International students travel in many ways. First of all geographically: they move from one country to another. Secondly, they travel through their own identities: they have to find a new place in a new context by familiarizing themselves with new values and customs, while making sure they meet the requirements their studies ask of them. Writing an academic text is almost always one of these requirements. Faculty assign their (international) students to write academic texts because they want to know whether or not they comprehend the content of the course they have offered. Some faculty also want to know whether or not students have familiarized themselves with academic genres and conventions, which may vary according to country or discipline. Consequently, when faculty ask international students to write an academic text, they are requiring them to undertake yet a third journey. In the process, international students may travel through a variety of genre conventions, exploring the conventions of their host country in combination with the conventions in their (new) discipline. In addition to these travels, they also have to find their own voices and their own identities while writing a text. Often, when they receive papers that they consider unsatisfactory, faculty assume that international students' capacities in academic writing are deficient. In this article, we will show how the design of two academic writing workshops for an international and interdisciplinary masters' program helped students in their interdisciplinary and international writing processes, not by working from a deficiency model, but by working from a contextual model. We will present the results in the conclusion by way of a pedagogical rough guide for teaching academic writing to international students.

Abstract I identify three modern approaches used to theorize epideictic rhetoric and suggest that each approach has difficulty dealing with the category of presence assigned to the genre by Aristotle. Drawing on Thucydides and, through him, Pericles' funeral oration, I suggest that Jacques Derrida's funeral speeches provide a way of rethinking the epideictic genre's presence as rhetorical ethics. More specifically, I argue that the function of presence in epideictic rhetoric is to provide an ethical interruption, and that Derrida, as one of our most accomplished funeral orators, helps us clarify the category of presence as it is described in Aristotle's and Thucydides' discussions of epideictic oratory.

Abstract The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates’ writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a “philosopher” vis‐à‐vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of “philosophy” and discourses of their culture.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

Fahnestock and Secor’s “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” characterized literary criticism of the 1970s as conservative and self-celebratory. However, although literary theory has since undergone significant change, few rhetorical analyses of recent literary criticism as the preferred genre of a disciplinary discourse community have been conducted. This analysis of 28 articles of literary criticism published between 1999 and 2001 reveals that because of their flexibility, the stasis and special topoi conventions of earlier literary criticism continue to function. However, the shared values assumed in literary criticism have shifted away from a preference for isolated meditation on textual particulars. Instead, criticism is now portrayed as a conversation in which knowledge about literary texts and their historical contexts is socially negotiated and accumulative. Moreover, this scholarly project is frequently assumed to work toward social justice. The article ends with implications for understanding how knowledge is built within disciplinary communities.

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.

This essay examines the writing done at the University of New Hampshire in the period between 1928 and 1942. It argues that while there was extensive writing from personal experience, this writing did not perform the “turn” where the writer claims a new form of self-understanding. It goes on to suggest that work with this largely observational genre may develop important skills for the young writers.

In literacy and composition studies, efforts to develop data-driven theories of disciplinary writing expertise and of writers’ developmental processes in joining specific discourse communities have so far been limited. This case study, of one writer’s experiences as an undergraduate history major, parses the multiple knowledge domains comprising disciplinary writing expertise and compares his beginning and later work for signs of developmental progress. A conceptual model of five knowledge domains writers must draw upon—discourse-community knowledge, subjectmatter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and writing-process knowledge—is applied to the data both for analysis of the case and for exploring the usefulness of the conceptual model for further empirical and theoretical work. What results is a fuller depiction of the complexities of gaining expertise in any given discourse community, as well as an indication of the importance of educators across all disciplines considering the multi-dimensional and developmental nature of their curricula for building literacy skills.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

Although the rhetoric of relatively stable scientific disciplines has been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to discourse formation in young disciplines. The author extends recent theories of genre and disciplinary discourse in a close rhetorical analysis of early papers in ethnological science. Practitioners apply extant rhetorical resources to new disciplinary problems as they learn to identify themselves as participants in a collective project. The young discipline "learns" its discourse from its practitioners.

Reviews L art de parler: Anthologie de manuels d'éloquence, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, ed., Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. xxi+362 pp. In his introduction, Salazar points with envy to the United States for the liveliness of our rhetorical tradition and practice compared with France, especially the continuous place of rhetoric in higher education. Looking with corresponding envy from this side of the Atlantic, one advantage I see in this anthology over comparable American anthologies: greater apparent continu­ ity. Greece and Rome—I was glad to see an excerpt from Tacitus, an unjustly neglected source for the history of rhetoric—lead seamlessly into the Middle Ages; Erasmus and Calvin lead to French renaissance authors such as Ramus and Amyot. We see rhetoric employed in the education of princes (Amyot, la Motte le Vayer), and diplomacy (Lancelot). The rhetoric of the academy (Patru), of lawyers (Dubois de Bretteville), of literary studies (Rollin), of bu­ reaucratic reports (Andrieux), and even how bourgeois mothers should talk and their children listen (Mme. Dufrenoy) all have their place. The continuity of French rhetoric is also nicely emphasized by selections from the rhetoric of preaching not only from medieval and renaissance authors but writers up to the 20th century (Augustine, de Basevorn, Erasmus, Calvin, Maury, Bouchage, Morice). The diversity of places where rhetoric is exercised leads to interesting insights and surprises. For example, the short excerpt from Lancelot's Le Parfait Amassadeur is entitled, "one cannot be a good ambassador without being a good orator," and draws interesting connections between, as Salazar puts it, the art of speaking and the art of speaking in the name of someone. As he says in his introduction, rhetoric from the time of Gorgias has connected the art of speaking with the art of speaking in the name of someone. We only get three pages of Lancelot (1642), and that is a translation of a work of Zuniga (1620), but the treatment of the ambassador as the complete orator is enough to raise stimulating questions about personification, representation, and disguise. It would be worth connecting this handbook for speaking in the name of someone with current rhetorical problems of how to be a representative and how to be an advocate. Similarly, the selection from Olivier Patrus' Discours de reception (1640) introduces the peculiarly French rhetorical genre of the academic oration. Intellectuals occupy a different place in French culture from their role in Rhetorica, Vol. XXII, Issue 4, pp. 401-407, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2004 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 401 402 RHETORICA Anglophone culture, and proficiency in this genre should be part of the accounting of the difference. Unusually, this anthology does not neglect the last part of rhetoricaction or delivery—and so we see excerpts from texts on pronunciation and self-presentation. This is the first time I have ever found the art of delivery interesting. Instead of looking to politics, where rhetoric should flourish, Salazar wisely looks at where rhetoric has flourished, and produced a fascinating anthology. Some of the selections will be as unfamiliar to French readers as they are to this American one. (The editor reports that the selection from Basevorn is here translated into French for the first time.) This anthology is exciting reading not only for readers interested in learning about rhetoric in a distinct tradition, but for anyone interested in the diversity of appearances that rhetoric has taken over the ages. The theme of his introduction is, I think, at odds with this ecumenical approach to the selections themselves. Rhetoric, Salazar notes, had a demo­ cratic birth. He claims that the persuasive tradition and practical politics of the west are fused with rhetoric, eloquence, the art of speaking, the art of oratory (vii). "Democracy gives each citizen the right to defend himself, by speech, if he sees himself injured, but which imposes on others, between equal citizens, to judge the case....Speech replaces violence" (ix-x). Conse­ quently, Salazar argues, rhetoric is a phenomenon unique...

Over the past thirty years, has flowered as a discipline in the academy. Doctoral programs in abound, and its position in the pantheon of academic fields seems assured. There is plenty of work in composition. But what is the nature of that work now, and what should it be? James Slevin asks such probing, primary questions in Introducing English, an overdue assessment of the state of by one of its most respected practitioners. Too often, Slevin claims, representations of take the form of promoting the field and its specialists, rather than explaining the fundamental work of and its important consequences. In thirteen thematically and methodologically linked essays, Slevin argues toward a view of the discipline as a set of activities, not as an enclosed field of knowledge. Such a view broadens the meaning of the work of to include teaching and learning, a two-way process, creating alliances across conventional educational boundaries, even beyond educational institutions. Slevin traces how emerged for him not as a vehicle for improving student writing, but rather as a way of working collaboratively with students to interpret educational practices and work for educational reform. He demonstrates the kind of classroom practice - in reading accounts of the Anglicization of Pocahontas - that reveals the social and cultural consequences of language and language education. For good or ill, writes Slevin, composition has always been at the center of the reproduction of social inequality, or of the resistance to that process. He asks those in the discipline to consider such history in the reading and writing they ask students to do and the reasons they give for asking them to do it. A much-anthologized essay by E. B. White from The New Yorker is the site for an examination of genre as social institution, introducing the ways in which the discourses of the academy can be understood as both obstacle and opportunity. Ultimately, Introducing English is concerned with the importance of writing and the teaching of writing to the core values of higher education. Composition is always a metonym for something else Slevin concludes. Usually, it has figured the impossibility of the student body - their lacks that require supplement, their ill-health that requires remedy. Introducing English introduces a new figure - a two-way process of inquiry - that better serves the intellectual culture of the university. Chapters on writing across the curriculum, university management, and faculty assessment (the tenure system) put this new model to practical, innovative use. Introducing English will be necessary reading for all those who work with composition, as well as those engaged in learning theory, critical theory, and education reform.

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

The personal statement written for graduate school admission has been a genre virtually ignored by rhetoricians but one that deserves attention. Not only a document of pragmatic importance for applicants, the personal statement is an indicator of disciplinary socialization. The discipline studied here is clinical psychology. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the author analyzed a corpus of statements to identify features distinguishing statements of admitted applicants from those of rejected applicants. The findings showed that successful applicants attended more to projecting their future research endeavors and demonstrating their commitments to scientific epistemology. Thus, the author argues that the modifier personal needs qualification, because successful applicants tend to emphasize their public identities as apprentice scientists.

Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.

In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, the editors have assembled a collection of new essays about genre, rhetoric, and writing that are relevant for scholars with a diverse range of interests in composition studies, including rhetoric, professional and scientific communication, computers and writing, writing-across-the-disciplines, literacy studies, and literacy education. The engaging editorial introduction recalls Donald Murray’s suggestion that writers ask of drafts, “Does it work?”

This article recounts how a communications and an engineering department developed a collaborative teaching venture—a linked writing course—to provide mentorship for students learning how to write lab reports.

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the genre is authentically used or in settings (such as writing classes) in which genre learning is decontextualized. Quantitative studies of teaching genre offer mixed results, but in particular, there are no control-group studies of first-language adults. In this paper, we report research on teaching the genre of the laboratory report to first-language university students in biology labs. In this posttest-only control-group study, the treatment was the use of LabWrite, online instructional materials for teaching the lab report. We hypothesized that the treatment group would be more effective in: (1) learning the scientific concept of the lab, and (2) learning to apply scientific reasoning. Results of holistic scoring of lab reports for hypothesis 1 and primary-trait scoring for hypothesis 2 showed that the lab reports of the LabWrite students were rated as significantly higher than those of the control group. A third hypothesis, that students using LabWrite would develop a significantly more positive attitude toward writing lab reports, was also supported. These findings suggest that first-language adults can learn genre through explicit teaching in a context of authentic use of the genre.

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

This essay suggests that Harrison’s representation of father–daughter incest in The Kiss draws on literary elements of two seemingly distinct genres, memoir and fairy tale, to tell a story of violence and violation in the white middle–class family. Through memoir, it argues, Harrison revises the moral and behavioral edicts that cultural narratives, especially traditional fairy tales dealing with father–daughter incest, seek to impose.

AbstractDuring the rise and growth of the Greek art of oratory in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the development of open and systematic techniques for awakening and encouraging a sense of pity can be observed both in rhetoric proper (the ten Attic orators) and in associated literary genres influenced by rhetoric (Historiography and Tragedy). These are classified—most notably by reference to the writings of Plato and Aristotle—in the light of rhetorical theory and significant examples are provided. Three techniques are investigated: (1.) the direct use of instances of pity, without elaboration, (2.) the development of axioms concerning the nature of pity, and (3.) systematic approaches to the awakening of pity.

This article studies the stylistic variation in the design of administrative forms in three European countries—the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain—through the linguistic analysis of a small corpus of multilingual administrative forms dealing with pension benefits and other kinds of allowances written in four different languages—English, Spanish, Italian, and German. The analysis included both monolingual administrative forms—written in English, Spanish, and Italian—and bilingual Italian/German and Italian/English forms. The purpose of the study was to search for cross-linguistic regularities in the design of administrative forms which would enable their characterization as a genre, both in terms of its staging structure and of the linguistic and formatting features of the elements which configure it as such. The analysis performed on the small corpus yielded interesting stylistic differences and tendencies in the design of comparable administrative forms in the different countries, characterized by different socio-cultural back-grounds. It is suggested that these differences are a reflection of the social attitudes of the different administrations toward their citizens.

A set of discourse-based methods—genre theory, genre analysis, and discourse analysis—can provide a descriptive basis for a critical analysis of the multiple connections between discourse practices and their underlying concepts and categories within professions. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological project, this article analyzes prognosis in the discourse of medicine. Using Goffman’s (1959) distinction between front-stage and back-stage discourse, the author suggests that a back-stage discourse of prognosis points to problems with prognosis in the front-stage discourse of medical encounters between oncologists and patients who have been diagnosed with cancer. The analysis shows that the oral genre of treatment discussion in oncology encounters is organized to allow practitioners to do, appear to do, or avoid doing difficult work like presenting a prognosis. The article suggests that discourse-based methods have the potential to become the basis for productive critical engagement between practitioners and researchers in professional communication.

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of articles appearing in Science and Nature that introduces research reports appearing later in the issue. These pieces refer explicitly to a research report in the same issue, and in addition to their own agendas, re-present the researchers’ claims and supporting evidence. To investigate how the core of an argument survives, the expression claims and lines of support in epitomizing figures are compared. The articles sampled suggest that the figure antithesis, embodyingsingle-difference arguments,often persists from version to version. But in the process of perfecting a figured expression, arguments may be subtly changed in subsequent versions.

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text ’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

Our heritage] stretches back... to Athens, where in a bus y marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers , no fees charged , offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end. -Stephen North, "The Idea of a Writing Center" Recent explorations of writing center research encapsulate the often -conflicting professional demands we face as administrators. On the one hand, we acknowledge the need for research to improve our understanding of the past narratives, present effects and future possibilities of writing center work. On the other hand, our individual identifications and disciplinary ethos often rely on the notion of a writing center director whose priorities include, as Harvey Kail writes, "teaching, service, service, service, and then research-on our service" (28). Added to this already-overburdened schedule is the privileging of place in writing center studies; if each center is uniquely shaped by its context, as the common argument goes, what kinds of research can speak across these myriad locations, moving beyond what Jeanette Harris has termed the "this -is -what -we -do -at -my-writing-center" genre? ("Review" 663). In other words, both our individual professional lives and the scholarship of our field are marked by our attempts to reconcile our identification as a highly communal professional group with our allegiance to the primacy of individual context.

In his introduction to Life Stories, a collection of New Yorker Profiles, David Remnick confesses that "the Profile is a terribly hard form to get right." Conceived as a form to describe Manhattan celebrities, the genre now travels widely and along all emotional and occupational registers. One quality runs through many of the best Profiles, though, notes Remnick: a sense of obsession. The Book Man is one student's foray into the genre of the Profile. It was written in an Introduction to Creative Nonfiction course and is based on her service-learning experiences for which she earned an optional fourth credit.

In the first-year composition research class, a disproportionate pedagogical focus is placed on the use of the library, rather than on the more difficult and integral problems of how to read, interpret, and analyze information the library offers, how to translate and synthesize this into knowledge, and how to produce a research product worthy of the genre.

This article argues that fact sheets produced by environmental activists in response to proposed nuclear waste repositories constitute a new genre of scientific rhetoric. By analyzing the rhetorical features of these texts, including the simultaneous reliance on and distrust of scientific evidence, this article demonstrates how effective environmental activists' texts can be, in spite of the constraints and pressures of their rhetorical situation.

This article is concerned with characterizing literacy activity as it is practiced in professional workplaces. Its starting point is activity theory, which grew out of the work of Vygotsky and has been subsequently elaborated in Russia and elsewhere. First, the authors propose that existing versions of activity theory are unable to account adequately for practical human activity in contemporary workplaces, and present a revised perspective that opens the way for new theoretical developments. Second, they elaborate two new constructs, task and work ensemble, and apply them to a short collaborative writing sequence collected in the field. Both constructs are seen to account in a substantive way for the structure of the composing activity carried out by the collaborators. They close with a discussion of the complementarity and theoretical advantages of the two constructs.

Explanation as a genre may support children’s reasoning and understanding particularly effectively. In this study, 20 fourth graders were given the task of explaining the effects of a pollutant on an ecosystem to third graders. Before writing, they completed a commercially developed science unit, instruction in reading and writing an explanation, and text reading. An analysis of their writings revealed that all children used rhetorical devices to connect with third-grade readers. Sixteen children synthesized text content with personal experiences to compose subexplanations that reported information, gave examples, and presented scenarios and that were logically ordered to enhance reader understanding. Nine of these children explicitly used the scientific model to explain phenomena. Outcomes suggested that writing explanations supported children’s reasoning about and understanding of an important scientific model.

Genres, although aligning people to joint activity and joint attention, shape the substantive material or information represented within the bounded space of the text. Each genre creates a space that prompts the production of particular kinds of information to populate that space. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that mandated the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was invented out of a perceived social need for greater information about the effects of human activity on the environment. The EIS has since spawned a constellation of related genres, has created a large informational market to fulfill the requirements of these genres, and has led to a proliferation of information. The set of relations among genre, information, and activity found in this one sphere of environmental information are suggestive of how information is produced and used in generic forms.

It is commonly accepted that writing instruction should meet the specific needs of writers and that students in scientific and technical fields benefit more by learning to write to match the requirements of their specific fields. A variety of models for writing classes have been proposed to meet these needs, from genre-based approaches to courses targeting specific disciplines to general courses serving a heterogeneous group of students from many disciplines. Although persuasive arguments can be made for discipline-specific writing courses, many writing courses for nonnative writers at U.S. universities operate with two key constraints. First, monetary and curricular limitations mean that students from a variety of disciplines are placed in the same course. Second, these courses are staffed by instructors who, while well-prepared in addressing language needs of nonnative writers, may know very little about the content and conventions of engineering and science. This paper discusses a writing course which works within these constraints and has been developed for graduate students who are early in their program of study. In the course, groups of students carry out an original research project as a vehicle to learn professional writing conventions common to research papers in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. In addition, students analyze written conventions in published articles within their fields to raise awareness of how general conventions are worked out in their individual disciplines. General principles for the course are discussed, and samples of successful research topics are provided.

This essay brings to light a previously untranslated Latin medieval rhetorical treatise from Castile and León—Juan Gil de Zamora’s letter writing manual Dictaminis Epithalamium, or The Marriaga Song of Letter-Writing (c. 1277). Juan Gil (c. 1240-c. 1318) was among the first writers in Castile and León to compose a rhetorical treatise on the technical elements of composition. I outline the theoretical and technical elements of Juan Gil s ars dictaminis. Following an explication of his theory, I historicize the Dictaminis Epithalamium within the western European rhetorical tradition and within the established dictaminal genre. I argue that Juan Gil develops a new rhetoric for letter writing—one incorporating innovations as well as compilations of ideas from the Italian and French schools of letter-writing.

Cet article explore certains des contextes rhétoriques et des caractéristiques stylistiques des plus importantes oeuvres de Wollstonecraft tenant compte de la publication récente de recherches bibliographiques ainsi que de la théorie contemporaine sur le genre. Comme rhéteur de sexe féminin, en marge d’une culture rhétorique masculine Wollstonecraft s’identifie avec ses contemporains masculins mème si elle dédaigne le rôle que plusieurs d’entre eux soulignent pour son genre; par conséquent, elle adopte les identités ainsi que les stratégies rhétoriques masculins et féminins dans son oeuvre. Cette utilisation de divers identités variés est une caractéristique intégrale de sa rhétorique dans son contexte socioculturel, et en quelques sortes représentatif de la rhétorique des marges.

Reviews Janice Schuetz, Episodes z/z the Rhetoric ofGovernment-Indian Relations. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97613-0. xxii + 316 pages. Relations between the United States government and American Indian nations, tribes, or individuals, in all periods of U.S. history, are notoriously resistant to easy analysis or straightforward conclusions. For one thing, the written record is typically incomplete and often heavily biased, in both form and content, against Indian interests. For another, the U.S. academy has been slow to develop adequate research methodologies or innovative theoretical tools that promote scholarship that will be relevant not only to academics but also to Indian peoples themselves. The interdisciplinary fields of ethno-history and American Indian studies have made important strides in these directions over the past couple decades, but there is still a high level of disagreement over which approaches are most appropriate and productive. A carefully researched and specifically-situated rhetorical analysis of significant texts in the history of U.S.-Indian relations would add an important perspective. Unfortunately, Episodes in the Rhetoric of Government-Indian Relations by Janice Schuetz, Professor of Communication at the University of New Mexico, offers neither ground-breaking archival research nor innovative theory. The book's main appeal is its ambitious scope: each of the eleven chapters analyzes a different "episode" in U.S.-Indian relations, from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. Moreover, like an introductory textbook to rhetorical theories, each case study employs a different method of analysis: the dramatistic theories of Kenneth Burke are applied to the Pugent Sound War of 1854-58: genre theory is applied to the so-called Sioux Uprising of 1862; speech act and political spectacle theory is applied to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864; colonial discourse analysis is applied to the history of the Navajo Long Walk and Internment of 1846-68; Victor Turner's theories of ritual and redress are applied to Zuni Witch Cases of 1880-1900; and theories of lamentation are applied to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Given the range and diversity of cases, Schuetz's presentation and analysis of individual episodes is necessarily limited. Although the breadth of her reading in Indian history is impressive, it is also highly selective for any particular case and, in general, does not add new evidence or points of view. Furthermore, it is often unclear why individual theories were chosen for, and restricted to, particular cases. This is© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XXI, Number 4 (Autumn 2003). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 309 310 RHETORICA especially troubling for colonial discourse analysis, which is given a cursory treatment in Chapter Four but could have been developed in more depth and usefully applied in all of the examples. The last point draws attention to the fact that Schuetz does not develop an overarching thesis for her study in her brief introduction, and offers no separate conclusion. It is thus never clear what might hold these eleven very different chapters together beyond their interest as examples of governmentIndian relations or as examples of the diversity of rhetorical theories. The individual chapters consist mainly of summaries of the relevant history for the particular case study; surprisingly, there is little actual analysis. The conclusions to the individual chapters will likely seem obvious both to scholars actively engaged in American Indian studies and to American Indian peoples who live in the aftermath and ongoing legacies of these histories. The explanatory, theoretical, and activist potential of rhetorical analysis for these cases is left largely untapped. Chadwick Allen Ohio State University Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 293 pages. Readers of Rhetorica are not the audience Jeffrey Suderman targeted in writing Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Suderman writes that he was motivated to undertake this study to correct the imbalance of Campbell's modern reputation—as the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and his contemporary reputation, which rested more...

This article uses the notion of genre repertoire to examine electronic-mail communication exchanged in a period of three years by an interorganizational community of software developers (727 e-mail messages in total). It analyzes the development of this virtual work community by considering the use of communicative genres with respect to (1) the resources offered by the electronic-mail system, (2) the temporal development of the project in which the participants were engaged, and (3) the developing relationship between community members. The study shows that the community organized its communicative interactions mainly as informal exchanges between peers rather than as formal exchanges that followed the structure of an interorganizational project. The messages were strongly affected by the use of a system of electronic mail and changed as the community members' relationships developed.

Standardization discourse is dominantly linked to tests; yet standardization occurs in practices of everyday social life, too. This research seeks to understand standardization processes involved in the writing done by a class of seventh grade students, half of whom did not do well in school or on tests. Acting as participant observer in a classroom where a civics project resulted in the writing of an essay, the author collected audiotaped classroom and group discussions, student writing, field notes, and texts (a history booklet, a neighborhood-planning book, two videos, census data) students drew from to write a speech which their language arts teacher taught as an essay. One essay/speech was delivered to the school board. The author examined the exchange of ideas, across the 8-week project, to consider how standardization as a process of production, consumption, and distribution played in students' writing. The author found that standardizing forces involved direct teaching, genre memory, and several strategies employed to bring cohesion and unity to diverse ideas.

Although sometimes considered to be only marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgements are commonplace in scholarly communication and virtually obligatory in dissertation writing. The significance of this disregarded “Cinderella” genre lies partly in the opportunities it offers students to present a social and scholarly self disentangled from academic discourse conventions and personally thank those who have shaped the accompanying text. Beyond the role it plays in academic gift giving and self-presentation, however, the textualization of gratitude reveals social and cultural characteristics, an intimation of disciplinary specialization within a broad generic structure. This analysis of the acknowledgements accompanying 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English suggests that personal gratitude is mediated by disciplinary preferences and strategic career choices, reflecting one way in which postgraduate writing represents a situated activity.

202 RHETORICA insight into how access to public rhetorical space continues to be controlled today. As Johnson asserts, "Only by stepping into the contradictions between 'discipline' and 'possibility' inherent in how rhetorical traditions play out their power can we become more clear in our own minds why even in the new millennium our day-to-day lives remain corrupted by rhetorical theologies that value some voices more than others" (18). Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams University of Warwick Katerina Kostiou, Hè poictikè tes anatropès: Satira Eirôneia Parôidia Humour, Athènes: Néphélè, 2002, pp. 277. Le livre de K. Kostiou, La poétique de la subversion: Satire, Ironie, Parodie, Humour, est une étude originale dans le domaine de la littérature grecque, car il manquait une telle monographie théorique sur des thèmes qui touchent la Grèce moderne. La division de la matière est simple: quatre chapitres, un pour chacun des thèmes indiqués dans le titre. L'auteur présente son sujet de façon systématique et conceptuelle, dialogue avec la bibliographie internationale jusqu'à nos jours, et apporte des exemples tirés de la littérature grecque des deux derniers siècles. Dans une courte Introduction (pp. 21-30), où sont posées les ques­ tions de base et présentées les principales sources bibliographiques (Frye, Muecke, Booth, Rose, Pirandello), Kostiou trace une distinction entre les termes étudiés et le terme général de «comique» et fait référence aux tra­ ditions anglo-saxonne et française sur le sujet. Le premier chapitre est consacré à l'étude de la satire (pp. 31-108). Etant donné la difficulté qu'il y a à définir ce genre, l'auteur commence par un panorama remontant jusqu'à l'antiquité (Satire Ménippée des Grecs, Satura des Romains), puis analyse sa fonction, ses mécanismes, ses techniques. Ce qui sépare la satire de la comédie est le résultat obtenu. La critique du XXe siècle a prêté une grande importance à la dépendance étroite de la satire à l'égard de la rhétorique. Kostiou adopte le vocabulaire de Frye et envisage les six phases de la satire. La satire, dit l'auteur, n'est pas une forme d'écriture; elle est plutôt un ton d'écriture. La satire implique une stratégie, un contrôle et une distance par rapport à ce qu'elle satirise. Le grotesque, le pseudo-réalisme et l'imitation en font également partie. Les techniques de la satire, qui occupent la plus grande partie du chapitre, sont présentées en détail grâce à de nombreux exemples, tirés de la littérature grecque du XIXe siècle: elles comprennent notamment l'hyperbole, la caricature, l'antithèse, le cynisme, le paradoxe, la surprise, l'hypocrisie, le recours à une persona, l'allégorie, etc.—tous éléments regroupés à la fin dans un tableau (p. 102). Reviews 203 Le deuxième chapitre, qui porte sur l'ironie (pp. 109-192), est le plus long et le plus difficile à lire, à cause de son caractère purement théorique. Commençant par la définition de l'ironie et par la relation de celle-ci avec la satire, la comédie et la métaphore, l'auteur décrit l'extension du terme chez les auteurs anglais et allemands qui, au XIXe siècle, ont estimé que la littérature moderne devait être ironique, voire que toute bonne littérature est par définition ironique: «L'ironie moderne est moins satirique et plus subjective, moins rhétorique et plus 'd'atmosphère', moins agressive et plus défensive»(II.A.3). Après quoi Kostiou analyse les différents degrés de l'ironie (ironie verbale ou ironie des situations), puis la dimension philoso­ phique que lui ont donnée les philosophes français (Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida). Les différentes techniques de l'ironie sont présentées, en­ core une fois, sur la base d'exemples tirés de la littérature grecque moderne (voir aussi le tableau p. 179). Le chapitre se termine par l'étude de la dimen­ sion...

Preview this article: Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/65/5/collegeenglish1301-1.gif

Preview this article: Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/65/5/collegeenglish1303-1.gif