This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

ABSTRACT This article develops a theory of rhetorical impression through a critical genealogy of the term phantasia. The genealogy demonstrates cause for understanding phantasia as impression, not image. I trace phantasia as impression through the work of Plato and Aristotle but ultimately argue that the stoics offer the most productive leads for thinking through impressions, materiality, and sensations together. Specifically, I demonstrate how the stoics' concept of lekton can productively mediate the relationship between rhetoric, materiality, imagination, and idealism. In the closing section, I suggest how a theory of rhetorical impression can address lacunae in existing new materialist approaches.

ABSTRACT In this short text, I analyze various senses of being in time. My claim is that time forms a weird interiority through an embrace of whatever is “in” it. I, then, flesh out this claim through a close reading of Book IV in Aristotle's Physics, while grafting each “measure of movement,” through which the Greek philosopher defines time, onto the movements of plants. The result is a twisting and turning, ramified, wayward temporality that holds every sense of being in time in a vegetal embrace.

A concept in Aristotle’s thought that is both politically and rhetorically significant for all life forms is a sign (sêmeion). Yet, scholarship has historically left underexplored how Aristotle positions the utility of a sign across human and nonhuman animal domains. Rereading his presentation of signs in the Rhetoric in light of his statements on the use of sign-inference through physiognomy in Prior Analytics elucidates how rhetoric’s interest in persuasive things makes use of a sign’s physicality. In so doing, Aristotle demonstrates how rhetoric enables political communities to grapple with an inescapable nonhuman status.

ABSTRACT Many rhetorical theories of ethos mark their relationship with time by focusing on two temporal poles: the timely ethos and the timeless ethos. But between these two temporal poles, ethos is also durative; it lingers, shifts, accumulates, and dissipates over time. Although scholarship often foregrounds the kairotic and static senses of ethos popularized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, this article highlights how the chronic elements of ethos are no less important to rhetoric. By examining Xenophon's and Plato's representations of the trial of Socrates, this article contends that these competing views about the temporalities of ethos have a storied history that predates Aristotle's writings. This analysis also expands received understandings of Plato's contributions to rhetoric by illuminating how his view of ethos is deeply intertwined with ongoing philosophical practice. The article concludes by arguing that rhetorical studies has much to gain by more closely attending to the cumulative aspects of ethos.

ABSTRACTThe Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered rhetoric, opening the door for a “true” rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic.

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a vision of rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. This position contrasts with traditionally accepted views of rhetoric as phenomenological practice, evidenced prominently in contemporary rhetorical theory. I advance a framework that employs metaphorical accommodation and indicates a way that rhetoric can be situated as a perpetually productive force. The analytic tradition affords a method and vocabulary that when placed in conversation with rhetorical studies offers an alternative for viewing rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. I determine that rhetorical theory should engage with rhetoric as a measure of action, activity, and vitality that raises our awareness and connects us.

This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

In The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory, Ira Allen does much more than give us a theory of rhetoric. He gives us a map of reality, of how we make the world real to ourselves, how we convince one another (and ourselves) of its realness, even as what we so deem is constantly changing. This book is a primer on how the fact of radical contingency is not in and of itself fatal to the project of human life and politics. On the contrary, for Allen, it is the source of human life and politics. In his careful and elegant way of thinking Allen shows us how out of the chaos and swirl of all that is, we manage nonetheless to continuously produce a tension (what he calls a “hung dialectic”) between what we claim the world to be and what we experience it as being. At the center of this navigation is our relationship to rhetoric itself. For Allen, rhetoric is no less aleatory and contingent than the world we try to describe through its tropes. But rather than being a drawback, this shared contingency is precisely how rhetoric is able to connect us with this world in ways that are both creative and powerful.Allen's book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the nature of what constitutes “truth” in rhetorical theory. Allen shows us that something deemed true can also (must also) be both fantastical and poetic. Yet, as Allen shows, this is nonetheless a “pragmatic fantasy” (13), that is, it does something; it coheres and performs. Chapters 3 through 5 develop the idea of a “troubled freedom,” a way of negotiating the rules (and there are rules!) to rhetoric without being overly limited by them. These central chapters explore the relationship between modern and classical rhetoric, the way that rhetoric circulates among what Allen calls “focalizers” (the one, the some, the many, the all), and the relationship rhetoric has to the symbols that it employs. These various discussions contend with what could be called the granularity and sedimentation of rhetoric, the traditions and modes by which it is undertaken and how these both shape and free up the power of rhetorical theory to explain the world. Finally, in chapter 6, Allen looks at rhetorical theory in terms of what he calls a “self-consciously ethical fantasy,” bringing this consideration into direct conversation with ethical understandings of how rhetoric functions.In his examination of the possibilities and limits of rhetorical theory, Allen not only describes but models the key notion of his book, which is that of “troubled freedom.” Troubled freedom, as previously noted, references the way we seek expression and persuasion even as we navigate the problematical limits of language. We are never as free as we want to be, but we are also never as constrained as we fear (here again, the tension between those two states is the basis for what we actually can do). Allen accepts the things that he can't prove or know, and from this limited basis, he shows how much freedom we do have, as well as the kinds of truths and fantasies—which in Allen's fascinating formulation are effectively the same thing—we can come up with out of this basis.In order to give a sense of the depth and breadth of this book it is helpful to further explain a few of its central notions. One key claim is the aforementioned concept of a “hung dialectic.” This notion is central to the entire scope of this work. A hung dialectic is one that does not resolve itself, does not lead to transcendence in any sense and is, perhaps above all, not a teleological certainty. For all of this, the hung dialectic still is highly effective. Allen tells us that rhetorical theory is itself a hung dialectic, writing, “As a hung dialectic, rhetorical theory does not issue in any one outcome. It remains multiple and in its multiplicity inaccessible [as a clear and determinable thing]…. No one aspect of rhetorical theory's work can be pressed into service as its truth” (71). This is, once again, not disabling but actually enabling because it allows multiplicity to be expressed, to contend with itself, to radically change and develop whatever rhetorical theory is even as it remains bound within its limits (including its limit to not be a single, coherent, and unchanging thing). A hung dialectic, you could say, is the basis for troubled freedom; it is a key part of how we navigate an imperfect and ever changing world.A second—and related—critical concept for this book is spirit. Allen tells us that spirit is the thread that ropes together the disparate aspects of rhetorical theory, its referents, its devices, its patterns and usages. But he is careful not to say that spirit is a teleology that contains within itself all that it needs to know before it even starts. This latter idea is redolent of a reading of Hegel that Allen vigorously challenges. Spirit is for Allen more of a moving target. When we read Hegel's work without a sense of spirit as a form (or really the form) of motion, we make mistakenly limiting snapshots of his work. Allen tells us that “[spirit] is anticipatorily apprehended as synchronic totality only in its diachronic passage through and by means of opposition that function as reality-makers and that never are wholly resolved” (99–100). In other words, spirit works not despite but because it does not conform to ordinary rules about temporality (and spatiality for that matter too). It is the throughline of rhetorical shapedness, but that shape can be seen only in retrospect.To call spirit “anticipatory,” as he does, does not mean that for Allen spirit already knows that which it is anticipating. It is a process of becoming, yes, but each stage of that becoming is not known in advance (even though it is anticipated). To think of spirit as a form of motion allows rhetorical theory, in Allen's conception, to make sense to us, to be like a particle wave whose shape over time constitutes a kind of cohering that allows for “reality mak[ing].” This insight allows Allen to graphically depict rhetorical theory as a whole. He charts for example a movement from classical to modern modalities. Just like quantum physics, these separated aspects are both particles and waves. It is spirit that unites them even while they keep their separate singularity. As Allen tells us, “Spirit is both a style of motion and the fullness of being that occurs via that motion” (105).I think that this concept of spirit is, like the hung dialectic, a very useful way to think about the coherence of disparate things, the way that they can be effective even though they are multiple and sometimes at odds with one another. I often think of the human subject, not as a singular organized and hierarchical whole but rather as a vast anarchist ferment of various competing, overlapping subjectivities, some of which are wholly interior and some of which are shared or borrowed from other selves. But this doesn't mean that we are paralyzed by dissension or multiplicity. We do things: we talk, we think, we act. You could say that the thing that holds us together is this spirit. But what exactly is spirit in that case? As Allen describes it, it is not in any way a theological concept. Perhaps it merely refers to the possibility of language and thinking producing an effectively unified set of concepts despite the apparent disorganization that comes with giving up on the kinds of certainties that Allen is battling against (certainties of sense, predetermined meanings, “truth” in language, etc.). Spirit, you could say, works along the lines of “if you build it they will come”: the mere possibility (or spirit) of coherence amidst contingency makes it so.To those who worry about such a view of language leading us into a zone of total chaos and confusion, Allen explains that human beings cannot not see the world as predicated, as having meaning and truth in it. I suspect that this is not only the source but the actuality of spirit; spirit is a kind of delusion, a fantasy (but then again, for Allen, all truth is a form of fantasy until it isn't). Spirit is this predication, the ability to see oneness where there isn't any; this is also the essence of rhetoric for Allen. That form of seeing deeply matters; it involves how we decide who is whom and what is what, the way we make sense of the world. It is the basis of politics, of our troubled freedom.Allen takes maximal advantage of this human propensity to predicate. He seizes upon it as a way to be able to say something about the world, about language and rhetoric itself (in this way this book is itself a superb example of spirit). It is our mistaken reading of the world as having meaning and truth in it that gives us a modicum of meaning and truth (another version of “if you build it”). The reader or listener or viewer's mistaken belief causes us to live as if amidst what we think must exist. And so it does (as far as we are concerned). Allen several times quotes Wittgenstein's comment that “something must be taught as a foundation” (1). It doesn't seem to matter just what that foundation is (since there are no actual foundations); since we have to have a foundation, we will certainly find one.This is where the connection between truth and fantasy becomes so important in The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory. In Allen's view, all truth is initially fantasy. In some sense it remains fantasy the whole time but insofar as there has to be a foundation, and since a foundation can't be read as a fantasy, for a time at least, a fantasy becomes true, until it is displaced by another truth and so on (actually I think that Allen shows us that it is much more complicated than this; in fact many truths are coming into being and then leaving in multiple discordant fashion at different and overlapping times, but we must read all of this, Allen says, as if it were coherent and so it is, once again, so far as we are concerned).As a response to this understanding of truth, Allen offers us what he calls a “chastened humanism” (220). He is interested in the concept of posthumanism, but he has a few hesitations about embracing such a position himself. He worries that to think oneself as being posthuman suggests the possibility of transcending limitations that human beings can't transcend (otherwise we wouldn't have a troubled freedom, we'd have most likely no freedom at all insofar as those limits are critical to what makes that freedom possible in the first place). For Allen we must embrace our own self-consciousness because this is a critical part of how we navigate our position as truth-makers. In a sense, we must be in on our own fraud in order not to be completely taken over by it and succumb to the very kinds of teleologies that Allen tells us that rhetorical theory helps us to trouble. He writes, “Humanism, chastened by this acknowledgment [of the fantastic nature of truth], is no celebration; it is a straightforward way of negotiating a hard limit. Posthumanism is no more a stance that can be taken up by actual human animals than is objectivity” (104).This is one of the rare places in the book where I found myself pushing back a bit on what Allen is saying, but it might just reflect our respective understandings of the term “posthumanism.” I haven't read posthumanism (at least some versions of it) as seeking to transcend humanity so much as similarly seeking to trouble it (not unlike Allen himself). I wholeheartedly agree that it is a mistake to try to imagine ourselves as no longer being human or occupying a nonhuman perspective. That's more like what the transhumanists do: transcend death and even humanness itself. Posthumanism, as I understand it, is itself somewhat chastened, but I don't want to split hairs over what might simply be a semantic difference.Chastened humanism is perhaps a better term than posthumanism because it doesn't mean abandoning roots and imagined origins but just recognizing our own lack of domination and control over the process we are moving through and being shaped by; it means recognizing the way spirit shapes our lives and serves as our ever-changing temporal and spatial envelope of possibility. A chastened humanism could also be given as the name for Allen's methodology in this book, which I would summarize as a style of thinking and writing where nothing is abandoned but nothing is allowed to dominate either. Except for his one axiom (that humans must predicate), Allen doesn't assume anything further. He allows rhetorical theory to exist in all of its glorious complexity and incoherence (and coherence too). So for example, one set of points that he sees as integral to the body and shape of rhetorical theory is a complicated relationship to its classical past. There is both continuity and discontinuity between that tradition and modern times, and there is no getting around that relationship even if it has been discarded or disavowed. This may not seem “methodological,” but I would submit that it is. The method in this case is to simultaneously accept two seemingly contradictory modalities, the fact that language is both chaotic and meaningful at the same time. Accordingly, the way that “modern” rhetorical theory predicates itself (and predicate we must!) is by saying either that it stems from classical rhetoric or that it doesn't stem from classical rhetoric. There doesn't seem to be any way around that relationship. Rather than see this as an impossible contradiction, Allen doesn't sweat this. He allows this to simply be, part of the spirit of rhetoric.Similarly, Allen allows for a multiplicity of what he calls “focalizers,” namely the sense of the “all,” the “many” the “some” and the “one,” to coexist despite the fact that they are at times patently contradictory. For example, to distinguish between conviction and persuasion, there needs to be an elicited sense of “the all,” that is to say the true and absolute audience that serves (even though it doesn't actually exist) as a witness to a truth; that is how you get the possibility of conviction. The many or some need not be true audiences either (or not as true anyway; I think there can be gradations rather than separation between these quantities; this too can be both a set of particles and a wave). These focalizers help to give dimension and heft to the practice of rhetorical theory without needing to be either ontologically true or in harmony with other focalizers.The final element in Allen's account of what could be called the material or substantive nature of rhetorical theory is the symbol, a notion that he derives in part from the work of Kenneth Burke. The symbol is a kind of working model of troubled freedom, a predication that can't ever be true but that has an enduring power of its own. One very concrete example that Allen gives of how the symbol can affect the world without a monopoly on truth (quite the contrary) comes in his discussion of how Burke thinks about constitutions. Burke suggests that in terms of constitutional law “what is really mandatory upon the court is a new act” (227). In other words, novelty and the circulation of laws and interpretations is what gives the law its life and its motion and indeed its spirit. This is a good example of how some things very tangible (laws, constitutions) are not prevented but enabled by their own contingent nature (in this case, via the category of newness).Here, you can get a sense of how all of the disparate parts that Allen focuses on fit together despite being wholly unalike; symbolism, focalizers, the relationship between the modern and the classic tradition, it is all part of the materiality of rhetorical theory. These things don't have to be truly true (which is fortunate because they aren't). They certainly aren't eternal or constant. There is nothing of the “idea” here. Or rather there is but in a sense that is closer to Walter Benjamin than Plato. Benjamin tells us that the idea isn't found in some ideal transcendent space but rather in each and every expression of a category. So for example, if you could gather every possible rendition of a chair—including chairs that don't really seem to be chairs at all, or maybe even everything that one could use as a chair that isn't a chair—you would effectively have the “idea” of a chair before you (although you couldn't possibly have them all literally before you). The idea is itself a kind of symbol, but it's a symbol that successfully—at least in its form as an idea—seems to encompass something in all of its material presence, its way of being and changing in space and time (that's the other thing; you'd need to know what a chair was going to be like in ten thousand years, ten million years too). As such, the idea suggests a kind of transcendent status, but I would actually say that it really has descendent status, that is, it is the essence of materialism in all of its aleatory and contingent multiplicity.This connects to the last thing I want to say and appreciate about Allen's book. This is a book about the ordinary and the every day. Allen celebrates ordinary freedoms, doxa in all of its banal variety. This is a book about not heroic truths but humbler, more chastened sorts of truths. I think this books shows how we can live without transcendent heights, without the need for perfection and true unity. As such, I would say this is a radically democratic and indeed highly anarchist book. The fact that Allen shows us how we can have truth and predication, a sedimented world that we can sink our teeth into, even without the requirement for higher laws and absolute truths and facts saves us from thinking that we need recourse to the kind of transcendent laws that are the stuff of archaism. For this reason alone (but there are many other reasons too), I think Allen has done us all a great and vital service.

As corrective to rhetorical theorists who disparage “expression,” the following article analyzes Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke on “expression” and its communicative counterpart “sympathy.” Pater viewed ideal style as a unity of expression and sympathy. Wilde saw Christ as the singular representative of absolute expression and sympathy. Burke resolved both expression and sympathy into the “compromise” of the symbol. I advocate for a return to expression and sympathy as rhetorical values in the twenty-first century.

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

The Queer Caucus created the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award to honor Anzaldúa’s impact on “studies of both rhetoric and queer theory” through forging “connections across difference and oppression in order to dismantle systems of privilege, whether that be heterosexism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism or ableism (as a non-exhaustive list).” However, the text of the Award, along with its impetus, belies these intentions. The Award erases Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad from her work and her person through the emphasis on culture-less sexual and gender minority experiences, the redefinition of Anzaldúa’s work as focused on generalized difference and oppression, and the omission of any substantive acknowledgment of her Chicanidad. This essay examines the erasure of Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad and the appropriation of Anzaldúa as a race-less and culture-less liberatory figure through the operation of homonormativity and whiteness. I analyze the text and impetus of the Award through an analytical framework rooted in the rhetorical concepts of Kenneth Burke and Gloria Anzaldúa’s own concerns about erasure and appropriation through homonormativity and whiteness. I argue that the meaningful change to the text and its authorship, as well as to meaningful inclusion of queers of color, is necessary for the Award to continue.

ABSTRACTThis essay tells the story of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “dissociation of concepts,” which they introduced in 1958 and is in use as a tool of criticism by many rhetorical critics. The story begins in England with John Locke's development of associative reasoning in 1770 and then moves to France, with Remy de Gourmont extending associative reasoning with the concept of dissociation in 1899. Gourmont's dissociation crosses the Atlantic and is then developed by Kenneth Burke in 1931. In turn, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca absorbed and expanded Locke, Gourmont, and Burke's theories of association and dissociation in 1958. They crafted a tool, the dissociation of concepts, that equips rhetorical reasoning with the capacity to navigate between the promise and perils of fission and fusion. Since 1958, many scholars have made productive use of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's innovation. The essay concludes with some possible futures for their dissociation of concepts.

ABSTRACT Dissociation is considered by many to be Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's most innovative and significant contribution to rhetorical theory. Currently on display in American debates over racial justice and public health, dissociation is a nuanced process of conceptual reconfiguration. After exploring how dissociation figures in these debates, the introduction summarizes how scholars over the years have extended and complicated the concept. The introduction then identifies key gaps in scholarship that are addressed by the articles included in this special section, including dissociation's philosophical genesis, its linguistic manifestations, its structural possibilities, and its role in comedic discourse.

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

Preview this article: Trust on Display: The Epideictic Potential of Institutional Governance, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/83/2/collegeenglish30997-1.gif

The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. Link to PDF

Research Article| September 01 2020 (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail is a Senior Research Fellow in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs at Indiana University. I wish to thank Professor Martin Medhurst for his sustained and ongoing commitment to inclusive excellence, diversity, and equity, Professors Aaron David Gresson, III, John Hatch and David Frank for their courage, commitment, and integrity, and Dr. Evelyn Boise Bottando for showing me the clear connection between white privilege, innocence, and sociopathy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 529–552. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Lawrence McPhail; (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 529–552. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

&#8220;As we teach deliberative and engaged rhetoric, we can use this case as an exhibit for students. The revisions to the Common Rule illustrate how publicly engaged rhetoricians can negotiate the policy process and help undo decades of systematic marginalization—marginalization that has occurred as a direct result of language.&#8221;

Drawing on Donald Schön’s concept of the reflective practitioner and the classical rhetorical concept of stasis, this article observes the habits and tactics of experienced community engaged instructors of writing and rhetoric. It suggests that a complete reflective practice, combining reflection in and on action, contributes to sustaining effective programs and practices. In moments of&hellip; Continue reading Stasis and the Reflective Practitioner: How Experienced Teacher-Scholars Sustain Community Pedagogy by Amy Rupiper Taggart and H. Brooke Hessler

The writing I received in my first-semester composition class at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, the semester immediately following Hurricane Katrina was stunning with respect to both student commitment and narrative sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative example of this writing entitled &#8220;life During Katrina&#8221; by a student I have called &#8220;K.&#8221;&hellip; Continue reading Writing the Blues: Teaching in a Post-Katrina Environment by Gwen Robinson

This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant&hellip; Continue reading In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing by Teresa M. Redd

ABSTRACT This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

ABSTRACTGoogle Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse (i.e., the long view)—general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives.

ABSTRACT This article explores the roots of (African American) rhetorical theory through an examination of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Rhetorical theory in this case is a forcible call for antislavery unity between races that at the same time rejects notions of the body as a racial essence. This essay attempts to make Douglass's rhetorical theory clear so that we can better understand how the key term functions today.

This article analyzes ideologies underpinning argument-based writing assignments and considers how they may contribute to a current climate of polarization. The authors suggest that the argument-based essay may be what Kenneth Burke called an unquestioned and habituated “cow path” and conclude by considering how students may benefit from a deeper engagement with explanatory ways of knowing, writing, and relating to each other.

&#8220;Though certainly not new to human experience, President Trump’s self-epideictic does mark cultural shifts in deliberative styles and argumentative proofs that should be of interest to rhetoricians. The proliferation of self-epideictic may signal changes in how we argue public policy effectively, with a potential chilling effect on democratic deliberation.&#8221;

In a 2002 article, Patricia Roberts-Miller asked if rhetorical theory has a place for what she then called &#8220;principled dissent and sincere outrage.&#8221; This article addresses that challenge, as the author follows a year of living in and writing for a community in Atlanta that works with the homeless in that city. In it, she&hellip; Continue reading It’s Not About Me: Public Writing and the Place of Principled Dissent by Diana George

&#8220;What our experience showed us is that communicating care in context requires a relentless engagement with stakeholders in context and a sophisticated understanding of the way ethics, history, sociology, politics and science affect one’s ability to experience feeling cared for.&#8221;

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

ABSTRACTThis essay argues for the value of presence as rhetorical heuristic. Beginning with the philosophical tradition, the authors establish a long-standing interest in presence or isness, understood as the thing-itself outside subjectivity. We then trace how rhetorical theorists including Aristotle, Quintilian, and Perelman have privileged isness as a baseline for true conviction, positioning rhetoric as an effort to imitate material proofs. Such views highlight the tension between presence (things of the world in their isness) and the arts of presencing (the capacity of words and symbols to shape an isness), suggesting a generative frame for analysis. To demonstrate, we examine global migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants, we posit that these individuals' paradoxical experiences of bodily presence but legal absence reveal a fraught interplay among rhetoric, state power, and competing notions of truth. However, immigration is only a case study; presence is a much more widely applicable heuristic.