Abstract In the summer of 1896 William McKinley, Republican candidate for President, remained at home while his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, conducted a vigorous railroad campaign. Nonetheless, McKinley was not idle as he campaigned effectively from his home in Canton, Ohio. This analysis of McKinley ‘s summer campaign speeches establishes, first, that McKinley ‘s Front Porch campaign, even in its earliest weeks, consisted of a series of artificial events staged for the media, and, second, that this feature of the campaign shaped what McKinley said and how he said it, as McKinley created the impression of identification between the voters and himself.

Abstract This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates’ performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.

Modern rhetorical theory suggests that epideictic creates and sustains values by addressing issues of legitimacy, inclusion, exclusion, and virtue. By focusing on the epideictic dimension in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, this paper explores Paul’s efforts to form an emerging Christian community that at once identified with its Judaic roots and yet dissociated itself from a conservative sect of Jewish Christians, who were attempting to colonize the young Galatian churches.

Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics by Steven Mailloux. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 206 + xv pp. Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century, edited by Bernard L. Brock. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 292 pp. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth‐Century Black Women by Shirley Wilson Logan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 255 + xvi pp. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, by Bruno Latour. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 324 + x. The Rhetoric of Science in the Evolution of American Ornithological Discourse by John T. Battalio. Bayshore, TX: Ablex, 1998. 264 + xix pp. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy, edited by John T. Battalio. Stanford, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pp.

Abstract This article explores the ways in which Romantic literary theory offers contemporary rhetoricians a balanced answer to the question of audience, . an answer that allows for prose which reflects a private vision at the same time that it strives for social transformation. In connecting Coleridge's and Keats's hostile reactions to their nineteenth‐century readers with current expressivist theories, especially the work of Peter Elbow, the need to avoid audience at certain stages in the writing process becomes apparent. Yet ultimately the most powerful writing is audience‐centered, as Shelley's A Defence of Poetry illustrates through its call for imaginative empathy.

Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.

Abstract: George Campbell's rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell's interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell's beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotie and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through coinmon sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell's rhetoric has frequentiy been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.

George Campbell’s rhetorical theory is based upon a philosophical tradition that has ancient roots—common sense philosophy. Campbell’s interest in common sense emerged through his association with Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Reid. However, Campbell’s beliefs about the relationship between individual perception and social knowledge at the same time reveal a philosophical affinity with Aristotle and the Stoics. For Campbell, as for the ancients, common sense represents both the intuitive ability that individuals use in apprehending the reality of the external world and the shared human capacity to make necessary collective judgments. Although Campbell believes that there is objective truth that is apprehended through common sense, he at the same time perceives common sense as providing a foundation for making decisions about the contingent circumstances that people face from day to day. Campbell’s rhetoric has frequently been described as managerial, but his interest in common sense creates an epistemic function for rhetoric, as it provides the means for negotiating the principles of moral evidence in order to resolve the specific questions that arise in the life of the community.

Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re­ inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...

RHETORICA 108 General Prologue and three serious tales. Much of the comedic and fantastic is left unexplored; indeed, he writes, "I hope others will extend the discussion...I have only initiated" (p. 212). Although Russell, at times, claims rather brashly to know what Chaucer thought or didn't think, what he read or didn't read without much qualification, the edginess of his prose provokes response. His work confidently negotiates contemporary Chaucerian scholarship, solidly convincing readers that the trivium can serve as an important lens through which we can read medieval literary texts. ANNE LASKAYA University of Oregon Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accepts poststructural questioning of the unity and autonomy of the literary text and the independence of its "author" and characters but argues that this critique of formalism has unnecessarily dismissed close reading of language. She seeks to restore it by applying concepts from discourse analysis to a comparison of Renaissance correspondence and Shakespeare's dialogue. Her assumption that letters and plays come close to recording actual conversation seems a little naive, and I am not always sure whether her goal is to recover Elizabethan speech or to illuminate Shakespeare, but she largely achieves both. In place of the Aristotelian categories applied to Elizabethan letters by Frank Whigham, she builds on theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, and especially the empirical research of cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. Their model describes attempts to manage risk and save face in conversation through strategies of positive politeness (identifying participants) and negative politeness (dissociating them) that take into account their social Reviews 109 distance, their relative power, and the culture-specific ranking of impositions. As an historian of rhetoric skeptical of imposing our own theories on Renaissance texts, I am startled by how well this approach explains Elizabethan language. Magnusson's study has three parts. Part One demonstrates that gender as well as class influences social dialogue. In Henry VIII, Norfolk employs positive strategies to advise Buckingham; Katherine and Wolsey address King Henry with negative strategies of deference and indirection. The correspondence of Edmund Molyneux, Sidney family secretary, reveals the complexities of Elizabethan relationships. Philip and Robert Sidney command him, while he responds to Philip's criticisms primarily with negative strategies. Lady Mary Sidney tempers her authority over Edmund with positive strategies. Shakespeare's Sonnet 58 and others deferring to his patron are best understood in the context of these conventions. Part Two focuses on letter-writing manuals and administrative correspondence, applying its examples to Shakespeare's plays. Magnusson contrasts Desiderius Erasmus' reform of the horizontal, homosocial relations of scholars in De conscribendis epistolis with Angel Day's reproduction of Elizabethan social hierarchies in The English Secretary, which nevertheless facilitates upward mobility. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, a translation of a French treatise, could have unwittingly supplied hints for the linguistic pretensions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the former play, the lords' linguistic excesses respond to imitation of their style by upstarts, while in the latter, Theseus appreciates his subjects' incompetence because bumbling shows deference. Elizabethan business depends on personal relationship: thus recommendations ignore job qualifications and requests for favors cement friendship. The Marchants Avizo of Bristol merchant John Browne advises the apprentice to seek aid from fellow merchants, adapting the courtly "pleasuring style" to the commerce. The Merchant of Venice shows the same patterns in the Christian community, but Shylock's speech challenges them, and in Timon of Athens they break down. In the personal letters by which Sir Henry Sidney, Sir William Cecil, and other courtiers administer 110 RHETORICA the Elizabethan regime, negative politeness to equals hints that the intended audience is the Queen, while expressions of "trouble­ taking" and regrets for "trouble-making" to superiors may excuse independent decisions. Positive strategies of identification present weighty requests as trivial. 1 Henry IV contrasts Hal's mastery of this social language and Hotspur's impatience with it. Part Three explores language as theme in three plays. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning cannot adequately explain...

The syntactic aspect of semiotic theory, especially its “aesthetic principle,” is very influential in document design theories and practices. It has its roots in Burke's and Lessing's gender-related theories of images. Thus, it is laden with ideologies: it embodies our patriarchal attitudes and our iconophobia. Employing the semiotic theory in document design, we are making choices to reinforce the gender-related ideology in Burke's and Lessing's theories. It is time for us to re-conceive the “aesthetic principle” by de-emphasizing it and to adopt the reconciliation approach to design effective documents targeted at various rhetorical situations.

This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

The Presentation of Technical Information. 3rd ed. Reginald Kapp. Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK: The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, 1998. 136 pages. User‐Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. Robert R. Johnson. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 195 pages. Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray. Lori Allen and Dan Voss. New York: Wiley, 1997. 410 pages. The Dynamics of Writing Review: Opportunities for Growth and Change in the Workplace. Susan M. Katz. Vol. 5 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1998. 134 pages. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy. Ed. John T. Battalio. Vol. 6 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pages. Outlining Goes Electronic. Jonathan Price. Vol. 9 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1999. 177 pages (including bibliography and indexes). Wiring the Writing Center. Ed. Eric H. Hobson. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1998. 254 pages. Inventing the Internet. Janet Abbate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 264 pages.

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.

This essay argues that in 1 Thessalonians, Paul uses eschatological discourse—language about the end of time—in order to evoke a symbolic world-view in which his readers become God’s elect, living at the end of time and awaiting the sudden, imminent return of Christ from heaven. This self-identification explains their present misfortunes, while at the same time demanding that they fulfill the ethical and moral demands of the Christian faith. More broadly, this essay points to the role that eschatological discourse played within early Christianity in general, suggesting that it formed a central, paradigmatic drama which helped to define ontological and teleological reality for the movement’s adherents.

Helen Rothschild Ewald's 1993 essay, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies, attempts to consolidate and redirect nearly a decade's appropriation of Bakhtin's work in composition studies. Its ambition to provide an authoritative map of and a new direction to Bakhtinian composition studies has been fulfilled in both its original place of publication and in its recent republication as the culminating essay in the first collection of landmark essays on Bakhtin, rhetoric, and (Farmer). While demonstrating the widespread use of Bakhtin in the field, Ewald characterizes this work as predominantly social-constructionist and heralds a new ethical emphasis that might be drawn from his earlier work on answerability. With heavy irony she deprecates how handy (332, 337) Bakhtin's work has been to a range of social-constructionist writers but chooses not to undertake a direct refutation of their claims. Instead, she chooses to suggest some teaching practices as part of a general reorientation of composition studies that would focus on and examine our specific situational responses to ethical issues that arise when we engage in or the teaching of writing (345). Connecting with a crossdisciplinary revival of inquiry into ethical issues, Ewald's intervention could be taken to herald an important ethical turn in Bakhtinian composition studies. Ewald necessarily draws much of her account of Bakhtin's early themes of ethics and answerability, as she acknowledges, from Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Slavicists who have provided the most extensive and authoritative reading of Bakhtin to date and joined vigorously in the revival of ethical issues in literary criticism. Ewald shares not only their emphasis in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics on the superior authenticity and ethical seriousness of Bakhtin's early work but also their impatience with readers of his work who have confined their interest to his socially oriented theories of dialogue and carnival. Like Morson and Emerson, she eschews refutation of these readers but identifies herself with a more serious and worthy future line of inquiry into answerability in the ethical sense of individual accountability as

Traditionally, has played a central role in how classical rhetoric defines, conducts, and structures both its subject matter and its methods.' The subjects of [rhetorical] deliberation, writes Aristotle, such as seem to present us with alternative possibilities (1357a). These alterative possibilities, structured as opposites, precede-as well as proceed from-the study of rhetoric. For example, stasis theory assumes that people find themselves opposed, actually or potentially, to other people in their interests, desires, and motives and that they require the means, or method, to clarify this opposition even as they seek to move beyond it toward consensus. To provide these means, stasis theory posits a heuristic set of categories-of Being, Quantity, Quality, Place, for example-designed to help disputants identify and evaluate the issues in any given case, chiefly by establishing the relative merit of the oppositions underpinning the contested issues: Only those cases whose points of conflict are sufficiently clear-i.e., are well formulated and resting on sufficiently common grounds-should go forward for debate and adjudication. Equally, opposition plays a key role in structuring the canons of rhetoric and, consequently, in structuring rhetoric as both a theoretical and a practical art. Within the canon of inventio, for example, we find appeals to the advantageous paired with the disadvantageous, possibility with impossibility, guilt with innocence, praise with blame; within dispositio, we find confirmatio paired with refutatio; within elocutio, we find a whole range of figures-from epanalepsis to antimetabole to isocolon-capable of pairing terms into stylistic antitheses; and, finally, within memoria and actiopronuntiatio, we find a spectrum of normative terms marked, at either extreme, by pairs such as natural and artificial, open and closed, high and low, and the like. Clearly, opposition is one of the key terms, if not a governing principle, of classical rhetorical theory and practice. But what of its role in contemporary rhetorical theory? In the critical analysis of visual, rather than verbal or written, texts? In images that seek identification rather than overt persuasion?

Richard Marback. Plato's Dream of Sophistry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 163 pages. Gregory Crane. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 348 pages. Josiah Ober. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiv + 417 pages. Harvey Yunis. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xv + 316 pages. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson, eds. Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 332 pages. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. Pages viii + 452. $29.95 paper. Tharon Howard. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Pages xii + 203. $24.95 paper. James Porter. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. Pages xiv + 203. $24.95 paper. Russel K. Durst. Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1999. 189 pages. $22.95 paper. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Pages, xl + 627. Richard E. Miller. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 249 pages. Lynn Z. Bloom. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan: Utah UP, 1998. 288 pages. $19.95 paper. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 233 pages. $22.50 paper. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, ed. Women/Writing/Teaching. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 294 pages. $19.95 paper. Peter Dimock. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 118 pages. $12.95 paper.

The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece by Edward Schiappa. Yale UP, 1999; 225 pp. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Plato's Dream of Sophistry by Richard Marback. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press (1999): 147 pp. Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education by Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 202 pp. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.

r he three essays that follow offer readings of one of the most popular and l widely known rhetorical performances of recent times, the Earl of Spencer's 1997 funeral eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales (text reproduced in Appendix). Each section of the paper offers a reading of the address through a critical lens derived from the rhetorical theory of a different canonical theorist, respectively (and chronologically) George Campbell, Richard Whately, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Three questions animate this project. The first concerns the relationship of theory to criticism. Neither Campbell, Whately, nor the Belgians discusses the role of rhetorical criticism or offers an apparatus that facilitates it, although each of their theories includes tenets applicable to criticism. How well do their theoretical tenets work at the level of criticism; do any of these theorists introduce concepts that analysis of rhetorical practice might challenge? The second question concerns influence. The three theorists we chose are particularly interesting from this perspective because all of them, to varying degrees, are selfconscious about their debts to the rhetorical tradition. Campbell cites and affirms the contributions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Whately incorporates Campbell, and the Belgians incorporate Whately incorporating Campbell. What is the nature of this influence? Are the differences among these theorists differences of perspective or of emphasis? We are aware of the complexities surrounding the question of influence since it was broached by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, subsequently complicated by Harold Bloom, and more recently challenged by Michel Foucault. Our purpose is not to arbitrate these quite different views (which raise their own questions about the nature of influence) but to prompt a discussion of the nature of influence within the rhetorical tradition. The third question concerns the idea of progress in rhetorical theory. In what sense can each of the theorists be said to have made an advance over his predecessors? Does rhetorical theory progress as science typically progresses, by making obsolete that which it builds on? Or does rhetoric resemble philosophy, a discipline in which responses to a relatively constant problem set seem to benefit from their predecessors' work without replacing it?

Abstract: The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.

Short Reviews Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Democratic Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) xv + 316pp. In methodological reflections written near the end of his career (and published in English translation as On Interpretation), the German classicist August Boeckh articulated a number of hermeneutic principles, including two very simple dicta. First, a good interpretation will explain as much of the text as possible. And, second, a good interpretation will make the text compelling on the terms of its own time. Judged on these two criteria, Taming Democracy by Harvey Yunis offers a very good interpretation of Plato on political rhetoric. Though Plato is not the only subject of Taming Democracy, he is at the center of this study of models of political rhetoric in democratic Athens: a study that runs from the theatrical responses to the Peloponnesian War of Aristophanes and Euripides, to Thucydides' self-conscious history, to Plato's evolving views, to Demosthenes' oratorical resistance to Philip of Macedon's imperial encroachments. As an interpreter of Plato on rhetoric, Yunis immediately stands out for his willingness to move beyond the two-piece puzzle posed by the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. To his interpretations of these essential dialogues Yunis adds some reflections on the Apology and the Republic and, in a nearly unprecedented move, a detailed assessment of the rhetorical theory implied by the "persuasive preambles" Plato introduces in his Laws. Looking at this larger set enables Yunis to conclude, "The philosophical distance that Plato has traveled from the bitter rejection of rhetoric in the Gorgias to the creation of a new rhetorical genre of legal-political discourse in the Laws is immense" (p. 235). Yunis then makes this philosophical journey historically compelling by setting it against the rise and fall and rise of the 331 332 RHETORICA Athenian empire. Yunis suggests that Athens' democracy depended in subtle ways on its imperial ambitions. The navy that gave the masses, the poorer classes, an important civic role to play also built for Athens an empire. And that empire brought revenues to Athens, revenues that provided the livelihoods for many of these poorer citizens. Thus, domestic harmony in Athens depended on foreign hegemony, even tyranny. Taming Democracy is an analysis of late fifth and early-mid fourth century thinkers who, like Plato, felt compelled to address the political questions raised by Athens' imperial history. "Athens' miserable defeat in the Peloponnesian War invited a réévaluation of its democracy in general and democratic rhetoric in particular" (p. 32). Their answers, according to Yunis, hinged on whether they believed that rhetoric could be instructive, whether they thought the rhetores—the most accomplished speakers in the assembly—could tame the demos, the public, by teaching it to deliberate wisely through mass political discourse. In Thucydides' work Pericles is presented as the exemplary rhetor because he had the ability and the moral will to teach the Athenians as he led them. The rhetores who arose after Pericles lacked his abilities and his character. They pandered to the Athenians' worst impulses and thus, Thucydides implies, led Athens to its ruin. The Gorgias, Yunis argues, is Plato's response to Thucydides' portrayal of Pericles. Unlike Thucydides who gloried in Athens' power, Plato regarded Athens' imperial ambitions as inherently corrupting. The Gorgias is set in Athens at its zenith; but the characters and historical references of this dialogue about rhetoric and power serve to remind the alert reader that the city will soon be led, by a speech, into the disastrous folly of the Sicilian expedition and, thereby, to the collapse of its empire. This is an extraordinarily provocative book. It is not without its weaknesses, however. First, though other scholars have acknowledged the echoes and parallels between the two authors, they have stopped short of the suggestion that Plato "read" Thucydides. Yunis needs to provide additional warrants for his more assertive position. Second, Yunis actually overlooks one supporting line of evidence in this regard: the paradoxical place of shame in Thucydides and its prominence in the Gorgias. Third, Reviews 333 Yunis distorts the Phaedrus by bending it too harshly to his thesis. The setting of the dialogue and the focal relationship of the...

Reviews 343 within this conventional context. "What this means in practice", Skinner explains, "is that I treat Hobbes's claims about scientia civilis not simply as propositions but as moves in an argument. I try to indicate what traditions he reacts against, what lines of argument he takes up, what changes he introduces into existing debates" (p. 8). While Skinner's method has occasioned much debate, culminating in a collection of essays entitled Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (1988), historians of rhetoric, who themselves attempt to understand texts within larger contexts, should welcome the attention paid to questions of intention, meaning, and language. Meticulously researched, Skinner's study of Hobbes and the rhetorical culture of Tudor England is a welcome contribution to histories such as Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric and Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Together, these studies clarify the complex interplay between rhetorical and political traditions in early modem Europe. WADE WILLIAMS The University ofPuget Sound Alan G Gross and William M. Keith eds, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) 371 pp. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar writes "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science", the lead essay in this volume—its "Provocations"—and the rest of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is a collection of "Dissensions", "Extensions" and "reflections", the last including a response to respondents by Gaonkar. So the book is the perfect rhetorical study. It is utterly dialogic; Gaonkar's claims are all tested on an audience of distinguished rhetorical theorists and rhetoricians of science: John Angus Campbell, Thomas Farrell, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, James Jasinski, David Kaufer, William Keith, Andrew King, Michael Leff, Deirdre McCloskey, Carolyn Miller and Charles Willard. The book has an 344 RHETORICA excellent cast—and a sometimes argumentative one (McCloskey writes that the philosophical warrants for Gaonkar's case against a ubiquitous rhetoric themselves warrant the question, "So what?", p. 107); it also has a very worthy project. The central question of Rhetorical Hermeneutics is this: can a theory of production be usefully, and without distortion, transformed into a theory of interpretation? This question sponsors others—for example, does the "thinness" of rhetorical theory (the paucity of constraints on its terms of use) make it so easy to spread, as it were (rhetoric is the universal hermeneutic) as to weaken the plausibility of rhetoric altogether (what distinguishes rhetoric as an interpretive program?)? Gaonkar answers his own questions in part by evoking the work in rhetoric of science of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli. Campbell and Gross respond. Campbell, Gaonkar finds, is mired in a problem of agency ("refuses to let go of an image of Darwin as the rhetorical superstar", p. 49); Gross is only successful as a rhetorical critic to the extent that he does not practice the neoAristotelianism he proposes; Prelli, among other questionable practices, seems to be "probing into the 'rhetorical unconscious'" of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 73). So Gaonkar describes problems in the house of rhetoric of science; he also draws attention not only to the problematic relation of rhetorical criticism to other criticisms, but also to the "embattled" relation of Rhetoric of Science—as a discipline—to both rhetorical studies and science studies. Gross and Keith's design and authoritative editing shape a volume which deserves consideration at a number of levels: What are possible answers to questions raised? What can be said about the questions qua questions? Why does rhetoric ask so many questions about itself anyway? The book not only deserves consideration at these levels; it also enables it. Fuller writes, for example, "The more that rhetoric of science looks like classical rhetoric, the less exciting its interpretations seem...[T]he more that rhetoric of science strays from classical sources, and the more provocative its readings become, the more interchangeable its methods seem with those used by sociologists and critical theorists" (p. 279). Gross writes, "The current attitude of Reviews 345 historians and philosophers oscillates between increased need to take a rhetorical point of view into consideration and an occasional hostility to the possibility of rhetorical analysis" (p. 146). With such comment, the authors invite readers to participate...

The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy saw a marked new interest in the study of Ciceronian rhetorical theory, in both Latin and vernacular contexts. This reflects the increasing prominence within the civic culture of the Italian communes of practices of oral and adversarial rhetoric which the dominant instrument of rhetorical instruction in this period, the ars dictaminis, was ill-equipped to teach. While the utility of the strategies of argument taught by Roman rhetorical theory was widely recognised in this period, the ethical attitudes implicit in that theory represented a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of the moral decorum of speech. Classical rhetorical theory may thus be seen to have constituted a destabilising presence within late medieval ethical discourse: a situation which presisted, to some extent, even after the political and cultural changes of the later Trecento had displaced rhetoric in Italy from a primary to a secondary, literary and educational, role.

Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

Based on a study of nearly 200 international faculty in the field of computer science and computer engineering, roughly 90 written genres in the computing discipline are identified and organized according to five central aims in the profession: generation, procuration, dissemination, evaluation, and regulation. The importance of writing in the field is discussed, and recommendations for further research follow to encourage greater breadth and depth in the identification and study of generic corpora characteristic of specific professional communities. Benefits of such research assist students preparing to enter a profession, working professionals wishing to improve their writing in a profession, and writing specialists who offer training or editorial services for a profession.

The Writing Program faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), developed a unique three-quarter writing sequence for College of Engineering freshmen. These students write a variety of engineering documents: design proposals, project management plans, status reports, instructions, poster papers, etc. The genres in the sequence, their identification, and their teaching result from outreach to the engineering community. Although this curriculum benefits from a three-quarter sequence, the methods used are applicable to shorter courses in academic and industry settings. This curriculum may be of interest to industry professionals who recruit or who wish to contribute to undergraduate engineering curriculum innovations.

222 RHETORICA substitute aux mots orator ou poeta celui de pictor et applique à la peinture des analyses rhétorico-poétiques" (pp. 19-20). The result amounts to a digest of everything in classical rhetoric relevant to the visual arts. The full extent of Junius's re-elaboration of rhetorical theory can be partly gauged by the subjects treated in the editor's invaluable commentary section, reduced to key terms: imitatio, ars, phantasia, ratio imitandi ("une problématique cicéronienne"), ut pictura poesis (including the roles of inspiration, enthusiasm, imitation, illusion, emotion), and contemplatio (the function of the spectator, aesthetic and moral). Every self-respecting historian of rhetoric should make sure his departmental library buys this remarkable edition. And we keenly look forward to its completion. Brian Vickers ETH Zurich James Robert Goetsch Jr, Vico's Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) xiv + 173pp. Goetsch undertakes a defense of Vico against his "friends", such as Isaiah Berlin, who are mainstream historians of philosophy; he is concerned to give Vico credit for a solid, systemic mode of inquiry, rather than the wildly eclectic mass of detail, chaotically presented, attributed to Vico by Berlin, (p. xi). His defense of Vico becomes a defense of rhetoric, for Goetsch insists on the significance of fundamental rhetorical assumptions and strategies of analysis of language structure and process as they frame an investigation. Vico's hermeneutics are, for Goetsch, a rhetorical hermeneutics. The defense of rhetoric is also an abandonment of the hegemonous strategies of definition and the standard issues of history of philosophy. To give a perspicuous, inclusive account of Vico's project, it is necessary to focus on the axioms, the key structuring principles, Vico lists in his New Science (p. 106); Axioms 1-22, 106 are common (koinoi), Axioms 33-144 particular Reviews 223 topics (p. 128). But, in Goetsch's rhetorical reading, the Vichian axioms, or elementi, or degnita (things worth thinking), are peculiarly rhetorical uses of the topoi,of the topical connections of the general and the particular (p. 108). The commonplace tradition illumines Vichian method (p. 104), because "topical storehouses" provide the arguments, enthymemes, motivating the most basic civil operations. The topoi, as both bins, spaces, organising argument and the contents of the bins represent a mode of connection in which both source and goal are in the domain of the communis. "Common sense", as a body of beliefs and dispositions held by a historical community, is a primary interest for Vico (p. 96), as the origin of the principles which illumine human history; Vico reads the axioms as "causes of customs" (p. 108). The description of common sense, as the summary of the common practices and values of the communities, is the goal of all historical initiatives and arguments. Moreover, when Vico claims that Providence, "like the queen she is", works only through civil institutions and practices, he selects irony as primary trope; history is not simply the product of self-conscious personal impulses; rather, particular institutional effects and strategies are often the unintended consequences of radically different, earlier dispositions and practices. Goetsch claims Vico's strategy represents a "recovery of an authentic Aristotelian rhetoric" (p. 106), a more "dynamic" Aristotle (pp. 54, 114). Goetsch reads the opening statement in the Rhetoric, that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, as pointing to the peculiarly heavy engagement with civic consciousness and civil effect of rhetoric (p. 108). Goetsch thus claims to recontextualise Vico in an Aristotelian tradition which is not that of a purely abstract, logical systematicity, the dominant reading of Aristotle in history of philosophy, but of a rhetorical, topical systematicity; a "rhetorical" reading of Aristotle, he claims, "corrects" the "scholastic" tendencies of Aristotle's logical interests (p. 77). Thus Goetsch asserts he may place Vico in a history of ideas aligned with the peculiar interests in philosophy of language and the philosophy of psychology represented in such twentieth-century figures as Ernst Cassirer, Ernesto Grassi, and Owen Barfield, to name three of the mentors frequently invoked by Goetsch.. At all times, Goetsch privileges, and claims Vico 224 RHETORICA privileges, "organic" wholeness (p. 116), valuing the image, imagination, ingenium, temporicity, historicity—a...

Reviews 233 plutôt: parce que rhéteur) en musicien: les idées sont des thèmes, les sujets sont des instruments. Pierre-Louis Malosse Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 314 pp. Endings, like beginnings, have always fascinated us; thus, speculative accounts of the world's beginning (etiologies) and its ending (eschatologies) have engendered controversial philosophies and gripping narratives. As we approach the end of a millenium, eschatological speculation can only be expected to increase; and thus, Arguing the Apocalypse is a timely contribution to rhetorical history and rhetorical theory. It is also broadly interdisciplinary, carefully researched, and intelligently written. The book's author, Stephen O'Leary, studied comparative religion at Harvard before going on to graduate work in Communication Studies at Northwestern; this book is a revision of his dissertation, and it is marked by the influence of both its director (argumentation theorist Tom Goodnight) and one of its readers (Bernard McGinn, a historian of medieval theology). With a few exceptions, the author has purged his book of the stylistic residues of the much despised "dissertation" genre. Nevertheless, as in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the first ninety pages will test the readers' mettle; only if they are able to wade through the complexities of the theory will they earn their just reward: two rhetorical histories that are fascinating (and at times, even "page-turners"). Yet there are those first ninety pages. Chapter 1 begins by defining apocalypse—a subset of eschatological discourse that "makes manifest a vision of ultimate destiny, rendering immediate to human audiences the ultimate End of the cosmos in the Last Judgment" (pp. 5-6). Given the powerful appeal of such discourse through the ages, the author suspects that rhetorical theory will be useful in showing how it has shaped human 234 RHETORICA thought and action within particular cultural milieux. Chapter 2 sets out three important topoi of apocalyptic discourse: time, evil, and authority. These topoi are ripe for rhetorical analysis, since they involve not only the intellect but the whole person. O'Leary provides thumbnail sketches of the typical accounts of these three topoi, suggesting that apocalyptic discourse attempts to address certain aporiae that have been left by such accounts. In chapter 3, O'Leary develops the dramatic frames of comedy and tragedy, through which he will view various apocalyptic movements. Traditional Christian eschatology, he argues, accented the comic frame by emphasizing God's complete sovereignty in bringing about the end of time; the divine plan is inscrutible, and we can neither predict the end nor bring it about. But this view still acknowledged an identifiable end, in which evil and time would be no more; and this created the rhetorical space for a "tragic" apocalyptic eschatology, in which God brings the world to a catastrophic close (an event that will be survived only by those who know what to look for, and when to look). "Once an audience has accepted the eschatological argument that evil will be both eliminated and justified in the Last Judgment...their experience of evil will create a hope and expectation for this Judgment that still requires satisfaction" (p. 81). Thus, in apocalyptic rhetoric, "the evils of the present day are pyramided into a structure of cosmic significance" (p. 83). This arouses ever more eager anticipation of the consummation of history. Apocalyptic rhetoric thus tends to be enormously persuasive in the short term. While often blithely dismissed as the ranting of fanatics, it has mobilized thousands, indeed millions, of adherents—a claim that O'Leary will demonstrate in the historical sketches that fill most of the remainder of the book. The next four chapters examine two of the most important apocalyptic movements in the United States. Chapter 4 chronicles William Miller's rise from obscure farmer, to sought-after lecturer, to religious figurehead, to discredited prophet; the chapter also shows why Millerism should be analyzed as a rhetorical movement. In chapter 5, O'Leary examines the particular forms of Millerite argument, showing why they were found persuasive by certain auditors. Chapter 6 jumps ahead some more than a century, examining the more...

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism by Robert Wess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 262 pp. Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, anda Theory of Social Change by Barbara A. Biesecker. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. x + 123 pp. Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric by Victor J. Vitanza. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 428 pages. Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 247 pp. Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Although over 11 million virtual workers in the USA are classified as teleworkers, we know relatively little about them. Drawing on the construct of telepresence, the relationships among four sets of variables seem especially important: actual communication technology use, identifications with aspects of work, degree of virtuality, and various teleworker demographic characteristics. A survey of 86 teleworkers in a wide range of organizations revealed that basic telephone and voicemail are the most frequently used and most vital communication technologies. However, several differences in technology use based on message content and interaction partners also exist. Additionally, moderately virtual teleworkers are more identified with their work team, organization, and occupation than are those who telework small or large portions of their work week. Also, use of advanced phone technologies is most predictive of organizational and occupational identification. Among the implications discussed are: equipping teleworkers with appropriate communication technologies and establishing telework programs where workers are only virtual for a portion of the working week.

Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to 98 RHETORICA explore the implications of this thesis in the context of issues such as national identity, cultural politics, and gender in Scotland, England, America, and Australasia. Robert Crawford introduces the volume by situating it within the context of recent accounts of the development of university English. He then addresses the establishment of courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at St. Andrews, focusing in particular on the career of Robert Watson, who was appointed Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in 1756. In the second article, Neil Rhodes continues Crawford's discussion of the curriculum at St. Andrew's by detailing the influence of Ramus on the teaching of Belles Lettres. Rhodes argues that it was the dissemination of Ramist pedagogy through the work of Roland Macllmaine at St. Andrews which led in the eighteenth century to the "redescription of Rhetoric as Criticism", first in the lectures of Watson and later in the work of Lord Karnes (p. 31). Joan Pittock focuses on the Scottish development of English Studies by examining the curriculum at Aberdeen. In her article, she illustrates the philosophical approach to Belles Lettres in the works of Aberdonian scholars such as David Fordyce, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, as well as the critical connections these scholars make between the concept of taste and the social and ethical development of students. The important social function of English Studies is also taken up by Paul Bator in his discussion of the novel in the Scottish university curriculum. Bator demonstrates the rise of the novel as a serious genre of study through careful analysis of lecture notes from Professors of Rhetoric at St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities, acquisition and library borrowing records, and activities of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society. He argues that for Scottish professors of rhetoric in the eighteenth century "the novel provided a unique and unstoppable vehicle by which their students could observe and learn vicariously the manners of their English brethren" (p. 90). The new genre, then, functioned as a form of conduct literature through which the values of mainstream British culture were perpetuated in Scotland. Bator's analysis of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society, however, indicates that the study of the novel in the Scottish universities...

RHETORICA 102 While several of the articles in the volume do address the extended influence of the Scottish tradition in countries formerly dominated by Britain, conspicuously absent from the collection is any discussion of English Studies on the Indian subcontinent. Taken as a whole, however, the volume presents an expanded account of the historical origins of English Studies and illustrates the degree to which we owe the institutionalization of university English to Scottish culture. DANA HARRINGTON Syracuse University Richard Morris, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) xxi + 237 pp. A modest but noteworthy contribution to research by rhetoric scholars on public memorials, this book focuses on symbolic responses to Abraham Lincoln's death during the nineteenth century in the United States. Morris asserts, "I know of no other event that so exactly marks the dramatic rupture of the social structure of a nation and that so clearly lays cultural transformation open to observation than the death of Abraham Lincoln" (p. 2). Written in a clear and accessible style, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes argues "the thesis that memorials are fundamentally rhetorical and cultural forms of expression, that a careful examination of American memorializing discloses the contours of at least three distinct American cultures, and that shifting visual and discursive memorial patterns across time reveal the ascendancy and subordination of these three cultures and their cultural memories" (p. xii). The organization of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is straightforward. An introductory chapter articulates an orientation to the rhetoric and culture of public memorials. In the three following chapters, each of the "three cultures" is the central focus of one chapter, corresponding to the three key terms in the Reviews 103 title, Sinners, Lovers and Heroes. Specifically, Morris considers patterns of response to Lincoln's death, as it was represented by members of cultures that Morris names "religionists", "romanticists", and "heroists" (p. 42). The conclusion synthesizes Morris's claims that "Different people memorialize, embrace, and seek to codify through public memory their different images of the memorable not merely because of temporal or spatial or physiological divergences, but because different cultures with different worldviews and ethoi require different images of and from their members" (p. 153). One strength of Sinners, Lovers and Heroes is the extensive use of published primary materials from various nineteenth century figures who commented on Abraham Lincoln's death. Morris claims, "what we see in the transformation of Lincoln's image, then, is not a single people creating and later transforming an element of the symbolic code of collective memory, but the rise and fall of different cultures, each of which positions Lincoln within a different world view and ethos" (p. 27). Another strength of this book is the attention to accumulating details that Morris synthesizes into an encompassing perspective in his conclusion. Unfortunately, however, the book makes little explicit use of contemporary rhetoric scholars' research on public memorials, public memory, or visual rhetoric, even though the book seems to be arguing, at times, with some key figures in these areas of research. Although the introduction and the conclusion stress "differences" among the U.S. people, there is little explicit attention to either race or economic class in the body of the volume (for his comments on race, pp. x, 111; on economic class, pp. 127, 142-43, 147-49). The discussion of the "religionists" depends heavily upon a Christian conception of spirituality. As one consequence, perhaps, the speech by a Jewish leader, Max Lilienthal, is discussed under the "heroists" (pp. 125-35). In the chapter on "heroists," one abiding oxymoron is the manifestation of leveling styles reflecting an egalitarian politics, because placing some people above most others is ordinarily a requirement for having "heroes". Morris writes, "True to the mandates of the first Heroist gravescape, however, cemeterial rules and regulations in lawn cemeteries require markers to be small and, in the vast majority of instances...flush with the ground" (p. 149). 104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term...

RHETORICA 96 Don Paul Abbot, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997) xiii + 135pp. The study and practice of rhetoric were at the center of all representations, interpretations and debates in colonial Spanish America. Readings and criticisms of the cultural production of the colonial period, since just before the Quintencenary celebration in 1992 and after, have shed light on diverse aspects of history, culture and society. However, these critical assessments have only superficially confronted the use and transformation of the precepts of the European rhetorical tradition across the Atlantic. In colonial Spanish America, rhetoric offered the theories behind the evangelization project and the rules to follow in the most important political debates of the period. Don Paul Abbot's contribution to colonial studies and the history of rhetoric in America, Rhetoric in the New World, looks at how Spanish, Amerindian and Mestizo rhetoricians challenged the classical tradition and offer a new perspective on secular and religious historical writing, the theory behind it, and culture. Spanish and Mestizo scholars gave continuity and provided a new perspective in theory and practice to Renaissance humanism and the rhetorical tradition. Abbot addresses this important problem, successfully demonstrating the important role of and adjustments made to ancient concepts in the practice of writing theory, considering the different addressees, and more important, the project of representation, translation and interpretation of the Amerindian culture. The texts under review in Abbot's book provide a crosssection of some important writers and intellectuals during the early colonial period. He discusses the works of Fray Luis de Granada, Bernardino de Sahagún, Diego Valadés, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, José de Acosta, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and José de Arriaga. The context to the transmission of the precepts of rhetoric from Spain to the New World is provided in an insightful manner with a study of the lesser known Breve tratado, by Fray Luis de Granada, one of the most important ascetic writers, Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to ...

104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...

Short Reviews Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) xii + 235pp. Glenn's purpose in Rhetoric Retold is feminist and cartographic: to remap the history of rhetoric by putting female rhetoricians and rhetorical practices solidly on the map. She challenges patriarchal rhetorical history at the center by including the voices of women who practiced rhetoric from the margins. Her hope is to revitalize "rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself" (p. 10). Glenn's method derives from historiography, feminism, and gender studies. She uses "resistant readings...of the paternal narrative" and "female-authored rhetorical works" as well as "broad definitions of rhetoric" (p. 4). Her rationale for subject selection appears in Chapter One. Thereafter, she develops each historical chapter by overviewing cultural conditions of the period, describing women's place in those worlds, sketching the nature of patriarchal rhetoric at the time, then presenting the rhetorical activities of some exceptional women who were able to speak and write from the margins. Whenever she can, she highlights significant "points of contact" across all of the subjects she considers. Chapter Two examines pretheoretical sources of rhetorical consciousness in ancient Greece. Her reading of Sappho and female Phythagorians (Theano, Phintys, Perictyone) present rhetorical avenues that mainstream tradition never explored. She details public (argumentative) rhetoric (Corax, Gorgias, and Isocrates), then treats Aspasia as a silent heartbeat at the center of Pericles's intellectual circle. Aspasia was as likely a source of inspiration to Socrates and Plato as was Diotima. Glenn examines© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 89 RHETORICA 90 tradition (Cicero and Quintilian), challenging this tradition with voices from the margins. Here we meet Vergima, Cornelia, Hortensia, Amasia Senta, Gaia Afrania, Sempronia, Fulvia, and Octavia. In Chapter Three Glenn details Christian cultural dynamics, calling the Bible the "ur-text of history, wisdom, and doctrine" (p. 75). She discusses inheritance laws, conceptions of women's bodies, the theoretical equality of men and women in the eyes of Christ, yet the practical inequality of doctrine and of Christian institutional piety. Examining representations of women in medieval literature (imaginative, Marian, inspirational), Glenn contends that women never received "the full range of human feelings or characteristics" (p. 86). Women appear as inferior to rational men, some of whose (Augustine, Jerome) rhetorical practices (ars poetica, ars dictaminis, ars praedicandi) Glenn treats next in some detail. She shows how a small group of religious women achieved some release from the cultural hold, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose unusual rhetorical practices Glenn tells in illuminating detail. In Chapter Four Glenn overviews the general nature of Renaissance culture, tracing the patriarchal bias of laws, the nature of women's work both outside and inside the home, the inferiority of women's bodies when compared to men's, and more. She situates classical and Christian humanism, showing the usefulness of humanistic education in society and religious life. Some special English women, according to Glenn, received humanistic training, and she traces their (modest) literary accomplishments. She contrasts these women to the fake representations of women in literature; some women appear overly assertive (Edmund Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth), while others appear willfully disobedient (Juliet, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi). Such images reinforced women's exclusion from the public world of traditional Ciceronian rhetorical practice, though the entry of educated women became more probable as rhetoric and poetics converged in early English rhetorics that focused on style and eloquence. Glenn shows how three exceptional woman each used their own versions of rhetorical eloquence to make an impact on the public Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult...

RHETORICA 108 from "the people", the tabloids, the dirty political infighting. Rhetoric awaits its Disraeli who can persuade the appropriate personages to bring rhetoric back to the life that damaged it in the first place, the life that is its life, for better or worse or otherwise. BRUCE KRAJEWSKI Laurentian University Craig Waddell, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, Landmark Essays 12 (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press-Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) xix + 239 pp. The eleven essays reprinted in this collection map the ecotone where rhetoric and environmental politics meet. Though individual essays resist easy classification, the collection reveals important focuses of work in this sub-field. Several essays trace and evaluate characteristic lines of argument in environmental policy debates. In the lead essay, for instance, Robert Cox glosses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's account of the locus of the irreparable in The New Rhetoric, drawing out the strategic and ethical implications of, among other deployments of this locus, "forewarnings" of irreparable damage to the environment. Jonathan Lange analyzes five characteristics of the "logic of interaction" between the timber industry and environmentalists engaged in the debate over protecting Northern spotted owl habitat in old growth forests. Other essays study (mis)constructions of audience. Craig Waddell argues that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb failed to "reconstitute" its audience because it did not articulate "a more comprehensive [ecocentric] framework" to replace egocentric and anthropocentric ethical frameworks (p. 68), while Tarla Rai Peterson and Cristi Choat Horton study ranchers' sense of stewardship for the land "to show how communication that responds attentively to an audience's perspective can assist in retrieving potential points of affiliation among diverse groups" (p 168). Reviews 109 Still other essays focus on the ethos of environmental advocates. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer consider the charge of hysteria lodged against Rachel Carson and other environmentalists, arguing that the "environmentalist and the nature writer, in becoming 'voices for the earth'...represent the return of the repressed, the coming into consciousness of that which, having been avoided for far too long, has created an illness within the mind-body system of earthly existence" (p. 37). However, they note that "like any political position, environmentalism seeks to restrict access to certain subject positions just as surely as it opens access to others" (p. 50), and like Peterson and Horton, they warn against this exclusionary tendency. Finally, some essays view environmental debates through wide cultural lenses. For instance, Christine Oravec argues that the debate over damming Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park was settled not so much by the explicit arguments of the conservationists and preservationists engaged in the debate as by the alignment of conservationists' arguments with "prevailing presumptions concerning the nature of the 'public' and its relationship to the natural environment", presumptions characteristic of early twentieth-century Progressive politics (p. 17). All of these essays conceive of environmental rhetoric in deliberative terms, focusing on conflicts over public policy (individual essay titles bristle with terms such as "controversy", "confrontation", "conflict", "dispute", and "opposition" or evoke contentious deliberative situations). Accordingly, this collection provides an excellent introduction to rhetorical studies of environmental policy debates. But readers should keep in mind that there are more discourses on earth than can be studied from any one perspective. The disciplinary rhetoric of environmental sciences and the epideictic rhetoric of much American nature writing are just two of the landscapes that lie for the most part beyond the bounds of this particular map. H. Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University ...

A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

This article explores the possible grounds for a research program in cognitive rhetoric that aims to forge a tight link between the structures of meaning and structures of brain, body, and world. In section one, I outline a theory of human meaning-making in terms of pragmatic, epistemic, and symbolic actions as they relate to the principles of intentionality, projection, publicity, and materiality. In section two, I consider recent global theories of mind and brain to assess the theory's neurological plausibility. The common link between these two sections is the phrase, “tombstone technology,” taken from the voice-over narration from a television show about plane crashes. I first analyze this construction in terms of its effects on attention, value, categorization, and memory; I then use it to speculate on the neurophysiological processes subtending our ability to use symbolic resources to make inferences and decisions. I conclude with some suggestions for future research in discourse production and comprehension.

Examines the simultaneous rise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. Presents and discusses three definitions of “rhetoric.” Argues for the historical prominence and continued relevance of the third definition: rhetoric as the study of speaking and writing well.

The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...

Reviews 447 Thomas W. Benson, Rhetoric and Political Culture in NineteenthCentury America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. This collection of essays developed out of the third biennial conference on Public Address that was held in 1992. The contributors range from scholars such as Edwin Black who helped define modern rhetorical criticism to critics who are working to adapt rhetorical criticism to broader trends in contemporary critical theory. The respect paid to "old historicist" examination of individual orators is balanced by "new historicist" attempts to situate individual agency within the social construction of discursive practices. Thomas Benson characterizes the collection as a "a series of close textual readings of significant texts in American rhetoric, inquiring into the text, the context, the influence of pervasive rhetorical forms and genres, the intentions of the speaker, the response of the audience, and the role of the critic" (p. xiii). However, the works that he has brought together often challenge the assumption that critics determine significance by looking into texts and outside to contexts to discover the intentions of authors and the responses of auditors. For this and other reasons, this collection should be read not only by those who specialize in the "art of public address" but also by others outside communications departments who are interested in revitalizing the civic orientation of rhetoric and composition. The contributors engage in critical dialogues that give the book a coherence and richness that is too often lacking in collections of isolated essays. After a foreword by James Andrews and an equally brief preface by Thomas Benson, Edwin Black's essay, "The Aesthetics of Rhetoric, American Style", introduces a theme that echoes throughout the collection and resounds in Robert Hariman's concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of the Public Address". Black calls for attending to the aesthetic dimension of rhetoric by distinguishing two aesthetic modalities: "a dispositional or structural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of power, and a stylistic or textural aesthetic that is associated with a rhetoric of character" (p. 4). Black's essay is followed by four pairs of essays: James Farrell and Stephen Browne on Daniel Webster's Eulogy to Adams and Jefferson, John 448 RHETORICA Lucaites and James Jasinski on Frederick Douglas's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", Martha Solomon Watson and David Henry on the "Declaration of Sentiments" from the 1833 American Anti-Slavery Society and the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, and Michael Leff and Maurice Charland on appropriations of Lincoln in works by Henry Grady, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Adams. The second contributors respond to the methods of their predecessors to develop and often provocative discussion of critical assumptions and modes of interpretation. These exchanges broaden the significance of the explications themselves, especially for readers who are interested in assessing the state of the art in research on public discourse. Such an assessment is offered in the concluding "Afterword: Relocating the Art of Public Address" by Robert Hariman. According to Hariman, research on public address has interdisciplinary significance because "public performances" provide an insider's perspective on discursive structures in action (pp. 164-5). Hariman characterizes the tension between "the traditional study of oratory and modern communications studies" as leading to a current "standoff between a neoclassical revival and an appropriation of poststructuralism" (p. 166). He insightfully explores the limitation and potentials of each perspective and then argues that both could be enriched by an attention to "persuasive artistry" that accommodated a "hermeneutics of fragmentation" as well as a concern for "civic memory" (pp. 166-171). By complicating rather than resolving the conflicts among his predecessors, Hariman's conclusion provides a rich context for rereading their explications and considering their broader significance. Research on the arts of public address gains in significance as distinctions between public and private and aesthetics and rhetorics are being reconfigured across the academy. This collection should provide a useful point of reference for mapping and advancing those interdisciplinary trends. Thomas Miller University ofArizona ...

Short Reviews George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Comparative rhetoric, the study of rhetoric across different cultural traditions, is a potentially rich, extremely challenging, and thus, largely untouched area of study. Anyone reviewing George Kennedy's book on this subject must begin by commending him for his scholarly dedication and, even more, his courage, in venturing into such a demanding subject. As he describes it in his prologue, comparative rhetoric involves using comparison to identify the universals and the particulars in various rhetorical traditions, and then formulating "a General Theory of Rhetoric that will apply in all societies", with concepts and terms applicable across cultures. Kennedy construes the object of this inquiry equally broadly, defining rhetoric as "a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication". But Kennedy's comparative rhetoric very quickly becomes something much less ambitious. Kennedy gives pride of place to the terminology and theories of Western rhetoric, not just as a heuristically convenient starting point, but also as the limit of his inquiry. From Kennedy's perspective, the project is one of "test[ingj the applicability of Western rhetorical concepts outside the West" (p. 5). Specifically, to what extent can the rhetorical terminology of the Greco-Roman tradition describe the practices of other traditions? Kennedy makes two highly questionable methodological choices as he pursues this question. First, he rules out serious consideration of rhetorical terms and systems developed by other cultures, even as a categorization of their own practices, on the grounds that they are "unfamiliar" and their use would be "confusing" to the reader. Second, he refuses to explore the 431 432 RHETORICA possibility that Greco-Roman terms or concepts might be rooted in particular presuppositions that are not widely shared across cultures. With these two moves Kennedy has erased the most obvious sources of checks on, correction of, and resistance to his readings of these cultures. The "testing" of Greco-Roman rhetoric is reduced to a simple identification of similarities and differences; as Kennedy puts it, "I see no objection to the use of Western terminology to describe parts of a non-Westem discourse where these are clearly present" (p. 236). This is comparison with no methodological safeguards, and thus no struggle against such ever-present dangers of cross-cultural work as unreflective projection, forced comparison, and unexamined ethnocentrism. Caveat lector. The reader might be surprised to find that the first half of this book, titled "Rhetoric in Societies without Writing", begins with communication in animal societies. This reflects Kennedy's desire to ground rhetoric, not merely in human nature, but in nature itself; "[tjhe existence of elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in animal communication suggest that they are all natural parts of rhetoric" (p. 220). Kennedy then turns to speculation about the origins of human language, as a bridge to his discussion of rhetorical practices and terms in various non­ literate societies. The organizational principle here is developmental, for Kennedy believes that Australian aboriginal culture may allow us to see more clearly our (rhetorical) closeness to the animals, and also preserves the early stages of human rhetorical development. The objections to this kind of developmental theorizing have been voiced so often elsewhere that I see no need to reiterate them here. The second half of the book, titled "Rhetoric in Early Literate Cultures", starts with the Ancient Near East, moves to Classical China, then to India, and ends where it all began, with Classical Greece and Rome. In each chapter Kennedy introduces the culture's rhetorical practices, concepts, and theorizings, analyzes some representative examples of oratory or literary composition, and provides references and a bibliography. It is in these introductions to other literatures and the accompanying reference lists that I see one of the greatest values of Kennedy's book. These individual chapters will doubtless be Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this...

Contents: Part I:Theory, Language, Rhetoric. C. Schuster, Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist (1985). R.A. Harris, Bakhtin, Phaedrus, and the Geometry of Rhetoric (1988). J. Klancher, Bakhtin's Rhetoric (1989). T. Kent, Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction (1991). K. Halasek, Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic Reading in the Academy (1992). M. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (1994). M. Cooper, Dialogic Learning Across Disciplines (1994). K. Halasek, M. Bernard-Donals, D. Bialostosky, J.T. Zebroski, Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism: A Symposium (1992). Part II:Composition Studies, Pedagogy, Research. J.S. Ritchie, Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and Individual Identity (1989). J.J. Comprone, Textual Perspectives on Collaborative Learning: Dialogic Literacy and Written Texts in Composition Classrooms (1989). G.A. Cross, A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report (1990). D.H. Bialostosky, Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self (1991). T. Recchio, A Bakhtinian Reading of Student Writing (1991). M. Middendorf, Bakhtin and the Dialogic Writing Class (1992). N. Welch, One Student's Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding With Bakhtin (1993). H.R. Ewald, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies (1993).