapter 6 engages listening from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Chapter 7 is less a Lacanian theory of rhetoric than an engagement with Lacan's own rhetoric and its implications for theory. It ends with a fine aphorism, borrowed from Simone Weil, about how the wall dividing rhetoric and psychoanalysis might also be the medium of communication between them.Taken as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a worthwhile exposition of its specific foci, even though many other potential symbioses are left unexplored in this short text. For scholars of rhetoric whose familiarity with psychoanalysis is limited, but for whom Kenneth Burke or the topics of each chapter are of interest, this book can serve as a valuable place to begin thinking about psychoanalysis's confluence with rhetoric. Those knowledgeable about psychoanalysis outside the rhetorical tradition will likely find it helpful as well, especially because its treatment of rhetoric is accessible to non-specialists and forgoes the opportunity to grind intradisciplinary theoretical axes. Rhetoricians more extensively versed in psychoanalysis, however, will find particular points of interest, but may be somewhat frustrated by the book's failure to intervene in any of the important conversations happening at an intersection that Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may seem to inaugurate, but in fact is simply compelled to repeat.

David Landes, Duke University 11 November 2023 Abstract In light of cross-disciplinary interest in rethinking the conceptions of attention and attention economy, this paper conducts an archeology of Kenneth Burke’s concepts in order to construct a theory of attention implicit in his work. First, I overview key parts of rhetorical studies calling for rethinking the idea of attention. Then, I read Burke’s concepts for their implicit attentional aspects and implications. These findings are collected, listed into a glossary, and extrapolated into an account of Burkean attention, which I call “symbol-formed attention” to complement the reigning empirical theories of attention problematically borrowed from the sciences. I conclude by suggesting how Burke provides a rhetorical idea of “attention” as a terministic screen adaptively reconfigurable to situation and strategy. What would it mean to conceive “attention” rhetorically? Terms considered “psychological” have been reinterpreted to recover their elided rhetorical processes: Oakley’s rhetorical conception of cognition (Oakley) , Goffman’s rhetorically performed self (Goffman) , Gross’s rhetorical publicness of emotion (Gross) , Billig’s rhetorical argumentation that constitutes psychology (Billig) , and rhetorical studies’ formulation of public memory (Phillips et al.; Dickinson et al.) . Such projects “rhetoricize” the psychological by explicating implicit rhetoricalities and by reframing concepts of mechanistic motion into socialized action. In their rhetorical interpretation, these terms—cognition, self, emotion, social psychology, and memory—are terministic screens attuned to discursive purposes. Rhetoricizing scientized terms is one of dramatism’s imperatives. Dramatism provisions our vigilance to round out reductive terms, animate action in motion, and de-mechanize accounts of human motive in the face of homo symbolicus’ catastrophic inclinations. The salience of “attention” as a crisis term and as an inherency…

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

ABSTRACTWhat exactly is the Church? Is it primarily an institution? Or is it the people in its pews? And depending on the answer, what obligations do the people who constitute it in the present have toward the past? This essay utilizes the Pennsylvania State Legislative debate over clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a way to explore how communal commonplaces are activated in public argument and used to shift the dominant meanings of a community. Communal commonplaces act as a shorthand to bring audiences to a place of shared understanding while managing opposing lines of argument, images, and tropes. Understanding the Church as a communal commonplace illuminates how divergent meanings can be activated for wildly different and materially consequential purposes. Analyzing the Church helps us to understand how other communal commonplaces— the nation, for instance—manage opposing images of a community.KEYWORDS: Catholic Churchcommunitymetaphortropes Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 There is considerable debate over the terms used to refer to individuals who have experienced sexual violence. The term victim is often used in legal contexts, whereas survivor is common in antisexual violence advocacy circles (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network [RAINN]). Some individuals who have experienced sexual violence prefer one term over another (or neither), and that preference may change over time and in different contexts (Williamson and Serna). Throughout the essay, in an attempt to honor the terms individuals have chosen for themselves, I use whatever term appears in the text I am most recently quoting or analyzing. Otherwise, I follow RAINN’s practice of referring to individuals as victims when referring to their relationship to the criminal or civil legal system.2 While a partial Statute of Limitations reform bill was signed into Pennsylvania law in 2019, Rozzi’s look-back window was taken out of the bill and put forth as a constitutional amendment. Due to several significant setbacks, the question of the look-back window remains unresolved.3 Both within legal and academic circles, the idea of institutions expressing corporate agency is a contested one. This idea is a part of an ongoing debate over whether groups can exhibit the capacities and actions associated with theories of individual agency, such as the capacity for thought, intention, and moral blameworthiness (Smiley). In both its legal and public use, it is oftentimes used to capture both the tendency for institutions to be the subject of moral reproach, and the idea that individuals both share and enable each other’s actions within specific group structures (Williams). My use of corporate agency within this essay is meant to capture the sentiment of the Rozzi coalition, and their insistence that the structures of the Church enabled the concerted actions of multiple individuals, and thus that the institution could be held legally and morally responsible.

The author proposes a model for reading material characterized by “nested” literacies to decipher complex information where literacy operates in enmeshed and unpredictable ways. A case study of a nesting Allosaurus fragilis illustrates how deciphering multiple interacting literacies can identify areas needing technical communication intervention. In this context, multiple literacies include the usual reconstruction of Allosaurus fragilis in museum displays, the public discourses surrounding the nesting Allosaurus, and the associated scientific literature.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...

Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...

Students process information in two modes: cognitive and experiential. Case studies and stories are generally used as tools for experiential information processing. This article uses memes as an instructional tool to deliver information for experiential information processing in a public speaking course. The effectiveness of memes as an instructional tool is assessed through a questionnaire in terms of their overall effectiveness and its memorability, concreteness, and course orientation. The findings suggest that memes can be used effectively as instructional tools like stories to make the students understand, discuss, and engage with course content.

Kevin Musgrave's Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology breaks novel ground in rhetorical studies by unspooling the historical evolution and contemporary significance of a phenomenon so seemingly worldly as corporate personhood. This robust transdisciplinary conversation on economic theology is suasive in arraying its theoretical and methodological provisions for discerning how notions of the sacred are vouchsafed in the secular formations of modern economic life. And too, Persons of the Market is cogent in advancing the claim that by attuning to political economy's theological inheritances, critics can enter into a generative grappling with Western capitalist and racial power in the era of juridical personality.Corporations are people too. If this provocative, vexatious, and even baffling refrain of the neoliberal public sphere is an obvious exigence for this study, then Musgrave pierces its roots by using personhood to rethink historical relations among Christian theology and liberal capitalism. Departing from a common account of political economy, which looks to secularization to explain how an economic order founded on market rationality displaced the sovereign and divine right of kings, his hermeneutics traces “the gradual process of the emergence of a new social imaginary that occurs in and through theological grammars, not against them” (xiv). When we discern how such grammars historically authorize the capitalist order, we discover new relations of persons—between the person of Christian theology and that of political economy; between human and corporate personhood; among the person and an array of human and nonhuman, racialized, social and political, earthly and divine bodies; and more. To re-see political economy as relation rather than negation of theological thought, Musgrave situates the contending legacies of economic theology by taking Foucaultian biopolitics as a theoretical vocabulary for critiquing political liberalisms from within; then repairs against Foucault's atheistic framing with Agamben's reinstatement of the theological; then, finally, works from the current consensus in humanities studies that, one way or another, economic theology must inform political economic critique. Enfolding rhetorical dispositions—Black's cognizance of subjectivity, Burke's socioanagogical sensitivity—within a genealogical approach inflected by Nietzsche as well as Foucault, he offers economic theology as a register of meaning-making. It bears noting that this attunement does not seek “a unified and clear development of its conceptual basis in the teleological or dialectical unfolding of capitalist logic or in the concerted efforts of a unified bourgeois stratum” (xvi). Rather, by accenting rhetoric's ontological and material dimensions, it strives to grasp how notions of corporate personhood are seeded theoretically, supported juridically, and sustained politically in complex, even haphazard rhetorical dances between the theological and the secular, the religious and the rational.How do corporations become persons? In a quick synopsis: When courts rule that for legal purposes they are persons, and social and political worlds fall in line. Prior to, within, and beyond juridical decision-making, the bizarre corporation-to-person becoming has discursive and intellectual co-requisites. Before anything, corporate personhood incubates in the fecund environs of liberal political and economic thought, ripening in rhetorical traditions that—from Roman slave law to Trinitarian doctrine, from Adam Smith to Roberto Esposito—gradually economize the theological heredity of personhood with the recombinant genetics of self-ownership as a contractual right. From this mutative embryonic nurturing, a corporation assays to capture in studied succession the key thematic attributes of personhood: a Body, a Soul, a Voice, and a Conscience. Locating each acquisition at a chaotic yet formative juncture of U.S. political economic history, Musgrave narrates something like the four-stage tour of a body snatcher, the piecemeal making of a Frankenstein, but in this case, the suturing of the animate form strangely does not yield a monster. Quite the contrary, it refigures an entity “once understood as a monster of capital, an alien, and even a worm in the entrails of the nation” (45) as a normative model of personhood so elegant that corporeal persons can only aspire.The Body is, first, seized from the conflicted terrain of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the mid-late nineteenth century. The corporation wrested embodiment from the incorporation conflicts that, emerging around the development of commerce and the amalgamation of actual corpora in the body public, claimed the Chinese laborer as embodied host for rising racio-economic anxiety: “If the nation was civilized, Christian, prosperous, and pure—that is to say, white, in all of its coded language—how could it incorporate a people that was deemed biologically incapable of reaching these statuses?” (29). Musgrave's impressively detailed analysis shows how the corporation, once anathema in Jacksonian democratic sentiments, sails to legal protection thanks in large measure to the theologically-soaked rhetoric of one eventual Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field. Through two cases that laid jurisprudential ground for the landmark 1886 Waite Court ruling that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, Field liberalized corporate law vis-à-vis the right of Chinese laborers. To be clear, these rulings were far less about protecting the laborer's right to safe and legal working conditions and far more about preserving the industry's right to exploit their productive capacities for profit. How are we not surprised? No synthetic fabrication, corporate corporealization requires the appropriation and expenditure of the actual material bodies of racialized persons. By marking the Chinese worker as “the racial other of the corporation” (51), these legalities stood the corporation as an embodied symbol of white Western capitalist rationality, securing its ascendancy through the symbolic hierarchies of personhood.The Soul is next, as early twentieth century Progressive activism placed the corporation in need of salvation. Musgrave's theologically-attuned economic rhetorical analysis finds early masters of mass communication turning to the cultural power of advertising not only to promote the corporation's commercial products but also to “personalize” the corporation itself. Merging Protestant convictions with free markets ideals, the new discourse of evangelical capital mobilized the “great parables of advertising” within secularized versions of Christian spiritual themes—shepherd and flock, confession, transformation, redemption—to renew the corporation as a “benevolent shepherd” (63), which could minister a lost public to salvation. Then it's Voice, as political antagonism toward the New Deal and the affects of the Cold War vitalized godly libertarian businessmen to better align Christianity with capitalism, launching a new wave of jurisprudential activity that granted the corporation legal voice.Lastly, Musgrave offers Conscience, as the nearly-personified corporation forges from the evangelical neoliberalism of Reagan, to the paleoconservative backlash, to Trump's successful rallying of conservatives around key issues of conscience—that is, “freedom from a godless and all-powerful state apparatus that polices language through a soft totalitarian discourse of political correctness on the one hand, and mandates that companies abandon their religious convictions in the name of state-sanctioned multiculturalism on the other” (140). With each successive acquisition, the corporation more fully realizes personhood, even as personhood is itself flattened and recast as “a mask that never fully adheres to the face that wears it” (3), reordered as a dispositif of techniques and technologies for systematizing biopolitical bodies.The operative claim of this book is that our best hopes for resistance against neoliberalism do not lie with rational persuasion. Rather, they depend on our capacity to enter onto an existential plane where we may query our theological commitments and convictions about human personhood. Rhetorical readers of many persuasions will appreciate this book's potential to incline critique and analysis in various directions, not least into further discussion of the intriguing possibility with which the book closes: the potential for rhetorical thinking on economic theology to instantiate more humane and democratic configurations of personhood by adopting a post-human humanist orientation to life as a gift. If “the cosmic and existential levels of economic theology” (175), as Musgrave argues, suffuse our public and political worlds, then scholars of communications and rhetoric indeed stand to gain by engaging them—as do scholars of economic theology, arguably, by inviting the contributions of communications and rhetoric. What new future may emerge for a rhetorical critique of economy that better apperceives how sacred and secular understandings of the person share affinity? What might economic rhetorical inquiry discover when it looks both at and beyond the clear-cut theologies of evangelical capital discourses? How might theological attunements that surpass Judeo-Christian adherences to also account for non-Western, non-white, and non-dominant belief systems open rhetorical studies to more diversely cultural knowledges of moral and market order, and thus better equip them for critique? Persons of the Market poses these questions; they are ours now to answer.

This edited collection offers an array of essays forwarding the rhetorical work constituting the political activity of and concerning Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although scholars have certainly interrogated Latin American experiences in the United States and across the Western Hemisphere (some of whom have contributed to this volume), I can think of no other collection in rhetorical studies that supplies the kind of birds-eye-view of Latin America and its political landscape(s) as a whole. The edited volume is unabashedly transnational in its case studies, although not each individual case study is transnationally oriented, and the authors invited by the editors claim homes across the Western Hemisphere (e.g., the United States, Columbia, Argentina). In short, this book embodies and takes care to fulfill its commitment to presenting “rhetorics of democracy in the Americas.”Although it is customary to provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters in a book review, the chapter summaries provided by the editors in the collection's Introduction are superbly written and need not be replicated here. I would encourage those interested in their summaries to access the “Introduction,” which is made available through the publisher's website.1 The book follows, flexibly, a conventional Part I “theory” and Part II “case study” structure that readers can navigate easily and according to their own needs. Each chapter stands alone quite well. Even so, in what follows I retrace the chapters and articulate what I think are the major questions the collection and each essay provokes. For, while this book is commendable for initiating a conversation, it would be a mistake to treat this volume as more than an entry into the exploration of “rhetoric of democracy in the Americas.” Thus, I provide a bridge between the entry point that I think the collection offers and further lines of inquiry that I believe it spurs.One of the collection's strengths, as I have stated, lies in its focus on the “Americas.” Given this focus, readers wishing to find how the notion of an “America” informs rhetorical or democratic theory must reflect on how they might extend the work provided by these chapters. For example, editors claim a “constitutive” notion of rhetoric over an “instrumental” view in the Introduction (15), but I find that most case studies adopt the language of “instrumental” rhetoric in their examinations (e.g., chapter six's discussion of “strategies”). Though readers might not care too much about whether one adopts an instrumental or constitutive view of rhetoric, I point out this feature to highlight that the collection's presumption of this distinction evinces its reliance upon conventional rhetorical theory. That most case studies interrogate “rhetoric” as a “tool” or “device” to be leveraged to some end underscores how these case studies recontextualize traditional rhetorical theory within Latin American spaces rather than spurring retheorizations of rhetorical inquiry. Similar presumptions about “democracy” and its supposed “ideal” also become manifest in each essay when trying to define democracy. The “Introduction” certainly provides some guidance by claiming democracy as “among the vital concepts in rhetorical studies” (5), and as a governmental form offering citizens a “promise” of “good things” (5–6). The collection's case studies, nonetheless, do not furnish much about what “democracy” entails or how democracy in Latin America differs from, in content and form, that in the United States or anywhere else. Democracy is presumed as a context for each study and an ideal in which rhetoric flourishes.Such presumptions, though not misguided or wrong, highlight not a problem with the collection as much as they illuminate opportunities for other scholars to take up. Christa Olson's chapter, as I read it, articulates a notion of the telluric in contrast to the traditional topos to encourage readers to consider new material stakes in rhetorical discourse—a materialism based in “ideas” of Latin America. Though gesturing toward the operationalization of the telluric in her beautifully written essay, Olson's proposal demonstrates how we might interrupt the conventional reliance on the “commonplace” for studying rhetoric in América. Cortez's essay does something similar to Olson in that he encourages a departure from a familiar concept—subalternity. Though offering the most philosophically minded take in the collection, his take-down of the “decolonial imaginary” underscores how studies involving Latin America pose a complex and inescapable problematic, namely, how to conceptualize Latin America without reproducing the very colonial structure rendering it, in the words of Walter Mignolo and other decolonial scholars, a fiction. While I personally remain skeptical that “rhetoric” is capable of resolving the issues Cortez raises, given the imperial stakes “rhetoric” qua art implicates, Cortez's argument that the terms we use to characterize and study “Latin America” cannot be presumed to give it a voice spurs scholars to reflect on the classifications used to identify non-dominant rhetorics.Although Part I begins with theoretical explorations, its remaining chapters take on a more practical tone. Chapters 3–5 address a different subject related to but not limited to U.S. relationships with Latin America(ns). De los Santos's chapter tackles the rhetorical contributions of migrants, a work that he is curiously committed to distance from prior work on citizenship despite suturing his study to “ancient Greece” (84). I find De los Santos's work to be quite similar to, for example, Josue David Cisneros's for its emphasis on a discursively constructed yet politically imagined citizenship. Nevertheless, perhaps the most surprising theme—or not, depending on the reader—was the prevalence of former President Donald Trump. I say surprising because, while President Donald Trump has had quite an influence on recent rhetorical studies, Trump's relationship to Latin America is not any more appalling, xenophobic, sly, or even pretentious than past U.S. presidents. I am not denying that this former President might have altered the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere during his administration, but I think that the ways in which chapters center Trump's influence suggest that his actions are an aberration. Still, while these scholars view more dissonance than coherence in U.S.-Latin American relations, I think that the essays foster inquiry along its opposing line, namely, answering the question of how consistently presidencies have negotiated and enforced a power imbalance between the United States and Latin America.The chapters encourage not necessarily a complete reassessment of “migrants,” “immigration,” or even “American Exceptionalism” as much as they compel revisitations of what we might call “familiar” rhetorics to impart a peculiarity to otherwise recognizable themes. That peculiarity is important, for, recalling Olson and Cortez, the ways in which we critically interrogate “rhetoric” in and through Latin America cannot be presumed to simply reinscribe what we already know about “rhetoric” or “democracy.” Indeed, as Butterworth underscores, “American Exceptionalism” takes a particular form when Cuba is involved, and it takes on a peculiar form when it involves relations with Latin America. Viewed thus, each of the chapters in Part 1 encourages scholars to come back to familiar rhetorics to “question the narratives of democracy” that we take for granted and presume to be universally operative.Part II takes up the theme of “Problematizing and Reconstructing Democracy in Latin America,” with each chapter proffering not only a unique perspective on politics in Latin America but a discrete take on “rhetorical” study within politically resonant moments. Privileging as it does not only Latin American regions but Latin American scholars, this section showcases what scholarship done in and through Latin America might look like for future scholars across the Western Hemisphere. More concretely, these essays magnify senses of rhetoric and rhetorical study that scholars interested in prioritizing Latin America might assume in their own work. Focused on a variety of politically rich subjects such as corruption (chapter 6), rhetorical agency (chapter 7), the religious right (chapter 8), presidential rhetoric (chapters 9 and 10), and, finally, crisis (chapter 11), these case studies diversify the subjects with which rhetoricians can—and should—grapple. At the same time, they underscore how these subjects might be theorized in and through Latin America. This is not to say that the subjects are exclusive to Latin America or that certain themes need to be relegated to Latin America. Rather, if I consider how many studies have been written on “corruption” in the United States, I might have to consider alternative vocabularies (e.g., racism, bureaucracy, morality, etc.) to expand my inquiry, since there are simply too few studies of U.S. political corruption outside of Bruce Gronbeck's 1978 essay—an essay nearly fifty years old! Studying rhetoric in Latin America is, these essays suggest, productive of the kinds of questions that rhetoric scholars across the Americas must consider. For, what happens in Latin America cannot be presumed to be exclusive to Latin America.Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas challenges scholars to take on two distinct but related tasks. First, the collection urges us (U.S.-based scholars) to consider how we might employ familiar tools to study rhetorics in Latin America. No longer can or should we view rhetoric in Latin America as a uniquely Latin American operation in need of new tools. Even though calls from Olson and De los Santos to consider Latin America in “Américan” rhetoric creep toward a decade old (!), this collection encourages us not to provide comprehensive work but responsible work in interrogating relationships between politics and rhetoric in “the Americas.” U.S.-based scholars (of which I am one) must begin to view themselves as Américan scholars.Second, if U.S.-based scholars assume the identity of an “Américan scholar,” this collection encourages us to deploy and harness Latin American histories to theorize “rhetoric” and “democratic” politics across the Americas—including the United States. In what sense must we alter our rhetorical theories and vocabularies in light of the way persuasive communication is enacted and performed in Latin American spaces? How might we conceptualize rhetoric's relationship to “democracy” in light of the ways in which Latin American rhetorics engage with the United States? With other Latin American nations? With their own histories and traditions? Alejandra Vitale's essay (chapter 10), I suggest, demonstrates this concretely by revisiting how our conception of ēthos might be transformed when considering the rhetorical work accomplished through an Argentinian presidential farewell address. As readers will see, Vitale is no stranger to U.S.-based rhetorical scholarship, nor a stranger to Argentinian scholarship and culture. In the essay, Vitale demonstrates how conventional understandings of ēthos, a rhetorical concept that U.S.-based scholars might cringe at for its neo-Aristotelian status, might be disrupted and expanded by prioritizing a uniquely Latin American political context.The collection edited by Drs. Angel, Butterworth, and Gómez shows paths of inquiry that I think hold promise for graduate students looking to integrate more transnational approaches to their study or those wishing to study politics outside of U.S. borders. It is an exhibition in how to overcome theoretical challenges to the study of Latin American rhetorics, as well as how to problematize conventional understandings of rhetoric in light of having studied and taken seriously Latin American politics. Moreover, I think that The Pennsylvania State University Press deserves credit for expanding the repertoire of Latinx rhetorical inquiries with both the 24th volume and this 25th volume in the “Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation” series. That a couple of this press's latest volumes have focused on scholarship related to Latinx politics highlights how now is the time to strike the anvil and continue to pursue such a rich scholarly endeavor.

When the Medium Was the Mission is an account of the ways in which religious discourse and network infrastructure were entangled in popular imagination of nineteenth century U.S. Americans. To trace the “surprisingly religious origin” (1) of communications networks, the author analyzes the case of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable, a project that exemplifies the utopian hopes undergirding infrastructural developments in the antebellum period. Supp-Montgomerie makes clear from the outset that, as an instance of infrastructural development, the Atlantic cable was an abject failure. It rarely worked and broke down completely after a few short weeks (5). Nonetheless, the “successful” completion of the line, which ran from Newfoundland to Ireland, was heralded at the time by enthusiastic observers as an event of world-historical significance (3–5). Supp-Montgomerie's account is an attempt to understand the roots of public enthusiasm for an occurrence that, on its surface, appears to be no more than a failed attempt at laying an undersea cable. She argues that the true impact of the 1858 telegraph was far reaching and continues to shape our understanding of networks. U.S. Americans, specifically white Protestant Christians, saw the electromagnetic telegraph as a means to connect and thereby “civilize” the world through technology. The work of building telegraphic networks was simultaneously the work of God and the work of the nation since, in the popular imaginary of the time, the two were aligned. According to Supp-Montgomerie, the topoi around which this religious public's hopes and dreams converged—“connection, speed, unity and immediacy” (209)—remain central to how we discuss networks today.At the heart of this work is a theoretical investigation into the ways in which a religious rhetoric of connectivity (i.e., body to soul, believer to God, church to community) preceded the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph and helped stabilize its symbolic place in the social imaginary (80). The telegraph became the metaphoric embodiment of an overarching worldview concerning the United States’ place in the global community. It was rhetorically framed as the herald of a unified Christian world conjoined by a fast, reliable, friction-free network—a dream that persists to this day (albeit in less overtly religious terms) (11). As the author explains, “Religious actors put telegraph technology in place around the world, religious language described this new mode of global communication, religious imaginaries covered what the worldwide telegraph network would become, and religious forms of communication indelibly marked the idiomatic conventions of networks” (1). According to Supp-Montgomerie, tracing the indelible mark such religious rhetoric left on the social imaginary is crucial for understanding the underlying teleological drive toward ever-increasing connectivity. Namely, this framework erases other important aspects of how networks actually function, including through disconnection (21–23). As she explains, “network disconnections always appear problematic not because they disrupt networks (networks expect and even rely on them) but because they disrupt the religiously empowered myth that networks connect” (3). This persistent “disconnect” between how networks actually function and how they are imagined to work did not arise through sheer chance.Chapter one focuses on the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire. While it may seem odd to begin an inquiry into the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable in Istanbul, Supp-Montgomerie explains that “U.S. religious activity abroad helped form and strengthen emerging—and increasingly protestant—imaginaries of networks at home” (38, emphasis in original). Protestant missionaries saw themselves as “primary agents of the circulation of [U.S. American] ‘civilization,’” (36) and as such their efforts included a healthy dose of technological evangelism. For them, the telegraph was more than a communicative technology, it was “marvelous material evidence of God's work on earth” (37) that could “awe others into a particularly Christian reverence” (37). In this religious framework, telegraphic networks were seen as a vital “partner” (37) in the spread of Christianity. Missionaries treated the Ottoman's embrace of telegraphic networks as proof that “any possibility of Christian conversion required first a step of familiarity with European and U.S. technologies” (44–45). In reality, the Ottoman telegraphic network was both faulty and fractured, and building it helped fuel local resistance against imperial rule (59).Chapter two focuses on the disconnect between public enthusiasm for the Atlantic cable and its technical failure. Supp-Montgomerie argues that the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph as the telegraph was not the result of its technological superiority or ubiquity, as is popularly imagined. The electromagnetic telegraph was too expensive for the general public (105) and largely unreliable as a communicative medium (115–16). Furthermore, in 1858 the electromagnetic telegraph was simply one of several forms of telegraphy then occupying a place in public discourse. Among these were the “grapevine telegraph” used by Black Americans during slavery (98) and the “optical telegraph,” which often supplemented the less-reliable electromagnetic telegraph (114). By the century's end, however, these other forms of telegraphy had been largely forgotten, swept aside by public enthusiasm for electromagnetic networks. Unlike the other telegraphs outlined above, the electromagnetic telegraph fueled the fantasy of “a divinely ordained human destiny” to unify the world through a combination of U.S. Protestantism and technological know-how (93). By examining electromagnetic telegraphy alongside other contemporary telegraphs, Supp-Montgomerie “complicates the naturalization of a number of characteristics that we now think of as inherent affordances of networks: that they are national, global, politically neutral, technological, connective, and even fully functional” (83). What we learn instead is that networks are as much affective as technological.In chapter three, Supp-Montgomerie turns her attention to the utopian movements of the mid-nineteenth century as a way of further demonstrating how the religious fervor of the period shaped public reactions to infrastructural developments. Rather than attempting to analyze the entire movement, Supp-Montgomerie uses the Oneida Community as a case study in the overlap between “moral and technological perfection[ism]” (128). Utopian communities like Oneida, she argues, may appear the products of fringe enthusiasts but actually serve as a fitting synecdoche for the utopian underpinnings of an emerging global imaginary (127). These experimental communities “organized themselves around the ambitious assurance that they could make a perfect world in the present” (128), thus sharing in the broader “popular imagination of a world united and pacified by electric communication technology” (129). By taking a “highly local” approach to her analysis, the author demonstrates that even the most insular communities internalized the prevailing “religious logic of . . . a world united by communication technology” (135). The Oneida Community members understood the Atlantic telegraph as “a compelling metaphor for their own utopian endeavor, as a sign of the bridging of this world with God's, and as a primary means for the unification of humanity through communication technology” (136). As such, “the Oneida Community represents a broader and emphatically mainstream U.S. movement that saw an ideal reality become accessible in unprecedented ways” (132). In the social imaginary, religion and technology played equal and mutually dependent roles in realizing a unified globe. By negotiating the disconnect between the world they envisioned and the limits of the technology before them, religiously motivated actors like the Oneidans “cemented connection into technological and social forms as a given, no matter the reality of their promise” (160).In chapter four, the author focuses on the “simple signaling” of the Atlantic telegraph (167). As mentioned above, in the rare instances when the Atlantic cable worked as intended, it required slow, painstaking labor to make sense of the garbled messages sent across its expanse (170–72). The overwhelming majority of transmissions consisted of little more than a steady stream of electrical impulses meant to signal that the line had not broken. While these signals were meaningless in and of themselves, “this meaningless telegraphic language bore profoundly meaningful effects” (172) for a public transfixed by the “grand imaginary of global connection” (167). By focusing on this steady stream of content-free impulses, Supp-Montgomerie makes the claim that it was the “infrastructural form” of the electromagnetic telegraph itself that was imagined as meaningful rather than the messages it often failed to transmit (174). Because of the affective, religious meaning attached to the very idea of connectivity, a cable that was “primarily a medium for the failure of communication” (171) was made to stand in as proof of the inevitability, or even immanence, of a global, Christian network. In other words, “the telegraph relocated meaning from content to technology” (167) so that the development of network infrastructure became “both the message and the mission” of its champions (174).When the Medium Was the Mission challenges many assumptions about how we understand the rhetorical relationship between infrastructure and imagination. In a brief epilogue, Supp-Montgomerie explains that her aim in this work was to “sketch out a possible characterization” of “the relationship between the original and contemporary networks” that will “invite further inquiry into this particular genealogy” (204). As she continues, “both the telegraph and the internet are networks hailed through imaginaries that deny some of the most basic elements of their functioning” (204). While our network imaginary pictures a world of ever-increasing connectivity, the spaces between connections are what make networks possible at all. Networks do not only (or even primarily) connect; they also exclude, and the latter is just as important to their overall functioning. It is only when networks “fail”—for example, when we encounter an unexpected and undesired disconnection (Why won't Netflix load? It was working five minutes ago!)—that we encounter this constitutive feature of the form itself. To the author, disconnection should be central to how we understand networks, since “failure is part of how networks work” (206). The refusal to attend to disconnection is problematic since networks are imaginaries as much (or more) than they are infrastructure. This governs how infrastructure serves political ends. When the imaginary of the infrastructure is one of unmitigated, utopian goodness, it can lead to “technological and social practices that feed the omnivorous appetite of connection as such: every element that falls outside the purview of the network must be integrated into the broader structure . . . effectively excluding from recognizable existence anything that breaks from network logic” (206). By attending to the religious origins of this imaginary, we can better understand that the “defining elements of ‘the digital age’ . . . are not contemporary technological affordances but the effects of a habitual set of cultural practices” (209).

Socio-cultural and practice-based approaches to literacy, associated with the (New) Literacy Studies, having emerged in the 1980s, nowadays are an established research field. Based on in-depth research, in many contexts and countries, the (New) Literacy Studies has much to offer to teachers and policymakers. And yet this impressive body of work has had little impact on policy. Taking as my example England, I ask what research has shaped policy in the past 30 years and why socio-cultural and practice-based studies have been ignored. Thus, I address the question of where the field has been and where it should go to from the point of view of its relationship with policy. My focus is on the initial teaching of literacy in primary (elementary) schools. I discuss three factors which I believe contribute to our struggles to influence policy: the policy environment itself and how it has changed; the wider economy of literacy research and what knowledge counts in the interface between research and policy; and, finally, the role of the media and public discourse in the relationship between research and policy. I end with questions about what we may have missed and where the field might want to go.

September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 As I detail in the book I’m writing, Hitler received intensive, rhetorical training in public speaking and propaganda in the German military’s demobilization force after the First World War.2 He actually says there are six elements of eloquence, but the fifth entry in his enumeration is just a list of analogies he thinks are incontrovertible.

This article argues that latrinalia is an important and potentially beneficial source of public writing deserving of educators’ and researchers’ attention. I start by comprehensively reviewing the research record of latrinalia in order to demonstrate its status as a legitimate academic field while surfacing the major trends, questions, and fault lines of latrinalic scholarship. Then, after outlining how most research on latrinalia takes place on college campuses, I trace recent work on spatial practice which implicitly advocates for public discourses like latrinalia in order to make the case that bathroom graffiti is an important but often neglected source of public writing and rhetoric that aligns with contemporary conceptions of composition theory and holds pedagogic potential for the teaching of writing. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and unresolved questions of the field of latrinalia before sketching future directions for research. “The slight scratching of many of the Maeshowe Runes, and the consequent irregularity and want of precision in the forms… of what, it must be remembered, are mere graffiti.” (D. Wilson, Britanno—Roman Inscriptions: With Critical Notes, 1863)

Digital communication and digital oratory have become an integral part of today’s workplace. This research discusses an innovative assessment tool that uses digital oratory and digital video along with YouTube to create opportunities for the students to develop self-efficacy in digital oratory and public speaking. The measurement of the effectiveness through a survey questionnaire displays that the assessment tool met its learning objectives. The assessment tool fostered self-efficacy in digital oratory and improved digital communication knowledge and skills. The article also discusses the challenges and recommendations for implementing this assessment tool in various contexts.

This article draws on Toulmin’s model of argumentation to propose a way of engaging with controversial topics in ways that require not only the assertion of a point of view, but attentive listening to contrasting beliefs. Given the paucity of models of respectful listening in public discourse, school becomes a place where teachers can provide opportunities for contentious discussions to be conducted through civic discourse. The article begins with an outline of Toulmin’s model, with an emphasis on warranting examples so that they serve as evidence for a claim, and engages with opposing viewpoints for a reasoned rebuttal and synthesis. The article then suggests that the topic of school dress codes would be a fruitful topic of student inquiry and argumentation, given the ideological basis of a dress code and the many differences of opinion surrounding them. Such instruction is illustrated through a method that relies on inductive reasoning and discussion as the basis for generating ideas in argumentative writing. The article concludes with a view of writing pedagogy that promotes responsible argumentation in light of critical responses that lead to a synthesis and extension of learning.

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy.

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

This article investigates whether Attic orators use prosodic and phonological effects to convey meaning (iconicity). Four hypotheses are explored: 1) heavy syllables tend to occur more often at period boundaries than within the sentence; 2) heavy syllables convey solemnity of tone and, in narrative, low dynamicity; 3) clustering of unvoiced consonants correlates with unpleasantness of tone or content; 4) alliteration is used when the author wishes to draw particular attention to the argument. Quantitative analyses for these hypotheses yield few positive results, so that we should be sceptical concerning the importance of iconicity in Attic rhetoric.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky Rafał Toczko Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation, Supplements to Vigilae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 166. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021. 195 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-44668-7. Augustine's rhetoric is experiencing a new wave of scholarly interest. Michael Glowasky's PhD monographic thesis is among the growing number of explorations of Augustine's rhetorical practice, unique in focusing solely on Augustine the preacher. The introduction (1-29) first presents the reasons for selecting this subject and reflects on the problems of studying Augustine's sermons as a coherent corpus. Next, he proposes classifying them into three categories based on the audience's "stages of spiritual maturation" (15): catechumens, neophytes and the faithful. This is novel, as scholars usually discern between catechumens and others, because the rules of participation in liturgy differed between them. Glowasky corroborates his decision with passages from two sermons (353 and 392) in which Augustine makes a parallel between the age of innocence of the newly baptised and infants. Glowasky's division of audiences into three categories is crucial for the whole study, constituting the basis for the selection of material and the method of communicating findings. The grouping is simple and elegant. Closing the introduction, Glowasky outlines his method for approaching Augustine's use of rhetoric and scripture in these three groups. First, he redefines the classical concept of narratio, to apply it more broadly as a way of communication that may replace logical argument to "communicate deeper meaning with more persuasive and emotive force" (23). Glowasky assumes that Augustine drew here on a long Latin rhetorical tradition and made use of narratio in two senses. Firstly, narratio is the story God tells the faithful through creation, history and Scripture. Secondly, the Scripture was understood as the narratio of the sermons. Furthermore, he assumes Augustine used a different type of narratio addressing different groups, applying a forensic narratio addressing neophytes, a deliberative type addressing catechumens, and, preaching to the faithful, "draws out more fully the dialectical quality of narratio." Chapter 2 (30-56) explores the notion of narratio more deeply, building on John O'Banion's controversial claim that, for Quintilian, narratio was [End Page 207] "the orator's fundamental art" (341) and was understood as a thought process and way of communicating rather than a part of speech.1 Glowasky believes that Augustine shared this tradition and hence saw narratio as "a ready-made tool to be used to refer to the strategic ordering of temporal events in order to convey an author's particular meaning" (36). Narratio could substitute logical argument and be more persuasive if ordered properly. Glowasky again turns to O'Banion and Kenneth Burke to explain that Augustine treated "narratio primarily as a tool for interpreting Scripture" (41) but, contrary to these two scholars, links this thinking with the prior rhetorical tradition. This tradition seemingly emphasised that narratio proved to be the best tool for conveying meaning. Augustine presented Scripture as a coherent and reliable narratio in De doctrina Christiana and employed it as the narratio of his sermons. Glowasky bases his thesis on O'Banion article on Quintilian. However, Quintilian says various things about narratio throughout his vast work—some contradictory. But the main difficulty is that nothing suggests that Augustine knew the Institutiones well. They were not used as manuals of rhetoric at that time, when teaching was dominated by De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and many books drawing on them, authored by Marius Victorinus, Grillius and other rhetores latini minores. Chapter 3 (57-88) is dedicated to proving the thesis that Augustine's sermons for catechumens seek to persuade them to enter the Catholic Church as the only place where salvation is attainable (57). Glowasky observes how Augustine's technical advice concerning preaching to the catechumens from De catechizandis rudibus shares much with Cicero's view of narratio in judicial oratory. Augustine's two sample speeches from the same book focus on describing the character of the Church through narratio...

Communication apprehension can lead to professional challenges for individuals, teams, and organizations. This is the first study of communication apprehension that involved a randomized national survey of working adults in the United States and captured broad representation in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, managerial status, and other factors. The study showed that communication apprehension is common, including in group discussions, meetings, interpersonal situations, and public speaking. It is significantly more common among early-career professionals, women, introverted professionals, and professionals with anxiety. Interpersonal situations appear to be the situations in which contemporary professionals are most likely to experience high communication apprehension. This study suggests more attention is needed to address communication apprehension in interpersonal and group situations. It also frames communication apprehension as a matter of inclusion and team performance.

The role of emerging media is often central in stories of presidential campaigns, from Herbert Hoover's embrace of radio to broadcast his speeches and John F. Kennedy's success in the first televised debate to the contemporary adoption of social media by Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The presidency has always adapted to (and been shaped by) emerging media. Studies of U.S. media history have the potential to capture the changing norms of presidential rhetoric. To that end, Mel Laracey's new book provides an important antecedent to modern presidential media use with its account of Thomas Jefferson's reliance on print media to influence public opinion. Just as Brian Ott and Greg Dickinson studied Trump's “Twitter Presidency,” Laracey argues that Jefferson created a “Newspaper Presidency.”1 This book expands Laracey's earlier work by focusing on Jefferson's creation of the National Intelligencer, a partisan Washington D.C. newspaper that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the American public via what was essentially “the state-controlled media of its time” (1–2).Laracey's argument is twofold. First, he claims that the Intelligencer served as a “presidential newspaper,” a medium that allowed Jefferson to make direct appeals to the public in a way that challenges Jeffrey K. Tulis's concept of the rhetorical presidency. Second, Laracey uses his exhaustive reading of the newspaper's contents to show how Jefferson used public appeals not just to sway public opinion in favor of his own election, but to also define his political ideals and convince the American public to adopt them. The latter point offers an opportunity for rhetoricians beyond the focus on political and media history; the implications point to a consideration of public opinion, national identity, and the articulation of ideology through news media. Laracey reveals how the Intelligencer allowed Jefferson to avoid direct engagement in partisan politics, in line with a Constitutional view of the presidency, while still shaping public opinion, as in Tulis's rhetorical presidency (2).The book moves chronologically through Jefferson's presidency. Chapter two outlines the creation of the Intelligencer and establishes Jefferson's influence on and strategic use of the newspaper. This supports Laracey's claim that both the public and Jefferson's Federalist rivals read the paper as an extension of Jefferson's rhetoric and political platform. Chapters three and four examine coverage of the 1800 election and the aftermath of Jefferson's victory, which he claimed both for himself and for Republicanism. Chapter five collects the Intelligencer's defenses of Jefferson's appointments and removals of federal officers, unpacking a Jeffersonian vision of executive power that reflects Vanessa Beasley's work on the “unitary executive.”2 Chapters six and seven turn their focus to the judiciary, specifically how the Intelligencer covered the Marbury v. Madison case and the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. These chapters trace the changing Republican understanding of “judicial review’” and correct what Laracey views as omissions in the existing historical accounts of Jefferson's role in the impeachment. The concluding chapters analyze news coverage of the Louisiana Purchase and the 1804 presidential election.One of Laracey's primary contributions is a critique/expansion of Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency.3 In Tulis's story of the presidency as an institution, Woodrow Wilson oversaw an early twentieth-century shift in presidential communication in which presidents began to appeal directly to the people to establish support for their policies and pressure Congress. Tulis worried that this new “rhetorical presidency” threatened the traditional Constitutional model that had dominated the eighteenth century. As many rhetoricians have done, Laracey complicates Tulis's timeline. Reiterating the thesis of his first book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, Laracey argues that “presidentially sponsored newspapers . . . were widely understood to be speaking on behalf of a president's administration,” allowing presidents to “engage in a form of mass political communication” (3).4 Through various examples of Jefferson's Federalist opponents recognizing the Intelligencer as carrying Jefferson's messages (sometimes, quite literally through the use of editorials that Laracey claims Jefferson published under a pseudonym), Laracey positions the newspaper as a site of presidential rhetoric. Of particular interest to rhetoricians is the argument that, in addressing the public, Jefferson went beyond garnering political support and into the realm of political definition. While the book's first goal is to provide a detailed history that responds to Tulis, it also considers “how the treatment of various topics in the Intelligencer can expand scholarly understanding of the strategies and goals of Jefferson and his allies as they confronted those issues” (15–16).With this aspect of Informing a Nation, Laracey establishes generative grounds for analyzing how Jefferson used a newspaper to address public opinion and, by extension, attempted to persuade “the people” into embracing Republican ideals. While a rhetorician might want to extend many of Laracey's arguments into a larger conceptualization of how early nineteenth-century presidents understood the role of public opinion, this is the most promising part of the book for scholars of presidential rhetoric, and it is best exemplified by the third and fourth chapters. These chapters go beyond campaigning to show that Jefferson was not just making the case for his own presidency, but for his vision of a nation. In other words, he was articulating a set of values and ideals that we might understand as Jeffersonian Republicanism.Public opinion mattered to Jefferson, Laracey argues, because his Republican ideals positioned him as representing the will of the people. In turn, Jefferson's democratic theory called for a “body politic” of an “informed citizenry” (6). Consequently, the people required information to make decisions, and the Intelligencer served that function by “presenting to the American public the information, ranging from the factual to the constitutional and even philosophical, that Jefferson and his allies thought would facilitate responsible popular control of the government, a bedrock principle of Jeffersonian Republicanism” (39). As Samuel Harrison Smith (the newspaper's editor) said, the Intelligencer would publish both “unperverted facts” and “correct political ideas,” the correct ideas in this case being Republican ideas (8). As Laracey summarizes, “Issue by issue, the Intelligencer was constructing for its readers a communal understanding of what being a Jeffersonian Republican meant,” culminating in what the Intelligencer portrayed as a victory of Republicanism over Federalism in Jefferson's 1804 re-election (185, 192). In this sense, Laracey pushes the public opinion framework into a borderline rhetorical history about Jefferson's vision for the young nation and its ideals. This history traces the development of Republicanism as a discourse and analyzes Jefferson's emerging rhetoric of nationhood as he argued for his own interpretation of what the U.S. presidency should be.Still, the book is first and foremost a political history, and to that end, many of the contributions are of most interest to those directly engaged in either Jefferson's presidency or the political debates of the day, such as the interplay between Jefferson and the early development of the U.S. Supreme Court. Laracey makes several corrections to the historical record, especially regarding the impeachment of Samuel Chase. While traditional histories described Chase as remaining mostly silent until the trial, Laracey uncovers an editorial by Chase that the Intelligencer published in April of 1804 in which he directly attacked Jefferson. Laracey also uses continuing coverage of the trial to critique narratives that Jefferson eventually lost interest in the impeachment, showing that it was a Republican priority even after the final verdict in Chase's favor. Likewise, the fourth chapter further contextualizes Jefferson's decision to give his Annual Message to Congress in writing, referencing a series of editorials that portrayed the move as a strategic decision to reflect Republican values and not, as Tulis suggested, a decision based on Jefferson's Constitutional understandings of the presidency (90–93).At just under two hundred pages, Informing A Nation is a well-written, briskly paced look at Jefferson's newspaper presidency, though its main argument and historical emphasis create a few limits. Given his framing as a critique of Tulis, Laracey occasionally overstates the connection between Jefferson and the Intelligencer. When the authorship of a pseudonymous editorial is less defensible as Jefferson's work or does not reflect Jefferson's opinions as clearly, Laracey asserts that Jefferson would have agreed with a given editorial even if he did not write or sanction it, stretching the analytical framework of the book. There are some parts of this analysis that might have been better served by understanding the Intelligencer and its writers as having their own agency and conceptualizing the newspaper not only as Jefferson's mouthpiece but as an interlocutor regarding Republicanism. The aim to correct the historical record also presents a few structural trade-offs. For example, while the Louisiana Purchase is a sensible inclusion in terms of historical significance, the eighth chapter detailing the Intelligencer's coverage of it offers less analytical insight than the book's middle chapters.Though scholars invested in expanding the historical records of Jefferson's presidency or the development of American newspapers make up its immediate audience, Informing A Nation offers interdisciplinary contributions. Scholars of presidential rhetoric, especially those studying the Early American Republic, will find a valuable analysis of Jefferson's political discourse and a well-chronicled example of presidential rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Those in media studies or political communication willing to engage in historically-oriented work will be more drawn to Laracey's emphasis on the development of a partisan newspaper system in the United States and the challenges he poses to Tulis's account of the rhetorical presidency. Overall, Informing A Nation is a concise but comprehensive analysis of both an understudied element of the Jefferson presidency and the origins of partisan news media.

The late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor, compared the discourses that govern the affairs of this world to the stickiness of chameleon remains. For Awoonor, when one steps into the chameleon's gluey byproduct, it is difficult to wipe it off.1 This imagery represents the rhetorical potency of capitalism, its affective circulation, and how its influence over our lives makes it challenging to emancipate ourselves from the grips of market forces. For Catherine Chaput, the market is a powerful rhetorical force. The market's inherent trait to habituate our experiences means when “we place our faith in this all-knowing construct, we displace our own agentive powers” (2). In Market Affect, Chaput critiques capitalism with the conviction that other anticapitalist critiques could not dislocate the “affective circuits” of capitalism (18). Taking on Michael McGee's challenge to rhetoricians to investigate the link between rhetoric and social theory, Chaput rethinks affect to explain how we might unmask, demystify, and challenge capitalism by reclaiming human rhetorical agency.Since market forces obscure the exploitative powers of capital and have “fused with the energetic power of affect . . . thinking and acting,” anticapitalist discourses, Chaput asserts, constantly find themselves trapped and subsumed by procapitalist discourses (29). Chaput believes scholars are increasingly frustrated with the impotence of prevailing ideological analyses that sought to help us avert the influence of capitalist instincts in our lives (28). Chaput presents affective rhetorical critique as a paradigm in this endeavor. Affective critique, Chaput argues, empowers scholars to locate the “agentive capacity in our traditional rhetorical theories, enhance it with contemporary materialist perspectives, and develop a practice through which to glimpse, and later engage, the affective sensibilities” (18-19). Affect operates as an “organic power” (29); it is not a “theoretical abstraction or an illuminating metaphor, but a concrete, physiological force circulating into, and out of bodies through their sensuous interaction in the world” (30). Through affective critique, Chaput offers scholars new ways of discerning liberatory strategies against the aegis of capitalism.Chaput explains how procapitalists exploit the potency of affective desires to illustrate how capitalism operates and its ramifications for society. For Chaput, in the same way capitalism became an impregnable force, so is the principle that could derail its strategic maneuvers. Chaput rereads the rhetorical traditions of the classical, medieval, and enlightenment periods and exposes how forces of enlightenment crippled the affective resonances of rhetoric. In recovering this lost rhetorical power, according to Chaput, scholars ought to account for the omissions of the affective dimensions in the traditional rhetorical discipline and the “non-agentive impersonal operations that function so inconspicuously as to bleed into the natural background of life activities” (23). Chaput claims this notion of affect “has existed alongside and underdeveloped within” the rhetorical tradition (23). To convalesce this lost critical framework, Chaput's affective critique seeks to “expand and augment, rather than displace” rhetorical theory's valorization of the Aristotelian conceptualization of rhetoric. Across four chapters, Chaput reviews how economic theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Milton Friedman and John Galbraith “intuited and engaged the living power . . . of affect” in their positions for and against capitalism (37). In the final chapter, Chaput weaves their arguments and brokers them with Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism, packaging Foucauldian ideas as the most formidable salvo on capitalism.In chapter two, Chaput stitches the conflicting epistemologies of affect in Adam Smith's analysis of capitalism and Karl Marx's critique of capital. Chaput reasons that Smith and Marx are primarily immortalized as the “founding fathers” of discourses involving two opposing political systems—capitalism and socialism. Considered the father of capitalism, Smith postulates the “invisible hand” doctrine to account for the circulation of capitalist desires. For Marx, capitalism alienates us from our agentive powers. While both understood that labor, not commodities or gold, is wealth, they proposed “differing conceptions of the power structure propelling human relationships” (39). Smith sees the market as a natural force that represents traditional designations of affect. For Smith, capitalism pulls us into the market and constitutes us just as nationalism transforms us into nation-states. This way, the market's “invisible hand” directs societal and human affective desires.For Marx, an empowering agent exists internal to human beings, and capitalism works because of commodity fetishism— the ability to transfer a specific human power into things. Power circulates among people and things, orienting human decision-making. Affect is depleted through exploited labor because capital is “a process of coercive labor that traps naturally fluid lie energies or affect, within commodity form” (57). Capitalism depletes our personal power because commodities transform our “creative, energetic social beings into mechanical, lifeless, individual beings” (57). For Marx, “affect is that which adds value to life, and it is the essence or the core of our being as humans to participate in such value-adding activities” (46). Chaput observes that “for Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them mere caricatures of capital” (57). In effect, our sensory capacities are subsumed by capitalism.In chapter three, Chaput examines how John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen's divergent but resonant thoughts fail to provide a robust framework for rethinking the problems of capitalism. A fundamental defect in their thinking is their valorization of rationality. Chaput realizes that the two shared many thoughts on the interconnectedness of the global market and the illogical human behaviors that drive economic attitudes. Capitalism, for Keynes, is global, but individual sympathies are national. In this case, “affect circulates locally while capitalism functions globally, forging a gap between our inner feelings and the outer reality of economic operations” (68). Keynes substitutes the “perfect invisible hand” with “imperfect visible arguments and grounds the need for greater economic deliberation among the public” (74). Veblen, likewise, believes in argumentation but not an explicit role. While Marx allows us to see how language produces a dominant ideology, Veblen extends this assessment to commodities. Because humans have little capacity to “outwit capitalism,” Veblen classifies workers as change agents (85). Both Keynes and Veblen neglect capitalism's affective dimension, which renders their theorizations inadequate to account for how affect circulates.In the immediate post–World War II environment, Frederick Hayek and Theodore Adorno turned their attention to the epistemic consequences of affect. They critiqued the scientific rationality logic as governing human decision-making processes. For Hayek, a rationally managed capitalist state, as envisioned by Keynes, produces poverty akin to modern-day slavery. “Managed capitalism” weakens individuals and does not allow for the assertion of human agency. Adorno rejects the persuasive force governing human desires, extending Marx and Veblen with Freud by realigning affect with rationality (97). Hayek vindicates the “self-regulating nature of capitalism, while Adorno discounts the “role of nonrational motivation” of “administrative society” to emancipate itself (91). As Chaput observes, Hayek envisions the market as working through our sensory orders clandestinely or unconsciously. As a result, we participate in capitalist orientations without realizing its corrosive maneuverings. For this reason, Adorno recommends “aesthetic interventions” that shock us out of our slumber (111). Instead of engaging in active “political and economic questions of the day, individuals turn to mass-produced entertainment, channeling their entire libidinal energies into consuming practices” (111). Chaput reasons that Hayek seems to be endorsed by recent democratic engagements even though he espouses and orients us toward antidemocratic tendencies.Chapter five addresses Milton Friedman's (pro-capitalist) and John Kenneth Galbraith's (anticapitalist) meddling with the politics of the right and left. Although these scholars are not economists by training, they offer perspectives on capitalism's pervasive power. Chaput's reading of them stamps the rhetoric of inquiry—reiterating the need to have rhetorical scholars import interdisciplinary literature into our critical projects. Friedman postulates that, guided by historical forces, “human behavior, particularly within nation states—functions with a high degree of consistency and requires an equally consistent monetary policy to maintain market stability” (114). Galbraith locates reality in contemporary political economy, consumer culture, long-term planning, and the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy, creating a “corporatized marketplace” (114). Friedman believes in rational choice, while Galbraith sees corporate power as the most important way to think about human decision-making. Chaput argues that Galbraith's postulations appear overstated since they leave unexplored “anticapitalist discourse bound to a false binary between rational and irrational” (137).In the concluding chapter, Chaput details what she considers the most formidable confrontation of capitalism. Relying on Foucault's late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Chaput recognizes that procapitalist discourses appropriate the “affective force corralling human behavior before and alongside rationale decision making” (137). For Foucault, procapitalists maintain a superior “rhetorical edge” because they rely on a theory that combines the complexity of physiological effects and the discourses that govern humans. This understanding, Chaput maintains, prompts procapitalists to envision humans as subject to the market's governing rationality. Consequently, the market's “superior” affective sensibility inoculates it against critiques that ignore its affective dimensions and operations. Chaput reasons that anticapitalist offerings must consider humanity's thought-making processes and our natural instincts. Chaput directs us to the Foucauldian praxis that unlocks an unceasing resistance to capitalist governmentality. She believes a “free to choose” doctrine with a grounding in “courageous truth-telling,” or parrhesia, is potent to reconstitute and reinvent the governing praxis of our lives (150). Admitting that capitalist governmentality is impervious to “rhetorical deliberation” (142), Foucault's doctrine permits us to locate the “persuasive power of modern political economy in the market's invisible vitality” (144). Through it, we might see the formation of human agency as a “continuous ontological becoming” that must be orchestrated from within (144).Chaput concludes that the Foucauldian praxis is rooted in Greco-Roman practices of individual governance based on the apparatus of the “care of the self” and the desire to dissect the relationship between power, subjectivity, and discourse. This perspective is to create a confluence between “subject formation, bodily instinct, and truth” (150). Chaput states that “whereas biopolitics reflects the indirect manipulation of predictable instinct-driven bodies, care of the self consciously realigns automated bodily responses so as to oppose institutional injustice through the eruption of parrhesia or courageous truth-telling” (150). For Chaput, parrhesia's discursive apparatus grants agency and transcends courageous truth-telling to “adherence to a particular lifestyle designed to cultivate the kind of person who could “spontaneously confront injustice” (154). Through this attunement, we can distinguish bad parhessiates from good parhessiates. The telos of Chaput's call is “to produce people compelled to confront injustice even at the risk of retribution, requiring a practice of everyday life that constantly adjusts one's knowledge, behavior, and instincts” (157). Parhessiates, Chaput continues, identify as “sociopolitical and economic critics” even in the face of strict opposition (157). As cynics, parhessiates identify with all humanity and act altruistically. Chaput charges critics to “assess the persuasive work of our bodily instincts . . . to invent an alternative affective milieu . . . to assert newly cultivated agencies, ones simultaneously empowered by our conscious and unconscious choice” (159).Chaput's intervention comes at a time of global conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian strife, Russian occupation and aggression, movements and surges for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #Anti-racism, and the curricula of critical race theory. Chaput nudges scholars of rhetoric to examine the various affective circuits governing public debates. We might, for example, look to scholars and activists such as Ales Bialiatski, Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. Specifically, attention to parrhesia charges media organizations and those in positions of power to give attention to vernacular discourses and ideas that dislodge oppression. Market Affect emphasizes that criticism of governing ideas goes beyond examining popular cultural products, innovations, and authoritative discourses. Market Affect prompts us to deconstruct the ideas that underlie and govern our world. Chaput prepares us to decipher and challenge the organizing force of human society and the creation of ideal material worlds that better serve the human commons.

In the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 (re)election, the National Communication Association's annual conference featured an intellectual “Come to Jesus” regarding Jon Stewart and his brand of comedy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The “tl;dr” (“Too long; didn't read”) of this battle was that Professors Lance Bennett and Robert Hariman defended Stewart as a necessary agent in political discourse and public life; Professors Roderick Hart and Johanna Hartelius condemned Stewart's cynicism, arguing people substitute watching Stewart for material participation in public life to the grave detriment of the public sphere. Nearly 20 years later, James Caron's Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement makes a compelling argument that, while comedic speech has limits and is not by any stretch curative, it is an ideal stylistic fit in an era of postmodern truthiness because it creates an innovative public engagement in a participatory media culture (6).Caron “examines the relationship between satire and the public sphere, a relationship that creates a comic public sphere, a parodic counterpart to Habermas's classic articulation of a particular kind of discourse and set of social practices first associated with Enlightenment values and technologies” (2). Rather than presuming satire is political discourse, Caron's gambit is that “satire [is] a form of aesthetic communication supplementing political discourse with its mode of comic discourse” (7). It directly encourages citizens to act together in real life. Satire is public-directed—its purpose is not to mock one person but to direct attention to issues of broader public concern. In this sense, satire is generative.Caron moves through his argument in two parts. Part One is historical background and theoretical foundation. Part Two is comprised of a series of case studies.Caron defines satire in Chapter One saying “satire signifies those instances of comic artifacts that can “exceed . . . serious communications . . . for the sake of deliberation, advocacy, and exchange” (20). That is, the ridiculous and the ludicrous are effects of comic laughter. The ridiculous is designed to critique and improve its object; the ludicrous offers an appreciation of the object as is. Here Caron introduces a kind of rubric for understanding the comic: play, judgment, aggression, laughter. Play separates the comic from the earnest by providing a cue that something is funny. Judgment is critique that marks “The Comic” as both always serious and unserious simultaneously. Aggression enables ridicule and mockery. And laughter is, well, laughter. Here Caron makes one of the central moves of the book arguing, “satire's power lies in its rhetorical potential to change minds, to effect metanoia via it's a-musement” (26). This deconstruction of “a-musement” means we are not merely laughing about something; we are musing on it.Chapter Two investigates the distinction between the Habermasian theorizing on the public sphere and the contemporary reality of the digital public sphere. Habermas's construct relies on social and political bracketing of reality in which intellectual equals gather in coffee houses and argue enlightened perspectives on the issues of the day. The digital public sphere, on the other hand, values “personalized feedback, instantaneous interaction, participation potentially 24/7, and no geographic limitations” (38). But the digital public sphere is something of a Wild West scenario. While the democratization of participatory media culture invites those who would never have had access to Habermas's coffee houses, it also creates dis and misinformation, trolls, and other serious concerns. However, satire thrives in uncertain times: “Satire's most profound cultural role today, then, employs in comic fashion the basic ethos of modern/postmodern liberalism as part of the aesthetic-expressive rationality of Habermas” (50).In the final pages of Part One, Caron layers the nuance to note that “satire operates as comic political speech, not political speech, in the public sphere” (52). Satire operates within a playful aesthetic that fosters dissent, just of a different order than traditional political speech. Digital technologies afford more involved citizenship and (re)presentation as citizens, and so comic sense, irony, mock news performed satirically, comic name-calling and comic insults” are actually “in service to educating its silly citizens and furthering their conversation of engaged levity” (56–57). In this way, the comedic public sphere deals with fakery itself. Comics and satirists, then, are parrhesiasts, or those who speak truth to power. Both through satire and what Caron names “satiractivism,” there is potential for social justice, to turn a “ha ha into an a-ha!” (81).In the second half of Satire, Caron aligns his conception of the comedic public sphere with J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory, distinguishing between constatives and performatives. Constatives are statements of fact, report, or description that can be judged as true or false; performatives are not just saying something, but doing something (85). Austin also articulates the terms locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Locutionary is a performance of the act of saying something. Illocutionary is the performance of the act in saying something (satire ridicules, for instance). And perlocutionary is saying something that produces effects.Caron contends comic speech in satiric mode is illocutionary in that it performs ridicule, but it has potential to be perlocutionary in that it changes people's minds. It has effects. It is, in spiritual terms, metanoia—a conversion or conversion of belief. Satiractivism, or activism generated through satirical speech, is a special kind of political speech act. It is both serious and unserious; both constative and performative.Caron introduces several pivotal case studies in Chapter Five in which “the comic public sphere and the public sphere often appear as one discursive domain” (89). For instance, we see comics playing with the news on SNL's Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These programs are locutionary—news with comic speech as rhetorical flourish. They are also illocutionary because they ridicule a comic but with the veneer of reporting. One of the examples Caron cites is Jordan Klepper's person-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters.But these moments of “playing with the news” are not merely play, they are also a kind of satiractivism. They are quasi-perlocutionary. Jon Stewart hosting 9/11 first responders who had become ill led to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, for instance. Caron also notes the “John Oliver Effect:” Oliver has always eschewed the sort of SNL Weekend Update formula in favor of in-depth, fuller investigations into a news story but done satirically. Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert are also examples of satiractivism, bringing comedy to “real news” in order to amplify it.Yet, satire has limits. It is a methodological paradox in that the satirist is trying to bring about a better society through critique but is often doing so by ridiculing. And sometimes, it can go too far. This is especially perilous when the audience is not prepared to laugh.Michelle Wolf's 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one such time when the audience in the room felt ridicule crossing a line into mean-spiritedness. Part of this challenge for humorists is the particular and universal audience. The WHCD audience (in particular) found the bites too biting. The universal audience understood better the impossibility of civility in the Trump years.Many pointed out how thin-skinned people in the Trump orbit of power were in inverse correlation to their political and cultural power. Speaking truth to power is supposed to be uncomfortable for those in power. But what if those in power are perpetual victims with an entire media infrastructure designed to amplify their victimhood? That is, is what Wolf did a “screed or satire?” (181).Caron's final chapter of case studies centers Trump as buffoon and troll. Caron asks whether satiric speech is harmful to a democratic public sphere because its uptake can be dangerously corrosive. Trump's characteristic defense is he was “just joking,” but as rhetorical critic and historian Jennifer Mercieca notes, Trump consistently “gaslights” the audience about his intentions when the effect crosses a line.1In his final chapter, Caron reminds readers that postmodernism isn't an abandonment of truth but a deep skepticism about truth with a capital T. Comedic style, then, is ideally suited in this moment to scratch the truthiness veneer. As he writes, “The comic logic of truthiness satire and satiractivism repurposes discursive integration and a regime of simulacra with a postmodern aesthetic” (209). Considering that more people believe in the truth of what they learn from those playing with the news than from those delivering it “straight,” imagining the possibilities for satirical speech in the comic public sphere is a generative and purposeful endeavor.

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...

Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...

Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...

Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...

AbstractIn response to an urgent need for better decision making in the public sphere, this article presents a method by which literary study can cultivate wisdom, defined as the ability to respond to problems with courses of action that maximize flourishing and minimize harm for all parties, both now and in the future. Drawing on the latest evidence-based learning principles, the article explains the pedagogical strategies and practices by which four wisdom-constituting thinking skills can be developed.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

Who knew that the twenty-first century might turn on a battle over the legitimacy of democracy? As norms of deliberation and legislative compromise erode, and as a global struggle between democratic and autocratic rule is waged both between and within nations, a strange form of political theater emerges: all sides claim to represent the will of the people, which is expressed in images of populist demonstrations that are seen by their opponents as dangerous embodiments of irrationality. It should be no surprise that violence is waiting in the wings.Despite the historical specificity of the present conflict, it is not new. Although focused on the French Revolution, Jason Frank’s carefully argued study of the aesthetics of popular assembly resonates with contemporary concerns regarding political spectacles, populist movements, and whether or how democracy might prevail. Frank’s objective is not to restore anything but to challenge left and right critiques of “the people” in order to recover a “lost radicalism of democracy” (xii). By reexamining one of modern democracy’s origin stories, Frank zeros in on popular assembly as “a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation” (xiv). One result can be more clarity about why populism—and its mix of democratic self-assertion and delegitimation—has such a hold on democratic regimes today. Another, and Frank’s hope, is that paying more attention to the aesthetic contours of “the people” can lead to a rebooting of the political imagination—a rebooting, I would add, that is desperately needed if democracy is to become more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.Frank begins with the assumption that democracy depends on more than “enlightenment and education”: beyond rational-critical speech, it also requires distinctive illusions of collective belonging (see also, e.g., Allen 2004, chap. 2). “At the heart of modern democracy’s fantasy space,” he argues, “lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people” (3). But where are the people? What do they look like? Democracy’s constituent subject has an image problem: the people can’t be seen as a whole. Thus, the problem of envisioning the people “haunts the history and theory of modern democracy” (5).Frank becomes something of a ghost hunter, working carefully through theory and history to see what has been lurking around the corners and in the attic, more felt than observed. Through careful parsing of Judith Butler, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, and others, he constructs a theoretical framework for identifying a process of democratic belonging that is persistent, contested, and aesthetic. This dynamic field of political representation then is explored through his historical example.The French Revolution is taken up through its exponents, interpreters, and one of its visual figures. Rousseau is up first, as he comprehends both the historical transformation and its constitutive problem. Rousseau sees popular demonstrations as ritual performances essential to the transition to democracy and to the expression of democratic legitimacy. Instead of being props for the king or mobs of rebellion, the crowd becomes the people as the people become a self-aware actor in history. But there is a crucial deficiency that other actors don’t have: as a sovereign subject, the people are silent. The general will, beyond representation, is a spontaneous, authentic, and unmediated self-assertion that can be expressed only in part and must be enjoyed as sensate experience. This “mute eloquence” (64) of the assembly and a corresponding “collective self-absorption” (61) has obvious benefits for those who would usurp power, but it also opens a space for a more productive concept: the aesthetic resources that Frank labels the “democratic sublime.”The next chapter captures this aesthetic in the “living image of the people” as it involved “a dramatic transformation in the iconography of political power and rule” (69). The people came to be understood not as an incarnation of the general will but as “a surplus of democratic immanence, the physical manifestation of a fissure within prevailing forms of political representation” (71). Because democratic self-assertion was both embodied and beyond representation, it entered the aesthetic category of the sublime, which is sensed even as it exceeds a limit and can be evoked in multiple media and genres. A succession of images demonstrates how this transformation played out in visual culture, and most notably how “revolutionary iconoclasm was always entangled in, if not entirely superseded by, revolutionary iconophilia” (87). Thus, Jacques-Louis David redefined the mythical Hercules from a symbol of royal sovereignty to one of revolutionary power, and contempt for allegorical displays of kingship gave way to “spectacles of democratic self-witnessing” (91). Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Frank also widens a theoretical opening for reading political styles as modes of collective experience: “A particular style of imagining peoplehood is an unavoidable part of democratic theory, but one democratic theorists rarely explicitly engage. Confronting these questions helps us understand not only how the people is historically represented . . . but also how individuals come to experience and feel themselves as a part of this mobilized and empowered collectivity in the first place” (94–95).Like the revolution, however, the sublime also is a figure of terror. Frank takes up the challenge by turning to Edmund Burke, at once the foremost theorist of political aesthetics and the most passionate critic of the revolution. Frank’s careful tracing of Burke, his critics, and changes in political culture leads to a split decision. On the one hand, democracy’s aesthetic needs were for neither transcendence nor terror, but instead for more immanent sensations of collective belonging that could reside within ordinary social practices. Burke saw clearly that the people is not a “pre-political collective entity” (110) waiting to be mobilized, but rather something that has to be created as “first and foremost a community of sense” (112). On the other hand, democracy’s advocates resisted this awareness while its critics emphasized the dangers of transgression. Instead of bringing together the “molecular” relations of everyday life into a “unifying image” of collective authority (111, 112), political aesthetics was misrecognized in terms of either instrumental reason or conservative anxieties of disorder. Democratic engagement and the agency of the people would remain problems exceeding the available repertoires of political thought.Frank then explores two quite different paths to thicken understanding of the democratic sublime. The one of most interest to rhetorical scholars will be the “poetics of the barricade,” which documents “the most widespread and condensed symbol of popular collective action” (123) during the nineteenth century. As its tactical efficacy declined, its symbolic power as a “resonant historical manifestation of the democratic sublime” (126) increased, and for good reason, as Frank argues that it provided provisional solutions to deep problems of popular representation. The barricade emerges not out of a prior, unitary will, but through the act of resistance itself, an act synonymous with the people’s excessiveness: its surplus of bodies, desires, energies, and skills, and not least its ability to crowd and disrupt the space of political representation and create images of itself.For another approach to developing the sublime, Frank completes his integration of history and theory with a rereading of Alexis de Tocqueville. As with Burke, Frank explores an ambiguous relationship between a stinging critique of democracy (with Tocqueville, because of the danger it poses to freedom) and an appreciation of political aesthetics that challenges both liberal and illiberal critics of democracy. Tocqueville is read as a brilliant while transitional figure, and that might be the best way to think of Frank’s argument that Tocqueville’s call for “grandeur” in politics was not a look backward to civic republican “glory” or forward to fascist demagoguery, but something like a placeholder for a more aspirational and expansive conception of the democratic imagination.Although the book avoids analogies with the present, its relevance is both obvious and nuanced. A concluding afterword on “democratic appearance” takes up one line of application by discussing key elements of Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics, along with artworks by Glenn Ligon that articulate Black radical critique through depictions of the 1995 Million Man March. The basic movement of the chapter is not so much from past to present examples of democratic assembly but rather to highlight democracy’s radical promise. That promise exceeds the categories of contemporary progressive politics, and it depends on visual culture for both immanent critique and imaginative extension. Frank emphasizes how political aesthetics might work beneath or even against the grandest expressions of the democratic sublime to more effectively articulate “political capacities for collective refiguration” that “emerge from within the simple fabric of our everyday lives” (204).This observation should appeal to scholars in rhetoric, many of whom already are more interested in popular demonstrations, social movements, and political subjectivity than the inside baseball of governmental institutions. The more extensive relevance is that full realization of Frank’s argument would require bringing rhetorical perspectives and methods into political theory. (“Aesthetics” often is a convenient way for scholars in other disciplines to take up rhetoric without having to admit to it.) These corrections to what Frank calls a “blind spot” in political theory could include focusing more on actual political discourse (texts, images, performances); analyzing how collective attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and values are crafted; attending to the granularity of political interactions and the contingent relationships of ideology, political style, and locale in political subjectivity; and identifying moments of emergence or potential for distinctively or radically democratic schemes of representation and communicative action.At the same time, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how political theory can be used to improve rhetorical scholarship. Frank’s thoughtful engagements, which never recur to the idea of prudential balancing, suggest how much is needed to understand the complexity of democratic politics and any unrealized potential for change. The level of reciprocal engagement and sophisticated argument among political theorists is exceptionally high, and Frank is an exemplary scholar in that regard. He adds to this a combination of theoretical and historical study that can correct for conventional limitations on either side of that typical division of labor. The attention to constitutive problems and enduring tensions in democracy is important and might both restrain a tendency in public sphere scholarship to overvalue normative conceptions of liberal democracy and question assumptions in more radical critique regarding the functions of mediation and the process of historical change. In any case, more theoretical and critical attention could be given to a broader array of images of the people—visual and verbal, documentary and fictional—as they can articulate a just and beloved democratic community.I have only two criticisms of this fine book. One is that more could have been done with aesthetics, both as a framing device and in practical criticism. Popular assembly involves more than the sublime, and additional discernment can come, for example, from more extensive use of artistic terms and emotional responses, or by taking up additional arts and artistic modes of advocacy, or by shifting from representation to performance. This emphasis can work in tandem with a more explicitly rhetorical orientation, and Frank’s chapter on the barricades provides an excellent point of departure.Finally, I wish that Frank had taken a bolder approach to concluding the book. He certainly has earned the right to do so, and more risk taking is likely to be needed: first, to challenge the illiberal populisms that currently are serious threats to democracy in the United States and elsewhere; and second, to take up the daunting task of creating the political imagination needed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. That said, by staying in his lane Frank provides a sound integration of history and theory for extension by others. Whatever else it is, scholarship, like democratic politics, should be collaborative.

Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.

Flores’ key contribution to the field is to highlight the constitutive force of this figuration in sustaining racial national projects. She argues that the narratives characterizing Mexican migrants as temporary and cheap labor have constituted Mexicans as deportable, disposable, and racialized as illegal.

Focusing on the rich biographies of five influential figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Paul Stob's Intellectual Populism argues for renewed attention to a distinctive kind of populist rhetoric. In times of widespread corruption and social upheaval that he argues parallel our own, Stob identifies the “Great Agnostic” lecturer Robert Ingersoll, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, philosopher Thomas Davidson, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington, and writer, speaker, and activist Zitkála-Šá as salient examples of a “mode of inquiry” focused on connecting ordinary people around anti-establishment sentiments with intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, appeals (xv). Stob shows how each of these figures used their available means of persuasion to claim a voice among unfriendly and unlikely audiences. This, he argues, could be an approach for contemporary academics as we advocate for higher education in an age when our work is dismissed as, at best, irrelevant due to the Internet and new technologies and, at worst, the destructive and out-of-touch machinations of liberal elitism.Intellectual populism, Stob claims, is a means by which “populism and intellectualism can work together to enhance our knowledge of the world” (xv). While populism is often characterized as anti-intellectual, Stob argues that there are parameters in populist thought, taken up by intellectuals in the past, that have been constructive to democratic processes and engaged diverse audiences, inspiring them to think critically about how together they might change the established order. It is this coming together as a “new intellectual movement” that Stob hopes to enliven with a populist model of education incorporating broad notions of teaching and learning among those currently excluded from, or hostile to, higher education (227). However, it is important to note that it is the “fight,” not the “complete victory,” of the intellectual populist figure that Stob wants to highlight (208). As the concept itself elicits, intellectual populist rhetorical strategies engage a certain degree of irony and impossibility in their undertaking.As a case in point, Robert Ingersoll, the first figure profiled in the book, uses perspective by incongruity to call into question religious authorities and affirm agnostic beliefs. Described as a speaker able to make even the police sent to arrest him for blasphemy laugh and praise him, Ingersoll ultimately affirms religious ideals by turning them on their head. This is what Stob characterizes as the core of intellectual populism, “criticizing the established order to strengthen that which the order is trying to serve” (16). Even as Ingersoll attacks religion, the crowds that he drew found that he “enlivened religious inquiry. He brought religious questions into the marketplace of ideas, which strengthened religion by showing what was real in it” (34). Ingersoll appealed widely to audiences that shared various religious beliefs and would agree with him that their own renewal of these values was worthy of investigation. At the same time, Stob points out that “Ingersoll battled a religious establishment that not only survived the assault of free-thought advocates but also created a fundamentalist power structure that continues to this day,” thus showing how even the most successful rhetorical strategies are constrained by situation (208). However, Stob suggests, this could still be an adept strategy for academics: by affirming critiques that the university is out of touch with “the people,” academics could join critics in order to energize a “new intellectual movement” that would ultimately forward the mission of higher learning by broadening its reach, not overthrowing its aims (227).The next figure analyzed in Intellectual Populism is Mary Baker Eddy, the controversial founder of Christian Science. At its height, Christian Science lectures brought together large audiences of converts, interested listeners, and a wide swath of critics. Eddy's lecturers made the case to the public that Christian Science works because it is a science wherein personal experiences of healing prove that believers do not need medicine or the church. However, to Stob's surprise, Christian Science orators did not provide evidence of healing in their lectures, creating a void to be filled with ordinary people's personal testimonies. Stob asserts that this method of unsound syllogistic reasoning instead sought to empower listeners to reclaim their own agency and expertise, previously the domain of experts in religious and medical fields. Stob characterizes this on one hand as a dangerous rhetorical strategy, “duping lecture-goers into believing that Christian Science could accomplish something it never could accomplish” (73). By framing an individual listener's personal experience as “unimpeachably scientific” it makes personal truth “truer, fuller, more absolute than any deductive proof, any rationalist logic . . . any counter argument,” thus denigrating scientific evidence that would allow one to question or change those beliefs (71). This intellectual populist argument strategy therefore either fails with “listeners with an ear for scientific argumentation” (68) or makes receptive individuals resistant to scientific evidence based in logic and expertise that could “enhance our knowledge of the world” to shape a more democratic society (xv). This critique finds renewed importance in our current era of anti-vax movements that draw upon similar argument structures. However, instead of tossing out Eddy's arguments wholesale, Stob constructively points out that the vast power of religious inquiry continues to serve as touchstone of American public discourse. Instead of dismissing religion and personal experience as antithetical to intellectual thought, Stob suggests we think of these are “potent symbolic resources” to start, instead of stop, public conversations about science and expertise (226).The next figure Stob focuses on is Thomas Davidson, a savant Scottish philosopher who spent most of his life building intellectual communities for refined society. However, in his later years, Davidson created the Breadwinner's College, a “People's University” where he taught philosophy to Jewish factory workers from the Lower Eastside of New York City. Davidson initially undertook a series of public lectures in the neighborhood, where he framed philosophical inquiry as a form of labor that factory workers were apt to pursue. This “fell on deaf ears” and angered the workers, who argued that there was nowhere for them to study in their tenement houses, and thus the idea for the Breadwinner's College was formed (106). Davidson envisioned it as the first in a branch of many spaces where workers could gather and engage in Socratic exchange on curriculum that would give those without educational opportunities a “‘bird's-eye view of the scene and course of human evolution’” (109). Stob states that “Davidson's fundamental contribution to intellectual populism was his reconfiguration of speech and space—his grasp of the way words and ideas relate to the geography in which they emerge and through which they move” (118). However, “the irony was that Davidson wrote [much of this intellectual populist mission] . . . from Glenmore [his retreat center in the Adirondacks] . . . [where] Davidson's intellectual populism came from a position physically removed from the community he worked to empower” (117). This irony, Stob concludes, demonstrates that “Empowering the people needed to happen in the spaces that defined their lives;” Davidson in many ways failed to do this (118).In contrast, Stob's chapter on Booker T. Washington illustrates how he successfully provided educational opportunities for poor African Americans in the rural South. In his career as a public lecturer and educator, Washington argued that work itself was a rhetorical process that “communicated, influenced, and persuaded as effectively as words” (121). Washington used various success stories of Black Americans to show how dignified labor “did the suasory work that words and pages tried to do, and it was far more successful than any oration could be” (144). Stob describes this as ironic considering that Washington delivered this message through the medium of oratory and made a career of such words and arguments. However, Stob spends much of the chapter analyzing Washington's many accomplishments as the first President of the Tuskegee Institute, exemplifying through alumni letters how Washington's legacy was to “elevat[e] . . . labor to an intellectual practice” and help students “use their labor to control their lives” (160). While largely an appreciative read of Washington's legacy, Stob also points to ironies within Washington's approach which schooled students in “the politics of respectability . . . [that] emphasized moral reform and reconfiguration of self” and may have “eschewed the demand for structural change” needed by African Americans (150). Both the Davidson and Washington models for populist education support Stob's argument that spaces of higher learning must adapt to the communities they seek to reach by being more reflexive about modes and spaces of engagement. Furthermore, as Stob argues in the conclusion of the book, both rhetors exemplify the importance of education as a “maker's movement,” where students are the co-creators of ideas and communities. Instead of simply transmitting specialized knowledge, we must rethink how higher education might contribute to “putting people in a position to think and inquire for themselves” (223).The final figure featured in Intellectual Populism is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous American writer, speaker and activist. The least documented of the figures, Stob characterizes the limited archive of Zitkála-Šá’s speeches as strategically ironic, working to secure what influence she could within the constraints of a white man's world. Zitkála-Šá was critiqued in her time for accommodating or even affirming white stereotypes of Indigenous communities. Throughout her career she wore stereotypical costumes, opted not to correct inaccurate assumptions about her identity, and espoused the overwrought metaphor of the “national teepee” as a unifying vision for the pan-Indian movement. However, Stob notes that these strategies helped Zitkála-Šá in gaining legitimacy for the pan-Indian movement and attention from various white and Indigenous American audiences that had previously dismissed her vision for civil rights. Through an appreciative read of her rhetorical strategies, Stob beautifully captures how Zitkála-Šá’s “performances invited other American Indians to identify their grievances with hers to join her in a strong, broad coalition that could secure Native lives in the twentieth century” (166). Distinguishing Zitkála-Šá’s work from a wider constellation of her Indigenous contemporaries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the ways that disenfranchised people's intellectual movements can upend the status quo. In her speeches, Zitkála-Šá repurposed white stereotypes about Indigenous Americans through Americanisms such as “God, freedom, peace, and equality” that she showed were more astutely demonstrated by the first Americans—Indigenous Americans—than by white settlers (188). While just one example of Zitkála-Šá’s rhetorical brilliance, this final chapter distills the numerous ways that intellectual populist rhetoric can encompass “the people” far beyond the narrow confides of “the people” often evoked in populist rhetoric in the United States today.Overall, Stob illuminates five different historic figures who, through intellectual populist rhetorical strategies, made compelling critiques of powerful establishments to divided audiences in their time. While looking to achieve different goals, Stob convincingly argues that it is unfair to measure these rhetors’ contributions only by their unrealized visions to change the establishments they attacked. Stob instead contours these complex characters as sometimes flawed, sometimes successful, rhetorical actors whose work forms a broad lineage of American thinkers who attempted to give “ordinary individuals a sense of agency in the pursuit of knowledge” (229). This, Stob argues, “can make a difference, even if it doesn't change the world” (229). Intellectual Populism concludes with a set of lessons intended for academics to enliven debate around the state of higher learning institutions. At the top of Stob's list of lessons is a call for academics to build broader coalitions with communities in “physical spaces” and “face-to-face assemblages,” urging us not to “stay isolated on the carefully manicured lawns of college campuses” (222). Stob's words, ironically published mere weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, continue to serve as an important reminder to all of us, and our institutions, that our siloed intellectual communities must continue to adapt, diversify, and expand in order to serve the many and not just the few.

In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

Discussion of immigration is never contained to politics about migration, nation, and inclusion/exclusion. Indeed, because immigrants to the United States have frequently been framed as racially different in relation to white Americans, immigration discourse is perpetually saturated by race and racialization. Lisa A. Flores's new monograph, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant, meticulously studies public political framings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans across four historical moments of “crisis,” showing how public discourse racializes Mexicans and their descendants along the lines of deportability, disposability, and illegality.Employing constitutive rhetoric and a lens of racial performativity, Flores examines early- to mid-twentieth century newspapers, periodicals, and government documents. Flores traces how “rhetorical climates of deportability and disposability, or those constellations of discourses, cultural practices, laws, and policies that coalesce to produce and maintain constitutive spaces,” racialize Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “illegal” (9). In doing so, Flores's historical analyses identify the figures of the “illegal alien,” “zoot suiter,” “bracero,” and “wetback” as rhetorical sites through which this racialization is constructed and invoked (4). This analysis also allows Flores to identify the role of what she terms “body logics” and “mobility logics” amid a dichotomy of desire for Mexican labor and disgust of Mexican presence (13, 15).Taken together, Flores's monograph offers multiple contributions to scholarship. First, Flores presents rhetorical and race scholars, as well as the public, with a genealogy of the ways in which Mexican “illegality” came to resonate in American political discourse. Second, Flores draws previously undertheorized linkages between the racialization of Mexicans and Black Americans. Third, Flores offers a compelling case for why we ought to view racialization as a fundamentally rhetorical process. Consonant with Flores's article on the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism, this argument reiterates rhetoric's power as a discipline capable of grappling with the complex process of race-making.1 In Flores's words, if rhetorical regimes of deportability and disposability racialize Mexicans as illegal, then “that constitution is rhetorical, an effect of discourse” and rhetorical analysis is well-equipped to probe racialization (5).Deportable and Disposable's first chapter argues that in the 1930s a “rhetorical climate of deportability” spotlighting the figure of the “illegal alien” set the stage for the racialization of Mexicans into illegality (23). After the passage of the 1929 Undesirable Aliens Act, public governmental and media accounts put forward an image of Mexicans as both inherently inferior in “essence and character” as well as “criminal” (33, 35). This process was buttressed by deportation and repatriation campaigns. Deportation raids associated Mexicans with illegality, since Mexicans were deported for not presenting legal documentation; this even though carrying legal documentation was uncommon given the previously lax enforcement of immigration laws and the relatively recent criminalization of undocumented entry (35). At the same time, Flores also claims that Mexicans “perform[ed] that illegality through repatriation, their allegedly willing departure” (29). Combined with a body logic stating that Mexicans were intrinsically inferior and a mobility logic stating that Mexicans spread in scope as they “move across the space of the nation,” public campaigns and pronouncements made Mexicans an inferior, growing, and mobile criminal threat (33).Chapter 2 centers on the figure of the “zoot suiter.” Flores argues that discursive framings and violent responses to zoot suiters racialized Mexicans and their descendants as threatening and disposable (50). During the 1943 zoot suit riots, Los Angeles media and national news coverage fashioned zoot suiters—typically equated with Mexican American youth—as a sexual, masculine, violent, and unpredictable threat to white women, the city, and the nation (66, 67). Zoot suiters, and therefore Mexicans, then, were transformed into threats through tropes of “Black masculinized violence” (66). One media account, for instance, portrayed sailors as assaulting zoot suiters in retaliation for attacks against white women, who were previously represented in the cultural imaginary as threatened by Black men (69). In this account, the zoot suiter provoked a “justified defense.” Given the “threat” posed by zoot suiters, the sailors’ attacks framed whiteness and its concomitant violence as a source of “hope:” “superior, justified, legitimate, even powerful” (152). And as with “illegal aliens,” zoot suiters were once again marked by body and mobility logics. This, time, though, Flores notes that the identifying bodily marker was sartorial and that the mobility marker was instead the threat of “unpredictable” violence.Chapter 3 turns to the figure of the bracero and its implications for Mexican racialization. Unlike the “illegal alien” and the “zoot suiter,” Flores writes that the 1940s wartime bracero was received positively. Still, two prominent reasons behind the public and media celebration of the bracero resulted in a harmful racialization of Mexicans as deportable and disposable. Braceros were celebrated in part because they were synecdochally “reduced to the abstraction of their labor,” and they were conceptualized as temporary workers that “would go home, voluntarily and willingly” when they were no longer needed (82, 113). Thus, even though the body and mobility logics of the bracero did not frame the Mexican laborers as violent threats—the bracero was a Mexican person “eager to labor” whose movement was “carefully” monitored and controlled—these logics reinscribed Mexicans as inferior, deportable, and disposable (115, 103). And, as Flores points out, this racialization yet again relies on a trope key to a colonial American construction of blackness: in this case, that of the “happy slave” (105).Chapter 4 turns to Flores's final figure, the 1950s “wetback.” Flores argues here that the term “wetback” accrued the meanings associated with the previous figures and presented the nation with a non-white economic and criminal threat (143). Because “wetback” emerged after the earlier terms of “illegal alien, “zoot suiter,” and “bracero” had all produced “existing racializations,” it absorbed those meanings but also “extended and complicated” them (119). To illustrate, like “illegal alien,” “wetback” involved the “intersections in bodily logics . . . with mobility logics” such that “anxiety emerged in . . . the ways in which border rhetorics produce difference that is both on the body and exceeding the body” (142). That is, both the “illegal immigrant” and “wetback” were “criminal” figures who were dangerous because their movement traversed the nation (125, 126). However, Flores explains how “wetback” is not strictly reducible to the “illegal alien.” Like the bracero, “wetbacks” had a reportedly visible “primitivity” that assured the realness of race and racial difference (143).In her conclusion, Flores contemplates the “contemporary discursive departure” from the terminology of the four figures she analyzes and offers three potential interpretations regarding this departure's significance (155). First, Flores writes that humanizing narratives and the terminology of “family” and “children” may prompt sympathetic identification with recent immigrant family units and their children (156). Second, Flores provides the possibility that the “instability” of Mexican racialization is yet another mechanism of the “deportation regime” (156). Stated differently, Mexican racialization has always contained an “ambivalence” between desire and disgust that enables race to be “made and unmade” in the service of capitalism and nationalism (156). Third, Flores offers the disconcerting possibility that the figures of the “illegal alien” and “wetback” are no longer necessary because they have “achieved considerable ontological security” (157). In other words, illegality and deportability may now be “so firmly attached to all Latinx bodies” that the racial performative terminology is no longer necessary (157).Deportable and Disposable is useful for scholars and non-academics alike seeking to understand the historical and rhetorical processes behind Latinx racialization. Flores's attentiveness to language and detailed explication of racialized sociological dynamics can engage scholars as it can also introduce complex ideas to non-experts. For instance, it should not be lost on readers that Flores's monograph makes a compelling case that racializations are functions of discourse and that the discipline of rhetoric therefore can and should theorize historical as well as contemporary racializing discourses. In addition, Flores deserves credit for uncovering the rhetorical mechanisms through which illegality became a salient focus in immigration discourse. Sociologist Edwin F. Ackerman argues that, in much scholarship on the “illegal alien,” there exists an assumption that emphasis on illegality achieved widespread circulation because of the semantic and rhetorical “qualities [of “illegal alien”] as a discursive formation.”2 According to Ackerman, this assumption characterizes work by Lina Newton; Hugh Mehan; Douglass Massey, Jorge Durand, and Noland Malone; and Joseph Nevins.3 However, Flores's work resists this assumption and offers a corrective by demonstrating how public discourse coupled with deportation and repatriation campaigns tied Mexicanness with illegality despite undocumented entry previously being treated as a “technical flaw” rather than a moral failing.4

This article introduces a flexible and adaptable Map Composition assignment to promote cartographic literacy. With applications to composition and writing across the curriculum, this assignment promotes students’ awareness of the rhetorical nature of maps, which is important as maps inform and influence public discourse on wide-ranging issues. Student work shows how composing a map can lead them toward improved rhetorical awareness, cartographic literacy, and engagement with place-based civic issues. The article acknowledges limitations of teaching maps in writing classes and concludes with discussion of how this assignment can be adapted to a range of courses to promote cartographic literacy in support of broader literacies and civic engagement.

The article combines methods pertaining to Rhetorical Genre Studies and Discourse-Historical Approach in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s nomination acceptance speech which he delivered during the 2020 Confederation presidential primaries. The discussed genre of political speech is rarely realized in European contexts. Given various differences between the American and the Polish political systems, Bosak did not follow every pattern of the standard variant of the genre. Rather his speech appears to be more similar to a nomination acceptance speech of a third-party candidate. Overall, Bosak emerged as the leader of a divided and heterogeneous party, which was not given much attention by mainstream media. The paper investigates how these factors contributed to the structure and content of the speech. Moreover, recent decades have seen a rapid rise in significance of (far) right-wing movements in Europe. As Confederation is a relatively new political formation, there is a gap in research regarding the properties of its discourse. Thus, the present paper compares the discourse of the coalition with practices of politics of fear (Wodak, 2021).

With precise phrasing and dramatic flourish, Laura Mielke's Provocative Eloquence1 invites us into the performance cultures of the late antebellum era, showcasing the interplay between theater and oratory, politics and entertainment, ethical imperative and prevailing opinion. Violence suffused culture, language, and everyday experience in a time that found melodrama, minstrelsy, and spectacle in the ascendant, racial hierarchies and American slavery at the epicenter of political debates and popular culture, and a troubled white masculinity asserting its heroism. Mielke's book documents anti-Black oppressions of the antebellum stage and oratorical platform, and it also takes a fresh perspective: Mielke argues persuasively that theatrical forms offered strategic resources for abolitionist argument, that oratorical provocations permeated the stage, and that the theater and the rostrum provided sites for antebellum Americans to think together about the power of words and the justifications for force in the cause of freedom.This nuanced argument challenges assumptions that form is conjoined to stable ideologies and instead highlights creative adaptation, recitation, revision, and “political portability.”2 Drawing evidence from a wide variety of source material, Mielke develops compelling, intricate case studies of print and performance that instruct and surprise. Before turning primary attention to the late 1850s, she sets the stage two decades earlier with Edwin Forrest, entertainingly described as a “theatrical star and noted egomaniac”3 best known for “yoking articulacy to brawn.”4 A deft, deeply contextualized analysis of Forrest's calm, reasoned 1838 Fourth of July address at New York's Broadway Tabernacle shows the intertextual and interperformative dimensions of Forrest's Democratic partisanship, available for audience interpretation in light of his heroic, explosive roles like Spartacus, Metamora, and Macbeth. The orator recommended deliberation and gradualism; the actor regularly linked speech to revolt. Forrest's varied performances probed free expression, white working-class populism, and militancy in word and deed, while they resonated with staged rebellions, Romantic poetry, and defiance of all sorts. Mielke asks of the “stubbornly elusive”5 Forrest and of U.S. performance cultures more broadly: “Does one who speaks of liberty for all necessarily attack slavery, even if inadvertently?”6With the stage thus set—with an analytic focus on paradox and opposition and an analytic method characterized by deep historicization and sophisticated, imaginative readings across genres—Mielke moves on to the 1850s. The dramatic readings of Mary Webb and William Wells Brown highlight the suasory potentials of African American performance in what Mielke elucidates as the “rhetorically strategic recasting of the antislavery lecture into the drama.”7 In an increasingly menacing political climate, performers like Webb and Wells Brown began to signal the potential for physical resistance to slavery. As they vocalized a range of tragic or comedic characters—enslaved captives, cruel slaveholders, or overwrought white abolitionists—these artists adapted popular caricature and imitative form to their own ends while exemplifying control, decorum, and performative skill. Mielke compellingly shows how the form of the dramatic reading created conditions for the presentation of highly incendiary words while deflecting physical threat.The viciousness of proslavery political argument crystallized in 1856 when Preston Brooks took a cane to Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate the day after Sumner's “Crime against Kansas” speech had maligned proslavery argument and proslavery senator Andrew Butler, Brooks's cousin. The famous lithograph of this scene by John Magee, which Mielke aptly identifies as a theatrical tableau, efficiently encapsulates a drama of violent villainy and oratorical martyrdom. Building from this scene—reproduced on the book's cover—Mielke analyzes the political oratory of Sumner and Butler before turning attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred and its stage adaptations. Whereas the senators drew analogies and interpretative frameworks from dramatic literature, Stowe's novel incorporates a significant amount of public speaking, “from school recitation and revival preaching to courtroom address and lynch mob inducement,”8 in service of a wide array of perspectives on slavery and violence. The stagings of Dred, whether they reinforce calls to action or suppress radical potential, whether they play for laughs or highlight prophetic voice, embody the oxymoron of a slaveholding democracy.John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry grounds Mielke's investigation of legal discourse as the nation pressed ever forward toward war. Dexterously combining Portia's ironic eloquence in Merchant of Venice with abolitionist argument and nineteenth-century racial melodramas like Neighbor Jackwood and The Octoroon, Mielke shows how Portia's “redirection of legal violence and challenge to the contractual claim on another's flesh”9 were adapted in the late antebellum period to interpret physical violence, from armed revolt to capital punishment. Readily available in educational texts of the time, Merchant's trial scene offered the possibility that eloquence in the courtroom might conquer opponents without bloodshed. This theatrical form, whether explicitly cited or only presented in “family resemblance,”10 offered scripts for thinking through speech and violence even as battle beckoned.Mielke's concluding chapter is less a conventional summation than a final act, rehearsing key questions and arguments presented throughout the book and then comparing instances of theater and oratory that responded to Brown's raid, trial, and execution, climactic scenes in the drama of word and violence of the 1850s. Developing an interpretive framework through analysis of statements of Brown's detractors and defenders, Mielke explores themes of oath-taking, vengeance, aggression, and martyrdom in Kate Edwards Swayze's play Ossawattomie Brown and Henry David Thoreau's speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Here, again, forms like the theatrical tableau and the speech of moral principle occur in multiple genres, and when they recur, revised and recited, they help to constitute a performance culture and a basis for belief and action.Mielke's Provocative Eloquence will be of abiding interest to scholars of rhetoric and performance as it offers compelling insights into the ways that cultures are created, maintained, and changed in and through performance practices and as it centers the fraught histories of eloquence and violence in the deeply racialized context of U.S. history. Mielke's analytic perspective offers instruction for scholars and students since her book enacts an adroit blending of history, theory, and practice as simultaneously text and context. The comparative analysis of Forrest's theatrical and oratorical productions, the thoughtfully imagined presentation of Mary Webb's polyvocal dramatic readings, and the demonstration that Portia's irony haunts so much nineteenth-century public commentary on the law—these were favorite sections of mine, although I learned much from every chapter. Mielke's book, engagingly written and filled with dramatic historical nuggets, provides foundational arguments and analytic methods, and it prompts further reflection on topics like the scope of an identifiable theatrical (or rhetorical) form and on the range of spectatorial response. Reading this book will also inspire questions about continuity and change in the enactments of eloquence and violence up to our own time, in the persistent struggles to realize the hope of Black freedom and democratic equality. Mielke asks, “Can a true distinction be maintained between rhetoric and force? Can words alone provoke or justify violence, and under what conditions and for whom?”11 Such questions, pertinent to the 1850s, reverberate today.

Catherine Chaput’s Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates places an affective and rhetorical emphasis on the vexatious question that she argues plagues the academic Left: Why is the capitalist mode of production so much more successful than its alternatives? Capital’s hegemony, the book argues, stems from its foundational theorists’ capacity to adroitly articulate the public’s bodily affects toward its regime of private property and wage labor. By contrast, its critics, be they revolutionary or reformist, are caught in a series of rhetorical traps or oversights that neglect the affective dimensions of capital, and hence are incapable of mobilizing effective (and affective) countermovements. She writes, “The market is an affective force that influences rhetorical action by linking bodily receptivities to economic persuasion. The market feels real because it is the nominalization we give to the very real affective energies circulating throughout our lived experiences” (2). To prove this claim, Chaput carefully pairs four sets of historical thinkers, in which a proponent of the capitalist mode of production is pitted against a critic thereof. With few exceptions, the thinker allied with the capitalist mode of production emerges victorious, for they are more adept at linking these unsymbolized/unarticulated bodily affects to the mode of production’s acceptable means of expression.Prior to the main event, Chaput first reviews how affect has been underthought or misconceived in the materialist tradition and traces a critical genealogy of affect from within the rhetorical tradition as a corrective. Via readings of Ancient and Renaissance thinkers, for whom “the passions [are] coextensive with the rational and understanding both as simultaneously embodied and transembodied” (23), Chaput advocates an affective materialism that aims to suture the noncognitive, the bodily, and the social to the realms of rhetoric, symbolic influence, and ideology. Chaput accomplishes this methodologically by proposing a schema for assessing the “materiality of affect and its rhetorical significance” (36) with rhetorical inputs and material outputs. For instance, rhetorical frequency and repetition lead to “push or pull identification,” which “shapes ideological context,” while “volume/intensity” raises or lowers affective energy, which then “motivates action or inaction” (37). Chaput returns to this framework occasionally in later chapters to demonstrate what makes certain authors more effective than others at channeling resonances between bodies and private property.Chapters 2 through 5 constitute the bulk of the book, in which Adam Smith / Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes / Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek / Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman / John Kenneth Galbraith are read both on their own terms and through the lens of affect, and I commend Chaput for providing a perspicacious reading of each thinker. Chapter 2, wherein Smith and Marx are pitted against one another, is the heart of the argument, from which every other chapter’s assessment flows. In Chaput’s reading, because Smith’s concept of sympathy, generated from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is “a richer, perhaps intuitive, understanding of the physiological work of affect” (42), arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production are more likely to be successful than criticisms thereof. Echoing the schema described above, Chaput writes, “The Wealth of Nations illuminates an affective structure that motivates capitalism such that market freedom opens one’s receptivity to capitalism, while participation pulls toward particular identifications within the system and the supply and demand of exchange mobilizes the fluctuating energies of specific actions” (53).In contrast, Marx’s diagnoses of the capitalist mode of production bend the opposite direction: “For Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them caricatures of capital” (57). Chaput reads Marx’s early writings on alienation as also implicitly theorizing affect, but because Marx was committed to a critique of political economy (rather than an affirmative case for it), his account is hopelessly impoverished when put alongside the thinker writing several decades prior. She writes, “Smith’s affect theory, which leaves its ultimate origins to the mythical invisible hand, trumps Marx’s affective account, which requires not natural instincts but arduous propositional thinking and scientific reason, forcing a reconsideration of critical political economic theory” (60). From this point on, the die is cast. Smith’s rhetoric of sympathy, freedom, natural instinct, and the invisible hand renders bodies conducive to wage labor; his expansive, positive affects triumph over Marx’s decision to emphasize capital’s dehumanizing and divisive qualities.Chapter 3, on Keynes and Veblen, poses two reformists against one another and is the only matchup that could be scored a draw. Because both thinkers “suffer from an inflated valuation of rationality” (85), Chaput concludes that their persuasive power is weakened, “and thus the receptivity of these thinkers” (86). Despite the fact that Keynes draws the public’s attention to the “animal spirits” that systematically throw off financial markets, and the fact that investors make decisions off of second-order rationality and not on the value of assets themselves, resulting in “mass affective practices untethered to concrete material realities” (80), his endorsement of deliberation, regulation, and probabilistic thinking as a palliative dooms his work. Yet it seems to me that Keynes’s fatal flaw for Chaput is his skepticism of neoclassical economics’ concept of equilibrium, or the supposedly natural functions that balance out supply and demand: “Emphasizing that equilibrium cannot be taken for granted, Keynes offers an inefficient version of affective identification as he relies too much on persuasion and not enough on the human capacity to synergistically combine around similar experiences” (79). Arguments that presume that exchange is “natural, inevitable, and perfect” are the more efficient case for readers, and thus, once again, the capitalist mode of production triumphs discursively.If the Smith/Marx dyad is the pediment upon which the book’s argument rests, the Hayek/Adorno dyad, in chapter 4, acts as its symbolic button-tie. (Historical events occur twice, as Hegel, via Marx, reminds us.) Here, Chaput generously reads Hayek’s work as emblematizing a sophisticated concept of affect that joins together arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production to the bodies that experience it. For Chaput, Hayek’s invocation of cognitive psychology counts as scientific proof of Smith’s intuitions surrounding sympathy and the invisible hand: “Adding cognitive psychology to Smith’s theory of moral connectivity, Hayek replaces sympathy with disposition and refines morality as political and economic liberalism” (94). Tracing the complexities of Hayek’s thought through his notions of language, of social order, and of human cognition, Chaput affirms that it is his capacity to blend the cognitive and the noncognitive in a story that renders economic liberalism more conducive to bodies than alternatives. In contrast, Adorno’s relentless negative dialectics, a ruthless criticism of everything existing, and the claim that his “body of work appears to attack people as unthinking” condemns his life’s work to a distant second place in this rhetorical matchup (112). In Chaput’s account, by asserting the moral value of economic liberalism and championing (rather than castigating) human ignorance in the face of enormous social and economic complexity, Hayek’s work completes a flawless victory over Adorno’s. Chaput concludes that this rhetorical triumph “set the path for the practical economic work of the late twentieth century and, ultimately, for the triumph of neoliberalism” (112).Chapter 5, in which Chaput sets two public figures of “the economic” against one another, Milton Friedman emerges victorious over John Kenneth Galbraith, but for a surprising set of reasons. Chaput’s overarching thesis is stretched to its limit in this chapter, for Chaput locates in Friedman’s relentless privileging of human beings’ capacity for rational economic behavior (and equally importantly, insisting that economists must interpret human behavior as if it were rational), a sublation, rather than a repudiation, of Hayek’s affect theory (117). Meanwhile, despite Galbraith, a bleeding-heart reformist and critic of unrestrained capital accumulation, arguing that corporations move individuals and the socius at the level of affect, his account is paltry in comparison because he cannot affirmatively endorse the positive affects that the capitalist mode of production generates in the production process. She writes that he “offers no energetic replacement for these negative affective situations” (120) and, later, that “Galbraith cannot theorize this identification [with corporations] as the embodied energy circulating among and thereby animating these employees and their projects” (121). And once again, much like Keynes, because Galbraith’s solution to corporate capture of the American political system is to encourage deliberative democracy, he is doomed to failure for naïvely adhering to a logic of representation that capitalist affects can overcome, divert, or recode.Those who have read thus far may be in a state of despair: not only is capital dominant, but it is persuasive, and not simply at the cognitive level. By describing procapitalist theorists’ ability to better articulate “the physiological energies inhabiting the world” (4), the capitalist mode of production is a resounding success—discursively, affectively, bodily. Every key thinker from Adam Smith onward better articulates affect, the “physical power that moves seemingly uncontrollably through human beings and other things to produce preconscious readiness” (33), toward capital’s contemporary dominance. But for those predisposed to a Foucauldian perspective, Chaput’s conclusion promises succor. Here, Chaput reads Foucault’s lectures, which focus on ethopoetic behavior and parrhesiastic speech, as a potential site of anticapitalist agency through “the cultivation of a critical subjectivity with the capacity for reflexive truth-telling” (150). From Foucault’s consent “to Smith’s explanation of the market as an ordering mechanism that exceeds full human understanding” and because he accepts “the invisible hand as a real power” (144), only the free individual, the parrhesiastic rhetor, can constitute a meaningful counter-power to the capitalist mode of production.For Foucault, “mental exercises designed to create free individuals—ones capable of assessing, mobilizing, and reorienting the fleshy impulses of their experience in the world” (151)—are vital to producing good parrhesia (rather than bad parrhesia, which acts on unearned certainty). Here, Chaput conveys Foucault’s suggestion that subjects sleep on a pallet, wear coarse clothes, eat little, drink only water, and play affectionately with one’s child while reciting the truth that this beloved individual will die (151–52). Only through cultivating this form of the self can the parrhesiastic rhetor speak disruptive truths such that the genuinely new can emerge.The turn to late-period Foucault may be unsatisfying to a reader who seeks nonindividualized remedies to the cascading inequalities and catastrophes that capitalism unleashes. Chaput frequently sets up binary oppositions (reason/passion, science/sympathy, cognitive/noncognitive) in which the procapitalist position carries the day, but a collective/individual binary is left unremarked upon. Because Chaput locates affective harmonics within discrete bodies (and crucially for her argument, bodies capable of coming to reasonable conclusions about the merits of the capitalist mode of production), individual bodies are prioritized over their being-in-concert. Take the assessment of Galbraith’s work: “Not surprisingly, Galbraith theorizes how corporations—and other large organizations—use identification to compel individuals but does not offer a productive counter-power for individual agents” (120). Despite noting that even for Foucault the invisible hand is “a manufactured ontology” designed to coordinate bodies in spaces as if they were rational economic agents, it is only sympathetically driven actors of “civil society” that can become an effective counter-power to capital’s hegemony (149).Ironically, Foucault’s insight, that what we call spontaneous order or natural inclination is manufactured, rather than discovered, ought to draw our attention to the rhetorical dimensions of each reconsidered thinker. Here, I wonder whether Chaput need have committed to a single through line, from Smith onward, as a process of discovering the unseen affective forces that sympathetically bond bodies, and not a story with rhetorical hinge points on how affect is theorized. Hayek’s role as a master-signifier would then work in two directions: First, his rhetorical interventions retroactively alter our perceptions of Smith’s own work, such that we cannot but help see him as incipiently Hayekian. Second, once a Hayekian vision of the social bond is secured, procapital rhetors need not agree on the importance of affect, sympathy, spontaneous order, and so on, to be rhetorically effective. This would help better ground the Friedman chapter, for as written, his rational choice theory, and dismissal of affect, is narrated as confirmation and not a rejection of Hayek’s position (118). By making Hayek’s monumentality central to the overall argument, it opens space for how scholars must navigate the politics of reading itself, how certain signifiers become ineluctable. This would also explain more precisely how one master-signifier, the assemblage we call “Keynes” or “Keynesianism,” functioned as the dominant mode of capitalist expression for nearly four decades, and precisely how it was thoroughly superseded by another signifying regime.Finally, Chaput devotes space in both the introduction and conclusion to the work of Dana Cloud, whose materialist commitment to ideological demystification and consciousness raising is (along with other Marxists, like James Arnt Aune) characterized as “futile” (18), and whose failure to “acknowledge affect as a semiautonomous ontology motivating our bodily instincts” renders her approach insufficient to the task of rewriting capitalist affects (159). Yet Cloud’s own 2018 work, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture, acts as a counterpart to Chaput’s. Cloud agrees that liberal approaches to capital-T Truth are feeble in the face of capital’s stranglehold on the enthymemes that organize our embodied common sense; she similarly agrees that “affect” and “embodiment” are necessary—as is struggle (51). I encourage readers to put these works in conversation with one another, for they locate similar lacunae in our thought, but conceive of the source and solutions thereto differently.Market Affect exemplifies the kind of intervention that a rhetorically attuned scholar can bring to pressing political-economic debates; I commend the work for both letting the chosen thinkers speak on their own terms and considering the status of affect in each. The book’s thesis is admittedly provocative: it upends much materialist social history by foregrounding the affective dimensions of procapitalist writing as that which explains the mode of production’s enormous success. Future critical work that resides in the intersections of rhetoric, affect, materialism, and economics must engage with the implications of this move, and rigorously inquire exactly when, where, and, crucially, for whom this case can be proven as true. Chaput also contributes methodologically to the field of affect theory by enjoining scholars to focus not just on the “physiological energies” that circulate among bodies, but through their representations in consequential writings; Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are welcomed into the ranks of affect theory scholars via this avenue. Scholars interested in this reconsideration now have a treasure trove of thoughtful interpretations of the most consequential thinkers in modern history (the readings of Marx, Hayek, and Adorno do deserve special mention). And as mentioned, rhetorical scholars eager for a Foucauldian political intervention will find the conclusion especially edifying, for she reads Foucault’s late work as fundamentally concerned with a rhetorical problem space. Finally, scholars ought to test Chaput’s models of affective circulation and rhetorical interpretation in future scholarship, in particular her claim that repetition, timbre, and “volume and intensity” have definable and predictable affective outcomes that influence action (37). It is a reminder to rhetoricians that we must listen as carefully as we read. As affect appears to increasingly dominate our understandings of how capital functions, this is an exciting time for inquiry on economics and the economy, and this is a powerful contribution from a notable scholar.

In this essay, I examine the film Johanna d’Arc ofMongolia (1989), made by German director Ulrike Ottinger in the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I argue that it can be read as an anti-authoritarian articulation of a desire for radical public spheres better suited to serve minority interests, particularly at a time of drastic transformations of social and political conditions. The film’s narrative ambiguity should be read in the rhetorical situation of radical fairy tales in West Germany and their attempt to develop counterpublic spheres to resist the organization of experiences by the consciousness industry. Ottinger’s film, while shot mostly in Inner Mongolia during the crucial year for the reunification of Germany, is far from being escapist. The shock of the displaced lower-class heroine, so different from the “happy ending” imperative of traditional fairy tales, unveils the fiction of a neoliberal economy that considers people and land as mere commodities. Like Karl Polanyi, Ottinger wants to empower people to question the assumption that they had to accept major displacements and flexibility in the name of a self-regulating market. The fairy tale, as a contested genre related to education, is a primary field for this struggle.

This article applies the lens of genre to the social media advocacy of three patient-activists—self-identified “zebras” whose rarely diagnosed conditions are frequently comorbid—who, through performing consistent genre moves, and using the capabilities of social networking to translate personal experiences into public discourse, amplify visibility, and normalize their voices as collective advocacy. Ultimately, through networked communication, these patient-activists perform emergent connections between their conditions outside of the traditional legitimization networks of biomedicine with the aim of gaining legitimacy in public and clinical settings.

Rhetoricians of science often (rightly) demarcate as antiscientific the way creationists engage with, manipulate, and circulate scientific knowledge. Though this demarcation work is essential for understanding how creationists manipulate science in the public sphere, relying on demarcation analysis closes off rhetorical inquiry. By analyzing Answers Research Journal, a creationist scientific journal, this essay contends the way creationist authors engage with scientific knowledge production offers a more nuanced way of seeing how scientific meaning-making has rhetorical capacity, which offers new avenues by which rhetoricians of science can investigate the power of scientific methodologies.

ABSTRACT In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot say, “Equity achieved.”