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October 2016

  1. EOV Editorial Board
    doi:10.1080/10572252.2016.1222164
  2. Editorial Board EOV
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1215125
  3. Peeling<i>The Onion</i>: Satire and the Complexity of Audience Response
    Abstract

    Satire is a popular form of comedic social critique frequently theorized in terms of Kenneth Burke’s comic frame. While its humor and unexpected combination of incongruous elements can reduce tension that surrounds controversial issues to make new perspectives more accessible, audience response to satire can vary tremendously—including the very negative as well as the very positive. Teaching satire should include exposure to rhetorical theory and audience reception analysis to better prepare students as consumers and creators of satires. With a complex, layered pedagogy, satire can be an important component of the twenty-first-century rhetor’s toolkit.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1215000
  4. Acknowledgments
    doi:10.1177/0741088316669118

September 2016

  1. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion by Vessela Valiavitcharska
    Abstract

    Reviews 465 In chapters 3 and 4 Cribiore works through the question(s) of Libanius' opinions of paganism and Christianity in his letters and speeches, showing convincingly that Libanius held a moderate cultural-conservative position that enabled him to genuinely be friends with Christians as well as pagans — which, after all, one would expect from a rhetorician who grasps the value of argumentum in utranique parton not only as a method of debate but also as a way of life, an ethic for a civilized, humane society. Despite these criticisms I do in fact like this book. I particularly like its refutation of the Gibbonesque judgment on Libanius, and its portrait of rhetoric in late antiquity as very much still alive and doing practical civic as well as cultural work (see in particular p. 36). In a sense this book is a sort of appendix to The School of Libanius, which I think remains the most impor­ tant of Cribiore's books for rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric. Different readers of this journal will want to read both Libanius the Sophist and Hellenistic Oratory for different reasons, and your responses likely will differ from mine, depending on your scholarly interests and orientation. Bottom line, these books give us a closer, better description of rhetoric in the Hellenistic age and late antiquity, and belong on the rhetorician's bookshelf. Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas at Austin Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 243 pp. ISBN: 9781107273511 Midway through the introduction to Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium, Vessela Valiavitcharska sets forth the book's aim, which is to "make a step toward contributing to" an understanding of "the argumentative and emo­ tional effects of discourse, and of the mental habits involved in its produc­ tion" (p. 12). That professed goal, enfolded in prepositions and couched in the incremental language of a step—and a single step at that—is modest. And while the framing of the book, and for that matter, Valiavitcharska her­ self, exude modesty, the rigor, disciplinary reach, and sheer brilliance of her study calls for less modest account. That is where I come in. In addition to its intrinsic value of reclaiming the Old Church Slavic homily tradition for rhetorical study, Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium joins at least three rising trends in rhetorical studies. The first two are burgeoning interests in 1) Byzantine rhetoric and 2) the recovery of pre-modern class­ room practices. Thomas Conley and Jeffrey Walker have both pointed out the importance of Byzantine rhetoric and have done much to dismantle assumptions that this period presents merely a redaction of classical texts and teaching. Scholars in the U.S. (David Fleming, Raffaella Cribiore, Marjo­ rie Curry Woods, Martin Camargo) and Europe (Manfred Kraus, Ruth Webb, 466 RHETORICA María Violeta Pérez Custodio) have revived an interest in the progymnasmata and have developed new methods for identifying and extrapolating class­ room practices from extant artifacts. Valiavitcharska both makes use of those methods and extends them. These two contexts together mean that there ought to be a broad, interdisciplinary readership for Rhythm and Rhetoric in Byzantium. But there is still a third exciting context for this work, one that extends its reach past classical scholars and historians of rhetoric and to scholars concerned with sensory dimensions of rhetoric, specifically those facilitating rhetoric's sonic turn. Scholarship in rhetoric, communication, and commu­ nications have very recently seen an uptick in interest in how sound shapes thought, interaction, messages, and sociality. Scholars such as Gregory Goodale, Matthew Jordan, Joshua Gunn, Richard Graff, and Jonathan Sterne are leading the way here. This work, partly a response to what rhetoric scholar Sidney Dobrin (following Donna Haraway) calls the "tyranny of the visual," is cutting edge. Some of it is historical, but (with the important exception of Graff) the history is usually limited to the twentieth century, mainly because of its focus on sound-recording technologies, which are rela­ tively recent. Valiavitcharska's work promises to turn the heads of these scholars and their followers, to reveal to them the intricate and longstanding root system of sonic rhetoric, and to stretch...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0007
  2. Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity &amp; Change ed. by Christos Kremmydas, Kathryn Tempest, and: Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century by Raffaella Cribiore
    Abstract

    460 RHETORICA readings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century works. The book is also an excellent jumping-off point for future research, and Acheson s spe­ cific insights relating to the four particular modes of brainwork the book deals with and the work's broader project of finding productive crossmodal correspondences will certainly be productive for many working in the Renaissance. Chris Dearner, University of California, Irvine Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, eds., Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, Oxford, 2013. 420 + x pp. ISBN: 9780199654314 Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Ithaca: Cornell, 2013. 260 + x pp. ISBN: 9780801452079 Recently I was looking at an early 15th-cenury manuscript copy of a 14th-century Greek "synopsis of rhetoric" in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Christian Walz, in the preface to his 1832 edition of this text, says that he has not seen the Vienna manuscript, but cites an 18th century scholar who cites a 17th century scholar who has (Walz vol. 3, pp. 465-466). It occurred to me that I might have been the first person since the 17th century to actually open the Vienna manuscript and read it. True or false, there's a certain roman­ ticism in such experience, and a certain pleasure: the intrepid academic, decoder of texts, historian and rhetorician, paddles alone upriver past ruins and jungles, armed with machete, flashlight, and a pencil sharpener, into the world that time forgot. Heureka; I havefound it; houtos ekeinos; this is that. Thus I am happy with both books on review here. Both offer new per­ spective^) on an insufficiently studied part of rhetoric's ancient history— four fifths of it, in fact: the roughly eight centuries from the Hellenistic age to the end of the ancient world. Both books, moreover, offer a case wellgrounded in the available evidence and delivered in a (mostly) clear, accessi­ ble style. In short they have many virtues, and are a pleasure to read. Let's paddle upriver a little way. I'll start with Kremmydas and Tempest. i. Hellenistic Oratory and the Myth of Decline At stake throughout this volume is the pervasive myth that rhetoric, or more precisely oratory (rhetoric-al performance), "declined" in the Hellenistic age, the period conventionally dated from the death of Alexander (in 322 BCE) to the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium by the soon-to-be emperor Augustus (in 31 BCE). The myth presumes that Reviews 461 rhetoric is the art of practical civic discourse embodied in the speeches of the foui th-centui y Attic Orators, especially Demosthenes, and that it flouris­ hes in democratic polities and languishes under autocratic rule. There are no preserved examples of Hellenistic oratory, which prompts an inference that little or nothing worth preserving was produced. Rhetoric (says the myth) had lost its civic role and was reduced to "merely" epideictic and literary functions for most of the next three centuries. Elsewhere I have argued against the "decline" story, mostly on probabi­ listic and definitional grounds (Rhetoric & Poetics in Antiquity, Oxford 2000, ch. 3). One can make epideictic/panegyric discourse the paradigmatic ("cen­ tral," "primary") form of rhetoric, as do Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke, in which case "rhetoric" seems to have enjoyed a great flourishing in the Hellenistic age. But even if we define rhetoric as the art of the Attic Orators, the fact is that it continued to play an important civic role. Law-courts contin­ ued to be busy, city councils continued to meet, kings and governors engaged in deliberative discourse with their advisors (if they were wise), inter-city diplomacy involved embassies and large amounts of written correspondence and chanceries to manage it, and so on. The needs of empire created jobs in the imperial bureaucracv, for which a rhetorical education was required, and there were municipallv sponsored ("public") as well as independent ("private") schools to serve the need in cities large and small, as can he seen in the papyrus fragments of boys' rhetorical exercises found at Oxyrhynchus and other prov incial towns in Hellenistic Egypt. Schools of rhetoric multi­ plied and throve. There were significant advances too in rhetorical theory...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0006
  3. Author Response: Reading Plato Rhetorically
    Abstract

    I am grateful to Arthur Walzer and Heather Hayes for arranging the opportunity for three scholars to respond to my book, and to Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda for their responses.Because he so thoroughly disagrees with my argument, Professor Krajewski offers me a helpful place to begin to clarify that argument. He argues that, whatever the intent of my argument, my reading of the Republic relies on the presumption that rhetoric is subservient to philosophy. My concern, however, is not with some hierarchical arrangement but with addressing questions essential for the theoretical grounding of rhetoric. Because these questions do not admit of empirical or fixed answers, they are the kinds of questions that the rhetorical theorist Michel Meyer characterizes as philosophic (74).Professor Krajewski is troubled by Plato’s unfair characterization of the sophists. No one can argue that Plato’s representation of the sophists is friendly, but I would argue that it is more nuanced than a simple dismissal of them as corrupt. More to the point, corruption is really not the complaint that Socrates brings against the sophists in the Republic. Indeed, he explicitly defends them against the charge of corruption and criticizes them, instead, for confirming rather than challenging the city’s views on justice.For Professor Krajewski, Socrates’s various depictions of the audience show contempt for interlocutors and readers, characterizing them as children, sheep, and worse. But Plato’s critique of the public is grounded on the assumption that we do not know who we are. This lack of self-knowledge is not one that divides elites and masses but is a condition of the entire human race. For Plato, the philosophical issue that necessitates his dialogue arises because the citizens of Athens are justified in what they believe, responsible in the way that they hold those beliefs, and, despite that, they are in deep self-contradiction. Glaucon argues that Socrates is simply the latest in a long line of apologists for justice who perpetuate a public discourse in which no one believes. This discourse has led unintentionally to a corrosive situation in which no one believes that he or she really desires to be just. Glaucon’s request, in which he is joined by his brother Adeimantus, is for a new form of discourse that has the potential to be genuinely persuasive—they seek from philosophy a rhetoric that can honor and address the concerns of the average citizen.Professor Krajewski raises the important issue of the relationship between ruler and ruled. To understand this relationship, it is important to realize that for Socrates this is an issue of persuasion and not of legislation. The rule that occupies Socrates is effected through public discourse; hence the request for a discourse that can genuinely speak to what the public believes. Glaucon does not seek advice on how to govern the citizens but on how to speak to them. The goal is not compulsion but persuasion.In pointing to the methodological role of doubleness in the Republic, Professor Lyon zeroes in on an important aspect of the dialogue, and she makes me wish that I had given more explicit attention to it. Although she admires my approach to the Republic, neither I nor Plato has convinced her fully that the goal of reconstituting a democratic citizenry can be accomplished through an act of persuasion. At issue is the way in which the audience participates in this reconstitution. Professor Lyon advocates for a process of deliberation, for such a process would invite active rather than passive spectators. She is uneasy with what seems to be a passive role for the spectator or reader of the Republic. I think that her insight into the doubleness of the dialogue provides a way of addressing her concerns.If part of the rhetorical effort of the dialogue is not simply to provide an intellectual defense of justice but to alter the way that its readers desire, so that they genuinely desire to be just, how can a text achieve that end? Professor Lyon argues that Plato attempts to achieve that end “through erasing alternative desires.” I don’t see any effort to erase desire. What I see is a text that is attempting, as a text, to transform desire, and I see it doing this through recourse to a doubleness that produces a dissonance, which, in turn, opens up justice as an object of desire. To suggest how this happens, I turn to Anne Carson’s account of the tension at the heart of the erotic experience. Although she does not use the term doubleness to characterize erotic engagement, that is what her account suggests. For her the moment of desire is when the actual and the ideal are brought into a proximity that both offers the hope of a new identity at the same time that it reminds one, painfully, that that identity is, in fact, not the case (17, 36, 69). The dissonance between the ideal and the actual fosters desire. Such a dissonance is at the heart of the Republic, as the Kallipolis as an impossible ideal is brought into continual contact with a reality to which Socrates and his interlocutors seek to be adequate. Out of that tension a desire for justice is born.Professor Svoboda and I agree that there are strong reasons to read Plato’s Republic, not as an anti-democratic text, but as a more complex response to a set of historical events that both created a series of crises for Athens and that led to the establishment of its democratic constitution. He rightly notes that Plato’s text makes deliberate allusions to those events, and that its opening book, in particular, engages those events and would be so viewed by fourth-century Athenian readers. I agree fully. Further, I agree with his argument that Plato’s philosophy is best understood as a “situated practice responding to particular problems.” Such a perspective supports a reading of philosophy as a particular kind of effort to engage responsibly the events that provoke critical reflection. It recovers a purposiveness for philosophy and makes clear that philosophy is inextricably joined with rhetoric.The point whose force I felt the most was Professor Svoboda’s reminder that the peace achieved in Athens after the Peloponnesian wars was attained only by an agreement of both sides “to forget injustices that had been done to them during the civil conflict.” This is a sound historical point and, as Professor Svoboda notes, this agreement turns the “Republic’s common sense understanding of justice on its head.” He goes on to make an important point: that it precisely the dissonance between Plato’s account of justice and Athens’ important pragmatic response to those serious injustices that marked civil strife at the end of the fifth century BCE that helps us understand the possible philosophical motivation behind the Republic. In offering an account of justice and making clear that such an account requires an extended philosophical justification, Plato is challenging his readers and confronting the costs hidden in the agreement that had succeeded in establishing peace. The question becomes: how to develop a complex understanding of the problem of justice sufficient to the world as it is and that provides a genuine reason to be just? It is this type of question that is at the heart of a philosophical rhetoric as a discourse essential to the psychological health of individuals and the overall health of the commonwealth.It is my hope that we have begun a discussion that relocates what I take to be an old, tired opposition and recasts it as a theoretically more compelling inquiry into the importance of rhetoric for values that are foundational to our culture and that shape us as creatures of language who participate in those cultures.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1234156
  4. Righteous Deception
    Abstract

    While finding material to admire in The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, I present a trio of significant presuppositions within Professor Kastely’s text in order to show that they are wrong, or, at least, questionable. It’s difficult to imagine a reader of his book who could deny the author’s profound concern for justice, for example. However, the misguided, well-intentioned can, at times, be a greater danger than obvious opponents bent on our demise. It will become clear that Kastely and I work in the same state, but do not live in the same political neighborhood.What interests Kastely from the opening pages of his text is “the philosophical importance of rhetoric” (ix). Now, this runs smack into extensive evidence in Håkan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists. Tell’s homework reveals that the distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to establish distinctions, to set boundaries, and to insist on a hierarchy of disciplines that persists with Kastely’s help.It’s an ugly story we get from Tell. The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. The Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for interactions with the young men. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men is a life that might be less than human. Gerald Bruns describes the philosophical life meant to function as a model for disciples of Athenian philosophy, what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (Bruns 14).The launching pad for Kastely’s text requires an acceptance of a several preconditions, such as that Socrates and Plato endorse dialogue and dialectic. My counterproposal, following Kojin Karatani, is that Plato’s dialogues, while looking for world-like conversations, are monologic (Karatani, 69). Many rhetoricians know that the dialogues turn out to be long stretches of Socrates speaking followed by an interlocutor’s response of panu ge, or something similar, phrases that are usually read as ongoing agreement, reluctant or otherwise.Kastely issues contradictory statements on the topic. At one point, Socrates exhibits “gentleness” (81, 113, 114), but in other contexts is said to shame interlocutors. At other points, Kastely offers evidence that Plato/Socrates hold audiences in contempt through various depictions that refer to the public as children, sheep, or worse (see Republic 488b, 590e–591a, 598c, and Kastely 42, 117, 180, and 189).Nancy Worman asserts: “The language that characterizes Socrates and his opponents shares more with the kind of parodic, insulting usage found in mimes, Attic comedy, and oratorical invective than it does with historical prose writing that depicts public speakers” (Worman 154). Platonic exchanges tend to denigrate and reconfigure interlocutors who do not accept the rules of the game set out by the philosophers (Karatani, 70).The philosopher Hans Blumenberg contends that the philosophical insult extends over the Republic: “The viewers of the ideal [thinking here of the figure who leaves the cave and then returns as representative of philosophy], the owners of the actual, have constantly found it easier to deride others who wanted to see with their own eyes than to show them what they could gain if they ceased to want only what is available physically” (Blumenberg 20).We have no shortage of scholars who want to read the Republic straight, adding in, where hermeneutical problems crop up, excuses about “Socratic irony.” Anyone working with Platonic texts ought to be aware of evidence pointing toward a deliberate Platonic agenda of esotericism described in the Seventh Letter. Plato: “We did not use such plain language as this—it was not safe to do so—but we succeeded by veiled allusions in maintaining the thesis that every man who would preserve himself and the people he rules must follow this course, and that any other will lead to utter destruction” (332d). In the same letter, Plato more than suggests a hermeneutical method that anticipates esotericism whenever a reader encounters a text by someone “serious,” and Plato fashioned himself “serious” (see 344 c & d in the letter).Arthur Melzer confirms Plato’s esoteric elitism (Melzer 21), using 341e as the proof text. I do not propose that Kastely has missed the boat on Plato’s esotericism, though some evidence points that way, such as the comment that Plato does not have a “fixed position he is trying to disguise” (35), or a line about those who “whisper in the ear of power” (17). Kastely then constricts options to an either/or: “This leads to a stark choice: either philosophy reconciles itself to being an esoteric form of discourse, persuasive only to a very limited number of practitioners and hence irrelevant to political life, or it discovers a way to speak to the multitude who are not philosophers.” Plato did not intend to make philosophy’s code “open source.” Kastely writes, “The philosopher becomes politically active in response to human need. If this seems like a convoluted understanding of philosophy, it is helpful to remember that it is an account of philosophy intended to explain to a non-philosophic audience the peculiar and privileged authority that should be granted to philosophy to rule” (155).Kastely: “The allegory of the cave establishes the legitimacy of philosophic rule—it is the tale of a humble and reluctant king who is moved by a sense of social responsibility to assume a burden of leadership for the benefit of a people” (141). Kastely feels that he cannot have his rhetoric without marrying rhetoric to philosophy, naming philosophy master of the household and asking rhetoric to sign a prenuptial agreement. “There’s a need for an unequal distribution of power in the city” (91), Kastely asserts. Kastely’s “heroes” are philosophers, in part because “philosophy, as Plato imagined it, is an arduous pursuit that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and tremendous stamina of which few are capable” (xv). From Kastely’s perspective, you and I are here to obey the practitioners of esotericism. We are the “they” of this sentence: “They need to obey rulers, even if they do not fully understand them” (133).Thus, I conclude with a question that discloses my political neighborhood, one illegal in the United States since 1954. The question comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (15.4): “It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten…. In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?”

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1234151
  5. Editorial Board EOV
    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1234166
  6. Note from the Editors
    Abstract

    From time to time, we will dedicate our review section to the discussion of a new work in rhetoric studies. In these more lengthy review sections, which we are calling “Book Review Forums,” we will invite scholars to write short responses to the chosen book and invite the author to respond to the reviews. We hope this will offer a robust space for discussion, debate, and deliberation over important book-length works as we think about advances in the history of rhetoric.Forum: James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of PersuasionThis issue’s forum focuses on Professor James L. Kastely’s 2015 work, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion (University of Chicago Press). Within rhetoric studies, Plato is often cast as rhetoric’s foremost critic, and, at least since Karl Popper included Plato as an enemy of the open society, as a foremost critic of democracy. In his book that is the subject of this forum, James L. Kastely offers a new reading of the Republic that challenges both of these characterizations. He argues that Plato’s goal in the Republic is to develop a rhetoric for philosophers that will persuade non-philosophers of the value of justice and the importance of living the moral life. On Kastely’s reading, Socrates presents this rhetorical approach to persuasion as an alternative to dialectic, which the interlocutors in the Republic judge to have failed to persuade the non-philosopher of much, except that philosophy is useless pettifoggery.The responses to Kastely’s book by Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda, as well as Kastely’s response to their judgments that constitute this forum, were first presented at an ASHR session at the Rhetoric Society of American conference, May, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia. The panelists revised and shortened their original oral presentations for publication here

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1234152
  7. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628773
  8. Information for Authors
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628763
  9. “Keep the Appalachian, Drop the Redneck”: Tellable Student Narratives of Appalachian Identity
    Abstract

    This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628690
  10. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce201628694
  11. From the Editor
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ce201628689
  12. Announcements and Calls
    doi:10.58680/ccc201628762
  13. From the Editor
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ccc201628752
  14. CCCC News
    doi:10.58680/ccc201628761

August 2016

  1. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/rte201628688

July 2016

  1. Students’ Perceptions of Oral Screencast Responses to Their Writing
    Abstract

    This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

    doi:10.1177/1050651916636424
  2. From the Editor
    Abstract

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    doi:10.58680/ce201628625
  3. Index to Volume 78
    doi:10.58680/ce201628632
  4. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce201628630

June 2016

  1. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy by Kathy Eden, and: Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion by William P. Weaver, and: Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne by Daniel Derrin, and: Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance by Catherine Nicholson, and: Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes by Roland Greene
    Abstract

    328 RHETORICA that Fitzgerald is correct in predicting that future rhetorical study does indeed have a prayer. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. x, 149 pp. ISBN: 9780226184623 William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. x, 219 pp. ISBN: 9780748644650 Daniel Derrin, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2013. xii, 197 pp. ISBN: 9781611476033. Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. iv, 218 pp. ISBN: 9780812245585 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. x, 210 pp. ISBN: 9780226000633. Of the five monographs on Renaissance literature reviewed here, the three by Kathy Eden, William P. Weaver, and Daniel Derrin offer learned applications of the history of rhetoric to significant authors and genres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the two by Catherine Nicholson and Roland Greene touch on rhetoric in examining early modem complexities of language as indicators of cultural tensions and changes. Eden's The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy makes a significant contri­ bution to the long-standing but frequently contested scholarly project of defin­ ing the Renaissance by the development of individualism. She reexamines the influence of classical authors on Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne to trace their lineage in the rediscovery of what she calls throughout "a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy," that is, a style of intimate writing and reading, activities that Eden, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, sees as inseparable. Focusing on familiar letters, Eden asserts that Petrarch's "letter reading is rooted in the intimacy associated with friendship" (p. 67). Guided by the Senecan model, he transforms Cicero's "rhetoric of intimacy" into "a hermeJ neutics of intimacy" by using the familiar letter to overcome not only physical distance (its chief function according to many ancient letter writers), but also temporal distance, in an effort "to understand his favorite ancient authors, whom he figures in epistolary terms as absent friends" (p. 69). Thus Petrarch, not Montaigne, was "individuality's founding father" (p. 120). The emphasis Reviews 329 Montaigne gives to writing, to friendship, and to frank self-revelation to his reader demonstrates that letter writing is foundational to his devel­ opment of the essay. His famous self-expression is grounded in friendly conversation, almost epistolary senno, between writer and reader. More­ over Montaigne foregrounds style in a legal and proprietary sense that Eden has traced from classical through humanist discussions of familiar­ ity, based in Roman and Greek concepts of the family and of property. Chapter 1 has surveyed the ancient "rhetoric of intimacy" from Aristotle to Demetrius and Quintilian. Erasmus's thoroughly rhetorical textbook on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis, would seeni to fit awkwardly between Petrarch and Montaigne in Eden's genealogy of a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy, as she acknow­ ledges, but she finds intimate writing in his correspondence, discussions of epistolary exercises in his pedagogical works De ratione studii and De copia, and praise of intimacv in the section on handwriting in De recta pronuntiatione. In its companion dialogue on stvle, Ciceronianus, Bulephorus emphasizes intimate reading as well as writing, both exemplified by the letter. As editor, Erasmus approaches Jerome's works as an intimate reader and describes style as ethos in his preface. Jerome's own editing of Scripture depends on a careful studv of stvle for evidence of forgerv and other corruption. As New Testament editor, Erasmus urges readers to experience Christ by approaching the Gospels as thev would a letter from a friend, while in his Paraphrase on Romans he attempts to capture St. Paul's ethos and use of multiple masks to reach diverse audiences. Eden's rich analysis of Erasmus's interest in intimate writing and reading in a wide range of works pioneers an exciting new scholarly direction in Erasmus studies that goes beyond the epistolary rhetoric he teaches to boys as an exercise...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0014
  2. Project-Based Learning
    Abstract

    In the previous issue of Business and Professional Communication, we focused on flipped classrooms and discovery learning. We continue that broad stream of research with our articles in this issue, most of which engage students in projects designed to facilitate learning in business and professional communication. Implementing projectbased learning can be challenging, and case studies can reveal issues that may be unanticipated in textbooks. Our lead article reports on the role of a commissioned research project in bridging the gap between theory and practice. At the authors’ research site, organizations representing different sectors of the corporate and nonprofit workplace commission teams of students in business and professional communication to act as their communication experts. The specific case discussed in this article is based on a study carried out by a team of five master’s-level students to promote corporate social responsibility in a professional association of a pharmaceutical industry. The authors analyze the student researchers’ perspectives, as well as the practitioners’ view of the collaboration, and the pitfalls involved in helping put theory into practice in a real-world situation. Our second article presents the results of an actual employee program evaluation as a case study of soft skills training at a large hospital. The authors posit four hypotheses, that greater reported willingness to learn will result in both a higher degree of course comprehension and a higher degree of behavioral change and that the method of delivery will affect trainees’ degree of comprehension and degree of behavioral change. The authors conclude that face-to-face or blended instruction is likely to be more effective than a purely online format. The authors of our third article examine the factors needed for success in group assignments. In a study of cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation, the authors find that group satisfaction is positively related to both leader assertiveness and leader cooperativeness. This research emphasizes the importance of the leader’s role to group outcomes and suggests that assertiveness is a critical component to success. 651428 BCQXXX10.1177/2329490616651428Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyKnight editorial2016

    doi:10.1177/2329490616651428
  3. Letter from the Editor
    doi:10.1016/s8755-4615(16)30044-5
  4. Index to Volume 67
    doi:10.58680/ccc201629624
  5. From the Editor
    doi:10.58680/ccc201629611
  6. Announcements and Calls
    doi:10.58680/ccc201629622
  7. CCCC News
    doi:10.58680/ccc201629621

May 2016

  1. The Great Chain of Being: Manifesto on the Problem of Agency in Science Communication
    Abstract

    This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate <em>key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context</em>. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four <em>topoi</em> that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned <em>topos</em>: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their <em>topos</em>. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1246
  2. Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom
    Abstract

    Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.49.2.0221
  3. An Essay on Current Quintilian Studies in English, With a Select Bibliography of Items Published Since 1990
    Abstract

    It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1182407
  4. A Quintilian Anniversary and Its Meaning
    Abstract

    This year 2016 marks an important six hundredth anniversary in the history of rhetoric and education.In September, 1416, the Italian humanist and book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini visited a Benedictine monastery in St. Gall, Switzerland. There he found—not in a library but in a dungeon which he declared was not fit for a condemned man—the first complete copy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (Orator’s Education, 95 CE) that any scholar had seen for nearly six centuries. Suddenly aware that it was a valuable book, the German monks refused to let Poggio take it away, so he was forced to sit down and copy it by hand over the next 54 days.The reaction to the discovery among humanists, especially in Italy, was swift and fervent. Leonardo Aretino wrote, “I entreat you, my dear Poggio, send me the manuscript as soon as possible, that I may see it before I die” (Shepherd 105). Lorenzo Valla’s first book (1428) was a comparison of Quintilian and Cicero. Later Quintilian was to influence Guarino da Verona, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Philip Melanchthon, the major Lutheran educator. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was one of the first rhetorical texts printed (1470, twice), and an even hundred editions appeared in print during the next 75 years. The work immediately ranked in popularity with the rhetorical works of Cicero and Aristotle, its precepts soon becoming a key segment of the “General Rhetoric” (rhetorica generalis) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ultimately the work permeated English rhetoric texts and eventually came to North America through Harvard and the parallel influence of writers like Hugh Blair.Why did Poggio’s discovery find such a ready response, and why did it lead to centuries of influence? One reason was that fragments of Quintilian’s work had been known throughout the Middle Ages, a tantalizing sample (textus mutilatus) which was obviously incomplete but which at the same time gave great promise. So the author’s name was known to scholars. Humanists like Gasparino Barzizza and Petrarch so admired Quintilian that earlier they had tried to fill in the missing sections themselves. Moreover, the discovery came at a time of humanistic debates about public life, literature, philosophy, the place of rhetoric, and the role of education. Thus the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio suddenly provided a thorough and balanced account of rhetoric embedded in an educational system offering to prepare young men for public life; it defined the perfect orator as “a good man speaking well,” combining morality with efficiency.What was nature of this text that so inspired readers over so many centuries? It was the longest and most ambitious treatment of rhetorical education in the ancient world. Its audacious aim is stated simply: “I am proposing to educate the perfect orator.” The Institutio was composed in Rome about 95 CE by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a retired legal pleader and teacher. Quintilian was one of the most famous teachers in Rome, flourishing under three emperors, and under Emperor Vespasian was one of the first teachers to receive public moneys for his teaching.Quintilian declares in his General Preface that he had taught for twenty years and then spent two years in his retirement researching and writing the Institutio. It has been described as four major works blended into one: a treatise on education, a manual of rhetoric, a reader’s guide to the best authors, and a handbook on the moral duties of the perfect orator (Little 2:9). But the fact is that every segment of the work is a teaching tool. The lengthy section on rhetoric, for example, is provided for the use of students, not for its own sake; Quintilian is not a rhetorical theorist like Cicero, but a teacher using anything (including rhetoric) that can help make his students better and more efficient citizens.The Institutio Oratoria is a large work of about 700,000 words, divided into twelve Books (libri)—a size which could make some readers reluctant to take it up. But Quintilian himself offers a helpful summary of the work to guide the reader: Book One will deal with what comes before the rhetor begins his duties. In Book Two, I shall handle the first elements taught by the rhetor, and problems connected with the nature of rhetoric itself. The next five books will be given over to Invention (Disposition forms an appendix to this), and the following four to Elocution, with which are related Memory and Delivery. There will be one further book, in which the orator himself is to be portrayed: I shall there discuss (as well as my poor powers allow) his character, the principles of undertaking, preparing, and pleading cases, his style, the end of his active career, and the studies he may undertake thereafter. (Institutio, Prooemium 22–23)A little later he adds that this is not an ordinary dry textbook, but that instead he has “gathered together in these twelve books everything that I think useful for the orator’s education” (Institutio, Prooemium 25). He begins in the cradle—the very first sentence in Book 1 says that “As soon as his son is born, the father should form the highest expectations of him” (1.1.1). He ends in Book 12 with a discussion of when to retire and what to do after retirement.Quintilian’s educational objective is to prepare the perfect orator—a good man speaking well—through a systematic program described in Books 1 and 2 (early education) and Book 10 (continuing adult self-education). His specific goal is the inculcation of what he calls habit (Greek hexis), an ingrained disposition in the writer/speaker to be able to use the right language in any situation. This is not the modern sense of “habit” as a blind repetitive tendency beyond the individual’s control. It is closer to Aristotle’s concept of “facility” (dynamis) in his Rhetoric (1.2; see Murphy; Murphy and Wiese). His aim, in other words, is to change the psyche of the student, to make him “rhetorical,” not merely by having him learn a set of rules, but also by having him exercise a wide variety of language uses so that ultimately he has familiarity with a large number of options. So Quintilian does include an extensive survey of the five “parts” of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but illustrates them with profuse examples to demonstrate that a great variety of possible language uses can occur in every situation. “Rhetoric,” he says, “would be a very easy and trivial affair if it could be comprised in a single short set of precepts” (2.13.2).In the classroom he employs systematic exercises in four categories: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. In the process called imitation (imitatio), model texts of various genres are read, analyzed, and imitated to familiarize the student with a variety of styles. A set of twelve specific graded exercises called progymnasmata, each more difficult than its predecessor, draws the student through increasingly complex thought and wording tests. As the student becomes more proficient, he is introduced to an exercise called declamation, in which a problem is set out and the student is charged to prepare and deliver an oration to solve the problem. Declamation becomes the main teaching method for older students, since it includes every feature of the whole preceding instructional program. (It also became so popular later as an ornamental display outside the classroom that for centuries onward it became a form of public entertainment by adult performers).Can the educational principles and methods of this famous author be applied in today’s world as they have been for almost two thousand years? We, the authors of the essays in this special issue on Quintilian, believe they can. So do others (Knoblauch; Kasper). We appreciate that this brief survey cannot do justice to the humane wisdom Quintilian applies to student psychology in his search for ways to enable the development of the autonomous language-user, nor to his appreciation of the almost infinite variations possible in the human interactions faced by speakers and writers. But readers are encouraged to pick up any part of his book and read two or three pages to get a sense of the intensely personal attention he devotes to every subject he looks into. Readers, on the other hand, are also encouraged to look to his general principles, not merely to details that might seem remote to a modern observer.The essays offered in this current issue of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, then, are offered as possible answers to the question posed in the preceding paragraph.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1182400
  5. Vol. 5.3: Rhetoric and Social Justice
    Abstract

    &#8220;In this issue, we learn that what gets written into law is as important as what gets intentionally omitted and that campus timely warnings are likely neither timely nor warning. We also learn the value of hashtags in cultivating concerned publics, how cynicism can be productive, and how public rhetoric can be a symbolic and material activity.&#8221;

  6. A Defense of Conduction: A Reply to Adler
    doi:10.1007/s10503-015-9368-0
  7. Editors' Introduction
  8. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628560
  9. Information for Authors
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628552
  10. Author-Title Index: Volume 43
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628563
  11. Guest Reviewers
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201628562
  12. Guest Reviewers and Translators
    doi:10.58680/rte201628603
  13. Index to Volume 50
    doi:10.58680/rte201628604
  14. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/rte201628602
  15. Fostering the Hospitable Imagination through Cosmopolitan Pedagogies: Reenvisioning Literature Education in Singapore
    Abstract

    While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.

    doi:10.58680/rte201628598
  16. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/co201628528
  17. From the Editor
    Abstract

    Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/78/5/collegeenglish28523-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/co201628523

April 2016

  1. The Rhetoric of Previving: Blogging the Breast Cancer Gene
    Abstract

    Previvors, women with a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, blog in response to the rhetorical needs of their community, needs that are fillable only in writing, for a specific audience, and to engage that audience to act. Previvor bloggers have created a rhetorical community in response to specific kairotic moments and have fulfilled three common rhetorical needs: to educate others, to advocate for more research into BRCA mutations and/or breast cancer research in general, and to support others in the BRCA+ community toward the main purpose of social action.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1142855
  2. Paradoxes in the Classroom
    Abstract

    Students in freshman composition classes often assume that the goal of college writing is to sound like someone else, so they struggle to frame their own questions in response to the world around them. This article analyzes the potential for student-driven learning to redress this problem. It focuses on a team-taught freshman composition course that asked students to collaborate in designing a section of their curriculum. The article argues that control over the curriculum inspired many students to push themselves intellectually and adopt the roles of teachers. On the other hand, increased autonomy sometimes disempowered students who had not yet acquired skills to assess their own strengths and weaknesses and who thus reverted to oversimplified ideas or avoided actively taking on responsibilities. If agency constitutes the power to carry out effective action, this course illustrated the capacity of autonomy both to foster and to subvert student agency.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-3436028
  3. Contributors
    Abstract

    Other| April 01 2016 Contributors Pedagogy (2016) 16 (2): 377–379. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3436044 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 April 2016; 16 (2): 377–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3436044 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Duke University Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-3436044